Cinema-ye Motafavet—also known as Iranian New Wave—emerged in the 1960s and 70s as an artistic response to the rapid modernisation and underlying paradoxes of Iranian society during the reign of the last Shah. These films, crafted by a small, passionate group of mostly self-taught filmmakers, combined documentary realism with poetic allegory, illuminating the complexities of…
I’m a big fan of this manifesto against best of the year lists, which applies as much to film as it does to books and restaurants. Since many of the sources of our collective pleasures are hard to reduce to a subjective opinion on contemporaneity and relevance within a given year. In the spirit of…
What lingers most from my year of going to the cinema in 2024 is not a particular image but an experience of time—or rather, several experiences of time as explored by filmmakers across the decades through a cultural and political inquiry into the intimate lives of women in various parts of Asia. This selection of…
Writer-director Pelin Keskin Liu’s debut short film Three Meals is a masterful portrait of the complexities, tensions and generational misunderstandings at the core of a relationship between a mother and daughter living very different lives. Yasmin and Suzy live apart – a metaphor for their having grown apart – but in the film they come together. Three…
December 2024 brings a trio of films from seasoned directors who have little in common, except that they are somewhat divisive. From the gritty realism of Andrea Arnold’s Bird to the opulent intrigue of Edward Berger’s papal-thriller Conclave, and the chaotic, darkly comic and deeply saddening world of Sean Baker’s Anora, these films showcase a range of modes of…
As part of T A P E’s SNAPSHOT, a year-long touring programme featuring films exploring Black girlhood, made by Black female filmmakers, MILISUTHANDO, directed, written and narrated by Milisuthando Bongela, is screening in select cinemas until March 2025. A deeply intimate portrait of past, present and future South Africa, blending poetry, film, and photography into…
All We Imagine As Light is filled with moments of beauty: moonlight filtering through cobalt saris fluttering by the open window as two women whisper in bed; a transcendent act of lovemaking suffused in golden light; a static shot of a woman reading verses of Malayalam poetry penned by a hesitant lover lit by the…
Transformation, reincarnation, augmentation, rejuvenation … Are we simply entering Halloween season, or is something more sinister lurking in the shadows? Something we’ve long tried to keep at bay? This month’s feature is a Halloween special double bill, spotlighting two movies which hold up to us a concave mirror by exploring our hyperfixation with the body,…