In light of the reflective time of the awards season for film, Yasmeena Sulaiman looks at how even though the BAFTA awards have not always been an indicator of how the Oscars will go, the 2023 Academy Awards is different. Mar 19, 2023
Looking back to a conversation between two characters in Jean Luc Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Weiyi Wang interrogates the camera’s relationship to the emotionality within the sequence. Mar 19, 2023
Michaela Flaherty is catapulted back into her teenage years as she reviews Disney Pixar’s fantastical take on the coming-of-age narrative, Turning Red. Mar 19, 2023
Looking at Takahata Isao’s animated film Only Yesterday, Katherine Heller discusses its portrayal of childhood and nostalgia and how we can connect with one another through such memories. Mar 19, 2023
How does one discuss, and remember, a film that resists both discussion and memory? Rhys Monaghan unfolds the layers and lands of time that confound in Mark Jenkin’s latest feature, Enys Men. Mar 19, 2023
Wifak Gueddana looks at Wong Kar Wai’s classic Chungking Express and how it explores the fractured memories of the heartbroken by narratively and technically playing with time, space, and narration. Mar 19, 2023
In Park Chan Wook’s Oldboy, memory seems to be a way of navigating a mystifying present. Ethan Radus argues that in remembering something we do not transport ourselves into a fixed history so much as we begin to reckon with our present day lives. Mar 19, 2023
In this welcomed analysis of a TV series, Aisling McDonagh explores the relationship between mourning and memory in After Life (2019-2022), a show that delights in the occasional proximity of laughter and pain. Mar 19, 2023
James Cameron’s overwhelmingly blue sequel recently burst onto the big screen, but can it measure up to its predecessor, which continues to hold the record for the highest grossing film of all time? Flora Stokes isn’t so sure… Mar 19, 2023
Lim Kai Tjoon analyses how in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the past is not always an inaccessible aspect of our lives but an embodied experience in the present. Mar 19, 2023
By walking us back in time with films from The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925) to Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), Lesley Finn reminds us of the power of film and family and how those closest to us can inspire a deep fondness for cinema. Mar 19, 2023
In their short film Fuori Programma, PhD student Irene Ros looks at the collective memory of Italian right-wing political violence (1969-1980) through interviews with Italian women who were young adults at the time. Mar 19, 2023
Returning to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a divisive love letter to Old Hollywood, Grace LaNasa unpacks the nostalgia and fondness the director imbues in his film through the reimaging of reality and a glamorisation of the past. Mar 19, 2023
The Phantom Lover is a melodrama between Danping Song (Leslie Cheung) and Yunyan Du (Jacqueline Wu). Nov 7, 2022
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) was an offbeat horror film. Nov 7, 2022
Coco (2017) offers the illusion of a link between the real world and the return of dead souls, through the memories and thoughts of the living, personified in photographs, which the souls are able to return to on the annual El Día de los Muertos. Nov 7, 2022
The Addams Family is a black humour films with a fun, playful and macabre tone. Its idea can be traced back to Charles Addams comic and the adaptation of cartoon in TV featuring the life of gothic family from 1912 to 1988 when its ideas of weird but funny monster …
In an era of media dominated by the sequel and reboots, no one was surprised to see that the horror icon Michael Myers was coming back to the big screen. Hollywood’s attempts at revitalising a franchise appear to have one question in common: how is what we—the modern audience—think and …
Directed by Henry Selick, Coraline (2009) is a stop-motion animated film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name, featuring a gothic-style horror and adventurous story of our leading little girl Coraline. Her name, differing from a much more common name “Caroline”, clearly grants her a discernable scent of …
After 28 years, Interview with the Vampire written by Anne Rice has once again been adapted for theatrical release. With Rice’s passing, her son’s involvement in the production, actors of color in the lead roles, this artwork has once again evoked the imagination of audiences. Nov 7, 2022
Julia Ducournau’s 2021 horror-drama fuses the scaffold of horror with shifting senses of gender, belonging, the body, sex, and technology. The product is a redefinition of the genre in which the object of fear isn’t what threatens to harm our bodies but the body itself. Nov 7, 2022
To have a strong or wild imagination has been a quality both admired and ridiculed within society. Amelie (2001, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet) tells a story of an emotionally intelligent and eccentric protagonist through such an intense visual and audible imaginative experience, that one simply cannot ignore. Sep 5, 2022
Every society tells stories; this is the way people make sense of the world around them. Cinema has the ability to animate these stories on screen, using a multiplicity of tools, stitching together and presenting these tales visually, resulting in a richly layered, multi-sensory experience. Whose stories are deemed valuable …
With the Edinburgh International Film Festival opening tonight, we spoke to director Marie Lidén about her documentary feature – Electric Malady (2022) – which is screening at the festival.
