Militantropos starts with a gloomy sky that morphs into dark grey smoke from a burning forest. People are looking up at the cloud of smoke, but they don’t seem to be panicked or surprised; they simply stand there and watch it all unfold. Throughout the film, nature and war are frequently juxtaposed. This depiction gives strong meaning to the idea of war as something natural, inevitable, and...

The essence of Arjun Talwar’s Letters from Wolf Street lies primarily in the filmmaker himself, whose sensitive gaze reveals Warsaw and its inhabitants to the viewer. His substantial yet not distracting presence throughout the film – a presence that also allows those in front of his camera to appear so natural – makes watching his documentary an absorbing experience.

Watching Cutting Through Rocks, I went through a range of emotions: from hope to frustration to admiration to anger. It was very easy for me to become attached to the character of Sara Shahverdi, a strong woman with bold, pioneering convictions for the village she lives in. The directors of the documentary, Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni, take us on an inspiring and beautifully crafted...

What could be more glamorous than being a radical lesbian? If you're wondering, just watch Sally! by Deborah Craig, Ondine Rarey and Jörg Fockele, and you'll realise that the question is rhetorical. There she is, vibrant, overwhelming and proudly lesbian: Sally Gearhart.

The opening sequence of Redlight to Limelight shows a young man sitting on a bed in a small room. Together with his friend, they’re testing out their camera, following birds and painted trees. The director Bipuljit Basu follows Rabin and his friends, self-taught filmmakers, during the process of making their own fiction film about the life of a sex worker in Kolkata. The men are not sex workers...

Luuk Bouwman in his film, The Propagandist revives fragments of history on the silver screen, encouraging us to reflect on whether the past is ever fully behind us. Today’s digital environment offers a wide range of possibilities when filmmakers working with analogue and digitized moving images. Contemporary documentaries tend to reinterpret the use of archival materials.

Arjun Talwar’s Letters from Wolf Street is the Indian-born, Polish-based director’s attempt at a dialogue between his Indian and immigrant selves and between his artistic and political selves, through filmmaking— simultaneously inscribing itself into both Indian and Polish cinema’s histories.

Escapism has always been one of the most common coping mechanisms when reality is too difficult to face. But how far can we go in our attempt to escape? Make It Look Real by Danial Shah is a Pakistani–Belgian film portraying a photo studio in Pakistan where people have their pictures edited. In the film, the photo studio serves as a small sanctuary for people’s hidden desires – some ask to...

In a world where corporate giants generate unimaginable profits, it is easy to forget the individuals who make this possible: the workers whose labor sustains these corporations but who themselves remain in the shadows. Union (dir. Brett Story & Stephen Maing, 2023) sheds light on these hidden figures by following the creation of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the first independent union...

Perpetrator documentary as a subgenre emerged with Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which interviewed German officers and French collaborators alongside resistance fighters. This documentary and its influence basically established that understanding historical crimes requires engaging with those who committed them, not just with survivors. Luuk Bouwman’s The Propagandist (2024)...