Notícias

This essay accompanies “In the Moment of Match-Strike,” Issue 6 of Notebook magazine, dedicated to expressions of youth in cinema.A Place Called Lovely.On Christmas day in 1988, a fifteen-year-old from Milwaukee received a toy camera from their dad. The Fisher-Price Pxl-2000, or Pixelvision, was the first camcorder marketed to children and teenagers, and it left young Sadie Benning unimpressed: “This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He’d told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder.”1Launched in 1987 at Manhattan’s International Toy Fair, Pixelvision’s main innovation was to record sound and image directly onto audio cassettes, making it cheaper and easier to shoot than a regular camcorder. Fisher-Price stopped production after only a year. The camera that was initially sold in toy shops was ultimately destined for the yard sale. And yet, on the road to the growing scrap heap of obsolete media,...

Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President stands among the most notable releases of a still-young year, is certainly the most lauded essay film in recent memory, and was of personal interest once my friend Zach Lewis offered his approval. As adventurous and open-minded a cinephile as any I know, Zach has equal-parts interest in both the films of Henry Fonda, film essays and, landscape-centered cinema––some Thom Anderson or Harun Farocki come to mind for one, James Benning another––in which Horwath is trading here. I couldn’t have been happier to connect with him to discuss the film, and hope our chat is fruitful for you in turn.

Listen below, follow Zach on Twitter, and subscribe here:

Music courtesy of Lex Walton: “Love Theme From an Unreleased Film” from the album Giving It Up.

The post Emulsion Episode Four: Zach Lewis on Henry Fonda for President first appeared on The Film Stage.

Henry Fonda for President envisions American history through the dual lives of Henry Fonda: the movie star and the real man behind him. While it’s the debut film from 61-year-old director Alexander Horwath, following his many years as a critic and programmer of the Austrian Film Museum, a lifetime of cinephilia and hard work lie behind it. Horwath’s engagement with Fonda’s films began with a trip to Paris in 1980. In Fonda, Horwath finds a defensible version of the U.S. (The film quotes James Baldwin to the effect that Fonda was the only white actor he admired.) Henry Fonda for President contrasts Fonda’s image with the rise of Ronald Reagan. Its montage brings together movie clips, footage shot in the U.S. by this film’s team, and audio excerpts from an exhaustive 1981 interview with Fonda.

The three-hour journey is an ambitious project that uses cinema...

“If you don’t care about money and you just want to do something cool, you can do it.”

When Richard Linklater thinks back on the Austin Film Society (Afs), now celebrating its 40th anniversary, it all boils down to that. A powerful example of creating something cool that you love and then the money might come later, Afs has given over $2.7 million in grants to filmmakers and boasts 20 acres of studio space with its Austin Studios — where productions have created 37,000 jobs and over $2.6 billion of economic impact for Austin.

On the evening of March 6, Afs will be celebrating its 40th anniversary at the annual event it hosts, the Texas Film Awards, which also touts 25 years of inducting Texans from the film and TV world into the Texas Film Hall of Fame.

In terms of swank and style, Afs has come a long way. But according to its founder, Linklater,...

The Berlin International Film Festival has announced its full lineup for the 55th Forum section, the festival’s sidebar focusing on experimental and avant-garde cinema.

Section head Barbara Wurm said the 2025 selection aims to showcase contemporary cinema that “moves beyond the cult and the commercial” while functioning as a “seismograph of our time.”

The program’s exploration of time is highlighted by Stefan Hayn’s 2024 (2023), which juxtaposes political Berlin with private Bavaria, utilizing both film and painting as frames for observation. Cao Yiwen’s AI-driven What’s Next? poses a philosophical question about the future, while Su Hui-Yu’s The Trio Hall presents a pastiche featuring historical dictators engaged in theatrical performances.

Around half the films at this year’s Forum are documentaries, with highlights including Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s The Memory of Butterflies, a reconstruction of Indigenous slavery and colonial crimes; Lee Anne Schmitt’s Evidence, which explores...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

Fidelio, our four-film program with Chapo Trap House’s Movie Mindset, begins this Saturday with Eyes Wide Shut on 35mm, which plays again on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

70mm prints of 2001 and Lawrence of Arabia screen.

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of Mexican popular cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s continues and a new restoration of Shinji Sōmai’s Moving opens.

Film Forum

A career-spanning Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective continues, as do restorations of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and Seven Samurai.

