Long-form criticism, filmmaker interviews, festival notebooks, and craft essays — written for people who still believe a film can change the temperature of a room.
From a converted dairy in Lisbon to a basement lab in Seoul, a quiet movement of directors is shooting on celluloid not as nostalgia, but as ethics. We spent six months with the labs, the DPs, and the projectionists holding the line.
Continue readingFestival reports from Locarno and Busan, an interview with a first-time feature director, and a defense of the 1.37:1 frame.
Every piece in the Journal is filed under one of six ongoing threads. Subscribe to a section and we'll surface the new writing the moment it goes live.
Long-form reviews, retrospectives, and argument-driven essays on what's playing, what's coming, and what we got wrong.
42 essaysDirectors, DPs, editors, and projectionists — recorded in their cutting rooms, not on a press line.
31 conversationsOn-the-ground reporting from Cannes, Locarno, Busan, Rotterdam, and the smaller shows that actually move the needle.
18 reportsLighting setups, sound design, blocking, and the unglamorous decisions that separate a film from a video file.
27 deep divesFinancing, distribution, exhibition, and the structural forces shaping what gets made — and what gets seen.
15 reportsRevisiting the canon — and the margins — with new interviews, restorations, and the occasional unearthing.
22 features"I learned cinema by watching projectionists. They know the audience better than any director ever will — they see who leaves at minute forty."
Director Anya Petrescu's debut feature, The Long Quiet, opens with a four-minute static shot of a Bucharest apartment block at dawn. No score, no dialogue, no establishing context — just a building waiting to be a character. It's the kind of opening that gets a film into festivals and out of theaters in equal measure.
We met Petrescu the morning after her second sold-out screening at the Mono cinema, where she is a resident artist. Over two espressos and a hand-rolled cigarette she talked about the audience she is writing for, the DP who told her to "stop being polite to the camera," and why she thinks the next decade of independent cinema will be made by people who learned their craft in projection booths rather than film schools.
One short note a week: the latest essay, a filmmaker pick, and a screening worth your evening. No tracking, no upsell — just the work.