By Phoebe Chen Suburban Birds screens at TIFF Bell Lightbox on Thursday, November 14 as part of MDFF Selects: Presented by Cinema Scope and TIFF. In the grip of this terrestrial life, nothing works so well as a sinkhole to bare the subterranean tremors of our weird planet. You have seen these pictures seized and…

By Phoebe Chen For certain filmmakers—attractive women—there is a popular kind of on-set photo that telegraphs authority: one eye pressed to the viewfinder of some behemoth camera, she is caught in a contra-glamour shot that codes the pragmatic as cool. Naturally, there is one of Chantal Akerman, taken some time in the late ’70s—shaggy-haired and…

By Phoebe Chen Pat Collins’ Henry Glassie: Field Work follows the folkloric practices of its title subject, an emeritus professor at Indiana University who has spent the past 50 years in decade-long sojourns with folk artists across various continents. That a white, American ethnographer should be the ideal interlocutor for communities of craftspeople in rural…

By Phoebe Chen Helena Wittmann’s Drift screens with Sofia Bohdanowicz’s The Soft Space at TIFF Bell Lightbox on Thursday, March 14 as part of MDFF Selects: Presented by Cinema Scope and TIFF. Creation myths have a suspect, anthropocentric charm—supposedly, the cosmos heaves, slow and indifferent, until one day, it makes itself amenable to human narration.…