Anthology Film Archives

Films by James Benning, Robert Bresson, and Jean Eustache screen in “Verbatim“; films by James Broughton play in “Essential Cinema.”

Bam

Claire Denis’ monumental No Fear, No Die and Mapantsula continue screening in new restorations.

Museum of Modern Art

“Silent Movie Week 2024” begins

IFC Center

“Defamed to Acclaimed” brings films by the Wachowskis,...

In Argentina, where the situation is already dire, one of the most prominent voices in the country’s national cinema is contemplating retirement. At forty-nine years young, Lisandro Alonso confided to James Benning that he would revisit the protagonist (as well as the filmmaking methods) he employed for his 2001 Un Certain Regard selected debut, La Libertad, and the shocker news according to the The FilmStage folks who got the scoop that this might also be his final film. Of course in the cinema of Alonso, an update on the character might not fall in traditional film sequel norms.

After a retrospective at the Sala Lugones in Buenos Aires (we unfortunately were departing the city that day), Alonso along with his filmography in canisters of film print were shipped off to the Los Angeles retrospective — David Hudson gave a great overview here.…...

Argentine master Lisandro Alonso teased his next feature at Space Not Time, a Los Angeles retrospective of his work. Speaking after a 35mm screening of the 2001 debut feature La Libertad, Alonso told James Benning his plans to revisit that film’s lead subject, Misael, this November, almost 25 years after the original shoot.

The formal constraints of both films will be identical: he plans to return to an eight-person crew and shoot only 54 cans of 35mm film. Alonso’s most recent project, the Cannes-premiering Eureka, was his first experience shooting digitally, and he admitted during the Q&a that he prefers how celluloid makes him organize projects.

It’s equally essential news that Alonso likes the idea of this being his last film: just as La Libertad is bookended by images of Misael’s face around a fire, Alonso’s film career looks to be bookended with these two day-in-the-life studies.

In...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSAn Inconvenient Truth.Participant, the socially conscious production company, has closed, which filmmaker Julie Cohen called “devastating news to anyone who cares about documentaries.” Their twenty-year track record includes many nonfiction films, such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), but also narrative features like Spotlight (2015) and Roma (2018).New data suggests that Hollywood production has gradually rebounded after last year’s WGA and SAG strikes, though not to the levels of the “peak TV” streaming bubble.The Archival Producers Alliance has drafted best practices for the use of generative AI in documentary, cautioning against the “danger of forever muddying the historical record.”In PRODUCTIONMartin Scorsese is reportedly developing a Frank Sinatra biopic, to star Leonardo DiCaprio as the crooner and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook.NEWSNostalgia.Industry experts warn that digital cinema files are not being properly maintained (“You have an entire era of cinema that’s in severe danger of being lost”), emphasizing the importance of amateur preservation efforts like Rarefilmm, recently profiled on Notebook.After a caucus week of intra-union meetings, negotiations between IATSE and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers continued, with their current contract set to expire on July 31. This week’s discussions focused on specific proposals from each of the 13 West Coast locals, starting with the International Cinematographers Guild, Local 600.Vision du Réel has announced the full program for its 55th edition, running April 12 to 21 in Nyon, Switzerland. The competition slate includes mostly first features.In PRODUCTIONLittle Shop of Horrors.

As various critics groups and awards bodies dole out their top films of the year, it can be hard to parse which ones are actually worth paying attention to. Following our top 50 films of 2023, one such list has arrived today with Film Comment’s annual end-of-year survey. Revealed at a special live talk last night, Todd Haynes’s May December, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon grabbed the top three spots, while Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3, Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, and Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes topped the best undistributed films.

“It speaks to the ongoing vitality of cinema as an art form, as well as the discernment of our critics in the year of ‘Barbenheimer,’ that this year’s top films represent some of the most boundary-pushing, complex movies of recent times—three new classics from contemporary masters,...

The festival runs October 21 - 29.

Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival will have world premieres of three new Ukrainian films as well as Portuguese director Andrés Marques’ The Drunk in its first complete edition with both competition and non-competition programmes since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian director-DoP-artist-exhibition curator Ivan Sautkin’s debut documentary feature A Poem For Little People about a group of volunteers at the front-line zone and two elderly female friends from a village in the Chernihiv region will premiere in the documentary competition which will also feature Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann’s...

If you are not familiar with James Benning, you may regard the 80-year-old American filmmaker's latest experimental and structuralist piece as nothing more than a surface level showcase into the modern phenomenon known as liminal space. Most of the exterior shots featured throughout Allensworth provide a simplistic, stretched out rural landscape with an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere that is coddled within. In all reality though, a much harsher but memorable message lies in wait for those who decide to go on this visual journey.

