Me and Rubyfruit

Feb 26, 2021 — There would be no Indonesian cinema without Usmar Ismail (1921–71). His third feature, The Long March (Darah dan doa, 1950), was not only the first film to be produced by a fully Indonesian crew and production company but also one...

Feb 19, 2021 — It was the early sixties, and Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Delphine Seyrig were the stars in our sky. When I first met Jean-Claude Carrière, about fifty-five years ago—he was thirty, I was twenty-three—we were working on the...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Feb 13, 2021 — Ify Chiejina is a Nigerian American artist from Queens, New York, with a multifaceted process that incorporates drawing, painting, collage, and pattern design, resulting in a distinctive approach to portraiture. Her work speaks to themes of family, identity, and a...

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Jan 28, 2021 — Deep Dives Domestic work offers both an agonizing ennui and the satisfaction of a necessary task being completed. In the 1981 documentary Clotheslines, filmmaker Roberta Cantow mines these two moods, as well as the subtler emotions that fill the distance...

Jan 26, 2021 — Larisa Shepitko was born in eastern Ukraine in 1938. Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, who left the family, fought in World War II. Her mother raised her and her two siblings on her own, and the moment Larisa...

Dec 31, 2020 — One of our editors made this as a gift for the Criterion community. We hope you enjoy it!

Dec 20, 2020 — Before ringing in the new year, we’re taking a look back at some of the most memorable essays and interviews we published on the Current in 2020. It’s been a head-spinning twelve months, to say the least, but we hope...

Dec 10, 2020 — Twenty-four features from around the world offer a remedy for cabin fever.