Category: Filmmaking
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What does it mean to film a powwow? What does it mean for a powwow to take place now, in the 21st century? These are questions provoked by Sky Hopinka’s second feature, Powwow People (2025), which takes us into the heart of a powwow, a contemporary gathering of Native Americans, bringing together different tribes and…
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François Ozon slowly and meticulously reassembles Camus’ The Stranger to create one of the best adaptations put to screen. Albert Camus’ first novel, L’Etranger, is, by virtue of its philosophy, a tough one to adapt to screen. What is, in many ways, a celebration of fatalism, doesn’t quite gel with the neoliberal inevitability that has…
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Returning for this year’s London Palestine Film Festival, Yasmin Fedda’s 2020 documentary about two men forcibly ‘disappeared’ by the Syrian Government, led by the now-ousted Bashar al-Assad. Five years after its release, the hope and perseverance of their loved ones to find answers burns as bright as ever. The film jumps between the lives of…
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Roland Nurier’s minor-release documentary The Tank and the Olive Tree about the history of Palestine passed cinemagoers in 2019. Revived for a screening in Sands Films Studios for the London Palestine Film Festival 2025 last month, the film acts as a catalyst for conversation, with the bittersweetness of renewing its appeal, yet through the vein…
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On its fleeting visit to the UK after winning the Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at IDFA last year, Omar Mismar’s meditative documentary A Frown Gone Mad brings Beirut’s industrial complex of beautification to London’s ICA. From a single room in a Bouba’s popular salon, Mismar explores the production of war, beauty, and cinema, with…
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Reading like an Ibsen play, but with the severity of occupation as a backdrop, Laila Abbas’ sophomore feature Thank You For Banking With Us!, nominated for Best Film at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, brings comedy and drama to an unenviable situation, but with morale and vitality for family life rather than nihilism. Thank…
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Opening this year’s London Korean Film Festival, Frosted Window marks another exquisitely constructed mosaic from writer-director Kim Jong-kwan. The Korean filmmaker shapes his new work through three separate stories set across different seasons (Autumn, Summer, and Winter) in the Seoul neighbourhood of Seochon, intertwining them into a meditative portrait of love, desire, and disillusionment. By arranging…
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Amidst plans to strip down Gaza to rebuild a ‘Gaza Riviera‘, Sepideh Farsi’s documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk strips down the lies entrenched in mainstream media about the war to rebuild a new, more constructive form of communication with Palestinians. Pivotal in all this, from the ‘Gaza Rivieria’ to recent investigations…
