In this interview, Kamal Aljafari discusses how three tapes filmed in 2001 revealed themselves as a new film, With Hasan in Gaza
Experimental Docs
In this interview, Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory discusses how she abstracts and rewrites post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reveal the queer
On the brink of America’s bicentennial, two filmmakers, a then-couple, filmed their cross-country road trips from the backseat of a car. The United States of America (1975) is the 27-minute product of these journeys and directors Bette Gordon and James Benning’s third and final collaboration. This short film typified the structuralist movement of avant-garde filmmaking, while also establishing documentary strategies that carry over to today.
Marking its 20th anniversary this edition (March 27–30, 2025), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has established itself as one of the UK’s most boundary-defying festivals for the moving image. This commitment to dismantling hierarchies extends to the festival’s structure. Many of the featured works explore the body’s mnemonic capacities—how gesture, movement, and touch might commune with history, or reimagine how to engage with the unknowable: Underground, Black & Arab Encounters on Screen, Bounded Intimacy, an Eri Makihara program, and Nightshift.
State restrictions in Cuba have turned independent filmmaking into a challenge, but with Chronicles of the Absurd, Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz show that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Coyula, the director, uses clandestine recordings of Cruz and others in encounters with authorities inside Cuba, whether when trying to hold a screening, or when asking evasive hospital staff for information about her father’s sudden decline in health. Instead of relying on video or explanatory interviews, Coyula lets the riveting audio tell the story, augmented with speakers’ avatars, text, stills of Cruz, and a little animation, plus music ranging from Cuban classical composer Ignacio Cervantes to the punk rock band Porno Para Ricardo. After its world premiere at IDFA, Chronicles of the Absurd was awarded the Best Film in the Envision Competition. Earlier in the festival, I spoke to Coyula and Cruz earlier in their first interview about the film.
At the bottom of page 49 in a 1993 edition of the fabled Argentine film magazine El Amante , there is a sidebar titled “Experimental Cinema,” written
In recent decades, the Locarno Film Festival has established itself as a premiere market for some of the more unusual experiments to come through the
In 2022, experimental documentarian Ben Russell approached the filmmaker and visual artist Guillaume Cailleau about making a documentary, set in ZAD
Few filmmakers have as recognizable a style as Bill Morrison. Those with even a passing familiarity with his work will think of degraded film stock
On a warm May evening, the opening ceremony of the 14th edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) was teeming with euphoria