Agnieszka is battling a country that refuses to accept its past, and thus cannot learn from its repeated mistakes.
Fruits of Labor: The Beginning of The Cinema of Moral Concern
Dorothy Arzner and Jill Craigie’s Working Girls
Perhaps in another universe “Cynthia, Dorothy, and Jane are marching side-by-side somewhere, dressed chicly, placards raised, fighting for the freedom to do their work.”
Rai Tide Rising
Two Algerian rai tunes made the top ten of the Village Voice music critics’s poll in 1989. Why were post-liberation Algerian pop singers winning a wide Western audience while an earlier generation of popular Arab singers like Umm Kulthoum, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Fairouz never did?
Magpies’ Mix Tape: A different kind of protest song
“Let’s call things by their name!
If we don’t break the silence
we will die in silence
Against fear is life,
against fear is love,
against fear we are,
against fear without fear.”
Taken in by Mercutio: on Carlos Gonzalez Olivo in Romeo & Juliet
From the moment Gonzalez made Mercutio real for me, I was inside the story, experiencing it as if for the first time. I was affronted: the cost of hate was too high, the sacrifice of youth beyond justifiable.
Mind Your Manners: I Am Cuba
“As a form of resistance to the unblinking long take, Maria smashes her eyelids tightly shut, inhabiting her own privacy for the first time that night.”
Mapgies Mixtape: American Eccentrics
A selection of music we find oddly perfect, to celebrate a different kind of freedom this Independence Day.
Work of the Restorer
“The biography became, in effect, two stories: one, in which Harss deftly traces the formative patterns of Ratmansky’s distinctive and prolific career, and a second shadow story, in which Harss herself grapples with the unfolding conflict, the changing international landscape of the ballet world, and, most compellingly, the shifting identity of her subject.”
Bang Bang: Saute ma ville
A wonderful essay on Chantal Ackerman’s first film Saute ma ville by film critic Adrian Martin.
L’opéra-Mouffe by Agnes Varda
The film is like a poem of a dream, composed in movements, and alternating between scenes of blissful young lovers naked in bed, surreal and frightening images that serve as worrying metaphors for pregnancy, and documentary footage of people on the Rue Mouffetard. In 17 minutes the film covers the cycle of life — childhood, youth, old age, infirmity, death — but in not in any logical order, rather in the bewildering way that life moves or that we move through life.
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