Interviews

The cogent documentary, Who Killed Alex Odeh?, codirected by Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans, investigates the unsolved 1985 assassination of a Palestinian living in Santa Ana, California. Alex Odeh was wo...

The stylish, atmospheric, and engrossing police procedural, Special Unit: The First Murder, cowritten and directed by Christoffer Boe (working under the moniker Hr. Boe), recounts a 100-year-old murder case in ...

Between doing the right thing and the wrong thing there is “an immensity of grey tones” – this is how Chilean director Juan Pablo Sallato describes the moral dilemma faced by the protagonist of his feature debu...

Yuki Aditya Husandy is dead. From 2013-2023, he was the director of ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Indonesia. He was also a keynote member of Forum Lenteng, a cine collectiv...

Happy Holidays (2024) is Palestinian Scandar Copti’s first solo feature as writer/director, following his Oscar-nominated Ajami (2009), cowritten and codirected with Yaron Shani. (Between films Copti helmed a s...

During his visit to the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS) 2025, film critic and programmer Antoine Thirion offered a masterclass to film students in which he recounted the experiences ...

For over a decade, the films of Argentine experimental filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland, have unfolded as spaces of discovery where touch performs a kind of thinking that reveals more intuitive ways of knowing....

The river as a mode of expression and perception has long been a source of inspiration for many filmmakers. From Jean Renoir to Ritwik Ghatak, Christian Petzold to Jia Zhangke, going upstream has meant giving a...

There are audiovisual artists for whom cinema is a medium of historical reanimation. In the works of Taiwanese filmmaker and artist Su Hui-Yu, the camera does precisely that: it documents bodies that resurrect ...

Michael Douglas is well known as an era-defining actor of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a resumé of, among others, Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987); Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987, for which Douglas...

For an in-depth analysis of Mariano Llinás’ evolving cinematic approach, read Terence W. Yang’s critical essay, also published in this issue.  As a guest editor of Senses of Cinema for the dossier on El Pamp...

Many worlds are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us The world we want is a world where many worlds fit. – Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, Zapatista Army of National L...

What happens when artists abandon the reflex to control – when they trade meticulous planning for an openness to chance, or when they prioritise direct experience in the living world over rational deductions? A...

“Cinema is death at work.” – Jean Cocteau Around about the time I first saw Christian’s Byer’s new film, Death of an Undertaker (2025), I happened across this quote by Cocteau. Happened across again, I should ...

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life ...

South Korean writer/director Syeyoung Park’s sophomore feature film, The Fin (2025), establishes him as a director to watch. His beguiling dystopian thriller is incredibly atmospheric, with distinctive visuals ...

Claire Denis returns to Africa, the setting for several of her films (Chocolat, White Material, and Beau Travail among them), for her latest feature, The Fence. The film, adapted from the play Black Battles wit...

Christoph Hochhäusler’s densely layered seventh feature, La mort viendra (Death Will Come, 2024), is a French-language neo-noir unfolding primarily in Brussels – the capital of Belgium and location of the Europ...

I met Neo Sora on a sunny morning in March in Amsterdam. His first fiction feature film, Happyend, was the opening film of the 17th CinemAsia Film Festival, the event dedicated to introducing Asian films to loc...

“My belief is that people love to play”. It’s hard to find a neater quote summarising the essence of Péter Kerekes’ cinema than the one coming from the man himself. The Slovakian documentary filmmaker balances ...

Portuguese writer/director Pedro Pinho’s extraordinary drama, I Only Rest in the Storm (2025), set in Guinea-Bissau, is hypnotising throughout its 217-minutes running time. The film introduces Sérgio (Sérgio...

Once a quiet town at the outskirts of Kyiv, Irpin became one of the first front lines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In February 2022, visual artist and filmmaker Alina Maksimenko found herself there, with a ...

In 2019, a middle-aged man from the Republic of Sakha sets out on foot from its capital, Yakutsk, to Moscow to exorcise a demon from the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin. Pushing a makeshift cart loaded with wooden pole...

Senses of Cinema was founded on stolen land, on Wurundjeri country in the Kulin nations. This is on the south east coast of what's now known as Australia. In this context, there's a counter-colonial angle in a ...

The slippery, slow-burn drama, The Things You Kill, is an intense psychological thriller set in Turkey and written and directed by American Iranian filmmaker, Alireza Khatami (Terrestrial Verses ). The story...

In an era saturated with a seemingly endless stream of films released across festivals, platforms, and regions, it has become increasingly easy – even inevitable – to overlook some truly remarkable, challenging...

“Tales in Tales: A Retrospective Glimpse of Miguel Gomes’ Short Films” is a curatorial programme dedicated to the celebrated Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes as part of the Astro Filmmaker in Focus section...

Writer/Director Florian Pochlatko makes an auspicious feature film debut with How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World. This topical drama, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, has vi...

“No final, não há nenhum corpo negro no chão” – thus director Anna Muylaert sums up the thrust behind her latest film, A Melhor Mãe Do Mundo/The Best Mother in the World, which premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film...

The credits of Quenton Miller’s Koki, Ciao (2025, 11’), which list a cockatoo as a narrator and co-writer, bear no trace of irony. Centred on the cockatoo Koki, who once belonged to Yugoslavia’s President Josip...

I met Raoul Peck in London when he was in town for the 2024 London Film Festival to promote his latest, searing documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Peck was impeccably turned out, with an eye for detail t...

As part of the retrospective dedicated to Tatiana Huezo at the 28th edition of the Santiago International Documentary Festival (FIDOCS), the Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker shares with us her vision and trajectory...

Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev The timely and topical documentary, Porcelain War, chronicles the lives of a trio of artists in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Codirected by Brendan Bellomo and one of the subjects, Sl...

Armenian cinema, just like its history, is marked by the scars of displacement and war. The country’s most celebrated filmmaker, Sergei Parajanov, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Soviet regime. The Armenia...

The cinematic year 2024 can be defined as one of entrapment, a recurring theme where characters across a diverse spectrum of films find themselves ensnared in vicious cycles with seemingly no escape. From the o...

In the middle of last year, I travelled from Australia to the Western Highlands in Scotland, right to the edge of the Inner Hebrides archipelago, to work on the production of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsanga...