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NEWS
On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert, 2023).
- The Berlinale wrapped up over the weekend. The Golden Bear was awarded to Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant, while other major prizes went to Christian Petzold, Philippe Garrel, Angela Schanelec, and DP Hélène Louvart. You can browse the full list of winners on Notebook, and keep your eyes peeled for our reports.
- In other festival news: Ruben Östlund will preside over this year’s Cannes jury, and the full lineup has been unveiled for Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films.
- The pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye—the first African woman to make a commercially distributed feature film (Kaddu Beykat, in 1972)—died last week at the age of 80. Writer and programmer Yasmina Price recently surfaced a thread of archival material, including a video clip of Faye reflecting on her earliest films as a student.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Barry Jenkins has shared a new short, Another Young Couple, on Vimeo. Per Jenkins's description: “Borne out of a camera test for If Beale Street Could Talk, James and I asked my friends Essence and Jihaari, newly transplanted to LA to allow us into their home for an afternoon tea about their lives and loves, apart and together. We were migrating to the Alexa 65 for Beale Street and wanted to see for ourselves how that large-format sensor would affect intimate portraiture within lived spaces…in particular the faces and spaces of Black folk.” Watch below:
- MDFF, a Toronto-based production company making a welcome move into specialist distribution, have shared their trailer for Ashley McKenzie’s second feature, Queens of the Qing Dynasty, which they will soon release in Canada. The film premiered at the Berlinale last year, where Lawrence Garcia talked to the director for Notebook.
RECOMMENDED READING
Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2022).
- Lee Chang-dong has a new short story, "Snowy Day," in the New Yorker. In an accompanying interview, he speaks about the story’s origins in “the memory of serving as a sentry one night during a heavy snowfall” with the magazine’s deputy fiction editor Cressida Leyshon.
- Coinciding with the release of his new film Pacifiction, Albert Serra shared six of his favorite films on Le Cinéma Club. Beatrice Loayza describes the film as a work of “imperial spectacle devoid of the spectacular” in a short piece for Artforum, and Emerson Goo adopts a more critical position in his Film Comment review, wherein he carefully exposes the “limitation of the film’s portrayal of colonialism.”
- “In literature, sole authorship is the rule; in film, the inverse holds true.” Also for Film Comment, Erika Balsom reports from the Berlinale, looking at Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography and Claire Simon’s Our Body, two very different films that both complicate “cinema’s relationship to first-person expression.” Jessica Kiang also recapped the festival for the New York Times, writing of a reinvigorated, “unusually strong” lineup.
- This is trance cinema, tranq cinema, existing somewhere on the thin edge dividing consciousness from sleep.” Melissa Anderson writes effusively about India Song (1975) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), two of Marguerite Duras’s most hypnotic films, for 4Columns.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Eleven Miles (Ruchir Joshi, 1991).
- London/Hawick: The Essay Film Festival recently announced its lineup, taking place March 25 through 31 in London, as did Alchemy Film Festival, which will run from April 27 through 30 in the small Scottish town of Hawick. The Essay Film Festival will screen work by Rania Stephan, Ruchir Joshi, Jocelyne Saab, and more; Alchemy’s program includes new films from a wide range of filmmakers including Oreet Ashery, Rhea Storr, and Anthony Ing, plus To Yield, a new performance by Maxime Jean-Baptiste presented in total darkness.
- London: EO director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose distinctive paintings were recently on show at a small exhibition in Berlin, is the subject of a forthcoming larger retrospective at BFI Southbank. “Outsiders and Exiles: The Films of Jerzy Skolimowski” runs March 27 through April 29, and includes a special on-stage conversation with the octogenarian filmmaker.
- New York: Across multiple dates in March, Spectacle Theater screens two rarely seen films from Ireland. Bob Quinn’s Budawanny (1987) tells the tale of a priest’s love affair and its effects on the local Catholic community, while James Scott’s Coilin and Platonida (1976) reworks a Nikolai Leskov short story about an out-of-luck man who, alongside his equally crestfallen cousin, carves out a life for himself in West Ireland.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Alcarràs (Carla Simón, 2022).
- Starting with Carla Simón's "beautiful and bruised, yielding yet bittersweet" Golden Bear–winning Alcarràs, now showing in many countries on MUBI, Sophia Satchell-Baeza speaks with the filmmaker "about improvisation, the seasons, and a rural sensibility in contemporary Spanish cinema."
- Carlos Valladeres tussles with the personal and the film-historical aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s new book, Cinema Speculation, a book conducive to "trips down movie-memory-lane," but also one that encourages him "to confront the psychology and the unvarnished thoughts of a movie-maker who has loomed incredibly large in [his] cinematic education."
- Who’s that knocking at my door: Patrick Preziosi sings the praises of M. Night Shyamalan’s “audacious, yet also modest” recent films, working from Knock at the Cabin back to his sleeper horror hit The Visit (2015).
EXTRAS
- Speaking of Knock at the Cabin, for any fans of the NBA, Shyamalan directed (and starred in) a trailer for the film that doubles as an ad for 76ers All-Star James Harden’s wine label. A surreal Philadelphia crossover: