"[The portrait's] fixity overwrites the mode of creation and reception that Joaquin originally foregrounded through the portrait’s immateriality. In the film, the Utopian space where the nuances of Filipino historiography and identity were teased out disappears."
- Gabe Tejada
"Where Joaquin sought to haunt, Avellana instead immortalised."
Gabe Tejada delves into Nick Joaquin's revered play, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FILIPINO, and what its 1965 adaptation loses by negating the writer's experiments with form and temporality.
tinyurl.com/4ye29cat
"Akerman has always been drawn back to the city; the metropolis’ desire lines. Catch the train through a city’s arteries; open the hotel window to let air through its valves. Sitting side-by-side: the confessional encounter allows for so much more intimacy than the face-to-face."
- Dylan Rowen
Dylan Rowen maps itinerant traces of 'home' throughout the oeuvre of Chantal Akerman, from 1968's SAUTE MA VILLE to her final film, 2015's NO HOME MOVIE, examining her lifelong interests in the themes of place, embodiment, queer desire, and matriarchal lineages.
tinyurl.com/ypa6a7ze
"The body camera image perfectly replicates and enhances the ideology of ‘the horror of police’ for the viewer, a perspective that twitches at shadows while remaining entirely assured of its righteous power."
- Fred Pryce on THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR
"Cameras are weapons, so film the police, and don’t let them film you."
Fred Pryce examines the aesthetics of the body camera image as seen in Netflix's Oscar-nominated documentary THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, within a lineage of ‘immersive’ propaganda and surveillance technologies.
tinyurl.com/745jxt6b
The Melbourne Cinémathèque screens films on Wednesdays at ACMI in Federation Square. We recommend checking out their 2026 program, released this week, which includes exciting Leos Carax, Jocelyne Saab, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Spike Lee seasons—among many others!
www.melbournecinematheque.org
The Emerging Writers Festival is a Melbourne-based festival which facilitates the development of writers’ skills and careers, connecting them with community through a range of participatory events and writing opportunities.
emergingwritersfestival.org.au
"Faith and virtue are ultimately extricated from one another in these films. The virtue of these characters comes not from the faith which often betrayed them, but rather from their own resilience, strength, and moral goodness."
- Liên Ta on MARÍA CANDELARIA and MACARIO
As part of our collaboration with @emergingwriters.bsky.social and @melbcinematheque.bsky.social, Liên Ta reflects on themes of religious devotion and sacrifice in several films screened during the Cinémathèque's season ‘Cine de Oro: Treasures of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age.'
tinyurl.com/2hycfntr
The Melbourne Cinémathèque screens films on Wednesday nights at ACMI in Federation Square. Screenings are presented in partnership with ACMI and supported by VicScreen. Full program and membership options—including discounts for students—are available on ACMI’s website.
"In a state of censorship, it is the voice of the people that is first suppressed, but places can have voices too. The slums and the city have their own language, just as capable of speaking about the untold truth as its occupants are."
- Sydney Leoli Reyes
"Happiness, community, and fantasy are no less present in spaces like this."
Sydney Leoli Reyes draws on the sights and sounds of four Filipino masterworks, which screened in October and November as part of the @melbcinematheque.bsky.social Lino Brocka season.
tinyurl.com/4j6ru4k2
"Esperanza’s story endures because it affirms a universal truth: liberation is never solitary. To rise, as she learns, is not to stand on another’s neck but to lift everyone upward together."
- Maudie Osborne
"The picket line [...] becomes not just a place of protest but of community and shared knowledge."
Maudie Osborne on SALT OF THE EARTH, a blacklisted 1954 film that dramatised the real events of a New Mexico miners' strike with women at its centre.
tinyurl.com/yc8x9t3k
![An excerpt from the interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul:
“It’s become a precious thing to not know, and to not be afraid about not knowing. When you [...] encounter nature, you don’t know sometimes what’s going on, but you appreciate the movements and the texture. [...] But in the man-made, you automatically think it needs to be explained or have a proper function. I think that’s why art is really fascinating, because it points to us, something beyond the known and logical.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5wvduijw2utd476z3ixbyu34/bafkreid35odll7adtgfhbfoigyo3ttjkbs3bea5riimuxkmlw7jyk56djy)
An excerpt from the interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul: “It’s become a precious thing to not know, and to not be afraid about not knowing. When you [...] encounter nature, you don’t know sometimes what’s going on, but you appreciate the movements and the texture. [...] But in the man-made, you automatically think it needs to be explained or have a proper function. I think that’s why art is really fascinating, because it points to us, something beyond the known and logical.”
An excerpt from the interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul: “When you make film, you just collect sound and image. Jessica is just like that, a non-judgemental entity that goes through space. Like Hernán, the Colombian guy who remembers everything. All the memories are in sound waves embedded in the rocks and trees. So, I think like that. Not only in one lifetime, but we persist, passing along these memories that impact one another. It’s kind of a romantic view: cinema as a recorder of humanity.”
Apichatpong's BULLET screens on October 29 at the Sydney Opera House as part of 'Music'—a dynamic program of debut sound-oriented works presented by filmmaker-curator duo Garden Reflexxx.
Find more info and tickets at the link:
www.sydneyoperahouse.com/cinema/garde...
“I still want to remind people that this is a collective ritual.”
Oscar Bloomfield talks to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul about being present, hearing music everywhere, and revisiting his first short, BULLET, ahead of a rare Sydney screening next week.
tinyurl.com/3yp5njay
More info on Saturday’s screenings and pay-what-you-can tickets available here:
checkout.square.site/buy/HQZM2KAU...
![Excerpt from the interview with Azza El-Hassan:
"What is cinema at the end of the day? It’s the ability to create your own logic of what is happening in front of you, to reorganise the world and see it in different ways. [...] Cinema is what says: No, let’s look at the little details. Let’s look at it in a different way. Let’s see what it’s doing to us, and to you, the one who is watching.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5wvduijw2utd476z3ixbyu34/bafkreiglbtmzu2gnkwxec3biqozdszus7jwhq3ad5hh6awra4gusl2w4mu)
Excerpt from the interview with Azza El-Hassan: "What is cinema at the end of the day? It’s the ability to create your own logic of what is happening in front of you, to reorganise the world and see it in different ways. [...] Cinema is what says: No, let’s look at the little details. Let’s look at it in a different way. Let’s see what it’s doing to us, and to you, the one who is watching.”
Excerpt from the interview with Azza El-Hassan: “I’m trying to put things back into use, because what the Israelis are doing is destroying stuff so we can no longer use it. For example, they keep saying now that they are bombing Gaza so that it will no longer be inhabitable. Well, what if it remains inhabitable, even if they keep bombing it? This is the idea: you try to put things back into use in order to eject the effect of violence and to have continuation in your life.”
“There is an archive that is lost, but there’s an archive that replaces it, which is made in the present.”
Indigo Bailey talks to Palestinian filmmaker Azza El-Hassan, whose work KINGS & EXTRAS screens at our Bridge of Solidarity fundraiser event Oct 11.
tinyurl.com/y3pmu75w
"The beauty of [Dwayne Johnson's] work in THE SMASHING MACHINE arises from just how unshowy it is; the star electing to play the melancholic rhythms of Kerr’s everyday life just a downbeat quieter than one would expect."
- Kevin Bui
"Kerr’s stop-and-go career momentum and the film’s aspirations as a somewhat conventional sports biopic create a friction, placing excess weight on the shoulders of its movie star attraction."
Read Kevin Bui on Benny Safdie’s THE SMASHING MACHINE.
tinyurl.com/327pm43s
Doors open at 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start at Static Vision HQ: 47 Melville Road, Brunswick West.
You can read more on the individual films and purchase a ticket at the link below:
checkout.square.site/buy/HQZM2KAU...
All funds raised will be donated to Bridge of Solidarity, an anti-capitalist, grassroots mutual aid organisation providing food and necessary goods to some of Gaza's most vulnerable, including people without phones, English skills, social media, wealthy or living relatives.
On Oct 11, we're co-hosting a mutual aid benefit screening of Azza El-Hassan's KINGS AND EXTRAS: DIGGING FOR A PALESTINIAN IMAGE & Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's HERE AND ELSEWHERE (ICI ET AILLEURS) in partnership with writer Dylan Rowen and Static Vision.
tinyurl.com/4tmeshzp
PS. the Emerging Writers' Festival launches today!
Explore their full program at the link below:
emergingwritersfestival.org.au/festival/
"Each man is alone in his position. No outsider is concerned about their whereabouts. The chef continues to linger in this limbo, existing on the outskirts of his sanctuary while another man revels in it."
- Laetitia Um
Our first piece in collaboration with the Emerging Writers' Festival x @melbcinematheque.bsky.social is a work of short fiction by Laetitia Um—a response to the Cinémathèque's recent Seijun Suzuki season that explores the troubled psyche of a side character in BRANDED TO KILL.
tinyurl.com/mu2ajak9
