LFF 2026: Let Them Be Seen (Nolitha R. Mkulisi, 2026)

The Xhosa‑speaking Eastern Cape of South Africa carries a distinctive rhythm shaped by its landscapes, languages, and long political memory.  Rolling hills give way to villages where isiXhosa is not just spoken but lived—woven into poetry, communal rituals, and everyday negotiations of identity.  It's a region marked by resilience: the birthplace of towering political figures, the site of fierce anti‑colonial resistance, and a place where traditions like cattle‑keeping still anchor community life.  Yet the province is also defined by movement, with many residents navigating the pull between rural homesteads and urban opportunity.

What emerges is a region that feels both rooted and restless, carrying forward a cultural confidence that continues to shape South Africa’s broader story.  Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi's feature debut Let Them Be Seen, which played earlier this year at International Film Festival Rotterdam and screens at the BFI London Film Festival today and tomorrow, is a slippery experimental documentary set in Tapoleng, the Eastern Cape village where the director grew up.  As with fellow LFF 2026 title At Night, Let Them Be Seen finds itself in the Dare strand when it would be rather less surprising to see it housed in the Experimenta section.

Tapoleng is situated near the town of Sterkspruit and close to the Lesotho border, and, like many villages in the region, is characterised by its prevalence of churches—a result of Dutch Reformed Church missionaries greatly expanding their activities in the Eastern Cape from the mid-19th century onwards.  Mkulisi includes frequent shots of these edifices as she essays daily life in Tapoleng, whose residents now look beyond the church buildings that once provided sanctuary as apartheid raged on.  The film also casts its gaze on the village's large cattle population, some of whom return this interest with an inquisitive bovine stare.

Besides these recurring shots of cows and churches, Mkulisi employs a more obscure leitmotif in the form of SABC music show Jam Alley, which is celebrated by a group of brightly wigged women as they endeavour to re-enact moments from the programme.  Mkulisi uses a mind-boggling variety of formats as she captures the essence of this largely forgotten community, for whom the spaza shop serves as a social hub; the countless small interruptions endured by the store's owner as he explains Rastafarianism are almost a running gag in this singular hybrid documentary, which is at once fluid and discordant.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

LFF 2026: At Night (Beatrice Gibson, 2026)

The late American poet Alice Notley's work feels like a continuous act of defiance against the limits poetry tries to place on itself.  Across decades, she carved out a voice that was at once intimate and insurgent, folding grief, feminism, myth, and everyday survival into sprawling, incantatory lines that refused neat containment.  Her poems often read like conversations overheard from another dimension—raw, restless, and fiercely protective of the inner lives women are told to quiet.  Notley's commitment to pushing past convention made her a lodestar for poets who see the page not as a boundary but as a site of ongoing rebellion, where language can be remade in the image of a life lived uncompromisingly.

Notley's work—particularly her epic poem The Descent of Alette—underpins Beatrice Gibson's feature debut At Night, which was presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart in 2024 and screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday and Tuesday.  Gibson established herself as a filmmaker through several experimental shorts, including IFFR Tiger Award winner The Tiger's Mind, and it's mildly surprising to find that, for all its experimental form, At Night has been placed in the LFF's Dare strand.  That said, the film is a more accessible work than what is typically found in the festival's ever-fascinating Experimenta section.

True to its title, At Night is a nocturnal odyssey through a Paris in which the bulk of its residents appear to have turned in for the evening.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric backdrop against which a number of women voice their hopes and fears.  One such woman, filmmaker B—deftly played by Gibson herself—is visiting Paris to scout for locations for an upcoming project.  While in the French capital, B attempts to contact her old friend Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), who once worked for B as a childminder; Didi lives in Belleville—where B is looking at potential locations—but appears to have been ghosting B for quite some time.

Gibson's film, which is wonderfully photographed (in 16mm) by Mare's Nest director Ben Rivers, opens up to include the stories of other women, such as Sophie Robinson's poet, who, in one of At Night's most striking scenes, recites one of her works to a roomful of people.  It is safe to assume that Robinson—like Gibson and the other women featured in this slippery film—is playing a once-removed version of herself.  The poetry of Notley, who died during production, is heard via a voiceover she recorded especially for this project after she became too ill to fulfil her planned onscreen role.  As such, Notley is a ghostly, ethereal presence, one who always seems to hover around the edges of this beguilingly original piece of autofiction.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Treasury of Human Inheritance (A. K. Mitchell, 2024)

Treasury of Human Inheritance, a series published from 1909 to 1958, represents an important milestone in the history of genetics.  This project—co-published as Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, which, even more confusingly, also served as Treasury's parent publication for a time—was overseen by Karl Pearson, a leading biostatistician and eugenicist.  Treasury of Human Inheritance sought to compile and analyse family pedigrees in order to illustrate the inheritance of physical and mental diseases in humans; the initiative sprang from of a need for hard empirical evidence to support studies in heredity.

