Sabzian is an international film magazine, hailing from Belgium.Sabzian est une revue de cinéma internationale, originaire de Belgique.Sabzian is een internationaal filmtijdschrift, afkomstig uit België.
Sabzian is a free online magazine that relies on the work of a group of dedicated volunteers.We could use your support. Please consider a donation!Sabzian est un magazine en ligne gratuit qui dépend du travail d’un groupe de bénévoles dévoués. Votre soutien nous aide beaucoup. Pensez à faire un don !Sabzian is een gratis online magazine dat afhankelijk is van het werk van een groep toegewijde vrijwilligers.We kunnen uw steun goed gebruiken. Overweeg een donatie!
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
Tenho uma boa notícia para todos: o cinema está em crise. O que, de certa forma, não é novidade, pois tem estado continuamente em crise ao longo da sua existência.
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.
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.”
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.
CINEMATEK has been selected as one of twelve finalists in the Heritage Tombola, a project organised by the National Lottery, Prométhéa, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage and museumPASSmusées. Their project, “10 Decades of Belgian Cinema,” aims to digitally restore twelve films spanning a century of Belgian film history – from the 1910s to the 2010s, crossing languages, genres and artistic movements.
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.
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.
In the selection this week: voodoo horror, post-apocalyptic action and Lovecraftian metafiction. Although these three films may seem worlds apart at first glance, all three take place in settings where social order and reality are undermined by forces that disrupt them from within.
Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), screening on Tuesday at De Cinema, is an early, haunting depiction of a world between life and death. Béla Lugosi plays a mysterious voodoo master who uses his gaze and sheer willpower to turn people into mindless zombies. The film derives its power from its strange, dreamlike atmosphere rather than explicit violence. Misty landscapes, dark interiors, slow movements and motionless bodies create a world that constantly seems to slip away from reality. White Zombie is at once primitive and wonderfully stylized, as if the film itself were trapped in a nightmare from which no one can fully awaken.
As we enter the final weeks of CINEMATEK’s retrospective of American “genre master” John Carpenter, we have reached his films from the 1990s. On Tuesday, one of his finest works from that period will be screened. In In the Mouth of Madness (1994), fiction invades the world itself, making it impossible to determine what is real and what is not. Insurance investigator John Trent is hired to track down missing best-selling horror author Sutter Cane. Following clues in the author’s earlier work, he finds himself in a town he had believed existed only in Cane’s stories. As soon as he enters the town, fiction begins to take over reality in an increasingly oppressive manner. “So it says both that horror is a kind of cheesy on one level but at the same time, if you’re tracking it, you can become crazy,” as Carpenter puts it. “I just pulled every bit of that idea out as much as I could.”
On Thursday, Flagey will screen the second film in the Mad Max franchise: The Road Warrior (1981). Set in a dystopian future, George Miller depicts a world in which scarcity, violence, and territory determine human relationships. He structures the film like an almost mythical Western, but finds its most spectacular expression in chases through the barren landscape. Dust, speed, metal, and explosions become a choreography of pure kinetic energy, in which the car is simultaneously a vehicle, a weapon, and the last symbol of freedom. “Neither Mad Max nor The Road Warrior is really speculative about a future”, Miller reflected; ultimately, it’s “a lot of stuff that is clearly exaggerated from the present.”
