Two Times João Liberada

2025

★★★★★ Watched

Just extremely down my lane. Past as ghost, a disturbance that sets on the celluloid material of the film itself, collapsing the confines of what creates a cinematic space for us, experientially. Cinema itself as a medium for spirit summoning.
Queer nuns, imposed martyrism transmogrified into rage and visions, visionaries and alternative apotheosis. Historical document and the hegemonial archival building itself through the legal definition of personage, as violence then and violence now. Fabulated history because to historicize is always…

Under The White Mask: The Film That Haesaerts Could Have Made

2021

★★★★ Watched

Not for one minute does it cross some people's minds that it would have been better not to have needed museums.

See also: Nora Al-Badri's 'The Post-Truth Museum' (2021-23)

You Hide Me

1970

★★★★★ Watched

Perfect to watch with Dahomey, to establish not only the continuities of the museum as colonial instituation but politics of restitution expressed via historical methods of the documentary medium. A conversation between a grounded camera gaze, waking artefacts and the emotions of touch and contemplation.

Sheer Madness

1983

Watched

still thinking about my copy of 'The Scorpion' (1920s novel about a lesbian obsessed with Karoline von Günderrode) that i lent to a friend and never saw again. R.I.P. to the parallels to be drawn regarding lesbian transhistorical desire and reccural as method of historical socio-political critique (adding Wolf's 'Kein Ort, Nirgends' to the equation).

(realized i forgot to log this 2020)

Orlando, My Political Biography

2023

★★★★★ Watched

i'm gonna get a bit personal here because i feel it's a movie that permits, even courts that. it's been a while since i've been so profoundly touched by a film. i cried several times and standing afterwards in the late winter evening sun i thought of my dear trans friends and my own journey going forwards, a soaring bird high between the city buildings transplanting my own sense of reality a few steps apart, into an opening which felt…

Nope

2022

★★★★½ Watched

I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, So I can
Watch you weave then breathe your story lines
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, So I can
Keep track of the visions in my eyes

Memoria

2021

★★★★½ Watched

Apichatpong loml

Benedetta

2021

Watched

Bartholomea, moreover, under the pretext of helping Benedetta with her blankets, came up to her and felt her chest around where her heart should be, and sure enough, she felt a void.
Judith C. Brown - Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy

"how can i live without a heart now that you have left me without one? How will I be able to love you?"
Testament of Mea Crivelli on Benedettas words

To impose twentieth-century…

White Material

2009

★★★★½ Watched

A sucessor to Chocolat (1988), transferring the same themes of the colonizers oblivious privilege, the illusion of belonging in a sharply uneven power balance, into a far more brutal and caustic picture. It almost seems like a logical continuation of the formers historical timeline, the crumbling which starts first breaking itself here in the letting of blood, the fires that burn in and through a violence which has been kindled far before.

Black Mountain Side

2014

★★★½ Watched

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Manta Ray

2018

★★★★½ Watched

Enigmatic and dreamlike, immerses in surrounding waters and forests with their undercurrents of violent, forgotten and silenced histories. Ghosts finding brief moments of calm memory in sparking iridescent lights. A blurring of boundaries and the interrogation of the possibility of convergence in difference.

The Lie

1987

★★★★★ Watched

The irony in the only way to memorialize the trauma being by way of the meticulously crafted documents and photographs of the perpetrators. But there lies so much strenght in reclaiming them while never stripping them of their destructive power, transforming them into legible proof, into mourning of the ones lost.