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Continue reading →: Locarno ’26 – Hanabi (Fire Flower)Soon after Ana Vaz’s Hanabi begins, deja vu strikes: a shot of a group of high-rise apartment buildings at night eerily resembling the opening shot of her previous feature, It Is Night in America. Every big city in the world seems to offer this exterior gaze of compartmentalized spaces; two…
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Continue reading →: Locarno ‘26: I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming / Tomorrow a Long Time AgoThe 79th Locarno Film Festival concluded more than a week ago. Due to personal scheduling reasons, I could not be there in person this year, so I am still catching up on many of its exciting offerings thanks to their intrepid virtual library. Here are two films that I watched.…
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Continue reading →: FIDMarseille ’26 – Last Stop for the Circular TicketWhen discussing Jean-Claude Rousseau and his body of work, solitude is the word that appears most often. As his own producer, cinematographer, editor, and often actor, this one-man crew is deeply engaged in crafting fiction as self-portraiture that concerns the spiritual confinement of how the artist is bound by the…
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Continue reading →: Locarno 2026 – Nobody’s ViolenceThe depiction of Death has always been a key thematic interest for cinema. It extends beyond narrative to the physical manifestation of death onscreen as mythical, living iconography, personified by human actors, visible to the eyes, and interacting with physical living spaces. The chess duel between Antonius Black and death…
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Continue reading →: TIFF ’26 Wavelengths PredictionTIFF announced its line-up for the Gala, Special Presentations, Platform, and Discovery programmes a week and a half ago. As those sections, SP specifically, contain the buzziest world premieres and Oscar hopefuls, many people who don’t follow the festival that closely may think that’s all they have to offer this…
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Continue reading →: My Sister’s Good Fortune / Dreaming and DyingThe treat of living in the era of online streaming and pirating is that one’s viewing habits are no longer constrained by what’s fed by big theatre chains and studio offerings; so many alternative paths can be taken, cinematic adventures ensue, and with that come a slew of unanticipated surprises.…
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Continue reading →: FIDMarseille – Foam of WorldsWhen I was in elementary school, my science teachers would often put on one of those documentaries that explained the effects of global warming and the urgency of environmentalism and climate mitigation. My childhood memories are filled with the voices of British men narrating over images of large groups of…
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Continue reading →: FIDMarseille – Flash Competition Part 2You Dreamt You Saw Yourself but Couldn’t See Your Face – Shireen Seno The central subject of the camera is a lake, and the handhelds vagrantly glide through its minute segments to observe the undulation of ripples and how fallen leaves flow across the surface. But the lake is not…
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Continue reading →: FIDMarseille – Flash Competition Part 1Little Poems in Prose – Radu Jude, Andrei Rus: Radu Jude is by far the biggest name in the Flash Competition this year, yet somehow his co-directing effort with Andrei Rus also feels like the freest amongst the line-up. As described at the beginning of the film, this is a…
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Continue reading →: Notable Films at Locarno 2026The full line-up for this year’s edition of Locarno Film Festival was announced earlier this week. In contrast to a festival Cannes or Venice, Locarno seems like a festival that is more open towards a mixture of international prestige and the formally daring not positioned for golden statues. As I…
