Even in New York, there often seem to be more experimental films and videos out there than any single venue could ever hope to showcase.…
Some of the most unique and provocative films of recent times have been works we might call anthropological docudramas. Adopting and expanding the tradition of…
The names of the two main characters in Sara Summa’s debut feature appear rather ambiguously on the screen. Summa’s opening titles are handwritten in partial…
Chinese-Korean director Zhang Lu has been a bit of a slow burn in the West. Despite having directed 12 feature films since 2003, only a…
Dutch director Sacha Polak set a very high bar for herself with Hemel, her 2012 debut feature. Raw and at times agonizing, Hemel is a…
In his critical study “Discourse and the Novel,” Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin described narrative fiction as a process by which individual characters are defined…
Stan Brakhage’s 1958 film Anticipation of the Night could perhaps be likened to the late-19th and early-20th century tonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. In works…
Gábor Reisz’s latest film is Hungarian through and through, but despite that, it feels very much like a sanded-down Romanian one. In fact, some of…
The syntactically redundant title of Tomonari Nishikawa’s latest film provides a subtle hint as to what the filmmaker is up to. If one watches the…
Now in its third consecutive year, the Light Matter Festival has become a major East Coast showcase for experimental film and video, presenting a diversity…
Godfrey Reggio is a filmmaker whose best-known work could be seen as a forerunner of the experimental documentary style that has become so widespread in…
Haitian director Raoul Peck has made some formally daring feature films, but his documentary work has tended to be a bit more subdued, preferring to…
After his disappointing 2021 film The Restless, a film in which a story of an artist’s manic episodes mostly provided an opportunity for actorly histrionics,…
Looking over the 25 years’ worth of productions by French-Canadian auteur Denis Côté, one discerns a kind of creative restlessness. Not only is Côté a…
In modernist art cinema, there has been a minor tradition of self-portrait films, and naturally they have been as different from one another as their…
David Depesseville’s debut feature, Astrakan, is a film that is at once deeply humanist and utterly pitiless. Essentially a character study, the film depicts the…
Jennifer Reeder’s new film Perpetrator has received some very strong reviews at Berlinale, and to be honest, it takes a while to figure out exactly…
Kamila Andini’s latest film considers the tragedy of life in her home nation of Indonesia. But despite this scope of Before, Now & Then, it’s…
French documentarian and academic Sylvain George has been making a particular kind of film for nearly twenty years, carving out a specific cinematic niche. In…