Authors: Kathy Rong Zhou
Sundance Film Review: MERATA: How Mum Decolonised the Screen
Her mission, in her words, was to decolonize and indigenize our screens. With Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen, her son Hepi Mita continues the task. … read more
Slamdance Film Festival 2019 – Boni Bonita
Boni Bonita was shot over three years and magnificently across three formats: Super 16, 16 mm and digital. “When writing this film, I always pictured it with a nostalgic look,” says Barosa. … read more
Film Review: Sorry to Bother You
Buoyed by its people-power, anti-capitalist, revolution-minded readiness to jolt us awake, Riley’s filmic storytelling debut stays daring and endlessly inventive. … read more
Film Review: Eighth Grade
Like eighth grade, Bo Burnham’s feature-film debut will have you wincing in secondhand (and firsthand) embarrassment and laughing through heart-pangs. … read more
Damn These Heels 2018: Close-Knit
Naoko Ogigami’s thoughtful, pastel-hued family drama Close-Knit follows the self-sufficient and searching Tomo, played by Rinka Kakihara. … read more
Fazilat Soukhakian
Fazilat Soukhakian’s approach is an active, inquiring one. The Iranian artist-photographer’s work continually records and questions what it means to exist in our contemporary world—what it means to engage with it, to have a stake in it. … read more
Art | Art and Fashion | LGBTQ+
Film Review: The Rider
Melding fact and fiction, Chloé Zhao’s second feature film, The Rider, remains on the Pine Ridge Reservation to paint an aching portrait of rodeo cowboys among Oglala Lakota Tribe (Sioux) community. … read more
Film Review: Foxtrot
Foxtrot’s three acts are tonally distinct, each bringing their own lurching plot twists, each grim or violent or (bleakly) humorous in their own ways. But the final chapter becomes oppressive in its reality, and however Maoz employs the hypnagogic and the hyperreal, he asks his audience to ponder war and borders. … read more
Film Review: Loveless
From the director of Gloria and Leviathan comes Loveless, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s bleak depiction, simultaneously brutal and measured, of a failed marriage and fractured family—a lost child and a lost society. … read more
Film Review: A Fantastic Woman
Director Sebastián Lelio crafts an empathetic and surprisingly soft portrait of Marina (Daniela Vega), a trans woman, as she pushes fiercely for a chance to carve out space for herself, a space to mourn. … read more
Personal/Public: Artist Jorge Rojas on Performance
For the last 10 years, Jorge Rojas has focused on performance art, veering between intimate moments and dramatic gestures, drawing from lived and shared experience, intercultural and contemporary identity, and much more. … read more
Art | Art and Fashion | LGBTQ+
Film Review: Phantom Thread
In Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s vision is as exquisite, meticulous and fixated as that of his lead character, Reynolds Woodcock. With superb cinematography, Anderson’s is a ravishing inspection of the pursuit for aesthetic perfection, of love and power and their dizzying, sickly, perverse intimations. … read more
