With the COVID-19 pandemic has come many emotions, not least of which is grief. Grief in the sense of loneliness, loss, and confusion; grief in the sense of isolation. In her stop-motion music video for “Anhedonia,” Brooklyn-based artist Cressa Beer was inspired by work of artist and writer Blood Milk...
From 1960 to 1971, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), collected files on more than 250 African American writers, artists, politicians, and activists who they perceived as domestic threats. Among the non-consensual participants of this illegal surveillance program were Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Marion Stokes -- three key figures whose...
Emerging from Grand Soleil's aptly titled 2021 album, Human Error, the music video for "Round Round Round" uses raises ecological consciousness through a dreamy sci-fi frame. The music video is a work of art which personifies the French brotherly duo's driving basslines and was crafted in careful collaboration with director...
"By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: 'Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.'" - bell hooks Launched in February 2021, Our Right to Gaze: Black Film Identities is a short film distribution and mentorship series curated in joint partnership between Full Spectrum Features (Chicago), The Luminal...
Hailing itself as Slamdance Film Festival's "largest and most accessible festival yet," Slamdance 2021 runs virtually from February 12th through 15th, and can be accessed with an impressively cheap $10 festival pass. With its long-time focus on emerging artists, the 27th edition of the festival boasts 25 features plus 107...
In the Criminal Justice Club at Horizon High School in El Paso, Texas, students bond and gain camaraderie while also rigorously training for careers in law enforcement. Horizon's program is the subject of At the Ready, filmmaker Maisie Crow's enthralling yet challenging documentary that premiered at Sundance Film Festival in...
In the music video for "All the Unknown" from instrumental Turkish-German and Swiss duo Grandbrothers, the band's long-time collaborator Manfred Borsch captures the track's delightfully melodramatic moods through one man's exploration of external landscapes and internal realms. Below, Grandbrothers and Borsch discuss the epic nature of how the music ties...
In her 2021 documentary, Film About a Father Who, filmmaker Lynne Sachs recalls how her dad, Ira Sachs, owned two identical red Cadillacs that he swapped out for each other, never letting his family in on his con. While benign, this secret was the first of many more, which were...
In Through the Night, a lovely new documentary by first-time director Loira Limbal, daycare owner Nunu coaxes an anxious young boy to put aside his electronic tablet and be more present with the other kids. With a rueful laugh, she asks, "I'm down on my knees; are you going to...
In Coded Bias, a new documentary about Big Tech's infiltration into every corner of our lives, MIT Media Lab algorithms scholar and digital activist Joy Buolamwini makes a bold claim: "The progress of civil rights could be rolled back under the guise of machine neutrality." Buolamwini's prediction is then fleshed out...
In the powerful new documentary, Since I Been Down, a swastika-tattooed man named Chad Walton explains that Taking Education and Creating History (T.E.A.C.H.) -- an initiative of the Black Prisoners' Caucus -- is best described as "prisoners lifting up prisoners." Officially founded in 1972, the Black Prisoners' Caucus is an...
Welcome to Libra season! It is heralded, appropriately enough, by an Equinox, when the days are as long as they are short. Libra is cardinal air: it initiates, but it can be hard to pin down, and its realm, as with all air signs, is the conceptual. Ruled by Venus, the...