During the first half of the twentieth century, access to such information was very limited, and Pearson's object was to standardise the data collected.  Treasury's evolution into an independent series reflected the growing emphasis on, and appetite for, genetic research.  However, Treasury—as the title of its sometime sister journal makes clear—is also bound to the murky field of eugenics, a sub-Darwinian belief system that aims to improve the human gene pool via selective breeding.  Nowadays, eugenics is rightly debunked, but the import attached to Treasury is a reminder that this outré theory was once considered a credible one.

For all its experimental form, Alexis Kyle Mitchell's film The Treasury of Human Inheritance—note the subtle use of the definite article, which is very handy when it comes to differentiating the movie from its near-namesake periodical—is an intensely personal work centring on myotonic dystrophy (DM), a hereditary muscle-wasting genetic disorder whose potency increases as it is passed on.  Via a dissonant combination of home movies, Zoom calls, and footage of derelict buildings, Canadian artist Mitchell poignantly depicts the ravages of this disease, which has affected three generations of the filmmaker's family.

The film is propelled along by a throbbing synth soundtrack which, as per Mitchell's stated intention, approximates particular patterns of genetic conditions.  This approach to sound design adds a haptic, visceral element to the work that complements the tactile 16mm cinematography; as much as Mitchell's film provides real insight into life with DM, it is also an experience, and a highly sensorial one at that.  The Treasury of Human Inheritance is a peculiar nexus of art and science, one which confronts the stark realities of disease, death and dying—not as alien concepts, but rather as integral aspects of the human condition.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI / Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons

The Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1983)

Chantal Akerman's The Eighties, first released in 1983, is an experimental film that ostensibly offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Belgian director's 1986 musical Golden Eighties.  The film is an idiosyncratic blend of documentary and musical, and for the first of its two distinct halves it focuses on the casting and rehearsal processes involved in staging this elaborate production.  Shot on video, this footage is presented with neither context nor commentary, but it nonetheless highlights the gruelling efforts of the cast and crew as they make incremental progress.  As with Golden Eighties, the first thing glimpsed in The Eighties is a succession of purposefully scurrying women, shot from the knees down.

Given that it was purportedly a tin-rattling dry run for Golden Eighties, The Eighties manages to be a markedly different beast from the later, glossier film, which stands as arguably Akerman's most accessible feature (although a film she made in the same year as The Eighties, the sublime The Man with a Suitcase, is also a good entry point for those unfamiliar with the director's work).  Clearly, there is much that connects the two films, but where Golden Eighties is fluid and straightforward, The Eighties is choppy and fragmented; while Golden Eighties has received a lavish 4K restoration, it seems oddly apt that The Eighties has only recently made it past VHS, the rickety format du jour of its title decade.

After an hour has passed, the raw, freewheeling rehearsal videos give way to several fully-realised 35mm sequences; if indeed Akerman hoped this film would attract financers for Golden Eighties, these slick, polished numbers seem the most likely way to achieve such a goal—so it seems strange that this dazzling footage is relegated to the film's back half.  While the songs and general mise en scène are recognisable to anyone who's seen Golden Eighties, most of the actors are different: Aurore Clément and Magali Noël, both so prominent here, are nowhere to be found in the 1986 film, although Lio appears in both titles.  As such, Golden Eighties is a palimpsest in which faint traces of this phantom film are still visible.

Clément and Noël, who both starred in Akerman's The Meetings of Anna, give full-blooded performances that provide a tantalising glimpse of a production that went unfinished—or did it?  Such is The Eighties' slippery relationship to its near-namesake.  Certainly, it's a truly baffling experience for anyone who hasn't seen Golden Eighties—which would be everyone who saw The Eighties on its initial run in 1983.  This poignant, life-affirming film finds Chantal Akerman at her most mischievous, and she's also a notable presence in front of the camera: witness her joyful, enthusiastic conducting of professional singer Noël's performance in the recording studio, before she herself gamely steps up to the microphone.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Raindance 2025: God Teeth (Robbie C. Williamson, 2025)

God Teeth, the debut feature by Robbie C. Williamson—AKA Double Diamond Sun Body—is a dazzling, innovative slice of experimental cinema, one that shuns conventional narrative in favour of a hypnogogic journey set on a drifting, abandoned ship, where four recently deceased souls share the details of their untimely deaths.  Williamson's film has already played at several international festivals, and it's nominated for the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature at this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens on Thursday and Friday.  Friday marks the end of this year's festival, with the closing night gala taking the form of the international premiere of Camilla Guttner's The Academy (Die Akademie).

