it's very important to make the film a real psychological process. (Béla Tarr)
I still remember the excitement I felt when I saw my first slow film. Summer 2009. Slow and exciting are perhaps two words that don’t often go well together. In this case, they do. This opening shot of Béla Tarr’s The Man from London (2007), endless almost if one has never seen a slow film […]
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. […]
The history of Western encounters with ‘the other’ is a horrifying collection of oppression, colonisation, extermination; of seemingly intellectual debates about race and the superiority of one race over another; of inflammatory remarks, persecution, camps. Anyone who was not Western (specifically European) and Christian (mainly Catholic) was considered vermin, subhuman, a danger to public life.…
How can a man understand the devastated should have a woman after rape? How can a man understand the shocked mind and body of a woman while she is caught in the hands of an aroused man? The laws of rape and self-defence are written by men. Reyhaneh Jabbari was a happy woman. Her parents, […]
It’s a sign of the times that the few film reviews I wrote since the beginning of the year dealt with Israel and Palestine. For me, it’s consequential. In difficult times, in conflicts and war, we turn to art to find answers, to find a way forward. I have always turned to film. Most films […]
The sea. I still remember the day when I saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. I often spent my school holidays at the Baltic Sea, which doctors had recommended to my parents to reign in my skin issues. I loved being at the sea. To this day, I associate it with purification, with […]
Les spectres de l’Europe, ce ne sont donc pas exactement ces gens « séculaires et sacrés », vêtus d’imperméables en plastiques et qui tentent de passer une frontière … : ce sont les questions qu’ils posent à notre présent, à nos propres désirs comme à nos mémoires politiques. Ils apparaissent comme des spectres parce que […]
We speak about colonialism, about the extermination of native peoples, about the enslavement of black people as if all of this was history, as if Europe had learned its lesson, as if it now strived to stand up for humanity, equality and the good in the world. Neither colonialism, nor the enslavement or extermination of […]
These words that I’m writing, I hope they don’t reach anyone. Words that won’t reach a world that would only persecute them. Tomorrow I’ll learn to kill legally. Birth is not an act of being. It is an act of becoming. When we’re born, we become someone. No one knows who we will become, what […]
I often wonder: when did we stop? When did we stop caring, when did we stop being human? When did we stop seeing in the other a human being? I have always had those questions in my head, maybe because I grew up with this heavy guilt of coming from a country that killed six […]