Does this conversation have to be so miserable? Tsai Ming-liang asks. His two-hour long conversation with his fetish actor Lee Kang-sheng, Afternoon, will perhaps remain one of the least known of the director’s works. First…
Those of you who have been with me for a while will remember that I used to be very keen on establishing a link between traditional Chinese painting and Slow Cinema. Of course, this approach…
It is possibly the first time that I’m writing about a specific video installation here on this blog. I have read quite a bit during my PhD research in order to understand the uses of…
Afterlives. The title of the new English-language book on Akerman’s work, edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson, is poignant, painful even, but perhaps the most fitting for this very collection. It’s been almost four…
Not so long ago, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. Published in the middle of the 19th century, it is now something of an iconic book about nature, about the woods, about the…
It’s been quite a while since I have reviewed a book. This was primarily down to my not finding the right ones, or my waiting for certain books to be published. Slow Cinema continues to…
Since the Industrial Revolution, children have been massively exploited for work. Even though nation states regulated child labour, there is still a lot of work to do in order to safeguard them. What seems to…
Even after many years writing on Slow Cinema, I still get the same question: where can we see the films you are writing about? It isn’t always easy to respond to that question. Some directors,…
The beauty of Slow Cinema is that directors welcome you to their world and let you explore it in your own way. If you follow one director in particular and have seen all of his/her…
My father’s hand was the city of Beirut. I came to Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement by accident and it’s one of those accidents that you’re grateful for. Not so long ago, I read a long article on the Guardian about our obsession with…