Legendary documentary filmmaker William Greaves conceived Once Upon a Time in Harlem decades ago – a literal assembly of legends. In the film’s opening, we see a typewriter typing out the letters Greaves sent to members of the Harlem Renaissance, inviting them to a party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse; it…

As one of the few – maybe the only – major international directors who unabashedly depict the daily lives of service workers in his cinema, it feels inevitable that Radu Jude would direct an adaptation of Octave Mirabeau’s “Diary of a Chambermaid”. The novel has been adapted for the screen…

A question proposed by Mariano Llinás, the director and narrator of Life of Jorge Luis Borges, sometime close to the beginning of the 5.5-hour travelogue, is whether the Argentinian writer has deliberately left clues in the artifacts about his life for posterity to rediscover, piece together, and formulate his own…

A strange and wonderful phenomenon at this year’s TIFF is re-encountering old, familiar faces in cinema. In Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, when Saïd, played by Syuleyman Alilov Letifo, opens the film with his travel-worn face full of smiley wrinkles, one instantly remembers his Adrian in Grisebach’s 2017 film Western;…

During her introduction for the world premiere of John Torres’s narrative feature debut, The Remotes, Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard described the filmmaker as the poet of Filipino cinema; Torres himself, half-jokingly, said during the Q&A that this is his first “real movie”, the kind that his mother has always wanted…

“I’m not sure how others perceive memory. Memory appears as a picture for me,” said director Yuula Benivolski as she recalls her childhood town, Shlomi, in her directorial debut, The Black Box is Orange, a personal essay split into 9 chapters and an interlude. She is not lying, as the…

It’s been 25 years since Lisandro Alonso’s La Libertad. This fact has been frequently repeated when discussing Double Freedom, a sequel (remake?) to the 2001 film that left a distinct footprint in its corner of cinema. It also feels like an important one to mention – the passage of time…

Beatrice Gibson’s debut feature, At Night, after a dozen or so short films, seems to stem from an imagination of the subway as a collective space and infinite fiction. It’s like taking the subway, briefly glancing at others around you, and creating a narrative from a few minutes of their…

At the beginning of German director Angela Schanelec’s 11th feature, My Wife Cries, a construction worker, Thomas, enters the frame and conveniently sits down on a chair at its centre; he is waiting for his crane to be fixed. When he begins conversing with two female offscreen voices, the composition…