In which I argue that "AI" as we understand it today is a structurally fascist artifact. https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/

I start a new full time job in a university library next week :)

In our final piece in collaboration with @emergingwriters.bsky.social, Tara Grace explores loss, embodiment, and continuity in the 2025 @melbcinematheque.bsky.social season, 'Mother Tongue: Australian Women in Animation', guest programmed by Dr Ruth Richards. tinyurl.com/4khyk4jp

"Where Joaquin sought to haunt, Avellana instead immortalised." Gabe Tejada delves into Nick Joaquin's revered play, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FILIPINO, and what its 1965 adaptation loses by negating the writer's experiments with form and temporality. tinyurl.com/4ye29cat

fried some eggs for friends on our weekend away and EIGHT out of ten eggs had double yolks in them which has to signal either wonderful good fortune or unthinkable misery ahead

Dylan Rowen maps itinerant traces of 'home' throughout the oeuvre of Chantal Akerman, from 1968's SAUTE MA VILLE to her final film, 2015's NO HOME MOVIE, examining her lifelong interests in the themes of place, embodiment, queer desire, and matriarchal lineages. tinyurl.com/ypa6a7ze

"Cameras are weapons, so film the police, and don’t let them film you." Fred Pryce examines the aesthetics of the body camera image as seen in Netflix's Oscar-nominated documentary THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, within a lineage of ‘immersive’ propaganda and surveillance technologies. tinyurl.com/745jxt6b

As part of our collaboration with @emergingwriters.bsky.social and @melbcinematheque.bsky.social, Liên Ta reflects on themes of religious devotion and sacrifice in several films screened during the Cinémathèque's season ‘Cine de Oro: Treasures of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age.' tinyurl.com/2hycfntr

bloody heck, nearing 100 (out of 124) withdrawals including pretty much all the big names and some surprises (to me)

Absolutely insane.

a wonderful holiday companion

"The picket line [...] becomes not just a place of protest but of community and shared knowledge." Maudie Osborne on SALT OF THE EARTH, a blacklisted 1954 film that dramatised the real events of a New Mexico miners' strike with women at its centre. tinyurl.com/yc8x9t3k

"Happiness, community, and fantasy are no less present in spaces like this." Sydney Leoli Reyes draws on the sights and sounds of four Filipino masterworks, which screened in October and November as part of the @melbcinematheque.bsky.social Lino Brocka season. tinyurl.com/4j6ru4k2

Here’s my Spotify Wrapped 🎵✨

woohoo! thank you sm to Litwin Books/Library Juice Press & the jury! litwinbooks.com/kailyn-slate...

🚨 Help our State Library! Executives are trying to cut 11 permanent librarian positions, meaning 10 frontline librarians would remain to run Australia's busiest library. They are proposing to outsource the library's critical information technology team. www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/ha...

“I still want to remind people that this is a collective ritual.” Oscar Bloomfield talks to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul about being present, hearing music everywhere, and revisiting his first short, BULLET, ahead of a rare Sydney screening next week. tinyurl.com/3yp5njay

I'm currently looking to talk with renters who have used a digital portal / app to conduct their own routine rental inspection without the real estate agent coming to your house. This is sometimes called a 'Remote Inspection' If this is you, please get in touch!

“There is an archive that is lost, but there’s an archive that replaces it, which is made in the present.” Indigo Bailey talks to Palestinian filmmaker Azza El-Hassan, whose work KINGS & EXTRAS screens at our Bridge of Solidarity fundraiser event Oct 11. tinyurl.com/y3pmu75w

"Kerr’s stop-and-go career momentum and the film’s aspirations as a somewhat conventional sports biopic create a friction, placing excess weight on the shoulders of its movie star attraction." Read Kevin Bui on Benny Safdie’s THE SMASHING MACHINE. tinyurl.com/327pm43s

On Oct 11, we're co-hosting a mutual aid benefit screening of Azza El-Hassan's KINGS AND EXTRAS: DIGGING FOR A PALESTINIAN IMAGE & Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's HERE AND ELSEWHERE (ICI ET AILLEURS) in partnership with writer Dylan Rowen and Static Vision. tinyurl.com/4tmeshzp

Worth linking to Eli McLean's Overland essay on Meanjin's closure and the state of publishing if you haven't yet

Our first piece in collaboration with the Emerging Writers' Festival x @melbcinematheque.bsky.social is a work of short fiction by Laetitia Um—a response to the Cinémathèque's recent Seijun Suzuki season that explores the troubled psyche of a side character in BRANDED TO KILL. tinyurl.com/mu2ajak9

Javier Bardem at the #Emmys: "Here I am today denouncing the genocide in Gaza... Free Palestine!" (via @Variety)

Since our very first issue Meanjin and Overland have been comrades, mates, rivals, and drinking buddies. The UMP board’s decision is a shockingly myopic act of cultural vandalism which will grievously harm the Australian literary community.

