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

Conversation
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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.”

Article
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Perhaps this is the function that computer animation can best assume from film: the creation of a totally administered world, a complete faith in the image. Whatever CGI might lose in its production of likeness and in the spectator’s knowledge of how this image is produced, it gains in this enhanced relation to control. No more rustling of the wind in the trees but merely a simulated wind, what Farocki calls a “new constructivism.”

A Conversation with John Smith

Conversation
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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.

UPDATED ON 30.09.2026
A COLLECTION OF 5 texts, 8 film pages,
EN

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.

NEWS
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Wil je je graag ontwikkelen als kunst- en filmcriticus en heb je een uitgesproken interesse in bewegend beeld? Dan is de workshop die cultuurtijdschrift rekto:verso en filmtijdschrift Sabzian eind oktober organiseren tijdens en over Contour Biënnale in Mechelen iets voor jou! Stel je kandidaat tegen 4 oktober.

Article
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Ik heb nooit beslist om documentarist te worden, om me voorgoed binnen een bepaald kader te installeren. Ik heb overigens een hekel aan dat woord: documentarist. Het draagt bij aan de afgrenzing van een genre dat voortdurend is geëvolueerd en waarvan iedereen weet hoe poreus het is, hoe variabel de contouren, welke bijna-bloedband het onderhoudt met het genre dat er altijd tegenover wordt geplaatst: fictie. Beelden zijn immers minder getrouw aan de “werkelijkheid” dan aan de intenties van wie ze produceert.

Projeções. Provisórias. Provisões.

Manifesto

Antes, as imagens estavam no mundo. Hoje, é o mundo que se banha em um oceano de imagens. Nosso mundo real, material e único; tecido e transbordado por imagens reais, imateriais, numeradas (constituídas de números), inumeráveis. Para observar o cinema contemporâneo é preciso inscrevê-lo no contexto desse exponencial aumento quantitativo e qualitativo da potência das imagens, interrogar o papel que ela desempenhou e continua a desempenhar.

Article
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Wie steun ontvangt, stelt zich zelden vragen bij wat er zich in zo’n commissie afspeelt. Wie geen steun krijgt, leest de feedback aandachtig, maar blijft vaak met het gevoel zitten dat het dossier niet goed begrepen werd. Commissiewerk verschijnt dan als een black box: je stopt er iets in en er komt een beslissing uit, zonder dat helemaal helder is hoe die precies tot stand kwam.

A Conversation with Anne-Marie Miéville

Conversation
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She could collect rocks and lace. She could be a harpist or a horsewoman. Lots of elegance, of calm blonde hair. Her first feature film, Mon cher sujet, is a film that talks of women without preciousness or complacency, a musical and essential film. Anne-Marie Miéville often answers questions with a hermetic gracious smile, as if everything we need to know about her is in her film. She’s right, of course. Miéville: “I also have a daughter. In the film, you can see her sing a song she has written; she’s twenty-four. And some months ago, when the film was already finished, my daughter in her turn had a little girl... I start from the principle that we need to talk about what we know.”

NEWS

From September 15 to October 15, L’Alliance New York presents Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned, a film series programmed by Michael Witt and previously presented at the ICA in London, exploring the unrealized projects and ideas that shaped Godard’s cinema.

NEWS
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Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán passed away in Paris on 15 September at the age of 85. Born in Santiago in 1941, he devoted much of his life and work to preserving the memory of Chile’s recent history.

NEWS
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Through 8 October, a new season at MoMA titled Long Live the Underground! traces the enduring legacy of New York’s underground cinema through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop.