On the occasion of the streaming release of two landmark Chinese independent films – Wen Hai and Zeng Jinyan’s Outcry and Whisper and Hu Bo‘s An Elephant Sitting Still – the good folks at Ovid asked me to share some thoughts. If you watch only two Chinese films this year, watch these two. I stand in awe of both films. Taken together, they form as deep, complex and varied a portrait as possible of contemporary China. Neither film should exist. Yet, they do. Beautifully. Miraculously. Brazenly. The producer and writer of Outcry and Whisper survived years of house arrest. The director o

As we enter the new year, it seems appropriate that I report on aspects of how OVID is doing. I also want to point you in the direction of two interesting articles which I think contextualize what OVID is all about. First, we’ve updated our searchable Master List of Films on OVID. We added about 30 titles over the past two months—we took a break over the holidays—so as of December 31, 2020, we are now at 982 titles. Of course we do continue to add more films every week. We have 18 titles lined up for January, and will be sharing each coming month’s schedule here on metafilm.

On OVID, we have two versions of Guy Debord’s classic film The Society of the Spectacle: the French original with commentary by Guy Debord himself, and one with an English voiceover. When we first received the restored film from Films du Losange, we noticed that Guy Debord’s French voiceover layered with English subtitles was overwhelming to viewers if they weren’t fluent in French. Luckily, Ed Halter and Thomas Beard of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, had produced a bootleg English copy with Paul Chan a few years ago and posted it online. With their per

Nancy Cooperstein Charney Who's Next? examines how the lives of Muslim-Americans have been affected in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In one way or another, all of them have been targeted by federal agencies, hate groups, and even former friends solely on the basis of their religious beliefs. This Hanukkah, the film encourages us all to choose knowledge over ignorance, take action to prevent hate speech, and to welcome strangers into our lives so that the challenges of marginalized co

According to the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Madeline Anderson (b. 1927) was the first African-American woman to have directed a documentary film. Hard as it is to believe—as the history of cinema goes back over 120 years—it was only in 1960 when Anderson directed her first film Integration Report 1.

Filmmaker Jethro Waters has a background in cinematography and an ear for music. He tackles the biopic of master photographer Burk Uzzle without ever making you feel like you’re doing homework. There is energy in his work and a true respect for his subject. Though it’s hard to witness how little America has progressed in terms of racial justice since Uzzle began working seven decades ago, the film vibrates with hope that good things might yet still come. We sat down over Zoom to discuss his film “F11 and Be There” and some of the influences that contributed to its creation.

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