Constantly imitated, never sured.

I feel like there’s not much I can say to add to the parade of praise that follows 8 1/2. It has long been one of my favourite films, which is such an insufficient way to describe the way that how every time I watch it I feel like I’m walking on air afterwards. It’s a magical feeling.

It’s an endlessly slippery film, and makes a great companion to that other slippery film set in a…

You’d expect a film about an activist commune titled Direct Action to be about the more obvious parts of activism; protests and rallies. Instead we are laser focused on the day to day action of the community; tending livestock, planting crops, cutting wood, making bread, making crepes, making posters, making music. The levelling of the methods of production, moving closer to the land they live on, this is work. It’s only in the last hour that the film follows a mass…

I’ve been to Congo once, for an afternoon. It was when my family were living in Rwanda, and my brother and I would come back from boarding school in the months between semesters. On the weekends when Dad wasn’t working, we’d go out for a trip, and on a few occasions we went to Gisenyi on the shores of Lake Kivu, and in the shadow of Mount Nyiragongo across the border lay Goma. One day, we drove across the border…