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07.01.2026
A COLLECTION OF 9 texts, 21 film pages, 1 event, 2 news items,
EN

The year 2025 marked the mournful fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini. After his death, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a passionate plea for him, warning against the posthumous moralisation and simplification of his oeuvre, which he considered a threat to the radical complexity of his work and his person. “Do not pass judgement on Pasolini,” he wrote, “do not render harmless what was never meant to be harmless.” This collection of texts follows Sabzian’s recent publication WHO IS ME, a Dutch translation of Pasolini’s posthumous autobiographical text Poeta delle ceneri [Poet of the Ashes]. In that text, Pasolini writes: “No artist in any country is ever free. An artist is a living objection.” In that spirit, this collection gathers several texts on Sabzian dedicated to Pasolini’s films, his writings and his lasting legacy.

12.01.2026
NL

Vanachter een muurtje, door een kijkgat, smeekt een meisje om aandacht: “Film me, dan heb ik een beeld.” De camera zoekt en vindt haar, hoewel ze amper zichtbaar is. Haar drang naar beeldwording spreekt luider dan het ontoereikende antwoord dat ze krijgt. Het is niet het eerste, noch het laatste kind dat het beeldkader opeist in With Hasan in Gaza (2025). Kamal Aljafari en cameraman Hasan beantwoorden hun verzoeken door via pans en tilts kinderen in het frame te vangen. Vervolgens kijken ze glimlachend de lens in, en vormen met hun handen een teken van vrede.

Sirât by Oliver Laxe

Article
10.12.2025
NL EN

If Laxe’s true subject is detachment and indifference, and his film is a form of punishment, then that results in a peculiar cruelty. In various interviews, Laxe says that Sirât arose from a “wound,” which he traces back to Gestalt psychology. “Art is pushing boundaries, spirituality is pushing boundaries, and that’s where you get to know yourself,” he says. The word “wound” also encapsulates the duality of the film: wounds can be healed and inflicted. Strangely enough, Sirât does both.

03.12.2025
NL

All my life…I’ve been waiting for you. De felrode bloemen, de verweerde schutting en de blauwe hemel zijn de hoofdfiguren van deze korte film. Met een telelens vertelt Bruce Baillie in een drie minuten durende panbeweging een liefdesverhaal tussen de kijker en de struiken. Wat is er zo bijzonder aan dit Californische zomertafereel?

In Praise of the Unexpected

Manifesto
12.11.2025
NL FR EN

The magic of cinema is something which leaps out, which isn’t planned: it’s what happens beyond all the work, the materials tools, the script, etc. In my life as an actress, it’s the encounters and surprises which attract, or even enchant, me.

Bugonia (2025) by Yorgos Lanthimos

Article
26.11.2025
EN

[Bugonia] sets itself in a broader genre of conspiracy movies such as Alan Pakula’s 1974 The Parallax View, Philip Kauffman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live. In such movies, aliens or conspirators are generally de-individualized so that they can function effectively as metaphors for “the system”. A way to see such movies is as an attempt to thematize conflict in late capitalism, meaning a contradiction that cannot express itself anymore in the terms of class war. For atomized workers, the conspiracy theory provides a “useful fiction” to understand the social totality itself.

Article
19.11.2025
NL FR EN

Television maintains, first of all, a quotidian intimacy with life and the world, such that it penetrates every day into our living rooms, not to violate our privacy, but rather to become part of it and enrich it. Even more precisely, TV, in the infinite variety of its revelations, favors man. Each time a human being who deserves to be known enters into the field of this iconoscope, the image is made richer and something of this man is rendered to us.

Article
19.11.2025
EN

From [Frans van de Staak], I learned not only how to make films but also how to be determined in doing so. He was open, unassuming, modest, but very strong. He was one of those rare people whose life and art matched perfectly. He spoke very little. He would laugh and say, “I started talking very late; my mother took me to the doctor for that.” Yes, his films tend to be modestly silent, but they could delve deeply into what he was telling, reaching the very essence of the subject, without any bombast.

Article
12.11.2025
EN

Through a mix of cultural neglect and self-absorption, experimental cinema has often remained outside vital contemporary discourses, for better or worse. Take for example its most towering figure, Stan Brakhage. Between the late 1950s and early 2000s, in nearly twenty films dealing with animals, Brakhage, more radically than anyone else, rendered amorphous the distinctions between looking and being looked at, subject and perception, human and non-human. Yet his work is rarely addressed from this vantage point. Surveying the repertoire of experimental and artists’ films for animal presence inevitably brings up many other formidable names. The most atypical figure who might feature in such a hypothetical catalogue could be the Berlin based experimental filmmaker Karl Kels, whose fascination with the zoological inspires both awe and admiration.

COMPILED BY Tillo Huygelen

Few figures in film history have left a greater mark than André Bazin (1918–1958), considered by many to be the film critic of the twentieth century. Between 1942 and his early death in 1958, Bazin wrote an impressive body of work comprising nearly three thousand texts – amounting to an average of roughly one piece every two days. Less well known are the hundreds of articles he wrote as a television critic. He began doing so primarily for health reasons: in the early 1950s, his fragile condition forced him to give up his daily activities, leave Paris and seek rest in the small town of Bry-sur-Marne. But there was also a deeper reason: for Bazin, television formed an integral part of the emerging visual culture, an evolution he wanted to follow closely and comment on.

NEWS
06.01.2026
EN

In January 2017, Jean-Baptiste Thoret and Nicole Brenez travelled to Rolle to meet Jean-Luc Godard, then 86 years old, at his home. This long, open conversation later became the basis for a film that, for years, could not be released due to rights issues. On 3 January, Thoret released the film for free on YouTube, for an unspecified period of time.

Obituaries
12.01.2026
EN

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has passed away on 6 January. As one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, he forged one of the most uncompromising filmographies in modern cinema.