One of the hallmarks of a truly extraordinary story is its ability to be adapted countless times, including instances where it is mangled and reconfigured into entirely different contexts while still retaining some degree of resonance to the original work. This is precisely why artists like William Shakespeare and Franz Kafka have remained so incredibly…
Category: experimental
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…
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…
Mr. K (2025)
I often wonder whether Franz Kafka realised that his writing would have such an enormous impact on global culture – not only have his works been formative in the creation of entire literary movements, the very mention of his name evokes particular images and ideas, such as the frustrations of navigating the bureaucracy, endless hallways…
Baan (2024)
Where is home? Perhaps a more interesting question is what is it about a specific place that leads it to earn such a label, whether it is for an individual or a wider group of people? In her second feature directorial outing (following her well-received Ashore a few years ago), Leonor Teles, who had previously…
It’s Not Me (2024)
I have always maintained that Leos Carax is such an ingenious filmmaker, he could make even the most abstract and unconventional ideas seem engaging and captivating. This is exactly what he did in It’s Not Me (French: C’est pas moi), his ambitious and utterly bewildering attempt at self-reflection, and his most recent offering. The film,…
Timestalker (2024)
Originality is such a valuable commodity in contemporary cinema, particularly because it seems so elusive – it has always seemed slightly unnerving the degree to which the industry relies on existing properties rather than embracing the potential of discovering some new, untrodden artistic concept or style. Yet, there are still some filmmakers who are firm…
Boro in the Box (2011)
If one wanted a strong entry point into experimental European cinema, two names that serve to be appropriate introductions are Walerian Borowczyk, the acclaimed Polish filmmaker with a penchant for the absurd, and Bertrand Mandico, a French director who has cited “Boro” as one of his influences. This is made extremely evident in Boro in…
Of Freaks and Men (1998)
There comes a point in Of Freaks and Men (Russian: Про уродов и людей), where we have to wonder whether director Aleksei Balabanov knew what he was doing, or was simply surrendering to the absolute absurdity of a premise that was already far from plausible, to begin with. However, what can’t be denied about this…
Poison (1991)
Before he came to be known as one of the most intriguing peddlers of melodrama and complex character studies, Todd Haynes was a rambunctious young independent filmmaker with a penchant for the absurd and the constant desire to push the boundaries of the medium, which he did consistently for the first few years of his…
The Postmodern Pelican 