Author: Film Quarterly

Queer African Cinemas: A Conversation with Lindsey B. Green-Simms

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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.

Phantasms of Dissent: Hong Kong’s New Documentary Vernacular

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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.

Conscience and Controversy

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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.

Summer 2022: Volume 75, Number 4

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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

Webinar: Sky Hopinka’s Visual Sovereignty

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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.

Webinar: The Resilient Spring of Arab Cinema, Ten Years After

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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).

Hollywood’s Embassies: A Conversation with Ross Melnick

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You may have seen Nicole Kidman last September, in a commercial for AMC theaters, stepping into an empty movie theater. “We come to this place for magic,” she says in voice-over, inviting patrons back into movie theaters after the hiatus forced by the worldwide spread of COVID-19. Pitching a return to normalcy while also emphasizing the theater’s cleanliness, safety, and, yes, magic, the commercial is also symptomatic of a delicate moment for movie exhibition.