Thought-provoking essays and new perspectives.

Does Art need a Winner?

Awards can bring attention, opportunity and history to a film. The stranger idea is that art must compete before one work can be called the best.

The Fiction of the Objective Review

A review records an encounter between a person and a film. Somewhere between criticism, ratings and consensus, we learned to treat that encounter like a measurement.

Decolonising the Film Industry

Cinema already contains many languages of time, character, rhythm and meaning. The global industry becomes narrower when only some of them are treated as immediately legible.

The Land of You-topia

A film can create months of work, hundreds of relationships and an extraordinary amount of knowledge. Too often, most of that value disappears when the production ends.

Work Inspires Work

Creative work rarely begins with complete clarity. Making something gives the idea something to answer back to.

The Gatekeepers of Cinema

Every film culture requires selection. The people making those selections also participate in deciding what the culture learns to recognise as valuable.

The Curse of Shortform Content

Every medium develops its own sense of time. The infinite feed has developed one too, and filmmakers increasingly create inside its rhythm.

The Indie Film Paradox

Independent cinema has gained extraordinary control over the image. The harder craft begins when that image has to belong to an entire film.

The Psychology of Persuasion

The ability to organise emotion carries an uncomfortable question about persuasion, freedom and the audience on the other side of the frame.

Film is Infrastructure

Every film depends on a web of people, places, institutions, knowledge and systems. When that infrastructure weakens, culture loses more than production capacity.

From Factory to Field

Film productions divide work because they have to. Creative decisions are less obedient; they move between people, departments and stages until the film becomes something nobody could have made alone.

The Public Role of the Filmmaker

Cinema participates in creating the symbols through which cultures recognise people, places and ideas. Those symbols are shaped collectively, long before an audience decides what they mean.

Death of the Single Genius

Cinema remembers films through singular names, even though almost everything inside the frame carries the judgement of many people.

Design as Narrative

Every frame contains decisions about what deserves attention. Design begins long before anyone describes the film as beautiful.

The Subtle Chaos

How filmmaking learned to romanticise the systems that exhaust the people making it.

The Artist's Responsibility

Every creative decision reveals something about how its maker sees the human being and the world around them.

Echo

The Voice of Unconventional Conversations around Modern Filmmaking

What makes a film bad?

When the craft becomes more noticeable than the film, something may have gone wrong.