I will be hosting a conversation with the directors of four recent Brazilian films tomorrow: Paula Gaitán, of Luz nos Trópicos (Berlinale); Rodrigo Ribeiro, of The White Death of the Black Wizard (DocLisboa); Pedro Diógenes, of Pajeú (FIDMarseille); and Caetano Gotardo, of All the Dead Ones (Berlinale), co-directed with Marco Dutra. The conversation will be in Portuguese, […]
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Pajeú (2020), Pedro Diógenes
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * The film is featured at Olhar de Cinema – Festival Internacional de Cinema de Curitiba, Brazil. The dammed In a landmark essay originally published in 1976, Canadian critic Robin Wood suggested that horror cinema was the arena where American society exercised what Freud called “the return of the repressed.” For […]
Los Conductos (2020), Camilo Restrepo
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * The film is featured at Olhar de Cinema – Festival Internacional de Cinema de Curitiba, Brazil. Closed circuit Right around the thirty-minute mark of the feature film debut of France-based Colombian filmmaker Camilo Restrepo, Los Conductos, there is a scene at a department store where the film’s protagonist, Pinky (Luis […]
Walker (2012), Tsai Ming-liang
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in December 2013. The politics of the sacred A man on a flight of stairs, with his head shaved bare and the red garments of a monk. It is the first shot of Walker, a 25-minute short film directed by Tsai Ming-liang. At first, the man appears […]
New short film streaming at Festival Ecrã
My new short film, In Another Eye (8′), has premiered at the great experimental film festival Festival ECRÃ. The festival is taking place online and you can watch the film with English and Portuguese subtitles from anywhere in the world between Aug 20-30. It is my first film since Two Birds (2016).
Republic (2020), Grace Passô
The journal of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) published a new dossier or their online platform (SCMS+) called “Short Attention Span Criticism.” Edited by Cara Dickason, Rebecca M. Gordon, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, “Short Attention Span Criticism” is a collection of experimental short-form writings on film and media reflecting on film and […]
Le Quattro Volte (2010), Michelangelo Frammartino
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in April 2013. Meta-existence Le Quattro Volte, by Michelangelo Frammartino, starts out like a typical observational film. After a few seemingly gratuitous shots of an artisanal charcoal clamp, we start following the steps of a nameless elder (Giuseppe Fuda) who works as a goat herder in a […]
Neon Bull (Boi Neon, 2015), Gabriel Mascaro
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in September 2016. Bull and glow There are many ways one can enter the world of Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull, but one that I find particularly fruitful hides behind a discreet casting choice: Vinícius Oliveira as Junior, a character who appears in the second half of the […]
No Home Movie (2015), Chantal Akerman
* Originally published at Cinética in September 2015. A branch in the wind “ ‘What am I doing here?’ There was no answer. The landscape did not answer.” Jonas Mekas in Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) No Home Movie – Chantal Akerman’s latest documentary focused on her relationship with her now-departed mother, Natalia Akerman – is a […]
Museum Hours (2012), Jem Cohen
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in November 2016. The politics of attention At an interview included in the book Dissenting Words, the philosopher Jacques Rancière tells a story of working-class emancipation published at a militant newspaper during the French Revolution: “He is in a bourgeois home, laying the wood floors; he is […]