Spotlight

Animals no longer live in nature; they now exist first and foremost on our screens. While each new internet-based encounter with them still feels as surprising and delightful as ever, the obsessive relationship with animal imagery often remains limited to fulfilling our emotional needs—rarely do we question the underlying motives. Mourad Ben Amor’s Bamssi (2024)—a diary film made alongside a pack of animal protagonists—hints that our fascination may sometimes be less about the animals themselves than about the spontaneity and impulsivity that emerge from their most routine gestures.

Much has changed in the last decades, but the concepts of clarity and detail still dominantly inform our appreciation of experiences and knowledge, including art. So an unclear film such as Chilean filmmakers Luciana Merino and Pascal Viveros’ Towards the Sun, Far from the Center, engages with contemporaneity in ways unsuspected at first glance. And when I say that it’s an unclear film, I mean this in the most obvious way: its image, consisting of slow pans of Santiago taken from a bird’s eye view (at a pace different from that of a drone—maybe from a crane?) is zoomed-in so much that it seems bidimensional; not abstract, but plastic, toyish, slightly unreal.

Henri Bergson believed that the phenomenon called humour arises when the material world falls short of our spiritual aspirations. Had he lived long enough to savour Chantal Akerman’s work, he could have found proof for his thesis. Not only was Akerman a gifted metteuse en scene of Chaplinesque slapstick, but how she depicted romantic love was also a source of uncontrollable chuckling, thanks to this gap between wishful dreaming and all-too-human reality.

“There’s a reason why everybody hates Batman in those movies,” comments one of the titular protagonists in Omar Chowdhury’s BAN♡ITS. Set in a liminal space between Bangladesh and India, the film follows a group of self-proclaimed “destitutes” who rob the rich to give to the poor and are obsessed with Heath Ledger, because “he died for his art.” Inhabiting a lawless limbo where radical credos coexist with state-sanctioned anarchic stances these outlaws are as porous and opaque as Chowdhury’s film itself. 

Through association, repetition, and accumulation, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller showcase the inventory of Hollywood formal clichés that contributed to the creation of the Twin Towers’ symbolic capital, reflecting at the same time on the power of those images to haunt our collective imagination to this day.

Portrait d’une paresseuse seems one of Chantal Akerman’s more playful and lighter works—a skit in which she acts out a filmmaker’s creative process of attempting (and failing) to make a film about being lazy.

Lounging on a small bed, Chantal Akerman’s posture seems casual and relaxed at first glance, but the repetitive tilts of her head—to the left and then back to center—contrasting with the smooth glide of the camera suggest otherwise. Restlessness is in the air, yet before we can discern it, the image is already on the move, retracing its steps for a second time.