Rough Cut is proud to be partnering with the Emerging Writers Festival and @melbcinematheque.bsky.social to publish three responses to Cinémathèque seasons by emerging writers during EWF 2025 and beyond. We'll kick off with the fest on Sep 11—watch this space! 💌🎥📝 tinyurl.com/ysmzzmmd

Where is Anthony Albanese in calling the attack on the First Nations Camp Sovereignty a hate crime, a terrorist act? There could not be a more blatant attack that is motivated by racial hatred and white supremacy and yet First Nations communities are again failed by this Government.

“This film is an artefact, and that’s how I wanted to make it; that’s how I want it to feel.” Michelle Huang speaks to PASA FAHO director Kalu Oji about collaboration, intergenerational love and learning, and refusing assimilation. tinyurl.com/4xpjxjbh

"I saw this very narrow version of Hollywood, and I didn’t like it." Emily Browning talks to @connordalton.bsky.social about the joys and anxieties of her most formative roles, from her breakthrough in GHOST SHIP to her latest turn in the homegrown rom-com ONE MORE SHOT. tinyurl.com/334699jy

Solidarity to the writers and artists taking a stand

I have studied the targeting of journalists for many years, but the scale and public display of these killings is truly shocking: “Israel admits deliberate attack on the journalist, known for frontline coverage, in a strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital“ www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

The entire team. The entire team! The monstrosity of this is incomprehensible.

Required reading this film festival season!

AI filmmaking is peeing. It’s pooping. It’s throwing up. It’s a new kind of liquid coming out. It’s hated by the establishment. It’s what goes in the toilet. It’s wet. It’s what’s in the bathroom.

On the site today, Philippa Hawker interviews the prolific screenwriter, director, and Cahiers du Cinéma critic Pascal Bonitzer about his new art world-set feature THE STOLEN PAINTING. Now in Australian cinemas courtesy of Palace Films 🖼️ tinyurl.com/2tuczmc6

sometimes you find a book in an op shop with a cover so perfect… so startling…

"Seyrig's performances [...] teeter on the threshold between person and place." Jamie Jungyoon Tak writes on LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD & MURIEL, OR THE TIME OF RETURN, which screened together as part of the recent Delphine Seyrig season at the Melbourne Cinémathèque. tinyurl.com/nnu7uw8y

🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

Indigo Bailey interviews Palestinian-American writer, director and actor Cherien Dabis about her miraculously executed drama ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU, which she was forced to recreate in exile after five months of preparation and construction in Palestine. tinyurl.com/bden6zb4

hearing reports of a mid-20s couple loudly debating addison rae’s star persona in the barkly square coles while blocking access to the spring onions and leafy greens

SCREENING THIS WEEKEND AT BUFF 🔥 Charles Carrall speaks with Leon O'Regan, the restorer of Charis and George Schwarz’s pioneering sex films. They discuss lifting them from obscurity, Australian censorship, and the couple’s hardcore artistry. tinyurl.com/mr3779sh

"Histories of making and handling with both care and violence manifest in scratches, time codes, rips, grain, and skipping frames." Alex Williams rounds out our BUFF coverage with a reflection on Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari's A FIDAI FILM. tinyurl.com/ydfz5rjj

In the latest entry of his Screen Play column, Austin Lancaster wades into a world of vulgarity—the "nasty, cheap, and gratuitous"—with indie game NIGHT AT THE GATES OF HELL, which riffs on the gauche greats of Italian horror, Lucio Fulci & Bruno Mattei. tinyurl.com/4nh7t6zu

"A crisis can be very fecund." Andréas Giannopoulos speaks to filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari about her latest feature, HARVEST, which follows a Middle Ages farming community as it descends into turmoil. Screens this weekend at Sydney Film Festival. tinyurl.com/mswspzrz

"There’s no point in making culture if you don’t believe in community building." Virat Nehru (@nehrukigalati.bsky.social) goes long with Matthew Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi about their absurd and moving film UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, collaboration, fluidity, and much more. tinyurl.com/4nkx7c2x

As part of our Summer Sacraments program in March, Indigo Bailey spoke to writer-director Laura Citarella about her 2011 feature debut, OSTENDE. Now live on the site, their conversation looks at the film's many echoes across Citarella's rich oeuvre. tinyurl.com/yn2pbh8f

Kevin Bui presents a star study by way of the latest MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE instalment, tracing Cruise's persona from "enigmatic movie star" to "intensely devoted action hero [...] willing to put his own life on the line" for our entertainment. tinyurl.com/mw3syjsd

"Cinema is no conveyer belt, no this and then that. It’s only now and now and now." Indigo Bailey surveys a trilogy of microbudget miracles from Adelaide collective Moviejuice, screening at the inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival this Saturday. tinyurl.com/yxzr645b