In Film Culture you’ll find my impressions of where cinema art is at now, as a profession, cultural phenomenon, physical space, and medium. Also, a bit about my past curatorial and promotional work, and podcasts.
Film Culture
Oscars 2024, Redacted
The 96th Academy Awards was not a corker, by any measure, more of a sprawling end-of-empire endeavour, with bad comedy writing, tired quips and tropes, and a bit of fresh individual pizzazz — a show which would have veered towards certain oblivion, if it not for the severe incongruity of the fantasy of the Oscars…
2001: A Space Odyssey on 70mm. An Interview With A Magician.
There is no one closer to the true enchantment of film than the film projectionist – a craft that is slowly disappearing, as celluloid itself, and should be cherished as cinema treasure. Film, in its essence, is its medium. And the projectionist, therefore, its magician in residence. So consider this an interview with a master.
The Artful Oscar
Oscars 2021 was a public exercise in reclaiming one’s own art from the hijack of a devouring billion-dollar entertainment industry, the scaling down from mass production to manufacture, a deliberate recalibrating and reframing in order to preserve cinema’s place in culture, in society, and in our individual lives. And to be sure, this ceremony was…
Golden Globes 2020: Anarchy, Pomp & Circumstance
The human need for a pedestal exists to look up at something that is, ultimately, to be achieved. The social contract breaks when the chosen begin to look down at the rabble. In his roast to end all roasts, the host of the 2020 Globes, Ricky Gervais, in eight golden minutes of television, reminded us…
International Queer Film Festival Merlinka – MSUV: Love Is All
Short & sweet weekend ride through a cinematic landscape that is slowly moving from niche to broader in the Balkans, yet with quality that never drops a beat. Merlinka is a bold festival of good humour and defiance, with a sophisticated programme, a growing audience, and enough maverick charm to face both friend and foe.
Oscars 2019: Culture of Consensus
All you need to know about the state of publicity today is that the 2019 Oscars ceremony, the hottest gig there is, did not have a host, most likely because no one wanted the hassle. The global equilibrium of self-promotion vs. self-censorship seems to have reached a screeching deadlock somewhere in the outer layers of…
Oscars 2018: Eating Cake
The Academy finally deciphered the writing on the wall, and promptly took their high-heeled shoes off, the entire spectacle meandering into something of an after-party at your agent’s house – half mercenary opportunism, half boozy honesty. What the aftermath of this will be is that the industry will soak in all the good intentions, appropriate…
Berlinale, Take Two.
Amidst the pomp, the circumstance, and the tightly wrapped boxes, there are the staff working for the Berlinale Service Centre who are not only incredibly helpful, but also smart, sweet, and informed. Organisationally, it is not only a festival of excuses (as one insightful employee put it), it is a festival of extremes. Gliding between…
The Festival Of Fences
An ambivalent mixture of sophisticated programming, great variety, lovely surfaces, all the shades of pink amidst a well-oiled division between fans/stars, outsiders/insiders, and talents/audience. It’s not a surprise, only serves as a timely reminder of just how long this has gone unchecked all across the industry. Social exclusion has many faces, the most obvious ones…
CURATORIAL WORK
Programme for No Exit: Essential Serbian Cinema, 1995-2000 a film season I curated & organised at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA Cinemas 1 & 2), 4-16 November 2005
“All these people… are just unfortunates, living in evil times.”
Slobodan Selenić (author of Premeditated Murder, novel/screenplay)
Curated by Milana Vujkov
No Exit presents the state of Serbian (and Yugoslav) society throughout the decade of the nineties and serves as an appropriate metaphor for a nation’s inner battle. It was devised as homage to ordinary people fighting valiantly to preserve the last shreds of decency in a society over-powered by fear. Held hostage by their home grown war-lords they were, ironically, often media stereotyped along with them. These widely acclaimed films, scheduled in chronological order (1995-2000), are not about war, but the effects of war-on the young, the powerless and the civilized. In their distinctly different styles, they depict a universally human vulnerability, the irreversible imprint of choices individuals are forced to make in the face of collective historical circumstance.
PODCASTS
You can hear me talking film & film culture at length with the rebel crew of Free Seed Films on Soho Radio – while I was with Picturehouse Cinemas:
Lola On Film 