In the last 10 or 15 years, the micro-universe that we call the experimental film world has made a decisive shift toward a form of…
The Plant from the Canaries The canary, a songbird of the finch family, occupies an eminent place in avian symbolism, not least for its melodious…
Aquatic and crispy shades of green, ochre, and blue dominate Park Sye-young’s apocalyptic The Fin. The title serves a double-entendre, referring not only to the…
The canary, a songbird of the finch family, occupies an eminent place in avian symbolism, not least for its melodious birdsong, which in turn underscores…
The Dead of Winter The cold is often a conduit for ardent symbolism, whether in the frozen recesses of repressed memories or in the merciless…
The cold is often a conduit for ardent symbolism, whether in the frozen recesses of repressed memories or in the merciless invocation of human hubris…
Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition.…
Tamara Stepanyan’s film In the Land of Arto begins with a service interruption that functions as a metaphor. Céline (Camille Cottin) is traveling by train…
Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a…
Dry Leaf Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a…
In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The…
Credit where it’s due: Dane Komljen is one uncompromising director. After his debut feature, 2016’s All the Cities of the North, enjoyed widespread acclaim from…
Blue Heron Sophy Romvari has used cinema to mine the fractured, seemingly incomplete nature of her family history since her first short film, Nine Behind.…
“An ode to cinema” — an audacious claim with which to open one’s feature, but audacity courses through the work of Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah…
In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform.…
Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may have felt a tension building…
Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed…
Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination…
One of the more compelling elements of the crime film occurs when a seemingly normal person gets roped into a series of illicit acts or…
About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas are…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly…