Rushes | Hamdan Ballal Attacked, Miami Beach Mayor Relents, Village Roadshow Bankrupt

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NEWS

No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, 2024).

• Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked by a group of masked Israeli settlers and subsequently arrested by the army, apparently under suspicion of “hurling rocks.” The following day, Yuval Abraham, who codirected No Other Land (2024) with Ballal, wrote that “after being handcuffed all night and beaten in a military base, Hamdan Ballal is now free and is about to go home to his family.” According to the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, there have been at least 43 attacks against the Palestinian residents of Susya since the beginning of the year. “This might be their revenge on us for making the movie,” says Basel Adra, who also codirected the film. “It feels like a punishment.”
• Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner has withdrawn a proposal to terminate the lease of arthouse theater O Cinema for refusing to cancel screenings of No Other Land. The proposal drew widespread condemnation from local residents and the filmmaking community. Earlier this month, Meiner sent a letter to the theater’s CEO claiming the film was a “one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people.”
• Village Roadshow Entertainment Group has filed for bankruptcy. The company, responsible for co-producing films like the Ocean’s series (2001–18), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), has reportedly struggled to bounce back since the pandemic and has engaged in a yearslong legal battle with long-standing partner Warner Bros. over its distribution strategy for The Matrix Resurrections (2021).
• Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings has donated $50 million to his alma mater, Bowdoin College, the largest gift the college has received since its founding, to study the risks and consequences of AI. Bowdoin plans to use part of the money to hire ten new faculty members and provide support for professors “who want to incorporate and interrogate AI” in their teaching and research.

DEVELOPING

• Ketchup Entertainment is in talks to acquire all rights to the previously shelved Warner Bros. animated/live-action hybrid film Coyote vs. Acme (2024) for around $50 million. Based on a 1990 New Yorker humor piece, the film has garnered cult-like status since Warner Bros. canceled its release, even prompting demonstrations from fans.

REMEMBERING

Rosetta (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1999).

• Emilie Dequenne has died at 43. The Belgian actress is best known for her performance in Rosetta (1999) as the eponymous teenager on a tireless quest to break free from cycles of poverty, for which she won the Best Actress award at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. She also delivered other acclaimed turns in films like Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), Our Children (2012), and Love Affair(s) (2020), for which she won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress.
• David Ehrenstein has died at 78. The American film critic began his writing career with a 1966 interview with Andy Warhol in Film Culture magazine. Since then, he wrote extensively about film, politics, and queer culture for publications such as Cahiers du Cinéma, the Village Voice, and Sight and Sound. He wrote the books The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese (1992) and Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928–2000 (2000), maintained a blog for over a decade, and briefly became a political flashpoint after writing a column for the Los Angeles Times entitled “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’” “He had such far-reaching taste,” writes Farran Smith Nehme in tribute; “he loved French films of any era, Japanese cinema, almost anything romantic or witty or gorgeous or campy. He’d spin stories of the many, many film people he’d known, and refer tartly to the difficulties of growing up black and Jewish and gay.” Much of his writing is available to read online, including essays for Criterion’s Current and Film Comment.
• Linda Williams has died at 79. The American film scholar and writer had been a professor at University of California, Berkeley, since 1997. She is the author of Screening Sex (2008), a historical survey of sex on film, and On The Wire (2014), a critical study of the HBO series as melodrama. Elisabeth Anker—coeditor of the forthcoming Melodrama as Provocateur, a volume built around Williams’s writings on the emergence of theatrical melodrama in France and the United States—writes, “Linda Williams was one of the most important film scholars of her generation.  She took a feminist lens to the most maligned film genres—porn, melodrama, horror—and showed how powerfully they made us ‘feel,’ how their titillations, sobs and screams gave us pleasure.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Bonjour Tristesse (Durga Chew-Bose, 2024).

• “Some people’s reactions, if I’m interpreting them correctly, are that movies like this don’t get made anymore. I think the sheer fact that it exists confuses people into thinking what they’re feeling is nostalgia.” For Reverse Shot, Saffron Maeve interviews director Durga Chew-Bose about her directorial debut, Bonjour Tristesse (2024), ahead of its Opening Night screening at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival.
• “Across her films, it’s not just women and their dreams that reappear but also the images that frame them.” For the New York Review of Books, Poorna Swami unpacks Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024) in the context of liberatory desire brushing up against national social divisions.
• “That the journeys of personal and social transformation depicted in these films frequently fail or fall back on themselves may hold a clue to the quixotic nature of Dogme 95’s own mission. But was self-defeat part of the point?” For Criterion’s Current, Leo Goldsmith examines the legacy of Dogme 95 and how its various provocations “forecast a radical destabilization of reality” that now resembles contemporary life.
• “We clearly indulge, and have always indulged, in a fantasy that a new piece of technology is going to save us or provide a moment of transcendence, and it never works out that way. What ends up happening is we very rapidly figure out the worst possible use for a new piece of technology. Bad ideas scale faster than good ideas.” For Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz speaks with Steven Soderbergh about his latest film, Black Bag (2025), his recent collaborations with screenwriter David Koepp, and the joys he still finds in “the process.”

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira, 2003).

• London, through April 4: As part of the Kinoteka Film Festival and in association with the Polish Cultural Institute London, Swedenborg House presents “The Film Décors of the Quay,” a collection of 23 handcrafted puppet film sets by the Quay Brothers, “the world’s greatest practicing stop-motion artist animators.”
• New York, March 28 through April 3: BAM presents “Mirror of Life: Manoel de Oliveira 1996–2004,” a series featuring the North American debuts of ten restorations from the prolific Portuguese director, featuring performances by actors like John Malkovich, Michel Piccoli, and Catherine Deneuve.
• Chicago, through April 5: The Siskel Film Center presents “Directed by Paul Schrader” and “Curated by Paul Schrader,” two programs dedicated to works made and inspired by the American director, in the lead-up to “An Evening with Paul Schrader,” a sold-out conversation with the filmmaker.
• St. Gallen, April 5 through July 27: Kunstmuseum St. Gallen presents Mikhail Karikis’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. Through a combination of artistic techniques, Karikis “explores the relationship between people and their environment and proposes mutual listen­ing, community building, and the collective creation of sound as means by which to build a better future.” The exhibition will span his twenty-year career and will also feature a new work produced on site.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Janus Films has released a trailer for David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (2025), which chronicles the fallout from the desecration of a high-tech graveyard.
• A24 has released a trailer for Celine Song’s sophomore feature, Materialists (2025), a romantic comedy following a love triangle between a professional matchmaker (Dakota Johnson), her wealthy new paramour (Pedro Pascal), and an old flame (Chris Evans).
• Le Cinéma Club presents Gabriel Herrera’s short film Motorcyclist’s Happiness Won’t Fit into His Suit (2021), about a man unwilling to loan his motorcycle to anyone. “Our short film is a small exploration on the meaning of handsomeness,” says Herrera.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Illustration by Chau Luong.

• “I’m in the movie.” In “Are You Experienced?,” the latest edition of the Notebook Insert, Tom Gunning, Blake Williams, Erika Balsom, and Gabriel Winslow-Yost contend with the cinema of the senses. Plus, Andrew Norman Wilson, Sara Magenheimer, Kevin B. Lee, Vera Drew, and Jake Tobin imagine cinematic paraphernalia of the future.
• “What if the robots, instead of rising up to overthrow us, aided and abetted a human revolution?” Jillian Steinhauer profiles Rashaad Newsome, who has developed an AI to conduct decolonization workshops.
• “Let’s make it look like a perfume ad, but it’s an action movie!” Matthew Thrift speaks with the pulp auteur Paul W. S. Anderson about challenging collaborations, critical drubbings, and video-game adaptations.
• “The film juxtaposes suits in offices with boots on the ground, data sheets with real-world danger.” In his latest Action Scene column, Jonah Jeng revisits Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire (2011), a domestically inflected espionage thriller in the same vein as Black Bag.

WISH LIST

• Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art, a survey of contemporary video and moving-image art from the last decade, is available to preorder from Phaidon. Featuring an essay by Erika Balsom, it’s the first book in Phaidon’s Vitamin series to focus on the moving image.

EXTRAS

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963).

• The website Binocular Shot collects film clips with “inaccurate binocular shots (i.e., two overlapping circles instead of one, as you would see in real life).” The latest clip comes from Ernst Lubitsch’s silent comedy The Wildcat (1921).