God Teeth’s protagonists—a 10-year-old girl named Boom, biker Albert, sports agent Rose, and family man Campbell—tell their stories piecemeal: Boom, a keen swimmer who excelled at holding her breath, attempts to come to terms with the death of her father while negotiating an underwater world populated by magical creatures; Albert recalls both a dark secret and his final moments speeding through a tunnel in his adopted home of Hong Kong; Rose, who formed a famous power couple with her footballer husband, outlines the mistake that led to her current state; and Campbell escaped a forest fire by climbing a 10,000-foot pole, but appears doomed to both stay there and refer to himself in the third person.

The quartet are up against the clock—incidentally, God Teeth runs to a wonderfully crisp 60 minutes—as a school of manta rays are circling the ship, intent on devouring the four souls' memories; with no realistic way of stopping this, it's vital that the stories are told before the rays descend on the vessel's inhabitants, else anyone who's failed to recount their demise will spend an eternity in purgatory (although drifting at sea on a ghost ship already seems suitably purgatorial).  As these tales unfold, there are occasional glimpses of a disembodied smile featuring the divine teeth of the title, with this disconcerting image recalling the equally unsettling mouth that forms the focus of Samuel Beckett's monologue Not I.

Made over the course of several years, this singular vision, quite remarkably, consists almost entirely of material Williamson found on the internet, with the characters' eerie voices created by text-to-speech software.  It's a clash of form and content, one that probably shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, but Williamson's painstaking efforts have resulted in a haunting, strangely moving piece of experimenta.  The film's ethereal, oeneiric nature sits completely at odds with the overconsumption of social media and fidgety browsing habits that were, presumably, necessary for its creation.  It's all very counterintuitive—as is the notion that the most original film of the year contains barely a frame of original footage.

Darren Arnold

Images: NYC Independent Film Festival

It's Not Me (Leos Carax, 2024)

Leos Carax's magnificent, striking essay film It's Not Me is an experimental piece that delves into the mind of its elusive maker; one of cinema's most enigmatic auteurs, Carax has made just a handful of films in a career that spans more than four decades.  This 42-minute film—whose running time sees it classed as a feature in the US and UK but not in its director's native France—offers a welcome glimpse into Carax's private and professional worlds.  The film is a reflective, byzantine journey in which Carax mixes excerpts from his and others' movies with newly shot footage to create a patchwork view of his career and influences.  Carax has experienced his share of tragedy, but a more uplifting aspect of his personal life is represented by the inclusion of his daughter Nastya among It's Not Me's eclectic cast.

The film also features Denis Lavant, an actor who has starred in four of Carax's six previous feature films, who here reprises his role as the unnerving Monsieur Merde from anthology film Tokyo! and Holy Motors.  It's Not Me's narrative is at once chaotic and controlled, a testament to Carax's ability to weave disparate elements into a cohesive, satisfying whole.  The film is littered with nods to his earlier works, such as Les amants du Pont-Neuf, Annette and the aforementioned Holy Motors, as well as references to several cinematic luminaries, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, whose essay film aesthetic greatly informs the look, feel and sound of this self-portrait.  Like Godard's final film—the coruscating The Image Book—It's Not Me is a densely packed work, one whose brevity belies its depth and scope.

In terms of visual style, It's Not Me is almost slavishly Godardian, with its choppy edits, bold intertitles and occasionally confrontational imagery serving to recall the work of the most obtuse member of the New Wave—yet Carax's film possesses a warmth that was never present in the oeuvre of his cantankerous idol.  As Carax offsets black-and-white clips against hyper-saturated colour sequences, the film's diverse soundtrack—which includes several Bowie classics, one of which is hidden in a post-credits scene—further enhances the emotional impact of these eye-popping images.  Yet one of the most moving aspects of It's Not Me is Carax's own voiceover, which is both illuminating and self-deprecating as it offers some insight into this singular filmmaker's working methods and artistic touchstones.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

A Common Sequence (Mary H. Clark/Mike Gibisser, 2023)

In just under 80 minutes, this experimental documentary zips around North America between South Dakota, Washington State and Mexico as it deals with three pressing eco-political issues, all of which are bound up with the erosion of longstanding ways of life.  A Common Sequence's first port of call is the Mexican state of Michoacán, home to the Lake Pátzcuaro salamander.  This neotenic, axolotl-like creature—known locally as the achoque—is exclusively found in the body of water from which it takes its name, but overfishing, pollution and the introduction of invasive species have all contributed to nudging these salamanders to the brink of extinction; it is thought that less than a hundred achoques now exist in the wild, although four colonies for captive breeding have been established in Mexico.  One such laboratory, close to Lake Pátzcuaro, is run by Dominican nuns, who extract a syrup from the achoques' skin, which is then sold to generate funds for the convent.  The locals who consume the syrup do so in the hope that they may take on some of the achoque's special qualities, for these salamanders possess remarkable regenerative abilities, and can even regrow entire limbs.

