In 2011, Lauren Wissot wrote about underground cinema curator Jeffrey Babcock, who programs films in theaters throughout Amsterdam. She forwarded me the below email, from his Jeffrey’s underground cinemas newsletter, and I think it captures beautifully the emotional tenor of the present moment as it pertains to film exhibition. With Babcock’s permission, we’re reprinting it here. — Editor Greetings everyone, I hope you are doing well, of course. This is one of the saddest announcements since I started the cinemas, because all the screenings have been cancelled by government orders. I hear people panicking, and others are suggesting good things […]

For the first time in its 34-year history, the SXSW Film Festival got cancelled amid coronavirus fears. For an indie filmmaker like me, I’ll Meet You There – Bismil, which was one of only ten films out of thousands to be selected in the narrative competition, was the film of my life; that personal story I was dying to tell, as best as I could, with as little as I had. The film that took a decade to decide to really shoot. The film that faced hundreds of rejections before one yes. Being in competition at a world-renowned festival like SXSW is not […]

Yaara Sumeruk’s short film If We Say That We Are Friends was scheduled to have its New York premiere tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look series. Of course, it’s been cancelled, along with the majority of the city’s cultural activity in the wake of the Coronavirus. But in what’s perhaps a forerunner of the way filmmakers may be responding to the screening cessations in the weeks ahead, Sumerek is going ahead with the event, but online, in a “social distant screening.” At 7:00 PM, viewers can click on this Vimeo link and use the password “Dine” […]

It took me a few days to leave the house after my dad died. I only left because I needed to get a dress for his funeral. Nobody at the Paramus Park Mall seemed to notice that my eyes were red and puffy, that the sleeves of my white sweatshirt were stained with snot. I walked among the living, scouring the store racks for a black dress. It was the end of the summer and everything was floral, pastel, or had shoulder holes. (Why, New Jersey, why?) I finally spotted an appropriate one on the sale rack, a size too […]

CPH:DOX, the boundary-busting Copenhagen non-fiction film festival that takes place each March, announced today that its upcoming 2020 edition will be a digital one. With indoor events of over 100 people banned by the Danish government, the festival is quickly scrambling to present a portion of its program online. Here’s the press release: In the light of the global crisis related to COVID19, and following the latest announcement from the Danish Government on March 11, 8.30PM further restricting public gatherings, CPH:DOX has decided to roll out its 2020 edition in a digital version. Sadly, this means that the planned +700 […]

Speaking to Tsai Ming-liang is itself like a Tsai scene. On the day of my interview with the Taiwanese director, the whole of Potsdamer Platz—the main hub for the Berlinale—feels emptied out of its inhabitants. His new film Days has premiered in the competition late into the festival, after the industry presence has largely packed up and flown out.  By this point, the grand space of the Berlinale Palast in midday is like a shopping mall in a zombie movie, abandoned to a splintered cadre of bodies shuffling under an eternity’s worth of exhaustion and weariness. The revolving lights in […]