Not too far from Beijing, in the western Qing tombs 清西陵 in Hebei. This was the last tomb we saw, the Muling 慕陵, which was the most simple and beautiful. The relatively modest Daoguang emperor used extravagantly expensive Nanmu wood, unpainted. It’s still fragrant after 175 years.

This is a tour de force of close reading/close viewing.

Zhang Lu’s exquisitely funny and exquisitely sad film GLOAMING IN LUOMU 《罗目的黄昏》won the top prize at the Busan Film Festival tonight. 恭喜恭喜张律导演！

Strolling along Dongsi 8 Tiao hutong 东四八条 in Beijing this pm I saw this gate, with a little Buddha statue inside. Then I read the plaque. *Everything* happened in this house. (Manchus to Martial arts to Mara Hari).

I’d like to think of this as a warm tribute to Canada in front of the Workers Stadium in Beijing 工体前面的枫叶

Advice — maybe for the Carney government vis-à-vis the U.S.? — spotted on the Beijing Metro.

Q&A’s at Busan International Film Festival.釜山国际电影节： Lee Hong-chi and Cici Wang: A DANCE IN VAIN 《我是全世界最幸福的宝贝》 Tracy Choi, Fish Liew, Jennifer Yu, Natalie Hsu: GIRLFRIENDS 《女孩不平凡》 Tsai Ming-liang, A Nong & Lee Kang-sheng: BACK HOME 《回家》 Zhang Lu, Bai Baihe, & Liu Dan: GLOAMING IN LUOMU《罗目的黄昏》

Couldn’t get any tickets to films at Busan IFF today. But can watching a film be better than seeing a temple by the sea? 龙官寺 Yonggungsa in Busan. 今天在釜山没法拿票。看海边的寺庙比看电影好吗？

At the beach. First time in Busan for the Busan International Film Festival. 到了釜山国际电影节。海滩不错。

I've watched several Christian Petzold films recently. What he's doing with film (structure, craft, self-conscious positioning in the history of cinema) seems like a very close correlate to Gerhard Richter's painting practice. There's also a remarkable similarity in the tone & colour of their images

This reminds me of how many Canadians reacted when Trump wouldn't shut up about annexing them. Not sure what will come of this, but sucks that we get to find out.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Finished watching TIFF 2025 films. Favourite films: Map of Traces, Chan Hau-chun 100 Sunset, Kunsang Kyirong Powwow People, Sky Hopinka Morgenkreis, Basma al-Sharif Dry Leaf, Alexandre Koberidze Below the Clouds, Gianfranco Rosi Girll, Shu Qi The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho

A really good review by Mark Asch of Sky Hopinka's wonderful POWWOW PEOPLE, one of my favourite films at TIFF 2025. www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/09/10/s...

That pedestrian overpass in Keelung, in Shu Qi’s very fine GIRL 女孩 (TIFF 2025). Also, a magic red ballon appears, briefly.

SHE HAS NO NAME, d. Peter Chan (酱园弄·悬案 2024/2025). “Make this as old-fashioned as possible” is not the solution to the riddle of how to make a social Shanghai melodrama for contemporary audiences. At least they seem not to have used the standard Hengdian set. And Yang Mi was surprisingly good.

There are moments, like this aft. on a shut down King St, when TIFF looks like the Canadians who welcome an American invasion. I mean American commodities, “talent” who commandeer or our public spaces to push U.S. product. How can we still tolerate being their supine platform?

Most ecstatic moment in a film at TIFF: In @astrostic.bsky.social Blake Williams’ 3D experimental short FELT, we see waves moving R to L. Gradually the L horizon starts to curl up until sheets of water seem to be curling, surging up towards the upper L corner of the screen. Giddy exhilaration!

Basma Alsharif. MORGENKREIS. (TIFF 2025 Wavelenghts) The other best film I’ve seen at TIFF 2025. So powerful. The pressure and authority and moral confidence of Basma Alsharif’s camera can consume, re-articulate, interrogate, and sublimate everything in its path. (Thanks curators Jesse and Andrea)

Alexandre Koberidze: DRY LEAF (TIFF 2025 Wavelengths). This is the film Camille Pissarro (my favourite Impressionist) would have made if he made films. Both artists use ecstatically lighted landscape to investigate (complicate? critique? problematize?) human intervention in the natural world.

My favourite film at TIFF is Hong Kong artist Chan Hau-chun's MAP OF TRACES 記憶座標. A beautiful, poignantly sad b&w essay/poem about HK spaces marked by violence, disappearance, separation. Letters to prison; disappearing water calligraphy. The camera as a tool for surveilance and a tool for freedom.

Kunsang Kyirong: 100 SUNSET (TIFF 2025). Beautiful first feature set in Toronto’s Tibetan community centre: Parkdale. Kunsang's eye is unerring: she transforms my dull dull Toronto into a place with cinematic character, like few other filmmakers have managed to do. 1/2

WITH HASAN IN GAZA, Kamal Aljafari (Wavelengths, TIFF 2025). Essential cinema. Even if you think you already have your moral & historical bearings about this place (Gaza) & these people (Palestinians). 1/2

Gianfranco Rosi’s BELOW THE CLOUDS: Naples, Vesuvius, Pompeii, National Archeological Museum, tomb robbers, the cute ramshackle Circumvesuviana, it’s like a documentary tuned to all my interests. Delightful and sublime.