Yet the achoque's borderline-magical properties have attracted attention way beyond Mexico, with the American military taking a keen interest in these remarkable amphibians' restorative capacities; perhaps unsurprisingly, the US Department of Defense has pored over the achoque's DNA to see if it can be used to help soldiers who have lost arms and/or legs.  But A Common Sequence also considers how the human genome is being studied, with the film later moving its focus to the lands of the Cheyenne River Sioux, where it is alarmingly revealed how private companies are sequencing the DNA of indigenous peoples in an attempt to better understand their resistance to certain diseases; tribal sovereignty in the United States is not a new concept, but in A Common Sequence noted biological scientist Joseph Yracheta argues how people in general, and Native Americans in particular, should have control over their own DNA.  The film's third narrative strand deals with a Washington State University AI machine that has learned to harvest apples, and this subject is linked back to Lake Pátzcuaro, as its fishermen, faced with a declining aquatic population for which they are partly responsible, have ventured to the Pacific Northwest in search of fruit-picking work.

A Common Sequence instils a sense of unease in the viewer as it looks to the future, with a planet that's staring down the barrel of a post-fossil fuel era already looking for new materials to extract and commodify.  Although we are currently living in an age where data mining is commonplace, Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser's film points to a world to come in which people are unwittingly reduced to a lengthy code consisting of just four distinct letters.  With the possible exception of the US DoD's research into limb regeneration, all of the ventures detailed in A Common Sequence dance to the tune of capitalism, from the sale of the achoque oil to the logging of Native American DNA to the robot designed to outperform the workers it imitates.  That the filmmakers have been able to weave these initially seemingly disparate threads into a fluid, cohesive whole says much about the skills of those behind the camera.  What's more, A Common Sequence is as interesting visually as it is narratively, with some striking imagery used to good effect.  This is an assured, thought-provoking film, one which deftly avoids didacticism as it invites speculation on what lies ahead.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Small Hours of the Night (Daniel Hui, 2024)

Daniel Hui's fourth feature Small Hours of the Night—which screened at the most recent edition of the London Film Festival—received its world premiere at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it played in the Harbour strand alongside the likes of Michael Gitlin's The Night Visitors, NZ coming-of-age tale (and festival opener) Head South, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's horror The Soul Eater, and Damien Hauser's After the Long Rains.  The last of these films joined the 16mm-shot Small Hours of the Night at this year's LFF, but while the IFFR saw these two titles as stablemates (in the admittedly wide-ranging Harbour), the LFF placed the films in separate strands, with After the Long Rains assigned to Journey and Small Hours of the Night occupying a berth in Experimenta.

Inspired by the tombstone trial of Tan Chay Wa, Hui's film is a 60s-set two-hander that pits Irfan Kasban's nameless interrogator against Vicki Yang's Vicki.  As per the title, much of Small Hours of the Night appears to take place over the course of one long, dark night as the official quizzes his prisoner on various incidents, some of which are actually from the future.  For Small Hours of the Night is a film in which time is slippery, à la the work of Alain Resnais, and in one sequence—as impressive as it is eerie—Vicki watches a clock face on which the minutes tick by as normal, yet the date changes every few seconds.  The interrogator seems not entirely unsympathetic towards Vicki—think O'Brien's relationship with Winston in Orwell's 1984 (a tale set just one year on from Tan's trial).  

Small Hours of the Night is perhaps one of the more accessible examples of experimental cinema, but it's still a demanding film, one that requires much patience and attention.  While both of the actors put in strong performances, plenty is asked of them; the story largely unfolds in a single location, and Hui's dialogue isn't always able to keep the odd lull at bay.  The film invites us to read around what it presents; for example, it's fairly clear that Yang is playing a composite character, but what isn't obvious is that several figures from the tombstone trial have been incorporated into this persona.  Despite its aura of disconnect and frequent temporal shifts, those who stay the course will be rewarded by this haunting film, whose cathartic conclusion proves that even the darkest night is followed by dawn.  

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

HBF+Europe: Post-production Support Grants Announced

International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund has announced the four projects each awarded a grant of €60,000 through the HBF+Europe: Post-production Support scheme. The awards, sponsored by Creative Europe MEDIA, offer support for the final stages of European co-productions with filmmakers from regions where the Hubert Bals Fund targets its support. Filmmakers from Georgia, Nepal, Peru and South Africa are supported through co-producers in Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands respectively. The diverse projects range from a 16mm inquiry into coloniality to a revenge noir.

Georgian filmmaker Rati Oneli’s feature fiction debut Wild Dogs Don’t Bite follows his observational documentary on a derelict mining town City of the Sun, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2017. Dealing in the winners and losers of post-Soviet Georgia, the film is a noir-inspired revenge thriller. Nepalese filmmaker Sahara Sharma’s film My Share of the Sky is a search for the elusive dream of home in a patriarchal society, as a young woman grapples with uncertainty on the eve of her wedding. Sharma was the first female director to open the Kathmandu IMFF with her debut Chasing Rainbows.

The selection moves into the realm of experimental storytelling with Estados generales by Peruvian filmmaker Mauricio Freyre, whose current project is a 16mm film that reimagines the voyage of a parcel of seeds from Madrid back to the place where they were picked in Peru. Fresh from the premiere of their Afrikaans-language drama Carissa in Venice earlier this year, Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs are supported for Variations on a Theme. Like the former, the project is rooted in the rural experience, blending the magical world and the mundane on the margins between fiction and documentary.

Source/image: IFFR

Hexham Heads (Mattijs Driesen / Chloë Delanghe, 2024)

As far as northern English Forteana is concerned, the case of the Hexham Heads is right up there with that of the Solway Firth Spaceman; barely 40 miles separate the sites of these bizarre events, which occurred in 1971 and 1964 respectively.  While the Solway Firth incident focused on a picture of what may or may not have been a photobombing alien, the Hexham affair involved something more tangible, namely a pair of stone heads that were unearthed by young brothers Colin and Leslie Robson.  Following the boys' discovery in the back garden of their home, a series of strange goings-on affected both the Robson household and the neighbouring Dodd family; this continued until the heads were offloaded.

While the heads' next custodian, Dr Anne Ross, was able to bring an academic's eye to the party—she was of the opinion that they were artefacts of ancient Celtic origin—her family also experienced the joys of residual haunting; as was the case with the Robsons, domestic order was restored upon the jettisoning of the creepy crania.  The heads' whereabouts are currently unknown, which only elevates a mystery that is now explored in Belgian-British experimental effort Hexham Heads.  Screening today as part of the BFI London Film Festival programme Right in the Substance of Them a Trace of What Happened, this curious, striking work plays like a folk horror run through a filter of stone tape theory.

The medium-length Hexham Heads starts out as a fairly linear endeavour, with co-director Chloë Delanghe's measured voiceover guiding us through the story of the heads' excavation—and subsequent eventful stay—at 3 Rede Avenue, the Hexham property where the Robsons lived; it's a fine précis, one that appears to be setting things up for an investigation into the various paranormal phenomena associated with the noggins.  What follows, however, is a haptic, fragmented piece that conjures a needling atmosphere worthy of such a juicy slice of oddball folklore.  Via an eerie succession of 16mm, VHS and still images, all set to Sam Comerford's unsettling score, the film achieves a cumulative, nightmarish quality.

While the movie's title is undoubtedly prosaic, Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen's treatment of the subject matter is anything but.  Hexham Heads drinks from the same well as Mark Jenkin's Enys Men and Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink—arguably the two most prominent examples of experimental horror in recent years—and like the latter work, it contains a top-class jump scare.  As the film draws to a close, it takes us back to a near-deserted cement plant that was glimpsed fleetingly in the opening scenes, the implication being that there's a pretty mundane explanation for all this.  Still, such airy reassurances count for little in the preceding half-hour, when the fever dream that is Hexham Heads exerts its clammy grip.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI 

Eight Postcards from Utopia (Radu Jude, 2024)

The death of Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989—the disgraced tyrant and his wife Elena were tried and executed on Christmas Day—marked a significant watershed for Romania, one which saw the end of communist rule and the start of a tricky transitional period.  As the 1990s progressed, Romania's attempts to get to grips with democracy and market reforms were met with financial instability and widespread unemployment.  But the country weathered the storm and would eventually join both NATO and the European Union—alliances which signalled a new role for Romania on the geopolitical stage.

