Deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party Fred Hampton was a stirring orator, firing hearts and minds out of slumber and into action against US capitalism. So clear and infectious was Hampton’s guidance against the country’s racist and classist economic system that the FBI and Chicago police department assassinated the 21-year-old as he slept. In documentaries like The Murder of Fred Hampton, which don’t circulate enough, Hampton is seen delivering his famous speeches at rallies, casually moving fellow Panthers with his warmth in a mock trial at the headquarters, mingling at the Free Breakfast for School Children Program and […]

Filmmaker Jack Dunphy makes personal films. His shorts Serenity, Chekhov and now Revelations, tell stories from his life with a dash of fiction. He uses construction paper as a base material for his animated films and seemingly does detail work with whatever bachelor-pad rubbish he has on hand. These stop-motion worlds are grubby and handmade; there’s no handsome veneer getting between us and Jack’s emotions, though they’re beautiful in their own right. In Revelations, now streaming as part of the Slamdance Film Festival, he combines animation with video footage and photos from his past to tell the story of his high […]

The fields that once sustained Arittapatti village have perished from a long drought. All that’s left is parched desert without trees to screen the land from the sun. Since farm work is virtually non-existent, locals must cross this harsh terrain to jobs in the surrounding towns. P.S. Vinothraj’s Tiger Award-winning Pebbles, follows a barefoot father and son as they travail this desert in rural Tamil Nandu. A day drunk Ganapathy (Karuththadaiyaan) plucks his son (Chellapandi) from class and immediately asks him to choose between himself or his mother. The little boy doesn’t reply, his frenetic father walks off, and the […]

In All Light, Everywhere’s opening shot, filmmaker Theo Anthony turns the camera lens on his optic nerve, as text narration explains that we’re blind at the point where the optic nerve and retina connect—there’s a fundamental hole in our ability to view the world that, Anthony suggests, we fill with our own biases. Literally baring his blindspot on screen, Anthony concedes to the viewer that All Light, Everywhere is limited by his own subjective framework. His latest visceral essay film (following Rat Film and ESPN “30 for Short” short Subject to Review) follows Axon (formerly Taser) spokesman Steve Tuttle and Persistent Surveillance […]

Lowell High School, whose student population is predominantly Asian American, is different from most US high schools portrayed on film. Director Debbie Lum came to the nationally ranked school to portray Lowell’s students, particularly so called “tiger cubs” in the heat of the college admissions process for her Sundance 2021 doc Try Harder!. Of course, not all of the Asian American students shown in the film have stereotypical “tiger moms,” and it’s refreshing to see an array of Asian American parents and students shown in communities where they feel comfortable, rather than shrinking in the minority. But the pressure on […]

In the world of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, people from the future have figured out how to reverse the entropy of people and objects, making them “time inverted.” Effect precedes cause for inverted objects and people. Inverted bullets return from bullet holes and swirl back into the barrel of the guns that fired them, a fight between an inverted soldier and a soldier operating on regular time looks like a freak-puppet show, and reverse speech sounds like the dream speak from the Red Room in Twin Peaks. All someone has to do to swap their inversion status is enter a turnstile […]

Mike De Leon made his Cannes debut in ‘82 when he premiered two films at Directors’ Fortnight in the same year—Kisapmata and Batch 81—becoming only the second filmmaker to do so at the time. Wim Wenders asked De Leon and certain filmmakers present at the festival that year to answer pre-written questions about the future of cinema in the span of a 16mm reel (around 11 minutes) for his documentary Room 666. Godard and Antonioni filled the time and could probably go on; the others, like Spielberg, Siedelman and Fassbinder, talked for several minutes. But De Leon’s segment lasted under […]

Yingying Zhang came to the US in April 2017 to conduct a year of research on photosynthesis and crop productivity at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was considering a doctoral program at the university and planned to marry her boyfriend, Xiaolin Hu, later that year. In her diary, she wrote, “Life is too short to be ordinary” and was anxious to fulfill as many ambitions as she could—but disappeared June that year. It was later confirmed her life had been taken.  Jiayan “Jenny” Shi, the director of Finding Yingying, accompanies Yingying’s parents, Ronggao Zhang and Lifeng Ye, her brother […]

A.I. and “machine learning models” can decide who is accepted into college, who gets housing, who gets approved for loans, who gets a job, what advertisements appear on our social media and when. The extent of what A.I. dictates in our lives, and how, is unfathomable to us because it is essentially unregulated, yet we have accepted these invisible systems into our lives with incredible faith and speed. We trust the algorithms, assuming their mathematical functions lack the ability or will to hurt us. But activist and filmmaker Shalini Kantayya’s film Coded Bias shows us how these systems will always […]