Wavelengths Diaries a series I launched for Cinema Travelogue in March 2026. This is a series of reviews dedicated to TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival)’s 25-year-old programme that curates formally adventurous cinema outside the mainstream. See the post below for my reasoning for launching such a series.
New Review Series: Wavelengths Diaries
The snow is melting; the frozen land thaws in Ontario, where we’ve had one of the coldest winters in years. Spring’s arrival is foreshadowed everywhere, the anticipation within my heart, the cool air that caresses my face – as opposed to an abrupt attack like that from deep winter – when I open the front…
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Locarno 2026 – Nobody’s Violence
The 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 as a Scandinavian dude in…
TIFF ’26 Wavelengths Prediction
TIFF 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 year. However, during the 4…
Mambar Pierrette
How may one regard the role of narrative? This question is a very important one to raise in the context of Rosine Mbakam’s Mambar Pierrette, an ostensibly cinema verité depiction of a Cameroon mother trying to take care of her mother and prepare her kids for the start of a new school year, while navigating…
Mekong Hotel
At times, during their conversations on the balcony of the titular Mekong Hotel, characters seem to be filmed with their backs turned away from the camera; their faces turned towards the river, facing the thither island, and the horizon set at the center of the frame. Even when they’re facing the camera, the natural, backlit…
Story of My Death – Albert Serra
Story of My Death, my first foray into Albert Serra’s cinema. The film is eponymous with Casanova’s autobiography, which Serra uses, along with the fictional Dracula, to create a narrative set at the end of the 18th century. The duality of the two figures, according to Serra in his interview with Cinema Scope, is positioned…
Laberint Sequences
Image Credit: blakewilliams.net It’s always so difficult to review works like those from Blake Williams, because the sensorial pleasures they provide can hardly be accounted for by superlatives. Yet because the film is in 3D and rarely screened, I also lack the opportunity to dissect it shot by shot to examine how Williams achieves the…
The Grand Bizarre
I attended a screening of Jodie Mack’s 2013 stroboscopic short Let Your Light Shine at Innis Town Hall last Friday, which included 8 other shorts made to produce rainbow 3D effects when viewed with diffraction glasses. The screening was part of UofT’s Cinema Studies Graduate Student Conference, with Mack delivering the keynote address. So it…
TIFF 50: Levers
In 2021, Rhayme Vermette’s debut feature Ste. Anne, a film about a woman’s (played by Vermette herself) return to her hometown in Manitoba, surprisingly won the Best Canadian Film Award at TIFF. I would call that a surprise, not because of its quality (which, let’s be honest, doesn’t usually have a solid correlation with awards),…
TIFF 50: The Season
Close to the beginning of Maureen Fazendeiro’s solo debut feature (given that a feature is >45 minutes long), The Seasons, a wide shot tracks a man pushing a wheeled land surveying device. As one would expect the camera to continue following the man and his equipment, it instead continues panning to the right and sets…
TIFF 50 Review: With Hasan in Gaza
When the end credits begin rolling for With Hasan in Gaza, a film entirely made of footage taken during Kamal Aljafari’s visit to Gaza back in 2001 – a tour he carries no memory of until rediscovering the footage over two decades later – we see him giving himself the “conceived by” credit instead of…