As directed by Radu Jude and philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, documentary Eight Postcards from Utopia—which screens today at the BFI London Film Festival—is a coruscating exploration of Romania's rocky economic transition of the 90s.  The film consists entirely of post-communist Romanian television advertisements, with the resulting collage serving as a commentary on the changing consumer habits that emerged in this era.  As per the title, the documentary is split into an octet of thematic segments, each offering a snapshot of late twentieth-century Romanian life as seen through the prism of advertising.

The film's occasionally overlapping structure allows Jude and Ferencz-Flatz to delve into a number of topics, from gender representation to a country groaning under the weight of history as it navigates a new system.  It's a narrative that manages to be at once specifically Romanian and universal as it examines the effects of capitalism and consumerism on the construction of national cultural identity—all done with a complete lack of narration.  The decision to rely on commercials alone to tell the story is a wildly brave one, and it forces viewers to infer their own meanings from the barrage of sights and sounds presented here.

As a record of Romania's choppy passage through the post-Ceauşescu years, Eight Postcards from Utopia conjures up a wonderful sense of time and place, and its experimental form belies an accessible, intuitive experience.  Above all else, this critique of global commerce is wickedly funny, a trait we have come to expect from Jude's work; of course, from our 2024 perspective it's easy to snicker at the fashions of the 90s—just as, in three decades' time, the modish trappings of today will cause much hilarity.  But this fizzing documentary offers up something way beyond cheap laughs: it is a nexus of history, culture and media.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Night Visitors (Michael Gitlin, 2023)

Since the mid-1980s, experimental filmmaker Michael Gitlin has steadily worked away on an eclectic series of projects, including Duplicating the Copy from Memory, The Birdpeople, The Earth Is Young and That Which Is Possible.  Over the decades, Gitlin has seen his work selected for numerous international film festivals, including the London Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.  It is at the last of these where Gitlin's latest film, The Night Visitors, played as part of the 2024 edition's Harbour strand, in which it took its place alongside the likes of festival opener Head South, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's eagerly awaited horror The Soul Eater, and Rotterdam favourite Amanda Kramer's new film, So Unreal.  Having received its Dutch premiere at the festival, The Night Visitors had its third and final IFFR outing in early February, when it screened at the city's KINO.

The Night Visitors is a documentary all about moths, and in less than 75 minutes Gitlin's film casts its net (ha!) far and wide as it examines these nocturnal lepidopterans.  Given that there are around 160,000 species of moth, the film can only look at a relatively small sample of these inscrutable creatures, but Gitlin sprinkles The Night Visitors with some striking examples: the tree-munching spongy (formerly gypsy) moth (Lymantria dispar); the giant, silk-making Polyphemus moth (Antheraea polyphemus); and the gorgeous, brightly-coloured rosy maple moth (Dryocampa rubicunda).  While there are plenty of fully grown moths on show, the film is punctuated with fascinating footage of several instars as a caterpillar undergoes its transformation.  The Night Visitors is an experience that allows us to get up close and personal with its title characters, with the superb cinematography befitting of a top-class nature documentary.     

Indeed, there are times during The Night Visitors when you have to remind yourself you're watching the work of a video artist known for his avant-garde efforts, as the film almost plays as a straight, linear piece of nonfiction—albeit one that exhibits the odd experimental flourish.  A fair chunk of the running time is devoted to the curious story of Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, an astronomer and amateur entomologist who perhaps should have stuck exclusively to the former role, given that his botched efforts at silk harvesting led to the spread of the aforementioned spongy moth.  Trouvelot brought some of the now-invasive species' egg masses into the US from Europe and was raising the moths in controlled conditions when some of the larvae escaped; with the catastrophic damage done—the caterpillars now defoliate over a million acres of forest every year—Trouvelot lost interest in entomology and eventually returned to France, where he remained until his death.    

The Night Visitors also references Edgar Allan Poe's "The Sphinx", a New York-set tale in which the protagonist encounters the badass outsider that is the death's-head hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos)—even if the species wasn't, and isn't, to be found in the United States.  As Gitlin wryly observes, "never let geographical distribution get in the way of overwrought symbolism" (while there are several voiceovers on the soundtrack, this particular nugget—like much of the film's most interesting information—is relayed via concise onscreen text).  The Night Visitors' inclusion of "The Sphinx"—which is here given a brief, witty precis—provides a tangible link to Gitlin's 1996 film Berenice, a freewheeling adaptation of Poe's eponymous short story.  As experimenta goes, The Night Visitors is certainly one of the more accessible examples; it's a fluid, engaging and beguiling work, one which provides a very welcome insight into the opaque lives of these remarkable insects.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado, 2023)

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography has previously been adapted for the screen by both Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, 1981) and Sally Potter (Orlando, 1992).  While Ottinger's effort veered towards the experimental, Potter's relatively accessible work quickly outgrew the arthouse box it had initially been placed in, and the film became a box-office success as it cemented the star status of Tilda Swinton.  While Swinton—who was hitherto best known as Derek Jarman's muse—was joined by an eclectic supporting cast (Quentin Crisp, Lothaire Bluteau, Billy Zane), Orlando proved to be a rather brittle, hollow experience, and Potter ultimately hit the same hurdle as Ottinger: the novel is one in which much hinges on the title character's interior life.  That said, the essentially private nature of Woolf's coded book is somewhat tempered by its high-concept premise.

