At what point does playing with your identity and persona become outright fraud? For the young man known as Brandon Lee, there seemed to be a very narrow distinction between them – and for his classmates at Bearsden College, a middle-class high school in an affluent suburb of Scotland, the distinction was even narrower, since…

I’d like to start this discussion with a brief personal anecdote, which I believe helps establish a clear foundation for the forthcoming conversation. In 2019, I visited the World Press Photo Exhibition in Hanoi – and while there were dozens of incredible photographs, one stood out to me. The photograph, taken by Philip Montgomery, is…

When bestowing the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in 2009, former President of the United States Barack Obama famously quipped that Sidney Poitier “didn’t make movies, he made milestones”, and this is immense praise coming from any public figure, let alone from one of the most powerful individuals of the few decades, and…

Klaus Kinski is not the easiest actor to talk about. On one hand, he is one of the most brilliant actors to ever work in the medium of film, spending several decades turning in magnificent performances fueled by a combination of his incredible talents and unhinged madness that made him one of the most celebrated…

There are many ways to look at life, but perhaps the most effective way to describe it is that we exist to tell our stories in various forms, since we all have individual journeys that make for profoundly moving narratives when we look at it from an outside perspective. In this regard, one of the…

Is there any story that embodies the idea of the American Dream better than a Lithuanian fisherman trying to escape Soviet rule by literally leaping across the open waters of the ocean from one boat to another, in the hopes of defecting to the United States? What sounds like an amusing premise for a charming…

“If you don’t like this…we don’t care” I remember the moment I became aware of Sparks – the faded, worn-out live recording where two peculiar individuals emerged onto a stage and performed a song I would soon come to learn was entitled “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us”. There’s a moment…

It’s incredibly likely that each and every one of us at some point in our lives as students encountered that one special teacher, the person who made us feel like we were the most valuable and cherished individuals in the world, and whose compassion and empathy made them vital role-models during those early years. Dieter…

In the promotion for the recently unearthed footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival that took place across the summer of 1969, it’s become popular to refer to it as the “Black Woodstock”, whereby not only did it occur concurrently to the iconic festival that was taking place not too far away, but also the array…

In the canon of iconic queer films, The Queen has always held a very special status, being one of the first documentaries that explicitly looked into the lives of members of the LGBTQIA+ community. In this instance, Frank Simon was documenting the preparations around the 1967 edition of the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest pageant…