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.
Experimental Docs
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
To learn about Josh Fox’s multimedia extravaganza,‘The Edge of Nature’, Documentary caught up with the veteran director-playwright-environmental activist the week after The Edge of Nature’s run at NYC’s LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club, which critic Bernie Sanders succinctly deemed “great work.”
The question of how to build a more open and equitable film festival is an old and still pressing concern. Ideally, there will be a plurality of answers and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival may be one of them. Its 2024 edition, which ran 7–10 March, felt like a festival whose program was not only deeply engaged with larger political struggles, but also open and malleable in a way that many festivals claim but rarely enact in the relations underpinning the screenings.
Imagine the hallways of Cornell University, a quiet, comfortable campus in upstate New York, in the mid-1970s. Now imagine, in one of the Ivy League rooms, a Marxist reading group that brings together students and professors from different generations, ethnicities, and countries. They are united by an urgency to make revolutionary art and contribute to the dismantling of imperialist capitalism. This is the origin story of the Victor Jara Collective, a coalition of artists and activists named after the revolutionary Chilean musician assassinated during the Pinochet regime.
Millennium Film Workshop is a cinema and gallery space dedicated to showcasing avant-garde, experimental, and noncommercial films and moving images