Creating 25 feature length films within a 40-year career thus far that include similarly made pictures like The United States of America and Maggie’s Farm, Benning once again wields a magnificent power through the cinematic style of a still shot in his newest release. Mysterious and slow yet unnerving and maddening all at the same time, he puts together 12 sections (that are five minutes each and coincide...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAggro Dr1ft.NYFF have announced a few new lineups, including their adventurous-looking Spotlight section, with new work by Harmony Korine, Hayao Miyazaki, Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie, and more. They've also shared the experimental program for Currents, which opens with Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 and features James Benning, Deborah Stratman, and Pham Thien An. And finally, their Revivals section includes restorations of Jean Renoir’s “almost ghostly last film in Hollywood,” The Woman on the Beach (1947); Niki de Saint Phalle's first solo feature Un rêve plus long que la nuit (1976); and a 4K restoration of Horace Ové’s Pressure (1976), world-premiering in conjunction with the London Film Festival. Following news last week that Leila’s Brothers (2022) filmmakers Saeed Roustayi and Javad Noruzbegi have been sentenced to six months in prison, suspended over five years,...

Following the first three section announcements, the final film section of the 61st New York Film Festival has been unveiled with Currents. Complementing the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices, the section presents a diverse offering of productions by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium.

Highlights include Currents Opening Night selection Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, Thien An Pham’s Cannes winner Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, a special program featuring Jean-Luc Godard, Wang Bing, and Pedro Costa––with Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, Man in Black, and The Daughters of Fire (As Filhas do Fogo), respectively––and much more.

“The filmmakers in this year’s Currents lineup range from well-known veterans to prodigious newcomers,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSLandscape Suicide, included on Benning's Sight & Sound ballot.Sight & Sound has made individual ballots available for their Greatest Films of All Time poll. You can browse the full, alphabetical list of critics and filmmakers here, along with voters’ comments and accompanying essays. Some favorites of ours so far: James Benning on self-referentiality, Genevieve Yue on the wind.Eight years after The Intern, Nancy Meyers has a new romantic comedy in the works at Netflix, reportedly budgeted at $130 million. Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Owen Wilson, and Michael Fassbender are all in early talks, according to The Hollywood Reporter.Author and curator Barbara Wurm has been appointed the new head of the Berlinale Forum program, succeeding Cristina Nord.Recommended VIEWINGIf it's too bad to be true,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSKristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016).The next film directed by Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead) will star Kristen Stewart as…Susan Sontag. Based on Ben Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Sontag: Her Life, the project will have some hybrid-doc elements, as we might expect from Johnson: according to Screen Daily, Johnson will film an interview with the actress about her preparation for the role at the Berlinale, where Stewart is jury president.Richard Ayoade will direct and star in an adaptation of George Saunders’s The Semplica Girl Diaries, with casting currently underway.New Spanish Cinema luminary Carlos Saura died last week aged 91. His best-known films depicted and critiqued life under the Franco dictatorship, like La Caza...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed the 28 titles selected for its Forum strand and the 26 projects at the Forum Expanded platform.

In the Forum strand, documentaries stand alongside personal essay films, while the films and installations that make up the Forum Expanded program revolve around political and personal legacies.

The festival takes place Feb. 16-26.

Forum Titles

“Allensworth”

by James Benning

U.S.

“Anqa”

by Helin Çelik

Austria/Spain

“About Thirty”

by Martin Shanly | with Martin Shanly, Camila Dougall, Paul Dougall, Esmeralds Escalante, Maria Soldi

Argentina

“Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait”

by Luke Fowler | with Margaret Tait

U.K.

“The Bride”

by Myriam U. Birara | with Sandra Umulisa, Aline Amike, Daniel Gaga, Fabiola Mukasekuru, Beatrice Mukandayishimiye

Rwanda

“Cidade Rabat”

by Susana Nobre | with Raquel Castro, Paula Bárcia, Paula Só, Sara de Castro, Laura Afonso

Portugal/France

“De Facto”

by Selma Doborac | with Christoph Bach, Cornelius Obonya...

The Berlin Film Festival on Monday unveiled the full lineup for its 2023 Forum section, its sidebar for independent and avant-garde cinema.

