Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024).
- Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024), a documentary about the repatriation of artifacts plundered by French colonists to the present-day Republic of Benin, won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. It is only the second film from the African continent to take the festival’s top prize.
- The Berlinale has filed criminal charges against activists who hacked the festival’s Instagram account on Sunday to post calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which the festival deemed “anti-Semitic.”
- The festival has also released a statement disavowing the acceptance speeches of award winners who used their platform to speak out against the occupation and war. Such speeches included those by Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, whose Direct Action won Best Film in the Encounters section, and by Yuval Abraham, whose No Other Land, co-directed with Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary. Abraham, who is Israeli, reported receiving death threats after his speech was excerpted on television in his home country.
- Last week’s Independent Spirit Awards were disrupted by a demonstration against the bombardment of Gaza, which made use of a loudspeaker. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” said Babak Jalali as he accepted the John Cassevetes Award for Fremont (2023), “but whatever they’re saying is probably a lot more important than what I’m about to say.”
REMEMBERING
The Saga of Khayal (Kumar Shahani, 1989).
- Kumar Shahani, a pioneer of India’s Parallel Cinema movement, is dead at 83. Shahani is known for such films as Mirror of Illusion (1972), The Saga of Khayal (1989), and Kasba (1990), as well as for his writing and teaching. His passing brings with it a sense of an ending, Shubhra Gupta writes in his obituary for the Indian Express, “of the passionate young votaries who embraced, without wavering even slightly, the art-for-art’s-sake credo.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Kevin Costner has unveiled a shoot-’em-up, make-’em-cry trailer for his four-part western historical epic, Horizon: An American Saga, the first two chapters of which are scheduled for a summer release.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986).
- "Cronenberg’s genius consists in his rare ability to see that elevation can attend disgust, and almost all his movies raise the possibility that a hideous ordeal might double as a reprieve from banality.” In the New Yorker, Becca Rothfeld considers sexual ecstasy, consent, and transformation via the films of David Cronenberg, “the father of the body-horror genre.”
- “Deciding that innovative fight choreography is more valuable than my personal privacy, I donated all of my precious data and signed up for a one-month trial.” For Screen Slate, R. Emmet Sweeney surveys the recent direct-to-video action offerings of iQIYI, the second-largest streamer in China.
- “Oh my god, my cinephilia is being ratified in real time.” Barry Hertz has assembled an oral history of Cinema Scope, “the most influential English-language film magazine of the past quarter-century,” in the Globe and Mail, with contributions from editor and publisher Mark Peranson; filmmakers like Guy Maddin, Denis Côté, and Pedro Costa; writers and programers like Erika Balsom and Andréa Picard; and more.
- “Disney is a religion that one is born into, the same way a 15th-century English baby was predestined to be baptised Catholic.… [W]e see Mickey Mouse around us like our ancestors saw the cross.” Amelia Tait investigates “the ‘Disney adult’ industrial complex” for the New Statesman.
- “Sloppiness just isn’t in the Coens’ wheelhouse, and yet there’s something promising—and even liberating—about the possibility of a genuinely cockeyed romp.” In his review of Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls (2024) for The Ringer, Adam Nayman compares the looseness of that film to Joel’s “frustratingly impersonal” craftsmanship in The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) and ponders the implications of the brothers’ separate creative sojourns.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966).
- New York, March 1 through 14: Film Forum and Japan Society present “Japanese Horror,” a survey of the genre spanning more than 90 years, including films by Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, and many others—much of it screened on 35mm.
- London, March 9: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents “Site and Simulation,” a program curated by Aria Dean including her own Abattoir, U.S.A.! (2013) and other shorts by Diego Marcon, Rachel Rose, Harun Farocki, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942).
- Peter Goldberg offers a new translation of a rare piece of criticism by Jean Eustache, a consideration of “the fusion of comedy and drama, of drama and life” in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942).
- Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton—director and screenwriter, respectively, of The Sweet East (2023)—drop by Posteritati to discuss their favorite movie posters and whether Robert Bresson ever had sex.
EXTRAS
- “We were told to hand the kids a couple of jelly beans and a quarter cup of lemonade at the end.” At an off-brand “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in a Glasgow warehouse, children were brought to tears by the decidedly un-scrumdiddlyumptious production value.
- “I don’t think we’ve made any progress on border issues since the movie was made,” says John Sayles, director of Lone Star (1996), who tells The Guardian he was recently moved to urinate on Trump’s border wall.
Correction: A previous version of this article included erroneous information announcing a new John Waters film, about which the filmmaker has issued a statement via the performer Peaches Christ: "We have no start date or green light to begin production...." We apologize for the error.