This year’s London Short Film Festival saw various filmmakers and curators pull from archives, as well as create and recreate them. In this, they formed a conceptually charged relationship with ‘the archive’ across the program that was neither predictable or heavy-handed.
In the exhibition, the final work (or first, depending which way you turn), by Hughes, depicts a beautiful eye with a single teardrop: it abandons hope for sadness. You would cry, too, if it happened to you.
I won’t lie: going out to eat in Paris can be hard. If we’ve learned anything from Emily (you know the one), it’s that there’s a gap between our expectations and reality in Paris. For some, it’s coping with the smell of urine on the streets. For others, it’s learning to avoid iPhone snatchers. For me—and likely you, if you’re reading this—it’s learning how to not murder our insides while visiting the land of bread, cheese, and more cheese.
Set in the Victorian goldfields of the 1850s, New Gold Mountain breaks new ground in its dramatic rendition of the power dynamics, racism and violence of this time and place, as seen from the perspective of Chinese migrant miners. Considering the SBS series in the context of the western genre it seeks to emulate and the Australian history it attempts to do justice to, Tahney Fosdike finds the show more willing to confront some myths than others.
A household name but with no one watching, are the Academy Awards… over? In 1998, the Oscars drew 55 million viewers to their self-professed glamorous ceremony. In 2010, numbers hovered above 40 million. Each year since, they have plummeted: 23.6 million in 2020 to 9.8 million in 2021. So why does no one watch the Oscars anymore?
Helena Sinclair’s work exists at the edge of a boundary – or playfully sits either side. Seeing it, take note of your first feeling or instinct. Is the platter bristling with hairsoothing with its delicate beauty, or discomforting with a grossness that’s not quite gross? Does your reaction sit between the two, not at neutrality but an in-betweenness that depositions your body? Does its silly name undo you further?