Highlights include Allensworth, a new documentary from acclaimed U.S. filmmaker James Benning (Rr, 13 Lakes), which looks at the first self-administered African-American municipality in California; the drama The Temple Woods Gang from director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (Story of Judas); and Being in a Place — A Portrait of Margaret Tait, a documentary by Luke Fowler on the Scottish poet and filmmaker.

Among the world premieres at the 53rd Berlinale Forum are In Ukraine, a non-fiction look at the ongoing Ukraine war from Polish directors Piotr Pawlus and Tomasz Wolski; the “coming-of-middle-age” tale Cidade Rabat from Portugese filmmaker Susana Nobre (Jack’s Ride); the Argentine comedy of errors About Thirty from director Martin Shanly (About 12); and The Bride, a debut feature from director Myriam U. Birara, which is set in Rwanda three years after the 1994 genocide.

Piotr Pawlus, Tomasz Wolski’s ‘In Ukraine’ and Vlad Petri’s ‘Between Revolutions’ both selected.

Documentaries about the Iranian and Romanian revolutions of the 1970s and 80s, and the ongoing war in Ukraine are among the final 20 titles selected for the Berlinale’s Forum strand.

Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions shows a semi-fictional correspondence between two women: one going to Iran in 1979, the other experiencing the years of Ceausescu’s Romania.

Scroll down for the full list of Forum titles

The Romania-Croatia-Qatar-Iran co-production is produced by Monica Lazurean-Gorgan for Romania’s Activ Docs.

Piotr Pawlus and Tomasz Wolski’s In...

As various critics groups and awards bodies dole out their top films of the year, it can be hard to parse which ones are actually worth paying attention to. One such list has arrived today with Film Comment’s annual end-of-year survey. Revealed at a special live talk last night, in an unexpected but welcome surprise, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future topped the list, which also included Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, two by Hong Sangsoo, and more. They also revealed their top undistributed films list, which included David Easteal’s The Plains, Bertrand Bonello’s Coma, and Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen.

“That the winner of this year’s poll is a strange, gory, apocalyptic film about a future where art and humanity are both on the precipice of extinction is a striking reflection of what we’re seeking from cinema in 2022,” said Film...

On the journey of making my new documentary film “Quintessentially British,” I encountered some quirky lords, charming knights, irrepressible dames and Shakespeare-quoting taxi drivers. I grew up in Ireland, but London has been my home since leaving university. Being an Irish filmmaker allowed me an outsider’s perspective to explore Britishness in the year of the late Queen’s platinum jubilee.

The first day of filming was in the House of Lords with the eccentric pro-smoking hereditary peer, Lord Palmer, or to give him his full title, Adrian Bailie Nottage Palmer the 4th Baron of Reading. He lives in the beautiful 109-room Edwardian mansion Manderston in the Scottish borders. But don’t be jealous, as Lord Palmer freely admits that it has 100 rooms too many.

Next up was the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, in his equally opulent home in the Palace of Westminster. His director...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAnna May Wong in Piccadilly.Trailblazing film star Anna May Wong will be the first Asian American to appear on US currency. Wong, whose legacy is overviewed in this Guardian article by Pamela Hutchinson, will be the face of more than 300 million quarters.Alice Diop has won the Prix Jean Vigo, an award given to a French director each year since 1951, for her first fiction feature Saint Omer. Earlier this year, the film won won two awards at the Venice Film Festival and was selected as the French entry for Best International Film at the 2023 Oscars.Paweł Pawlikowski’s next feature—tentatively titled The Island—will be led by Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara. Per Variety, they play an American couple who “turn their backs on civilization to build a secluded paradise,” until a...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWomen Talking.The 49th edition of the Telluride Film Festival, which doesn't reveal its lineup until the four-day festival starts, took place last weekend. Its program included world premieres of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, as well as Adam Curtis’s new 420-minute-long Russia [1985-1999] Traumazone, plus a tribute to Cate Blanchett. A.O. Scott, reporting from the festival for the New York Times, remarks that "Every so often, Telluride’s best is as good as movies can be," and singles out Women Talking specifically: "...what Women Talking shares with Moonlight is an absolute concentration on the specifics of story and setting that nonetheless illuminate a vast, underexplored region of contemporary life. A reality that has always been there is seen as if for the first time."Charlbi Dean Kriek—South African model,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSLight Industry, a much-loved venue for film and electronic art in New York, is creating a beautiful new space to host their talks and screenings. They are seeking donations to cover the costs of construction.Almost 40 years after first meeting as employees of California's Video Archives, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, co-writers on Pulp Fiction, will be making a new podcast together, watching and discussing movies that they first discovered in the library of the former video rental store.Apple have landed Steve McQueen's next feature, Blitz, a film set during World War II which will tell the wartime stories of a selection of Londoners.In what is yet another high-profile exit at a major film festival, Tabitha Jackson will be departing from her role as director of the Sundance Film Festival. As IndieWire note in their article,...