“The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said: What the caterpillar calls ‘the end’ the rest of the world calls a butterfly” (After Yang, 2022). Sep 5, 2022
Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan, 2022) is a film written and directed by Ruijun Li and selected for the main competition of the 72nd Berlin Film Festival. The film tells the story of two lonely individuals, Youtie Ma (Renlin Wu) and Guiying Cao (Hai-Qing), who are abandoned by …
Screened at EIFF, Winners is a film about a very specific kind of winner that every film buff is acutely aware of – the award winner. Sep 5, 2022
What better time to look at one of the finest Edinburgh-set films than at the start of a new academic year. As new students arrive in the city, they bring with them dreams of the stories they hope to weave here. Edinburgh has been the setting for many great stories …
Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961) is the type of film that requires savouring after watching. Sep 5, 2022
While there were many intriguing films shown at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, here are five that stood out to me. Sep 5, 2022
Drag. What started as an acronym for “dressed as a girl” in recent history has grown to be one of the most powerful tools for queer expression, queer joy, and motivating political change.
On the closing day of the Cannes Film Festival, a friend was beside me and said, “It’s like I’m just getting used to and familiar with it all, and it’s coming to an end”. During our three brief days at the festival, in addition to watching the films themselves, we …
It was surprising to watch The Last Picture Show (1971) as the last picture show on the beach at Cannes. It was a fantastic experience to simultaneously enjoy the seascape and an excellent film. Jun 17, 2022
Broker (2022) is another example of director Koreeda’s personal style. Controversial characters – such as baby traders and mothers who abandon their children – are sympathetically portrayed in his film, with warm humanity. Jun 17, 2022
When The Revenge of the Shiny Shrimps (2022, dir. Cedric Le Gallo and Maxime Govare) opens with a chorus of men in drag lip-syncing to Hit Me Baby One More Time, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were about to watch a light-hearted, camp comedy. Which you are but, the …
“It’s Like Riding a Psychotic Horse towards a Burning Stable.” Mike Nichols’ 1996 film The Birdcage is extremely ahead of its time as a queer film. Jun 17, 2022
Love, food and music have always been intertwined and Modern Love Mumbai’s “Baai” episode perfectly encapsulates this. It reminds me of a quote from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, that says “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may …
In classical Hollywood films, “A woman’s attempt to be both subject and object of the gaze has backfired” (Balsom, 2020). In patriarchal culture, female characters can only be gazed at, they don’t have the same right to gaze as the male ones do. Jun 17, 2022
Our previous issue – The Gaze – was about the act of looking and many of our contributors turned to Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. While reading their pieces, I was reminded of another successful queer film: Call Me By Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino). The …
With the modernization of society and the surge in feminist and LGBTQ+ movement, we’ve seen more and more lesbian stories moved to big screens, either represented correctly or falsely. Jun 17, 2022
The new smash hit Netflix production Heartstopper was released on the 22nd of April, 2022. In the short time span since its release however, it has won the affections of not only the queer community, but the world. Jun 17, 2022
Growing up as a creative teenager in Dundee in the early 1970s wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, and I’m fond of saying that my life didn’t begin until I went to university in Glasgow in 1975 and landed feet-first in the explosion of culture that was the city …
Halfway through Todd Haynes’ glam-rock biopic Velvet Goldmine (1998), teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) sits with his parents in their suburban living room, watching a televised press interview with glam rock icon, Brian Slade (Jonathan Meyers). As Slade languidly expounds his views on marriage and sexual orientation – “Most people are …
If we are used to Ang Lee’s straightforward portrayal of bodily exposure in Lust, Caution, then the gay-focused Brokeback Mountain could be described as an atypical Ang Lee-style queer film. The sexual images that receive the gaze in Lust, Caution are that refuse the gaze in Brokeback Mountain, which uses …
Our Chief Editor, Niamh Carey-Furness (she/her) sat down with Andrew Campbell (he/them), Youth and Events Manager at Edinburgh International Film Festival, to talk about New Visions Short Film Competition. New Visions is a youth-focussed short film competition created by the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF). Running since 2018, the competition …
Our Chief Editor, Niamh Carey-Furness (she/her) sat down with Andrew Campbell (he/them), Youth and Events Manager at Edinburgh International Film Festival, to talk about New Visions Short Film Competition. New Visions is a youth-focussed short film competition created by the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF). Running since 2018, the competition …
Van Gogh Alive – the touring exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous paintings – has recently arrived in Edinburgh. What sets the exhibition apart from others is that, instead of displaying the artist’s work framed and on a wall, Van Gogh Alive projects them onto huge screens. Apr 15, 2022
Last weekend, the fourth edition of the Youth Film Access Festival took place in Glasgow. The festival focuses on young people aged 14-25 by not only providing a platform for aspiring filmmakers to showcase their films but also, to network with industry professionals and be exposed to a variety of …
As an audience member at the 2022 Glasgow Film Festival, one of the most pleasurable parts of the festival was to feel its atmosphere. Being present means that you are wrapped up in a series of rituals, events, screenings, and atmospheres. Apr 15, 2022
Glasgow Film Festival’s motto is ‘cinema for all’. What I enjoyed about the festival was that this ‘all’ included volunteers. This year, the festival ran from the 2nd-12th of March and I volunteered during four of the days. Apr 15, 2022