For Orlando: A Biography is a work in which its eponymous male hero—having reached the age of 30, or thereabouts—metamorphoses into a woman, and goes on to live for several centuries (the story begins in Elizabethan times and ends on the day the novel was published).  It is not hard to see why this back-of-a-beermat idea would appeal to filmmakers—even those as cerebral as Potter and Ottinger—yet the ease in which the basic outline of the story can be adapted for the cinema is soon offset by the knotty details in Woolf's writing.  Largely inspired by Virginia Woolf's complicated love affair with her fellow writer Vita Sackville-West—Orlando's dual existence is said to represent the two sides of Woolf's lover's personality—Orlando: A Biography is a roman à clef that has no particular interest in giving up the secrets swirling around its key.        

The latest filmmaker to take a tilt at Orlando: A Biography is first-time director Paul B. Preciado, who opts for a refreshingly different approach from those of Potter and Ottinger in his attempt to crack the novel's subtext.  Orlando, My Political Biography is a documentary in which Preciado presents 20 or so different trans and non-binary people, each of whom inhabits the Orlando character while narrating the events of their own life (while Woolf's pioneering book explored the concept of transgender identity, it operated strictly in binary terms).  Via this setup, Preciado actively leans into Woolf's surprisingly complex novel, and the results are satisfying in a way that soon outstrips both of the aforementioned film adaptations of this text; it's as if the director has realised that a more aggressive style is required to reach the heart of Orlando: A Biography.    

There's a real sense that this is the first screen version to successfully grapple with the source novel's central tenet; perhaps Preciado realised that, while Orlando: A Biography is classed as a work of fiction, its hero is a proxy for a real person and, as such, real people were needed to tease out what Virginia Woolf was driving at.  Thus, a fictional biography is both explored and augmented by a documentary film, and it's fascinating to witness the insights provided by each of Preciado's subjects.  As an adaptation, Orlando, My Political Biography is both daring and worthy; it's a slippery work, one that effectively plays Woolf's novel at its own game.  This ambitious film is one of the most original debut features in recent years, and a late, joyous appearance from author and filmmaker Virginie Despentes ensures it sticks the landing.

Darren Arnold

Images: The Party Film Sales

LFF 2023: Gush / Desert Dreaming

Both Gush and Desert Dreaming form part of the BFI London Film Festival's Experimenta strand, where they feature alongside the likes of Filipino filmmaker John Torres' Room in a Crowd and Ukrainian animated tale It Can't Be That Nothing That Can Be Returned.  Experimenta, which traditionally sees the bulk of its screenings crammed into the final couple of days of the LFF, generally throws up some fascinating stuff, often at a point when burned-out festival goers are in dire need of a palate-cleansing experience.  Most of the titles shown in Experimenta present something radically different from the narrative cinema that forms a sizeable percentage of the LFF's fare, and the strand stands as an invigorating part of the festival programme.  You can even buy an Experimenta pass—which admits you to three screenings of your choice—for just £24.

Fox Maxy's debut feature Gush—which screens on Saturday, October 14—arrives at the LFF in the midst of a buzz that has been steadily growing since the film premiered at this year's Sundance, where it played in the New Frontier strand.  Prior to Gush, Maxy directed a number of short films—most notably Maat Means Land, Blood Materials and F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now—and saw her work selected for several international film festivals, including Rotterdam and Toronto.  Yet Gush very much feels like the film Maxy has been building to all along, as it draws from around a decade's worth of the filmmaker's personal footage, much of which predates the earliest of her shorts.  With its frenetic barrage of sounds and colours, the kaleidoscopic, overloaded Gush somehow manages to be at once personal and alienating; while F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now combined similar imagery with a discernible point about the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation, Maxy's latest provides fewer clues as to what the takeaway should be.