Gabe Klinger previously wrote at Filmmaker about the making of his Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (2013), which is now available on the Criterion Channel. Here, he recounts the last nine years of what he describes as “his sometimes uneasy path as a feature filmmaker” and discusses his latest project. — Editor It’s approaching a decade since I shared some anecdotes in these pages about directing my debut feature, Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater. Conceived with support from Ciné+ — a French pay TV channel where one of our producers, André S. Labarthe, had a pipeline deal […]

The post Looking Back: Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater Director Gabe Klinger on the Six-Year Journey to a New Feature first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Gabe Klinger previously wrote at Filmmaker about the making of his Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater (2013), which is now available on the Criterion Channel. Here, he recounts the last nine years of what he describes as “his sometimes uneasy path as a feature filmmaker” and discusses his latest project. — Editor It’s approaching a decade since I shared some anecdotes in these pages about directing my debut feature, Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater. Conceived with support from Ciné+ — a French pay TV channel where one of our producers, André S. Labarthe, had a pipeline deal […]

The post Looking Back: Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater Director Gabe Klinger on the Six-Year Journey to a New Feature first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

May on the Criterion Channel will be good to the auteurs. In fact they’re giving Richard Linklater better treatment than the distributor of his last film, with a 13-title retrospective mixing usual suspects—the Before trilogy, Boyhood, Slacker—with some truly off the beaten track. There’s a few shorts I haven’t seen but most intriguing is Heads I Win/Tails You Lose, the only available description of which calls it a four-hour (!) piece “edited together by Richard Linklater in 1991 from film countdowns and tail leaders from films submitted to the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas from 1987 to 1990. It is Linklater’s tribute to the film countdown, used by many projectionists over the years to cue one reel of film after another when switching to another reel on another projector during projection.” Pair that with 2008’s Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach and your completionism will be on-track.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSSian Heder's Coda took home the Best Picture award at the 94th Academy Awards, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car took Best International Feature, and Jane Campion won Best Director for The Power of the Dog. Find more of this year's Oscars winners here. We're saddened by the loss of Japanese filmmaker Shinji Aoyama, who recently died at the age of 57. Most revered for his 2000 film Eureka, about a trio who embark on a road trip after surviving a bus hijacking, Aoyama continued his humanist exploration of violence, family, and generation gaps in films like Desert Moon (2001) and Sad Vacation (2007), the loose sequel to Eureka. He was also a prolific novelist and critic, with his novelization of Eureka awarded the Yukio Mishima prize in 2001. Il Cinema Ritrovato has announced the programs of this year's festivities,...

Peter Tscherkassky's Train Again is showing exclusively on Mubi in most countries starting March 3, 2022 in the series Brief Encounters.Again A TRAINIt all began with a wonderful piece of found footage—as is so often the case with my films. Train Again was inspired by a 5-minute roll of 35mm film that a friend had discovered at a flea market and thoughtfully passed my way. It consisted of commercial rushes for our state-owned railway, presenting ten to twelve takes of a train emerging from a tunnel in the distance, gradually approaching and finally reaching the camera which in turn pans with the train as it speeds past and disappears into the distance—at the opposite end of the frame.Aside from the pan, the takes bear an unmistakable similarity to the Lumière brothers' L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat: What begins as a long shot of a...

IndieWire exclusively announces the lineup for the Museum of Modern Art’s 2022 Doc Fortnight, its annual series of documentary screenings at the New York museum. The festival runs from February 23 to March 10, and the lineup focuses heavily on environmental issues. This year’s edition of Doc Fortnight will be a hybrid festival, with 19 features and 10 short documentaries screening in the museum’s Titus Theater, with a selection of films available online via MoMA’s Virtual Cinema streaming platform.

The festival is set to open with “Bunker,” Jenny Perlin’s documentary about men living in military bunkers awaiting the end of the world. The official synopsis describes the film as “a timely reflection on ideas of survival and shelter among those preparing for the disintegration of society from a hundred feet underground.” The closing night selection is “The United States of America,” directed by James Benning. The documentary finds the filmmaking...

