Still Life

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Feb 22, 2021 — Labor films are not where one typically goes when seeking love and grace. They are more often concerned with bodies subjected to torsion and the furrowed brow of someone who knows the cupboards are growing bare. Then there are the...

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 19, 2021 — This week’s round takes us from Italy in the 1950s and ’60s to America in the ’70s and Hong Kong in the ’90s.

Feb 18, 2021 — We’re reading about Visconti, Fellini, Tom Stoppard, Eartha Kitt, and Anton Walbrook.

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 12, 2021 — In an interview with bell hooks published in 1996, Camille Billops responded to a question about the transgressive candor of her films by saying “It is probably exhibitionism on my part [. . .] some people say our films have...

Feb 12, 2021 — The virtual first half of this year’s festival will premiere new work from Céline Sciamma, Hong Sangsoo, Dominik Graf, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Feb 11, 2021 — The body never lies.Instead, it keeps score, with our very gestures and walk and physical eccentricities speaking to the traumas and desires we’d like to keep hidden. But there are some people so aware of this truth, and the power...