Watching La Perra, the new film from Dominga Sotomayor, one may be reminded of those pet adoption bumper stickers that read “who rescued who?” In…
The Quran states that “whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity.” The Station, the debut feature from Yemeni…
The very best instances of allegory are those that allow themselves to be completely ignored. Too often, an artist only pretends to be interested in…
The latest experimental documentary by Lynne Sachs — her 49th film overall — is entirely organized around a formal conceit that simply doesn’t work. That’s…
The Kinshasa-based media group known as Collectif Faire-Part takes its name from their 2018 debut featurette, Faire-Part, about Congolese street performers. Earlier this year the…
Back in the ’90s, Ken Jacobs came to the San Francisco Bay Area for a week of programs and seminars. When attending one of the…
Austrian-born, U.S.-based filmmaker G. Anthony Svatek has an interest in human systems, and how they are put in place to manage forms of chaos that…
In some respects, the “officially sanctioned” of the SWYC Collective’s productions — it was scheduled for broadcast in China, before it was pulled by its…
When a long-suppressed work of art finally surfaces, it generates unexpected conceptual ripples. We understand that the work was made in a particular time and…
In German, Kai Stänicke’s debut feature Trial of Hein bears the title Der Heimatlose, which translates as “the stateless person” or “the homeless.” This is…
In the first half of Fantasy, Isabel Pagliai’s feature debut, it is easy to become fixated on Fatty, the Calico-mix cat who lives with the…
When you see a lot of movies at film festivals, you begin to notice certain patterns in the cinema as a whole. One such pattern…
In my day job as a college writing instructor, there is a lot of talk about “multi-modal composition.” This simply means that instead of remaining…
Burak Çevik’s films often use a narrative framework as a jumping-off point for formal experimentation. This is perhaps best seen in his 2019 feature Belonging,…
Julian of Norwich was a religious mystic and anchoress in the Middle Ages. After a grave illness during which she experienced visions of Christ on…
Alain Gomis’ new film achieves something both impressive and paradoxical. It is simultaneously intimate and panoramic. Dao is built around two very large family gatherings,…
Sometimes the footage is the thing. Nova ’78 represents the completion of an observational documentary by the late Beat-adjacent filmmaker Howard Brookner, perhaps best known…
One would be hard-pressed to identify a film director on the world stage who has done a better job of articulating our historical moment than…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome…
It’s a classic conundrum: a documentary focuses on advocacy on a very important topic, and manages to some extent to communicate meaningful information about that…
Despite being so nondescript, the title of The Arab actually communicates quite a lot. In the singular nominative, it reduces a specific man or woman…