Escapism has always been one of the most common coping mechanisms when reality is too difficult to face. But how far can we go in our attempt to escape? Make It Look Real by Danial Shah is a Pakistani–Belgian film portraying a photo studio in Pakistan where people have their pictures edited. In the film, the photo studio serves as a small sanctuary for people’s hidden desires – some ask to...

In a world where corporate giants generate unimaginable profits, it is easy to forget the individuals who make this possible: the workers whose labor sustains these corporations but who themselves remain in the shadows. Union (dir. Brett Story & Stephen Maing, 2023) sheds light on these hidden figures by following the creation of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the first independent union...

Perpetrator documentary as a subgenre emerged with Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which interviewed German officers and French collaborators alongside resistance fighters. This documentary and its influence basically established that understanding historical crimes requires engaging with those who committed them, not just with survivors. Luuk Bouwman’s The Propagandist (2024)...

Watching Danial Shah’s Make It Look Real, one frequently encounters scenes that invite comparison between the director Danial and the protagonist photographer, Sakhi. Both work with a camera, yet their conditions diverge in pay, equipment, and workplace. When Sakhi earns about 0.5 dollars per print, Danial recalls earning about 100 dollars per image a decade ago while shooting for newspapers....

“...And yet we are strong and we are smart. And we are weird, and we laugh… And we are crazy… And that throws them completely off the track.” It is 1973. Vibeke Løkkeberg, a Norwegian filmmaker, travels to West Berlin with a small film crew to document the First International Women’s Film Seminar. The footage they captured remained lost for almost fifty years. It is 2025. After the...

Brett Story and Stephen T. Maing’s 2024 documentary Union details the story and struggle of members at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in their historic attempt to form a labor union. The documentary seems to be primarily interested in giving viewers a front row seat to the action as the movement develops, revolving specifically around Chris Smalls, the charismatic and ultimately divisive founder of the...

We’re told from the beginning that assimilation is the golden ticket. Learn the language, pick up the customs, and voilà; you’re in. You belong. Except, as Arjun Talwar shows in his documentary Letters from Wolf Street (2025), it’s not that simple. No matter how polished your assimilation act is, you’ll always be seen, and treated, as an outsider. I wanted to explore the strange paradox of...

Vibeke Løkkeberg’s The Long Road to the Director’s Chair intertwines the female body and political agency by revealing how European women in the 1970s film industry negotiated their professional lives and bodily autonomy within the patriarchal structure. While interviewing these women about their experiences, many of them mention unstable jobs and income, the lack of assertiveness or...

     Ewan Waddell’s documentary The Longer You Bleed not only captures the physical destruction of war; it also explores another, less visible front—the battlefield of the mind. The film illustrates how individuals cope with the psychological strain of conflict, where simply maintaining daily life and refusing to give in becomes a form of resistance. Instead of portraying civilians...

At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking (2024) directed by Maja Novaković, follows the isolated life of an elderly man in the cutting landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each movement, set against the boundless line of the snowy horizon, is transformed into a series of dreamlike symbols. Feelings of loneliness and seclusion somehow sit alongside intimacy and peaceful imagination,...