Vedant Srinivas

Vedant Srinivas is a curator, film programmer, and writer based in India. He is an alumnus of the Oberhausen Seminar and the critic academies at Locarno, Berlin, and Ghent. His film writing has appeared in MUBI Notebook, Senses of Cinema, Cineaste, Documentary Magazine, Photogénie, and Ultra Dogme, among other outlets. 

The World Begins Its Turn

On Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

Vedant Srinivas, 2026
ARTICLE
EN

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.

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