By Libertad Gills
Uber einen Teppich is a film about what is possible when we dream awake and when we allow our eyes to believe that things can actually be beautiful and good. In other words, it’s a film about a utopia which exists in a tapestry, and because it exists there, it ceases to be a utopia and becomes a reality.
by Martin Kudlác
Portuguese underground filmmaker Edgar Pêra presented his latest work, Asphalt Guerrilla, at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. A regular presence at the Swiss festival, Pêra returned after showcasing Telepathic Letters there in 2024. While that film stages a fictional dialogue between Fernando Pessoa and H. P. Lovecraft through generative AI, Asphalt Guerrilla resists such a straightforward description.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
I own a black notebook. During the last five years, movements, scenes, cuts, camera pans, acting tricks and even pure noises have found their way into it after each of my visits to the cinema. Over the course of time, sub-orders have been found in this book, for example “lifting an apron”. From this I was able to make my experimental film Been Waiting for you so long in 2012.
by Kasra Bordbar and Arash Monadi
Sirat (Oliver Laxe, 2025) begins from this overlooked possibility. The film opens in a landscape shaped by war, where military presence, checkpoints, and a lingering sense of instability define the world. Against this background, Laxe stages a massive rave in the Moroccan desert, where towering sound systems have been assembled and bodies move together in circles around them.
By Libertad Gills
The Cineteca Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato celebrated its 40th anniversary this June. A cinephile’s paradise, the festival showcases “found”, re-discovered and restored films, from all over the world, projected in eight indoor cinema theaters across the town center and with public screenings taking place every night in the Piazza Maggiore. As a XL festival, there were more films than usual this year -about 500 between shorts and features, compared to last year’s 400+ film program. The heat was also XL, with temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius. The heatwave did not deter viewers, however, as the festival reported its largest attendance yet, with over 145,000 attendees.
By Libertad Gills
The Beyeler Foundation has recently opened the first major retrospective of the renowned Japanese artist’s work in Switzerland, who is 96 years old. The exhibition will next travel to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (14 March 2026-2 August 2026) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (11 September 2026-17 January 2027). Organized in close collaboration with Kusama and her studio, the exhibition features many of her most iconic works, and also features works never before seen in Europe, including several pieces from her personal collection.
By Finn Jubak
The haunted nature of Italian history, and the uncertain future, circle around and through Tuttaunanotte, a cinematic showcase curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi (actually a pair of curators, Francesco Ragazzi and Francesco Urbano), which screened in-person at e-flux on November 13. Tuttaunanotte will also have four iterations screening online through e-flux screening room throughout November. The program is the first public output of the Altérité Italienne project that Francesco Urbano Ragazzi have initiated with a group of artists and filmmakers, based in Italy or otherwise related to Italy, whose work makes up these screenings, and is within the framework of the inaugural Italian Fellowship for Curatorial Research at the American Academy in Rome.
By Libertad Gills
In The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949), Mary (Ann Todd) is torn between two men: the boring husband (Claude Rains) and the exciting lover (Trevor Howard). She goes back and forth between them, undecided. What does she want? Lean explores cinematic ways of conveying what characters are thinking, with a special emphasis on the female protagonist. Even though she doesn’t voice it herself, the men tell her what she wants and why she cannot have it: her problem is that she “wants to belong to herself” and that’s why she cannot give herself over to romantic love. She will have a “failed life”, warns her lover, and this thought comes back to haunt her leading her to suicidal thoughts and eventually back to her husband’s secure arms.
By Libertad Gills
After nearly two years of a genocide against the people of Palestine, the film With Hasan in Gaza offers an unexpected beacon of hope. It is not because of what happens in the film but rather because the film exists that the film is hopeful. Let me explain.
Those who have admired Kamal Aljafari’s work for some time will recognize that this is once again a film made with archives. What is surprising, however, is that this time the archives are not material filmed by another. For the first time, Aljafari is working with material that he filmed himself.
By Jay Kuehner
The sorrow of exile is built into the very architecture of A While at the Border, Ileana Dell’Unti’s epistolic portrait of two sisters whose lives are cleaved apart during the advent of the Argentine military dictatorship; one, Claudia, fleeing for Sweden (having escaped via Uruguay); the other, Julia, remaining in the north of Argentina. The kidnap and torture of the former, briefly alluded to in the film’s prologue, is the haunting factor in an otherwise mundane exposition – integral to the film’s contrapuntal formal design – of various public spaces that ‘backdrop’ an exchange of voiced letters between the sisters, now a world apart.
Directors:
Mónica Delgado Ch.
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
ISSN 2311-7451
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