Being invited to participate in the Critics Academy was my first trip to Switzerland. It is a country I had romanticised for its vast scale: the land of CERN and particle collisions, hydroelectric dams and vast lakes. It is where Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity and Tim Burners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It is where in 1916, following the eruption of Mt Tambora, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Lord Byron spent ‘the year without a…

[...]
In continuation to the idea of the body as a canvas for the medium, Somniloquies portrays sleeping nudes against the background of the audio archive of Mike Barr who recorded his roommate’s Dion McGregor’s sleep talking for several years. Vulnerable bodies are exposed as the camera lingers over their most intimate parts. Every now and then limbs emerge from the black, backs curl in a foetal position. No bed can be identified, people seem suspended, as if they are…

La Libertad by Lisandro Alonso is a simple, unembellished movie about a lumberjack, played by professional lumberjack Misael Saavdera, though he is never named. For ninety minutes we follow a day in his life. He wakes up, eats, defecates, goes to chop wood, has his lunch, listens to the radio, returns to work, sells wood, cooks dinner. Routine is the plot, and isolation the drama. The only people he interacts with are a guy at the gas station, and a…

An editor-in-chief for the mythical La lettre du cinéma — a journal that championed such forgotten French auteurs as Jean-Claude Guiguet and Danièle Dubroux and which also spent many of its pages attempting to unravel the increasingly complex continuities of the nouvelle vague (a subject put aside by the Cahiers of that time) through analysis of the late films of Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette — Axelle Ropert has only released four films since 2004. She is normally associated with…

I, always and inexorably I, have had the misfortune and privilege to go through this pandemic in Beirut, Lebanon, where I have been living for the past two years. My abstract and blissfully unaware interest in this tiny Mediterranean country where I ended up living was first triggered by, among other stimuluses, Eric Baudelaire’s 2011 film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images. Having re-watched it recently, I was struck by the director’s…

What does waste sound like? Where does it live, where does it travel? Why is it here? You will not find answers to these questions in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest documentary Matter Out of Place (2022). What you will find however, is garbage on beaches, trash on mountains, waste at the bottom of the ocean and matter out of place hidden right under our feet.

This is a film that tries to understand who we are as humans by looking at…

Emerging from slumber amidst his funeral bed of roses, Joseph Stalin sits up in a distorted mausoleum amongst World War II’s most notorious figures. Winston Churchill watches from the door whilst an exhausted Jesus lays sleeping. History within this space works backwards and forwards; an incoming Hitler is able to question why this version of Jesus is stuck here and not with his father, and Jesus knows of the Nazi’s defeat. These are the feverish opening moments of Alexander Sokurov’s…

After the impressive presentation of her first feature film Drift (2017), the sea and its mysterious surfaces emerge once again as the main characters of Helena Wittman's new film, Human Flowers of Flesh. As its indecipherable yet fascinating title announces, this surprising shape-shifting sea odyssey shot on 35mm film coexists with a series of mysteries threatening us from the very beginning.

As absorbing as it is contemplative, the opening scene of Human Flowers of Flesh follows a bunch of trekkers,…

Equipped with a boom mic, a young woman wanders through a mountainous Australian landscape, trying to catch the sounds of the waves. But instead, an unusual encounter draws her into a new world of fantasy and magical realism. This is the opening scene of Petrol, the second feature film by the Australian-Russian filmmaker Alena Lodkina, which premieres today at the Locarno Film Festival in the the Concorso Cineasti del presente section.

This enigmatic drama is centered on Eva, a student…

Schlußakkord (1936), one of Douglas Sirk’s German films (signed Detlef Sierck) produced during the Nazi period, presents two inventive lines that often marked the enthusiasm of the studio films of the 1930s: the formal aspiration reminiscent of the various avant-gardes of the 1920s, which still uses the union of shots as a free zone for experimentation, and also, the increasing mobility of the camera as a technological development to be explored to its fullest in sets and scene compositions, pushing…

The surgical glove is a spectre that haunts Mahesh Narayanan’s Ariyippu [Declaration]. Sterile, blue, and sometimes blood stained – its presence holds together Narayan’s pandemic story of shame and precarity. Each visual encounter with the glove is wrought with meaning. At times it merely serves as a reminder of circumstance and setting: the pandemic and the industries it empowered with a new lease on workers’ exploitation. And then there are moments when the glove creeps upon you – cast over…

It’s a tale at least as old as the Salem witch trials. Where Arthur Miller looked at the mania that gripped early colonial-era Massachusetts and saw a metaphor for the red scare rippling through the United States of his day, in recent years it is ideas around gender that have driven artists to craft stories about witch hunts, both historical and speculative.

Svetlonoc (Nightsiren), the suspenseful, mist-shrouded second feature from Tereza Nvotová, falls into the latter category. The film centers…