In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag critically discussed how we position ourselves as empathetic beings, expressing our desire to help those who are less fortunate than us – but in the process, repeated exposure to those who are suffering can cause a psychological fatigue, even amongst those who genuinely set out…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Georgia (1995)
Independent cinema has had a long and storied history, but it cannot be viewed as a single endless stream, but rather a series of chapters, each one defined as something of a generation in a long journey towards negotiating the boundary between the mainstream and the arthouse. One of the most fascinating, at least in…
Pin de fartie (2025)
Pinpointing an artistic movement to a particular work or moment in time is difficult, since we’ve come to learn there’s nothing that can be considered truly original – as Roland Barthes said, “a text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”, which is the very foundation of postmodernism as a…
Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (2007)
Purely based on logic, it seems implausible that there is any subject that could attract a range of notable names in the entertainment industry to gather for a discussion, in which this group includes the likes of Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier, to Joan Rivers and Chris Rock, and everyone in between. However, such a…
Bye Bye Tiberias (2023)
“Images of the past overlap those of the present “ These words are spoken by Lina Soualem, whose voice is heard primarily as the narrator of her film Bye Bye Tiberias (Arabic: باي باي طبريا), in which she travels from her home in France to a small village in Palestine, in an effort to unearth…
Nouvelle Vague (1990)
Where does an artistic revolutionary go once the world has caught up with their ingenuity? Some are put out to pasture, fading into obscurity through struggling to come to terms with a rise in popularity, indicating that they were no longer symbols of the avant-garde and instead highly influential remnants of a bygone era. Others…
Twinless (2025)
We all grieve in our own way – there isn’t any predetermined guidebook on how to navigate the loss of a loved one, which can make the mourning process excruciatingly difficult for many people. It is easy to feel lost, adrift in a sea of emotion in which all the rudder cables have been cut….
Orphan (2025)
There was a point when we thought László Nemes was going to be the next great European auteur. He showed a lot of promise with Son of Saul, a film that has some flaws but is still an ambitious achievement. That proved to be somewhat of a divisive work, and one that did contain several…
Red (2008)
When someone has experienced an unspeakable tragedy, there is very little that can be done to soothe a broken soul – but for some, accountability is more than enough to push them towards a place of healing. This isn’t always necessarily easy to acquire, especially not when it involves people who don’t understand the enormity…
Ballad of a Small Player (2025)
Ghosts tend to follow us around. Whether we take such a sentiment as a literal description of the supernatural, or simply view it as a metaphorical idea about the inability to escape the past depends on each person, but it’s a relatively universal idea at its core. This is something that Lawrence Osborne explored in…
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