Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Cover-Up
"But by telling this story as straightforwardly as possible in an attempt to raise awareness through pathos, the film begs a morbid question: how could anyone, after two years of the most mediated genocide in history, possibly be converted to caring by a film?"
Gothic Decoding: Hall, Halberstam, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca
"Monsters in media so often offer us that escape from societal constraints, representing that which repulses the hetero-patriarchal system we live in—the different, the scorned, the uncanny, the queer. "
Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: Kontinental 25
"Though it sometimes spins its wheels, Kontinental 25’s parade of indifference towards suffering, combined with Jude’s eye for the absurdity of modern commercialized life (pissing in a Bitcoin ATM, kicking a robot dog, etc.), captures the stagnant despair of modern western life more accurately than most contemporary films. "
Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: Bugonia
"It’s aesthetically handsome with few visual ideas, matching a script equally devoid of ideas. The one-time provocateur has tamed his style, replacing anything potentially offensive with the most ephemeral and surface-level surprise."
Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: Magellan and Miroirs No. 3
"Though the men who’ve “made history” may reign death upon all the earth, Diaz proposes that the only universal truth is that all, master and slave, will be returned unto that earth from which they came, dwarfed by the forces of nature that they seek to conquer."
Female Representation of Grief and Tragedy in House and Margaret
Collective remembrance drifts away and warps throughout the passing down of generations, but even in the direct absence of trauma, it remains as a destabilizing force for the most detached generations. Situating the spreading of violence through young women who are encouraged to forget and ignore their trauma serves as an effective cautionary tale.
Industry and Ephemera: Media Archaeology and Film Preservation
“…There is great emphasis on “future generations” in terms of tangible film, but the widespread integration of the internet in the 21st century has caused this discipline to take on new life. The film industry has only begun to formalize digital media as the standard form of production as recently as 2013, and now preservationists and archivists are faced with a learning curve on how to preserve “born digital media”.”