Kevin Boitelle made his feature debut on a shoestring, and the result is one of the sharpest comedies about the Dutch film industry in years. Trip-Tych is simultaneously a film about making films and a meditation on what the creative process costs — personally, financially, and aesthetically. In conversation with Kiriko, Boitelle returns to his earliest film obsessions and the collaborations with friends that taught him what cinema should feel like: joyful, collective, and free. An episode about how to make something from nothing — and why the joy in that process is itself worth preserving.
A personal essay about falling in love with a fictional world for the first time — and what that falling changes. The essay begins with the millennial experience of choosing your cinematic religion by accident: one film, one moment, one deep passionate desire planted in the heart. For this writer, that moment was Studio Ghibli. The essay follows that first encounter through the years, asking what it means to carry a fictional world inside you as a way of understanding the actual one.
A provocation: does Martin Scorsese glamourise the vices he claims to be examining? His greatest films make you feel the seduction of the life they’re condemning — and this essay asks whether that’s a moral failure or a formal achievement. From Mean Streets to Goodfellas to Killers of the Flower Moon, the essay traces the specific charge of Scorsese’s cinema: the way it makes transgression feel like living, and whether the distinction between showing and celebrating ultimately matters.
Directors Sarah Blok and Lisa Konno bring a fashion-inflected documentary sensibility to the most underrepresented story in immigrant cinema: the father. Their short trilogy — timed to coincide with an exhibition at Dutch Design Week and the release of their accompanying book — strips away the expected immigrant narratives and offers something more tender and honest in its place. In conversation with Kiriko, they discuss why a hybrid form of documentary and fashion filmmaking can reveal more about a subject than a traditional talking-head approach.
A personal essay prompted by the release of Licorice Pizza that turns into something more uncomfortable: an examination of why Paul Thomas Anderson’s flawed, narcissistic, often monstrous male characters are so compelling to watch. From Daniel Plainview to Lancaster Dodd to Barry Egan: what is the specific seduction of a man who believes his own mythology? And what does it say about a viewer that she found herself falling for them? A piece about cinema’s power to make us desire what we know we shouldn’t.
An essay that begins with a passionate love for the tomato — a fruit that is, the writer argues, an emblem of life itself: often sour, sweet at times, bitter when gone wrong, and extraordinary when done perfectly right. From tomatophilia to cinema’s most famous tomatoes, this playful piece finds in the humble tomato a key to understanding what cinema does to us when it’s at its best: transforms the ordinary into something you can’t stop thinking about.
An essay that begins with a personal account of falling in love — obsessively, repeatedly — with film characters, and arrives at an uncomfortable observation: the majority of those crushes are white. Not a comfortable conclusion, and the essay doesn’t dress it up: it asks what it says about a cinema culture, and a critical education, when the most desirable bodies on screen are coded by a very narrow set of racial and aesthetic norms. Written with honesty rather than resolution.
The duty of a documentary filmmaker is to show, how master of reality Werner Herzog likes to call it, the ‘ecstatic truth’: a truth that is not necessarily fact-related, but more so a story that is an intensification of the world as we know it. In search of this truth, the documentarian is on an everlasting quest for the secret stories, the hidden pain that has not yet seen the daylight, or the – often troublesome – characters whose voices are yet to be heard. And mankind is vain. If a documentarian asks you to make a film about your life, you will most likely say yes. We like to believe we are special, that we have a story to tell.
Recent Comments