Renowned Palestinian documentarian and archival researcher Mohanad Yaqubi’s newest documentary, Revolutionaries Never Die, finds its roots in an unanswered message. In 2018, Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab contacted Yaqubi about collaborating on a project. She died three months later, before he replied. Years afterward, working through 113 reels of Saab’s 16mm films, Yaqubi constructs the response he never sent. The result is a tribute to the revolutionary Lebanese filmmaker, her filmmaking, and a meditation on what it means to inherit another person’s images.
Category Archives: Geen categorie
Locarno 2026 Review: “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming”
© X Filme Creative Pool GmbH There is a cruel irony at the center of Isabelle Stever and Anna Melikova’s newest film: just as co-protagonist Oleh begins to embrace his masculinity on his own terms, war arrives to prescribe him what being a man is supposed to mean. For Oleh (Markus Bright), a transgender manContinue reading “Locarno 2026 Review: “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming””
Locarno 2026 Review: “In All My Journeys I Am Returning”
In 1825, a young Swedish couple arrives in Colombia, chasing the promise of gold, carrying with them the hope that distance might be converted into fortune and exile into a new home. Manuel Ponce de León’s debut feature In All My Journeys I Am Returning takes this real historical migration as its starting point, but quickly loosens the boundaries of the period film to make room for poetic abstraction. The Colombia Karl and Petronella travel through is at once newly independent, politically unsettled and strangely unmoored from chronology, a place where the nineteenth century can brush against the twentieth and where the poetry of a descendant not yet born can echo backward through time. What begins as an expedition into Antioquia gradually becomes a film about inheritance, displacement and the peculiar ways history refuses to remain in the past.
Cannes 2026 Queer Palm: Between Assimilation and Preserving Community (Club Kid, Elephants in the Fog, Dora)
Each year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Queer Palm is awarded to recognize LGBTQIA+ cinema across the festival’s official and parallel sections. The 2026 selection, consisting of a record-breaking 21 feature nominees, highlights the importance of queer stories in cinema. In Marie Madeleine by Gessica Généus, religion, sex work, and homosexuality clash in Haiti. In Queer Palm winner Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, the trashy slasher film genre of the 80s becomes a vehicle to rethink anti-trans scholarship through an examination of self-identification at the intersection of horror, sex and queerness. In Flesh and Fuel by Pierre Le Gall, the long-distance romance between two gay truckers is tested by the hardships of working-class labor. These films came together at Cannes to showcase the current concerns in global queer cinema.
IFFR 2026 Review: “Projecto Global”
Projecto Global, directed by Portugese filmmaker Ivo M. Ferreira, positions itself as a political thriller in the tradition of Costa-Gavras, portraying conspiracy and systemic anger in both hectic and stylistically cool fashion. At its best, the film channels the atmosphere of this lineage effectively; at worst, it feels unsure of what, exactly, it wants to argue.
IFFR 2026 Review: “Yellow Cake”
Yellow Cake is a bold yet uneven sophomore feature from Brazilian writer-director Tiago Melo, in which he blends eco-sci-fi, political satire and B-movie tropes. The film trakes place in the town of Picui, Brazil, rich with uranium, where a government-supported initiative promises to eradicate dengue fever by sterilising mosquitoes through controlled radiation.
IFFR 2026 Review: “Butterfly”
Although Butterrfly’s aesthetic ambition may come at the expense of a thorough exploration of the narrative’s emotional core, viewers may find themselves intrigued by Renate Reinsve’s transformative work and her character’s arc, while fans of Guttormsen are met with a reward that links the film back to the director’s earlier, more successful works.
Locarno 2025 Review: Sorella di Clausura
Ivana Mladenović’s Sorella di Clausura is a darkly comic portrait of obsession, delusion, and the strange collisions between celebrity culture and everyday survival. Featuring a fearless performance from Katia Pascariu as the unforgettable Stela, alongside Cendana Trifan and Miodrag Mladenović, the film builds its own mad energy from the very first moments. A bright red title card declares, “If you thought you were going to watch a film based on true events, you are wrong and possibly paranoid,” setting the tone for a story that oscillates between satire, melodrama, and tragic comedy. Adapted from Liliana Pelici’s autobiographical manuscript, the film reshapes her personal testimony into a wild narrative that keeps viewers laughing, cringing, and thinking in equal measure.
Locarno 2025 Review: “God Will Not Help”
God Will Not Help, the sophomore feature from Croatian director Hana Jušić, is a poetic work on grief, faith, and the universal experiences of women within a patriarchal society. Led by powerful performances from its two stars Manuela Martelli as Teresa and Ana Marija Veselčić as Milena, the film explores how solidarity between the oppressed is able to form even in silence and cultural differences, and how it becomes their only shield against subjugation.
Locarno 2025 Review: “Le Lac”
Frequent Godard-collaborater Fabrice Aragno’s debut feature Le Lac is a film to absorbed rather than to be followed like a conventional work. Renouncing traditional dialogue and narrative progression, Aragno’s work is a sensorial experience that prioritizes touch, sound, and image over words. Over the course of five days, we accompany a couple, Anna (Clotilde Courau) and Vincent (Bernard Stamm), as they join a sailing race across a vast lake. What unfolds is an exploration of intimacy, nature, and the moments in which life itself feels most alive.
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