In 1962, a middle-aged cookbook author named Julia Child made an impromptu omelet on educational television. On the program “I’ve Been Reading” to discuss her new book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she commanded a hot plate and whisked up lunch for the tweed-clad academic host.
In 2002, Karim Aïnouz’s first feature film, Madame Satã, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes with a trigger warning attached. One of the first queer feature films to come out of Brazil, it presented an unvarnished representation of a real-life character—João Francisco dos Santos, a street-smart drag queen—which evidently caused concern for the festival organizers. In the event, half of the audience walked out, incensed by a tensely homoerotic sex scene.
Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná discusses TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life with author Lynn Spigel.
Join Film Quarterly on July 6th for a conversation between Page Views Live editor Bruno Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) and Lindsey B. Green-Simms (American University) about her new book, Queer African Cinemas (Duke University Press, 2022). Moderated by B. Ruby Rich.
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The first romantic sequence in Rafiki, by the Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu, opens with a close-up of a pair of sneaker-clad feet on a skateboard, its wheels thumping along the asphalt. The feet belong to the teenage Makena, who arrives at her friend Ziki’s apartment building to take her out around town for the day. After Ziki’s mother answers the door, an elliptical cut thrusts the viewer into a montage sequence in which the two teenage girls sit close together on a tuk-tuk ride around the streets of Nairobi.
Taking Back the Legislature and Inside the Red Brick Wall depict two critical events in Hong Kong’s relentless 2019 protests, illuminating the messy scrum of direct actions in unflinching detail. Produced collectively and credited anonymously out of concern for the filmmakers’ safety, they present a formal challenge to the tropes and ethics of documentary filmmaking that have come to redefine Hong Kong cinema and the “copaganda” film as genre.
Not since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that ended its Prague Spring, and the Chilean coup of 1973 that ended the presidency of Salvador Allende, has the film world been as galvanized by one country’s struggle as it has been in 2022 by Ukraine’s—though, of course, countless other global conflicts, atrocities, and deaths (Brazil, Yemen, Syria, Gaza) have also deserved such attention.
Hong Kong’s New Documentary Vernacular
Bodily Drama in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Days
Women Auteurs, Western Promises
Factory Farms in Cow and Gunda
Passing, Social Issue Films, and the Beautiful
Colombia Enchanted in Memoria and Encanto
Sundance Film Festival
Page Views: Queer African Cinemas
On March 9th, 2022, Film Quarterly hosted a webinar discussion of the films of Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/ Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), whose groundbreaking film practice is examined by Diana Flores Ruíz in Film Quarterly’s Spring 2022 issue. The webinar situates Hopinka’s work within a broader discussion of contemporary Indigenous film and media in context, with panelists Sky Hopinka, Diana Flores Ruíz (University of Washington), and special guest Bird Runningwater (Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache Peoples), curator and producer and formerly the longtime leader of Sundance Indigenous media initiatives. Moderated by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.
On February 24th, Film Quarterly marked the 10-year anniversary of the uprisings known as the Arab Spring with a webinar discussion based on its special dossier (Vol. 75, No. 2, Winter 2021) devoted to pivotal works of Arab cinema since 2011. Dossier co-editor and contributor Rasha Salti and FQ editor B. Ruby Rich moderated a conversation with contributors Donatella Della Ratta (John Cabot University), Kay Dickinson (University of Glasgow), and Stefan Tarnowski (Columbia University).