Everything seems to tick in Unrest, the latest effort from Zurich-born writer/director Cyril Schäublin. Unrest depicts the working lives of 19th century anarchist watchmakers in the Swiss mountains, laying bare the absurdities of the wage system. Schäublin follows workers as they navigate their working hours across four different time zones in one town—factory time, train […]
Pastries, Freedom, and Love: An Interview with The Artist Airidescence
The Artist Airidescence is a multimedia anarchist creator whose work has picked up significant attention on social media. Their ongoing anarchist raccoon art series has been popular enough to warrant sold out print runs on Etsy. Recently, in collaboration with scholar Zoe Baker, they have produced an animated short film entitled Pastries, Freedom, Love: A Malatesta Story based on […]
Prehistoric Planet Review
Almost a century ago, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle showed The Lost World (1925), a film filled with prehistoric creatures, to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, and impishly refused to disclose the origin of the film. Willis H. O’Brien’s stop-motion dinosaurs were impressive enough to convince at least some of the audience that […]
Weaponizing Whiteness to Save the Planet
Western documentaries tend to rely upon the dual tropes of white saviorism and white sympathy to offer myopic approaches to complex interconnected cultural issues. This results in two-dimensional solutions to problems like climate change which tend to overlook marginalized groups that suffer for the global system of white supremacy. Seen as a bargaining tool and voice of […]
Cowboys & Aliens: Extraterrestrial Manifest Destiny And Its Enduring White Gaze
On November 15, 2020, NASA and SpaceX partnered to launch a six-month science mission on the International Space Station. Despite the ravages of COVID-19, NASA’s collaboration with this brainchild of Elon Musk, himself a product of an apartheid South African emerald mining fortune, solidifies the “final frontier” as yet another domain for colonial capitalist dominance. […]
Salem Film Fest 2021: The Long Coast Q&A
Seafolk are a uniquely resilient bunch. Growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the oldest seaport in the country, I learned prosperity and precarity can alternate like the tide for fishermen. The danger of commercial fishing also means coastal communities often bequeath a cultural inheritance of grief. These elements drew me with great curiosity to The Long […]
“Oh Hai!” The Room, Cult Films and Togetherness
The first time I watched The Room, I couldn’t stand it. A friend had recommended the movie, but it was riddled with cheesy dialogue, stilted acting and continuity errors. When it finally reached its conclusion, I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding in. I had no idea what I had just […]
London Film Festival 2020 Highlights
It wasn’t like the last time I’d visited the British Film Institute. The buildings were all the same, massive cubes of concrete sitting along the bank of the Thames. Their façades were aglow with pink and blue lights, as I remembered them last time, glinting off of the river as we crossed Waterloo Bridge. But […]
Planet of the Humans and Climate Change: Muddled, Misinformed or Malevolent?
Planet of the Humans is a 2020 documentary directed by Jeff Gibbs, executive produced by Michael Moore and distributed by Films for Action. The movie purports to reveal the failures of environmentalists for investing time and activism in green technologies which, according to Gibbs, have not fulfilled their promise for a more sustainable future. You […]
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
J.J. Abrams’ torturous embrace of determinism and nostalgic imagery sinks what might have been a triumphant Star Wars finale.
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