My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” opens William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set in Chiba, Japan (while generally accepted as a reference to the novelist’s home in Vancouver). A similar pall intermittently lingered over the northern Portuguese city of Porto during the city’s Porto/Post/Doc festival. The pallid grey and smoke were reminders of the devastating fires that have engulfed northern regions of the country since the summer, claiming many lives. The cinematic image of smokey cobblestone streets — with a knowledge of the real, if unseen forces behind them — provided a somber and […]