Podcast

Highlights this week include the Glasgow Film Festival, entirely online, with its usual strong selection and carefully curated programmes, running from 24 February to 7 March and MLK/FBI is a 2020 American documentary directed by Sam Pollard who co-directed the 1987 doc Eyes on the Prize, which traces the FBI’s investigation of Martin Luther King. Obviously Eyes on the Prize comes up as we discuss our main film of the evening: Judas And The Black Messiah Subscribe for offers at: (…)

This week, guest and Mydylarama co-founder Judy Harris joins us to discuss the beauty of amateur cinema, community cohesion, gentrification, colourblind casting and the joys of play in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. We also touch on the issues around race and casting choices in Netflix hit show Bridgerton. When she’s not doing revisions on a PhD on the utopian film theory of the poet Vachel Lindsay, which the viva panel described as "conceptually ambitious but let down by its (…)

This week, we are joined by Georgina Allan, film editor for the Radical Art Review to talk about women in horror, specifically focusing on Julia Ducournau’s Raw and their representations of women as complex protagonists and instigators of violence (as opposed to helpless victims or mindless monsters). We mention Jordan Peele’s Us, Marina De Van’s In My Skin and Don’t Look Back and others. Picks of the week include Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s mind warping, beautiful Synchronic (…)

We are joined once again by Tom Barlow, chair of The Media Fund and host of the show News Club UK, to discuss the 2002 documentary series The Century of the Self.. Antebellum is a 2020 American thriller film written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz in their feature directorial debuts. While beautifully shot, Antebellum fails in its attempt explore the sociopathy of the white slaveholding class—mainly because the story isn’t set in a slave society. The film can’t come to (…)

Before we introduce our picks, we quickly shoehorn in one last point about last week’s Three Identical Strangers...This week’s top picks include Aaron Sorkin’s historical legal drama The Trial Of The Chicago Seven, and Najwa Najjar’s Palestinian road trip festival hit Between Heaven And Earth. We discuss the utterly bonkers documentary The Imposter, in which an Algerian-French young man in Spain claims to be a 16-year-old Texan, who’d been missing for 3 years, and Little White Lie, the (…)

New fortnight, new episode. Abla’s picks of the week are the brilliant, creepy horror debut Caveat by filmmaker Damian McCarthy and Palestinian film Western Arabs, a chaotic, powerful and very personal look at the impact of displacement, by Omar Shargawi, as both films are reviewed on here! Our festival to watch out for is Documenta. We focus on two feature films: Joe Talbot’sThe Last Black Man in San Francisco (2020), an engaging documentary that came out in October and is now (…)

This week, Abla picks Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult, a sort of parallel documentary to the previously discussed The Vow, also about Keith Raniere and NXIVM but more explosive and revelatory, and Egyptian horror series Paranormal. Coco Green talks about: The China Hustle (2017) Like the 2016 documentary Betting on Zero, about short sellers and their suspicions of fraud in the multilevel marketing company Herbalife, The China Hustle has a similar focus, but with Chinese companies (…)

Our guest this week is Phil Miller, investigative journalist and staff reporter at Declassified UK. We discuss the origins of British mercenaries in recent proxy wars and the extent of government culpability in his documentary (and the book it’s based on) Keenie Meenie: Britain’s Private Army (2020) - available online! We also touch on the issues around British intervention abroad, involvement in the international arms trade and the effects on migration. We’ve not been bawled over by any (…)

A longer episode than usual in which we are joined by Media Fund Strategic Coordinator Thomas Barlow. Among the many other things he does is conducting anti-fascist history tours in his home city of Manchester! Tom chose to focus on themes of revolution and social change in sci-fi, with a particular focus on Elysium and Battlestar Galactica. We discuss how the film and series creators depict the agents of change, the use of a single hero-like protagonist as opposed to the class of workers (…)

This week’s focus is "colonial chic" in light of the touted and actual removal of Gone With The Wind from a number of programmes and archives due to its racist outlook. We discuss themes of colonialism and postcolonialism through film, namely the above and Jane Austen’s work and their filmic representations. As the saying goes, it’s not what you’re looking at it’s what you see. Our picks this week are the Encounters Film Festival, David Tennant’s uncanny portrayal of serial killer Dennis (…)