Global stories. Digital first.
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There’s an increasingly undeniable hunger for the hand-crafted. As discourse around animation becomes more and more absorbed by anaesthetizing questions about AI, it becomes clearer that people who care about the medium are pushing for tactility and foregrounding real texture, materials imprinted with genuine human feeling. This feels especially true of Sun Xun’s “Magic Atlas,” […]
The early moments of “Hinotama: Ball of Fire,” the debut feature from young Japanese director Yaza Takenoshin (who graduated from Harvard this past summer), almost move like clockwork, finding a pleasing rhythm in everyday mundanities — matching the repetition of numbers being called out for test papers to a mother having groceries counted at the […]
Late on in “Kefi,” one of its central protagonists — the youngest of three sisters — justifies a spontaneous hook-up with a random stranger by claiming that “the flow” of their chance encounter “was really cinematic.” The same, perhaps, can be said for Kisin Saito’s brazenly confident debut feature as a whole — a genre-fluid […]
It takes a bold director to combine body horror with Sylvia Plath, but then again Rubaiyat Hossain has never shied away from pushing the envelope. From her 2011 debut “Meherjaan,” widely attacked by conservative forces, to “Under Construction” and more recently “Made in Bangladesh,” the maverick director’s focus on gendered spaces and female sexuality have […]