PoetBerlinale have announced the first 62 titles selected for the 72nd edition of their festival, set to take place physically from February 10 — 20.FORUMAfterwater (Dane Komljen)Poet (Darezhan Omirbayev)The Middle AgesEurope (Philip Scheffner)A Flower in the Mouth (Éric Baudelaire)Memoryland (Kim Quy Bui)My Two Voices (Lina Rodriguez)Nuclear Family (Erin Wilkerson, Travis Wilkerson)Super Natural (Jorge Jácome)The United States of America (James Benning)Forum EXPANDEDDragon Tooth (Rafael Castanheira Parrode)Home When You Return (Carl Elsaesser)Jail Bird in a Peacock Chair (James Gregory Atkinson)Sol in the Dark (Mawena Yehouessi)vs (Lydia Nsiah)PANORAMATalking About the Weather (Annika Pinske)The Apartment with Two Women (Kim Se-in)Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Nina Menkes)Swing Ride (Chiara Bellosi)Dreaming WallsKlondike (Maryna Er Gorbach)A Love Song (Max Walker-Silverman)Myanmar Diaries (The Myanmar Film Collective)Into My Name (Nicolò Bassetti)Nelly & Nadine (Magnus Gertten)We, Students! (Rafiki Fariala)Until Tomorrow (Ali Asgari...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Lina Wertmüller in Behind the White Glasses (2015).Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, the first woman to be nominated for a directing Oscar (for 1975's Seven Beauties), died on December 9. After working as an assistant director for Federico Fellini on 8 1/2, Wertmüller went on to become a prolific and distinctive filmmaker in her own right, combining politics and sex and humor in films like The Seduction of Mimi and Swept Away. In an interview with Criterion, she stated: "I consider myself a director, not a female director. I think there’s no difference. The difference is between good movies and bad movies. We should not make other distinctions." The prolific critic and theorist bell hooks has died today. In addition to her many writings on the feminist movement and cultural politics, hooks was also an important media theorist.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Steve McQueen and his installation "Year 3" at Tate Britain. Steve McQueen will be unveiling a new installation, “Sunshine State,” at the International film festival Rotterdam as part of its Art Directions section, which is dedicated to "daring films, installations, exhibitions and live performance." This is McQueen's first major commission since "Year 3," which was exhibited at Tate Britain in 2019. Martin Scorsese has set his eyes on his next project with Apple: a biopic about the Grateful Dead, starring Jonah Hill as frontman Jerry Garcia. As Variety points out, Scorsese did executive produce a 2017 documentary series about the band entitled Long Strange Trip. For that series, he described the Grateful Dead as "more than just a band." Hill and Scorsese previously worked together on Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a Coca-Cola ad for last year's Super Bowl.

To quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for documentarian Joshua Bonnetta, the Scottish Outer Hebrides is something of a “very silly place.” This is not to denigrate the remote cluster of islands on Scotland’s northern tip, and its inhabitants––far from it. More that, when taken as a whole, Bonnetta has been able to uncover a vast cluster of eccentricity on these sparsely populated lands, where people can see, hear or intuit things others can’t, and then tell of it gladly. Empirical science would question this, of course, but Bonnetta’s interviewees seem to transcend that, and instead carry knowledge more common to the animist practices of early homo sapiens, or maybe another plane of human evolution altogether. To cite a timely cinematic reference point, the desired end-goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding project in Dune, is this ability to intuit the future––the cutting-edge of human...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: M. Night Shyamalan on the set of Old (2021). Berlinale has announced that the one and only M. Night Shyamalan will serve as the Jury President for the festival's 2022 edition. In a statement, Shyamalan said: "I have always felt like an independent filmmaker within the system of Hollywood. It is exactly those things in us that are different and unorthodox that define our voice. I have tried to maintain these things in myself and cheer others on to protect those aspects in their art and in themselves. Being asked to be a part of Berlinale is deeply meaningful to me. It represents the highest imprimatur for a filmmaker. Being able to support and celebrate the world’s very best talent in storytelling is a gift I happily accepted.”David Fincher is partnering with Netflix...

Next month’s lineup at The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, featuring no shortage of excellent offerings. Leading the pack is a massive, 20-film retrospective dedicated to John Huston, featuring a mix of greatest and lesser-appreciated works, including Fat City, The Dead, Wise Blood, The Man Who Would Be King, and Key Largo. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre will join the series on October 1.)

