Ken Loach’s Palme D’Or Winner I, Daniel Blake is a bracing call-to-action against bureaucratic failures to treat citizens like people. But it falters by giving us a character who is uncontroversially the Deserving Poor without challenging this as a concept.
Social Justice
Explore stories about marginalized groups and the pursuit of a more fair society.
Age in Place: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius
Jesse Thompson explores sound, place, and gentrification in Aquarius and its parallels to the realities of real estate in Sydney, Australia.
Ava DuVernay’s 13th is an innovative spin on the talking head doc
Employing key but subtle twists on the convention talking head documentary, Ava DuVernay’s 13th explains how slavery in the U.S. was never really abolished without ever resorting to preaching.
Arabian Nights is an intoxicating, maddening mosaic of recession-era Portugal
Arabian Nights is the blind men’s elephant: miniseries and short story cycle, documentary and fantasy, proletarian and prohibitive. It’s an enormous six-hour movie split into three volumes, made up mostly of separate smaller stories.
The politics of sisterhood in Mustang
Mustang, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s directorial debut, charts five sisters’ resistance, as they both grow into and reject a narrow notion of womanhood. But Ergüven privileges perspectives that a Western audience can understand and approve of, making the story too familiar and incomplete.
3000 Nights explores motherhood behind bars
Mais Masri’s 3000 Nights was a highlight of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, a film by a female director that flew largely under-the-radar. Check out our coverage of other great films directed by women here. Mai Masri’s 3000 Nights shares some plot points with the TIFF audience-award-winner, Room: an unjustly imprisoned woman finds new hope and […]