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Taiwan International Doc Fest: The Island a Stage
Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024)
In 1998, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival held its first edition, a decade after martial law was lifted in the island nation. It was a particularly exciting moment for documentary in Taiwan: independent video activism was on the rise, and new models of community media pointed to alternative structures for production and distribution. And yet, apart from Yamagata (founded in 1989), there were not many festivals of politically engaged nonfiction that specifically championed regional Asian cinema; the inaugural TIDF featured both an Asian Visions Competition and a Taiwan Competition strand. In its 15th edition this May, TIDF continued to explore the breadth of political nonfiction Asian cinema, across a program featuring both new and recently restored films. One of the most… Read more
John Travolta on Propeller One-Way Night Coach
Propeller One-Way Night Coach
When I was asked for my favorite discoveries at Cannes this year, “the Travolta” was high on the list. Propeller One-Way Night Coach (2026), John Travolta’s feature directorial debut, premiered on the frantic first Friday night, when no one knew exactly what to expect. Before the screening, and following a highlights reel of the star’s career, Thierry Frémaux bestowed an honorary Palme d’Or on Travolta, who was touchingly grateful. But what, we in the packed theater wondered, would his film about a boy’s first airplane flight in 1962 look like? The answer was an absolutely charming portrait of experience, with a loving attention to detail and sense memory that arrives on screen in living color as if intact from Travolta’s own childhood. Propeller One-Way… Read more
If Youth Knew: Chie Hayakawa on Renoir
Renoir
Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir (2026) focuses on Fuki (Yui Suzuki), a preteenage girl whose perspective on life is darkened and complicated over the course of her father’s terminal illness. The film is set in 1987, a year or so into Japan’s “bubble period,” when financial and real-estate speculation radically reshaped the country’s economy a generation after its “miraculous” postwar recovery. This boom time becomes the backdrop for Fuki gaining awareness of the people around her and the consequences of her actions; a chance encounter with a reproduction of Auguste Renoir’s 1880 oil portrait of the eight-year-old Irène Cahen d’Anvers provides her with a clue into her own taste, and how she wants to carry herself moving through the world. Renoir takes things from Fuki’s perspective,… Read more
The Spinoff Comes of Age
The Testaments
Showrunner Bruce Miller admits that when he first read The Handmaid’s Tale, he thought the ending of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel was a little unsatisfying: “I was like, ‘Well, I hope there’s a sequel!’” Two decades later, Miller was at the helm of the Hulu series based on Atwood’s book. The show was an immediate hit—it premiered in 2017, during the first Trump administration, at a moment when its themes were particularly resonant. The evocative image of the red cape and white bonnet donned by star Elisabeth Moss and her fellow handmaids became not only an image of subjugation, but one of resistance. It became the first streaming offering to win an Emmy for best drama series (it would collect 13… Read more
The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson
There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night
A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to advertisements, then to optimization, and now to artificial intelligence—our digital past gets blurrier still. With There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night, Marcus Batto attempts the impossible, reconstructing June 25, 2009, the day of Jackson’s death, exclusively through the found footage available online. Batto, 31 years old, is an artist, archivist, programmer, and something of a YouTube ethnographer. “Growing up,” he says, “I wanted to… Read more
Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms
Backrooms (2026)
Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This unlikely source became the starting point for a diffuse, Lovecraftian latticework of anonymous mythmaking and creepypasta, whose locus eventually migrated to Reddit, where it split into separate communities of originalists and revisionists. Their prolific output is a striking example of hypermodern digital creativity predicated on the surreal anachronism of physical spaces that predate the advent of Web 2.0, tinged by curdled nostalgia for a less… Read more
