Features
Beavers is a uniquely formal lyricist, and his films typically consist of the rhythmic analysis of a narrow band of content, spiraling out from a core of significant people or objects to examine their immediate environment.
During the first days of the 2020 lockdown, when New Yorkers saw time opening out abyssally before them and for filmmakers any kind of large-scale production was impossible, Artemis Shaw found her old camcorder in her parents’ apartment.
Romvari and Xu are compassionate image-seekers, yet they also subtly interrogate the systems surrounding their subjects.
The documentary functions as a living archive, a collection of 20 films made between 1964 and 1982 reporting, commenting, and philosophizing on the Palestinian struggle.
Amidst this beautiful and mysterious backdrop, sequences occur at random without explanation and do not always add up to a broader narrative. But much of its strength lies in the fact that very little happens and even less seems to connote meaning in the way we’re used to in cinema.
In her loosely structured, sensorial documentary, Long maps this history out along the San Andreas Fault, which splinters the state from north to south, capturing the textures and colors of the mountainous valley on gorgeously grainy 16mm.
Anaita Wali Zada, a first-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021 with her sister after working for several years as a TV presenter and journalist, is often the lone subject of these images. Her composed, stoic face entrances just as it conceals a dull ache for something Donya struggles to name.
Nominally, A Common Sequence is a documentary, though, threading together meditations on colonialism, environmental degradation, capitalism, labor and immigration, machine learning and AI, DNA harvesting and genomic manipulation, the film adopts a nonlinear, almost impressionistic approach.
Abrahams frequently shifts aesthetic registers, from stylized vignettes to handheld observation, introspective narration to candid conversation, the heightened past to the quotidian present. Abrahams has explained that she wanted to evoke sense-memory, as if inviting the viewer into her own state of mind.
Herbaria offers audiences a unique meditation on extinction and preservation in the twinned worlds of plants and film. Shot on 35mm and 16mm, this mysterious, at times cryptic, essayistic work takes viewers to two locations: the seemingly disparate Buenos Aires Botanical Garden and the Museo del Cine.
Like most changed realities after COVID, there is ample fodder for both hope and concern. While centrally located theaters are thriving marvelously, places a little off the beaten track are having more trouble than usual coaxing people to journey out for old films.
While watching these world-famous women pantomime Brady fandom, I thought, bizarrely, of people I knew, wrapped up in different fascinations; I wondered about the importance of spectatorship to everyday life.
Little Richard: I Am Everything, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, The Stroll, A Still Small Voice
Featuring reviews of Gush, A Common Sequence, Last Things, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and You Hurt My Feelings