Also in the lineup is series on the works of Budd Boetticher (specifically his Randolph Scott-starring Ranown westerns), Ephraim Asili, Josephine Baker, Nikos Papatakis, Jean Harlow, Lee Isaac Chung (pre-Minari), Mani Kaul, and Michelle Parkerson.

The sparkling new restoration of La Piscine will also debut, along with Amores perros, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth, Cate Shortland’s Lore, both Oxhide films, Moonstruck, and much more.

See the full list of August titles below and more on The Criterion Channel.

Abigail Harm,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Julia Ducournau at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. (Photo by Stephane Cardinale / Getty Images)Cannes has come to a close with the Palme d'Or win of Titane, making Julia Ducournau only the second woman to win the prize in the festival's history. Check out the rest of this year's winners here. Following Cannes, we're looking ahead to fall festival season: San Sebastian's lineup includes the latest by Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Terence Davies; and Locarno has added films by Charlotte Colbert and Russian Gleb Panfilov to its now-complete roster. The Museum of the Moving Image's First Look Fest has also announced its full program, which will showcase films by Claire Simon, Lina Rodriguez, James Benning, and more, as well as the world premiere of Ken Jacob's 3D film, Double Wow. The much-anticipated lineup for this...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe announced today in IndieWire the upcoming launch of our new original podcast! Hosted by arts and travel reporter Rico Gagliano, the first season of the Mubi Podcast will focus on films that have great importance in their home country, but are lesser known by international audiences and critics. We begin with Paul Verhoeven's second feature Turkish Delight and its unique significance during the counterculture movement in 1970s Holland. The episode feaures exclusive interviews with Paul Verhoeven, Monique van de Ven, and Jan de Bont. Check out the trailer above and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts here.Filmmaker Milton Moses Ginsberg, best known for his debut feature Coming Apart (1969) and the horror comedy film The Werewolf of Washington (1973), has died. The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that Steven Soderbergh's latest, the...

Portuguese documentary festival reveals future ambitions after six months of events.

Eduardo Saraiva’s 42.Ze.66 has won the top prize at Portuguese documentary festival Doclisboa, which wrapped its extended 2020 edition after six months of events.

The documentary about a female truck driver was feted with the Fernando Lopes Award for best Portuguese first film during a closing ceremony on Monday (May 10).

It marks the end of a unique edition for the Lisbon festival, which saw its format reimagined in the wake of the pandemic and has been staged across six smaller events since October, at the rate of one per month.

Given the complicated situation with film festivals this year, there were obviously a lot of films from 2020 that might have potentially fallen through the cracks. They might have premiered at Rotterdam or Berlin, only to vanish without a trace. Or they could have simply remained on their maker’s hard drive, waiting for next year’s round of submissions, when they’d be competing with a new spate of other films. In light of this, the New York Film Festival is providing a public service with its rather swollen Currents lineup. Without inclusion in this year’s NYFF, many of these films would not receive another high profile screening, and this has consequences for future programming slots, distribution, as well as simply getting seen by viewers like you. Going forward, it’s unlikely that the Currents section will be so sprawling. After all, selectivity is NYFF’s brand.Having said that,...

“I was blind, now I see. I was deaf, now I hear. I was dumb, now I speak,” said Helen Keller in one of her most quoted orations, in a speech telling how the “miracle” of her journey from darkness to light, worked with the aide of Anne Sullivan and others, teaches that “we all live by and for each other,” and led her to her ultimate, though less quoted awakening: to socialism.

You may have known that Helen Keller was a comrade, a life-long socialist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World; in Her Socialist Smile, John Gianvito assembles Keller’s political addresses and writings into a portrait of a warrior for social justice and a passionate, insightful proselytizer of Marxist thought. She instigated a Braille translation of Bakunin and advocated for a general strike during the first Red Scare. Now, in a time of national self-criticism,...

Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) awakes with a start. She walks through her new house, filled with unpacked boxes and half-wallpapered walls. She puts on classical music, shops online for cremation urns and crawls across her living room floor. Something is clearly not right. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams), a photographer, stops by late in the evening to check on her, she finds Amy in a sparkly evening gown, blowing leaves on a precarious perch in her backyard. The glass of wine in her hand suggests she’s been drinking...

We speak with Sompot Chidgasompongse about Railway Sleepers, trains, Thailand, his collaboration with Weerasethakul and many other topics

Tell us a bit about the British you talk to at the end of the film. The dialogues seemed kind of surrealistic.