Now Moiree-ing. Critics’ ratings grid for festivals. Thanks for the invitation, smart critic buds. I guess I’m technically a “former film critic” but anyway it’s delightful company to be in. moir.ee/editions/tif...

“Map of Traces seems interested less in ascribing a single identity to Hong Kong than in capturing how the city’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy themselves.” —Dennis Zhou on Chan Hau Chun’s cinematic letter to Hong Kong

MIROIRS No.3, Christian Petzold. Relatively minor CP, so precisely crafted you don't see the art. But the characters-catch-up-with-plot-while-the-audience-is-way-ahead-of-them scene was ... long. I'm happy to watch any Beer/Petzold, no matter how light, but I'm not as committed as I am to Kim/Hong.

Ok SIRAT boosters, I need to read your pieces now. I imagine we should have been expected to feel that these European wanderers were so out of place that their fates were somehow logically determined? A critique of western privilege? Did I miss everything?

Ben Rivers’ MARE’S NEST didn’t quite gel for me. Or perhaps I didn’t quite gel for it, since I completely trust Ben’s imagination and art. The strangeness of the children was inspired. But things that should’ve felt incantory didn’t, to me. I fear I just didn’t rise to the challenge?

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is almost exciting enough, almost weird enough. It tiptoes right up to Argentina’s radical La Flor, by Mariano Llinás. But stays inside the lines, doesn’t break the genre barrier as outrageously. Still, it feels like La Flor’s influence may be there?

In 2016, TIFF’s essential Wavelengths slate had 15 features, four shorts programs and five installations. This year, just eight features – fewer than Primetime, the section that previews TV series – three shorts programs and zero installations. #TIFF50 www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/ti...

The Berlin Philharmonic is broadcasting. It’s opening season concert now. One of the few subscriptions I still have. The Berndt Aloud Zimmermann Obie Concerto was intense and weird and gloriously totally coloured: everyone seems to love principal oboe Albrecht Mayer. … 1/

(morning repost)

Rewatched NE ZHA 2 哪吒之魔童闹海. Much more impressed the 2nd time, as plot distractions faded. There's a fine Slate article by Jenny Zhang that shoots down glib mis-readings (it's pro-Party! it's pro-US!). I'll write up something longer, but perhaps looking at it through Chinese art history is useful.

Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang's new film DONGJI RESCUE (东极岛）is fun as spectacle; perplexing as ideology. The film's status as a 主旋律 (zhuxuanlu) anti-Japanese propaganda film is complicated, and it doesn't neatly rhyme with that genre. letterboxd.com/film/dongji-... 1/7

2 reactions to Chen Sicheng & Dai Mo's DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 1900 (唐探1900) that may be in tension: 1) redface is not any more tolerable in a Chinese blockbuster than it is in an American Western. Add the grotesquely "primitive" stereotypes, and this purportedly "anti-racist" film self-destructs. 1/

You could take the Globe and Mail's advice & line up for 15 "buzziest" movies at TIFF that you don't need to see because they're almost all going to be coming to theatres later on. Or you could imagine a film festival is an alternative to what the market wants you to watch, and consider these: 1/

NO PRESIDENT (1969) A great title (which re-activated now in 2025, is either a demand, a description, a lament, or an action plan... ) for a fabulous experimental film by Jack Smith about, inter alia, Wendel Wilkie & champagne-swilling vampiric beauties. 1/2

Thanks to @jhoberman.bsky.social ‘S EVERYTHING IS NOW, I finally watched CHELSEA GIRLS (or at least the reduction to video via YouTube from an Italian DVD that helpfully has optional English). 1/

I'm up to 1966 in J. Hoberman's EVERYTHING IS NOW (reaching a temporary mid-book summit, with BLONDE ON BLONDE and CHELSEA GIRLS. 1/3

From a trip to Doha in 2023 to see the Museum of Islamic Art: “Jahn installed on the Throne of Turan” from the fabled Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp. Posted for no particular reason other than that it’s extraordinarily beautiful.

Sometimes I still find a Philip Glass piece – new to me – that sets up an ecstatic pulse that feels like it soars forever. I heard this one, 5th movement of his 5th String Quartet, at the AGO, pumped out of a video celebrating Joyce Wieland (by her son). From 17’20” : m.youtube.com/watch?v=HiXo...

A short film for a Saturday: watch Dan Drasin‘s thrilling and funny SUNDAY, an account of the great beatnik protest for the right to sing folk songs in public in a park, @ Washington Square in 1961. “3000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN VILLAGE” said the New York Mirror. m.youtube.com/watch?v=gEvK...

An eloquent account, sorrowful but inspiring, in the NYRB by @marcishore.bsky.social of her experience co-organizing the Kyiv Book Arsenal. At its centre is a piercing analysis of how Ukrainians are removing the Russian language from their literary practice and souls. www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Fascinating discussion with some film experts after watching a Chinese-Kazakh film tonight. We each saw something very different (not necessarily a problem: think of how Leonardo's Virgin St Anne and Child (aka the Marlborough House Cartoon) looks completely different to everyone who sees it)... 1/

What is Evil Cat doing on this list? Just snuck in there, as evil cats are wont to do?

My chronic Torontonian "Montreal-envy" just intensified another few notches. Why can Montrealers have such good things but we here in Canada's "world-class city" have to put up with the destruction of public space for Ford's cronies' private waterpart-cum-parking lots?

With regret, I had to give up watching Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty after about 3 hours (it's 4h 45 min long). What started as a series of beautiful, elegiac family scenes, ... 1/4