It's quite clear that much—if not all—that's presented here holds real meaning for Maxy, yet it is difficult for the viewer to link the various motifs scattered throughout the film's chaotic 71 minutes.  Like many an experimental film, Gush appears to have been made without its consumption in mind, almost as if any consideration of audience might lead to a dilution of the artist's original vision.  Which is not to say that others aren't welcome to come along for the ride, and the suberbly-edited Gush, despite its singularity, makes for an absorbing experience.  Yet Maxy's film will punish anyone looking for a semblance of narrative: while our instincts might tell us to both attempt to join the dots and impose a three-act structure, this slippery film requires a rewiring of cinematic expectations if we are to navigate it without frustration taking hold.  Gush is a bold, fitfully impressive work, one that careens to a memorable conclusion featuring inspired use of The Cure's "The Perfect Girl".

Abdul Halik Azeez's Desert Dreaming screens at the LFF on Sunday, October 15—which marks the close of this year's edition—when it plays as one of five titles included in The Land is the Living Witness, an Experimenta programme centring on colonial histories and migration routes.  Azeez's film is specifically concerned with migration from Sri Lanka to the Middle East, and it begins with a conversation in which a man details his perilous travels through Iran and Pakistan.  While we're listening to this story, we're watching someone carry out some very basic photoshopping, which culminates in figures being pasted against a variety of international backgrounds; as these crudely hewn globetrotters float around, the dialogue is supplanted by music from M. G. Ramachandran's 1973 film World Roaming Bachelor.  As experimental shorts go, Desert Dreaming—like the aforementioned F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now—is a relatively direct example, and as such it stands as a fine entry point into the world of non-narrative film. 

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Herbaria (Leandro Listorti, 2022)

Amsterdam director Leandro Listorti's new film stands as the lengthiest work in his oeuvre; while he's previously made a couple of longer form movies, including 2018's The Endless Film—which, despite its title, did actually conclude after less than an hour—Herbaria tops them all in terms of duration, even if it does clock in at a scant 83 minutes.  Given that we've long since been in the age of the bloated running time, there's something refreshing about Listorti's approach of forgoing the filler in favour of simply saying what needs to be said.  That said, at no point does Herbaria feel rushed or overly pragmatic; rather, it's a contemplative, somewhat ethereal essay film, one that makes its important points with grace and subtlety.  Herbaria screens at the London Film Festival on Sunday—which marks the close of this year's edition—when it plays alongside Seaweed, an engaging short documentary on farming the marine vegetable of the title.

Both Seaweed and Herbaria are part of the festival's Experimenta strand, and as such rub shoulders with the likes of comic-fuelled collage The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness and James Benning's much-anticipated The United States of America.  Over the years, I've found that Experimenta has thrown up some real discoveries—often at a point when festival fatigue is threatening to kick in—and it forms a fascinating part of the LFF programme.  Moreover, some of the titles shown in Experimenta are quite rare; much to my chagrin, I still haven't tracked down a copy of a terrific film I saw in the section all the way back in 2013.  Experimenta presents something very different from the narrative cinema that forms the bulk of the festival's offerings, which may well explain its appeal, and it's a strand that makes you feel compelled to take a chance on what it serves up; such practice is actively encouraged by the sale of the Experimenta pass, which entitles you to three screenings for a very reasonable £21. 

Herbaria is wholly concerned with preservation, both filmic and botanical.  While these two endeavours may seem disparate, Listorti is able to pull them together in a way that is as cohesive as it is surprising, with the overarching theme being the large-scale extinction of both plant species and movies.  The film looks at ways in which such declines can be arrested, and early on an explicit connection is made between Herbaria's two areas of interest: film is susceptible to fungus attacks on account of the coating of gelatine it bears on its surface.  It may surprise many to learn both that film contains gelatine (so yes, there is no such thing as vegan film), and that it—just like plant life—can be ruined by fungal problems; forget the threat that is vinegar syndrome for just a moment: in Herbaria, we witness alarming footage of fungi destroying an old reel of film, the unpreserved contents lost forever.

While it's far more likely that a film festival will attract many more cinephiles than botanists—and chances are that this majority will be more taken with the side of Herbaria that's explicitly concerned with cinema—the film's message regarding plant life is one that everyone would do well to listen to; since 1750, more than 500 species of plant have become extinct, and Listorti's film highlights the measures in place to ensure that yet more flora doesn't suffer the same fate.  The efforts taken to preserve and catalogue all manner of vegetation, as evidenced here, are quite remarkable, with the dedication on show recalling another LFF 2022 title, the excellent Geographies of Solitude, in which naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas logs virtually everything that grows (or is washed up) on a remote Canadian island.  Like Geographies, Herbaria was shot on film, which lends an organic, tactile quality to this quietly impressive work.     

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI