Features

Center of Gravity: Justine Triet on Anatomy of a Fall

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall begins with no image, just sound: the click of a recording device being turned on and Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) asking, “What do you want to know?” Starting from this clearly symbolic opening line, the ensuing brief exchange foreshadows much. Sandra is an autofiction author whose work has generated controversy (her family objected to her first book, an event she dramatized in her second), so volunteering herself for interrogation by earnest graduate student Zoé (Camille Rutherford) isn’t merely an opportunity to provide biographical context but a risky invitation for moral scrutiny. Their conversation turns […]

By Vadim Rizov

• Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal

  St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]

  by St. Clair Bourne
• Inhabiting the Role: Todd Haynes on May/December

  Todd Haynes’s May December, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival and was snatched up by Netflix almost immediately, marks a return to the kind of expressive women’s drama for which the director is arguably most beloved. Think Far from Heaven (2002) or Carol (2015), two films about forbidden romance whose lush, stylized aesthetics both encourage nostalgia and destabilize easy emotional identification. As the title suggests, May December, too, concerns a taboo love affair—one whose throwback elements are anchored to the tabloid frenzies and true-crime obsessions of the 1990s.  Written by Samy Burch, a casting director making her […]

  by Beatrice Loayza
• Playing Politics: Developing the Best-Selling Board Game Shasn

  I have made two feature documentaries in my home country of India. The second, While We Watched, came out on the same day as “Barbenheimer” and just finished a month-long run at the IFC Center in New York. The first one, An Insignificant Man, which I co-directed with Khushboo Ranka, ran in theaters across India for nine weeks. However, my most commercially successful project isn’t either of these—it’s a board game, Shasn (“Governance,” created by Zain Memon), that was born out of An Insignificant Man’s impact campaign and has been sold in more than 75 countries across the world today, […]

  by Vinay Shukla