By Winnie Wang When a dirt road is paved between the remote, mountainous village of Balankha and the city of Dharan, the two-day trek by foot collapses into a swift bus ride. This promising expansion introduces access to shiny conveniences and gadgets, flooding the countryside with confections, fizzy drinks, toy cars, televisions and smartphones. Insistent…

By Winnie Wang The return of cultural items from national museums to their homelands is an ongoing process that does not simply end when the artifacts are handed over, or when the descendants of a community finally repossess ownership of their image. For co-director Suvi West, who follows the repatriation of Sámi objects to Sápmi—a…

Mademoiselle Kenopsia is centrally concerned with liminality—those spaces that oscillate between familiar and surreal, enduring in transitional stasis. The dimensions of transition can be temporal, as in sun-bleached plastic jungle gyms that evoke the passage from childhood, or spatial, as in secluded motels in the middle of road trip destinations.

By Winnie Wang “At least it’s a huge sum the government is paying you, and you won’t be drowning in debt,” quips the state official, hoping to ease the tension after seizing an elderly man’s land. Following the evacuation of his farmhouse in the Icelandic countryside due to flood risk, Gunnar (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson) begrudgingly…

By Winnie Wang “Fatal hyperthermia” is the official designation for four-year-old Anju’s cause of death after she is left on a school bus in the oppressive desert heat. Immediately, accusations are mounted between family members: Ananda (Tannishtha Chatterjee) shouldn’t have let her daughter attend school; Ravina should’ve woken up her younger sister; Gagan (Amit Sial)…

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel Women Talking is set in a remote Mennonite community that exists out of time and under its own jurisdiction, with its own rules and superstitions. For years, the nocturnal disturbances that left local girls and women bruised and bleeding were thought to be a result of divine retribution, demons, or “female imagination”; it was later discovered that their collective nightmare was, in fact, repeated sexual assaults carried out by men armed with animal tranquillizers, many of whom were brothers, cousins, or uncles of the victims.

By Winnie Wang The nocturnal attacks against the Mennonite girls and women, it turns out, weren’t ghosts or retributions for their sins, but a recurring collective nightmare in the form of repeated sexual assaults carried out by men armed with animal tranquillizers. After one assailant is identified and threatened with a scythe, the men of…

By Winnie Wang Brian D. Johnson’s second feature documentary is abundant with close-up shots of ink blooming into pools of colour. The pigment diffuses onto paper, branching into dendritic configurations that bear resemblance to fluvial processes. Water carries sediment from one place to another, depositing material to compose new arrangements. The Colour of Ink could…

By Winnie Wang Amidst stark plains and interiors in rural Missouri, 18-year-old Haas (Hannah Schiller) is faced with an uncertain future after the sudden death of her father Al, an outcast burdened with debt and dubious plans to flip properties along the Mississippi River. Alone with a house pending foreclosure, her most pressing concern is…

By Winnie Wang In his follow-up to Mariupolis (2016), the late Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius returns to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol to document the devastating effects of the 2022 Russian invasion as it unfolds. Composed entirely of verité footage, Mariupolis 2 follows a group of displaced citizens who struggle for survival in abandoned houses…