Merchant and Ivory’s India-set films tend to rip out my heart and stomp on it—in a good way. Two years ago I wrote about Shakespeare-Wallah for Switcheroo Month, and here I am again, this time with a sort of bildungsroman, complicated by imperial socio-political goings-on. Heat and Dust […]
Generational trauma knows no particular race, ethnicity, or personal experience but there is a unique and uniquely bitter flavour when it sets itself on Black lives. In communities where violence can be routine but the lasting effects and the voids it creates are anything but, trauma is often […]
Halaloween is back with 4 new films this month! You can stream Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves 2: Communion (Indonesia, 2022) and Alper Mestçi’s Siccīn 3: Love (Turkey, 2016) at home and then attend live screenings of Tarik Saleh’s The Cairo Conspiracy (Egypt, 2022) and Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger […]
Tanya Krzywinska has made her hard to find classic, A Skin For Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft, and Voodoo in Film (2001) available for free on her website. You can read it here.
Lagueria Davis’ Black Barbie: A Documentary (USA, 2023) explores “Black female respresentation through the history of Black Barbie. Through intimate access to a charismatic Mattel insider, Beulah Mae Mitchell, Black Barbie delves into the cross section of merchandise and representation as Black women struggle to elevate their own […]
The New Yorker has an excellent profile of writer Samuel R. Delany! “In the stellar neighborhood of American letters, there have been few minds as generous, transgressive, and polymathically brilliant as Samuel Delany’s. Many know him as the country’s first prominent Black author of science fiction, who transformed […]