It’s getting late at night, and you start to talk about your past, about your life. But then the morning comes, and you’re not sure if you were dreaming or not. The British character was constructed from real historical figures who have worked on Thai trains since the very beginning. They are all dead by now, so I needed to re-create the character. The dialogues were also based on actual academic studies, historical research, oral-histories, diaries of many people. I wanted to create a dreamlike feeling where you cannot be sure what is real and what is not. History is also like that.

You have collaborated with Apichatpong Weerasethakul a number of times,...

Some stand empty, slightly askew, some look as though they could be small wooden chapels, while others are slathered in graffiti and filled with people - all of them are the many and varied bus stops of Chile, caught on camera in Carlos Araya Díaz's quirky documentary.

They appear in locked off shots, as Díaz and his cinematographer Adolfo Messiah record the day-to-day conversations and encounters within them. In one night-time shot a person suddenly appears from the shadows, in another we meet wannabe rappers The Guerillas of the Desert, in others there are declarations of love or discussion of the news. Reminiscent of the work of James Benning and with a similar eye for connection and the absurd, Díaz intercuts the various stops across the country with occasional snapshots of life seen at close quarters - passengers on the bus, a hospital reception, a succession of dogs identified mostly by.

The coronavirus pandemic is still going on, and shutdowns are being lifted oh so gently. That generally means two things: go outside with a mask on while strafing away from passersby on the sidewalk, or stay in and watch stuff. Luckily, The Criterion Channel has announced its June 2020 lineup, which is full of things old and new.

June sees the streaming premiere of Bertrand Bonello’s fantasy-horror, Zombi Child, which originally premiered in the Director’s Fortnight section of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The month also brings us the Channel’s addition of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, which comes with deleted scenes, a making-of documentary, and more. Meanwhile, they will also flesh out the service’s Chantal Akerman selection, adding features such as One Day Pina Asked…, Golden Eighties, and her penultimate feature, Almayer’s Folly. On the other side of the coin comes Jamie Babbit...

This audiovisual essay proposes an understanding of cinema as a transformative device able to affect a series of re-signifying operations, involving political and historical re-examination as well as shifts in the subjective experience of time-space. The essay is focused on the transformation that takes place in the viewer’s perception of a specific kind of cinematic entity: filmed void spaces, and how they may turn out to be read as places of memory.Cinema has the possibility of qualifying spaces, materializing information and connotations that, at first sight, seem invisible. This potentiality of cinema unveils the paradoxical complexity of filmed void spaces: something simultaneously is and is no longer there.This is a double transfiguration between each unity of image and sound and what that specific image-sound brick communicates, since they effect each other respectively and at the same time, as a result revealing what is condensed in the shot,...

Three key films at the Berlinale take the form of landscape documentaries made in the Americas, and as such make the unavoidable point that you cannot film the land without engaging in a nation’s politics. This is most clear in the direct accusation made by Jonathan Perel’s vividly unsettling Corporate Accountability. The director films through his car window the exteriors of various companies, flourishing or defunct, across Argentina that had deep ties to the country’s dictatorship. As we watch the images of company plants, gates, and signage, all seemingly shot in the dusk or dawn, with a sinister, insomniac color palette and framing that suggest an imminent need to flee the scene, we hear Perel in voiceover recount details from a report put together by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.His voice tells us of union repression, military collaboration, torture, and disappearances. The term “victims...

The Berlinale continues to unveil its lineup, today announcing films selected for its Forum category: an independent section of the festival, organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, celebrating its 50th anniversary.

This intermeshing of old and new runs throughout the selection. The category offers challenging and thought-provoking films that bring together cinema with the visual arts, theatre and literature. Many of the 35 films in this year’s program — 28 of which are world premieres — are distinguished by how they navigate between past and present.

Included in the selection is late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz and his widow Valeria Sarmientos’ “The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror,” which opens this year’s Forum. Ruiz, who died in 2011, shot the material in Chile in 1967, but was unable to complete it before going into exile in 1973. His widow Sarmiento has now transformed the footage into a finished film.

The...

The strand’s 50th anniversary to open with a previously unfinished film by late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz.

The Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20-March 1) has revealed the 35 films in this year’s Forum line-up, including 28 world premieres.

Scroll down for full list of titles

The strand aims to highlight challenging and thought-provoking filmmaking that brings together film with visual art, theatre and literature.

This year’s Forum will open with The Tango Of The Widower And Its Distorting Mirror from late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz and his widow Valeria Sarmiento.

Ruiz – a four-time Palme d’Or nominee who won...