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Liberal Delusions

On Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning (2026)

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The popularity of The Social Reckoning’s narrative lies in the political function it serves for both liberals and tech entrepreneurs, rather than in its accuracy. For Silicon Valley moguls, despite their apparent uneasiness with the subject, it works as the perfect sales pitch for their business model. The idea that platforms can change – or even control – political behaviour through “psycho-targeting” is precisely what they sell to advertisers.

The Spirit of a Moment

A Conversation with Viola Stephan

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Of all the filmmakers to receive retrospectives at the Play-Doc International Film Festival in recent years, Germany’s Viola Stephan is the least known. And while discovering forgotten directors is one of the joys of attending this small but smartly-curated nonfiction-focused festival Stephan’s obscurity presents a unique challenge for critics and historians who may assume that the story of art cinema of the 1990s, and of films from that era about post-Soviet culture and the sociopolitical currents between Germany and the former USSR, has already been written.

30 mei 2026

7 Walks with Mark Brown (Pierre Créton & Vincent Barré, 2024)

Op een dag een film
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Terwijl de stad gonst en kreunt onder de hitte, zoek ik verkoeling in de cinemazaal van Bozar voor 7 Walks with Mark Brown (2024). Botanicus Mark Brown neemt filmmakers Pierre Créton en Vincent Barré mee op sleeptouw door het Normandische platteland. Nu en dan houdt hij halt, het signaal voor de filmcrew om in actie te komen. Wanneer de camera begint te ratelen, wordt het verder stil. Vijf mensen staan bewegingloos rond het apparaat, turend naar het gras. Opperste concentratie blijkt vereist om het zeldzame plantje in beeld te brengen.

Palace of Dreams

The Making of a Filmmaker

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For as long as I can remember I always liked the pictures. As a boy I spent so much time in cinemas, a friend suggested I take my bed with me. I would have, had it been possible. That was my real home, my happiest place when I was lucky enough to be there. Outside, whether in the village or the city, whether I was seven or seventeen, it always seemed to be raining or grey and my heart would sink to despairing depths. I hated reality.

“Time was the most important material”

A Conversation with Pablo Guarise and Guillaume Maupin

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On April 10, 2026, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem presented the New York City premiere of The Magic City: Birmingham According to Sun Ra (2025), the first feature co-directed by French-born, Brussels-based filmmakers Guillaume Maupin and Pablo Guarise. The film, an inventive portrait of jazz pianist/composer/bandleader/cult-icon Sun Ra, focuses on his first three decades in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. The screening was followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and programmer Andrew Castillo.

The World Begins Its Turn

On Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

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The red-hot sun, enormous, rising on the distant horizon. A stillness before everything else. Yeelen – brightness, light – opens not with a character or a crisis but with the world itself. This is the first and most decisive of Souleymane Cissé’s refusals: to begin where narrative cinema usually insists one must. Instead, we are made to wait, to look, to be reminded that the cosmos predates the story, and that the story – any story – simply emerges from it.

Adaptation as Dialectics

Radu Jude on Le journal d’une femme de chambre (2026)

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After the international premiere of Le journal d’une femme de chambre (2026) at the Cannes Film Festival, Flavia Dima spoke to Radu Jude during a brief break between final rehearsals for his next film about how his films transcend cultural codes and local specificity, his views on adaptation and the usage of ultra-contemporary technologies in cinema, and his growing influence on both Romanian and international cinema. Radu Jude: “Nobody feels under attack because someone takes their violin into the street and is playing, or records themselves singing in the shower and puts it on YouTube. In cinema, by contrast, there is a constant anxiety – perhaps also a fear that cinema is dying. And so any new technology provokes fears, as AI does.”

Du noir

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Met de kortfilm Dans le noir du temps (2002) componeert Jean-Luc Godard een eschatologisch filmessay, “un film sur la fin de tout”. Verspreid over elf segmenten schikt en herschikt hij filmbeelden volgens nieuwe gedachtebewegingen die samen het einde evoceren van “alles” wat de mensheid heeft voortgebracht. Godard recycleert daarbij beelden uit zijn eigen oeuvre (Made in USA, Le petit soldat, Vivre sa vie), uit de filmgeschiedenis en uit anonieme archieven. Toch is de film meer dan een eenvoudige collage. Door beelden te vertragen, te herfilmen, te vervormen en plastisch te bewerken, laat hij ze oplichten in een poëtische compositie.

Making On the Bowery
UPDATED ON 11.11.2026
A COLLECTION OF 5 texts, 8 film pages,
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70 years ago, in 1956, Lionel Rogosin made On the Bowery, a landmark of American cinema and a key work in the revival of American independent filmmaking. The texts gathered here return to this formative period in Rogosin’s career: to his influences, his encounters on the Bowery, his collaborators and his search for a cinematic language. The collection coincides with the retrospective of Rogosin’s films at CINEMATEK, presented in collaboration with Sabzian.

This Thing Called Language

A Conversation with John Smith

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For the past fifty years, John Smith has been making himself at home in the ambiguous realm of image and language. He worked within and parallel to the London Film-makers’ Co-op in his early years, adding to the collective’s structural approach to cinema an equal concern with the construction of narrativity. In all seriousness, he creates a game in every film, deconstructing the givens of words, sound and images, remaking them with humour, even when laughter seems inappropriate. Sabzian spoke to Smith during Courtisane Festival 2026.

One-day Wonder Festival at Sphinx Cinema
NEWS
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In the weekend of 20–22 November, LUCA School of Arts presents a series of films at Sphinx Cinema in Ghent by filmmakers whose limited but influential bodies of work left a mark on film history.

The Lower Depths: The Cinema of Shohei Imamura
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From 22 October to 13 December, the ICA in London presents a major retrospective of Shōhei Imamura, one of post-war Japan’s most distinctive filmmakers. More than 25 years after the UK’s last major Imamura retrospective, the programme brings together new restorations, rarely seen works, contextual screenings and guest introductions, alongside a new monograph on his work.

Palestine Cinema Days Around the World
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The fourth edition of Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, organised by Filmlab Palestine, will take place on 2 November 2026, marking the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The initiative brings Palestinian cinema to audiences worldwide, inviting cinemas, universities, cultural centres and community groups to organise screenings that highlight Palestinian stories, histories and lived experiences.

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