Valeska Grisebach
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Slow Burn: Dispatch from Cannes
The wearied refrain—Cannes 2026 was a ho-hum edition, no masterpieces to see here, take the earlier flight home—obscured the quiet revolution taking place in film after film. This was a year of stories that build: All of a Sudden, The Dreamed Adventure, and La Gradiva are accumulative works, beautifully wrought and devastating in different ways, but not in the white-knuckle, nerve-racking manner of last year’s Sirat or It Was Just an Accident. Again and again, I had the sense of these movies having a bodily impact on me—not a wham-bam blow, but a more incremental emotional effect, as if the […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 19, 2026 -
“Where Are the Men I Can Imagine on a Horse?”: Valeska Grisebach on Western
Given the sense of suspended time often pervading the narratives and atmospheres of classic westerns, perhaps it’s appropriate that the wait for Valeska Grisebach’s own Western was a protracted one. Arriving eleven years after her previous film, the understated Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006), the third feature by the German filmmaker (and Berliner Schuler constituent) sacrifices none of the depth and focus of her previous work. With a plot following a group of German construction workers in Bulgaria, the film is in some ways far removed from the vast plains and Monument Valley iconography we identify with the Hollywood western tradition, while at […]
by Jesse Cumming on Mar 12, 2018 -
Pingyao Year Zero: A Report from China’s First Authority-Approved, Privately Operated Film Festival
Much has been written on the proliferation of film festivals over the last two decades or so. Tentacular events in whose midst commercial imperatives and nobler intentions (or alleged such) dialectically coexist, festivals can be many things, but rarely do they feel as vital and unprecedented as the first edition of the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival (PYIFF). Unprecedented indeed it was, for the festival founded by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke is the first ever in China to be approved by the authorities but operated by a private company. This organizational set-up allowed its founder and […]
by Celluloid Liberation Front on Jan 2, 2018
