Review: "Your Fat Friend" Is a Sigh of Relief and a Necessary Reflection

by Cláudio Alves

Not to be indulging in self-pity, but I think it's fair to say that existing as a fat person in our world is a complicated affair. And I'm not talking about the physical realities of being fat. Instead, it's how people see and treat you that irks, how so much of our society is full of insidious anti-fat bias, from the doctor's office to pop culture, from total strangers to those who call themselves your friends. Social codes so often teach us to conflate fatness with moral rot, laziness, stupidity, the worst of humankind, and something worthy of disgust. Feeling unlovable, inward hate is the inevitable endpoint. What's worse is that when you try to call attention to it, you're often met with euphemistic justifications or treated as if what you're saying is nonsense.

Even those who putatively sympathize can be doing more harm than good, confusing what they feel for empathy when it's pity. Look no further than last year's The Whale, an odious work that proposed a humanizing view of fatness by reveling in its assumed tragedy. And yet, many people I respect loved it, expounding about its "merits" in ways that had me question what they must think when they gaze upon my person. Well, they were not alone, seeing as that trash won two Oscars. To them and others, I'd like to propose Jeanie Finlay's Your Fat Friend as a necessary watch. While not a perfect documentary, seeing it felt like releasing a breath I didn't know I was holding…

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Best International Film: Pakistan's "In Flames" & India's "2018"

by Cláudio Alves

Considering the Academy's general disinclination to honor horror cinema, it's always surprising when the genre pops up amid Best International Film submissions. This year, Pakistan is one of the brave countries that didn't let genre bias stop them from selecting a scary movie for the Oscar race. Zarrar Kahn's In Flames is the lucky flick, a Canadian-produced meditation on grief, trauma, and poisonous patriarchy bound to unnerve viewers. Neighboring nation India didn't dip their toes into nightmare cinema but sent a disaster picture that's horrifying in its own way. Juan Anthany Joseph's 2018 dramatizes a real-life catastrophe that befell the state of Kerala…

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Best International Film: Poland's "The Peasants" & the Philippines' "The Missing"

by Cláudio Alves

As Guillermo del Toro loves to remind us, animation is cinema. It's not a genre but a medium with its own particularities and styles, distinct idioms, and formal grammar. This year, some countries have taken these values to heart, selecting animated works to represent them at the Oscars. Curiously, two of them offer original ways to consider Rotoscoping as an animation practice, defying those who dismiss such films as lesser. They are Poland's The Peasants, from the same team behind Loving Vincent, and The Missing from the Philippines. Between painterly ravishment and digital befuddlement, these filmmakers take Rotoscope cinema to its limits and beyond…

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Best International Film: Italy's "Io Capitano" and Belgium's "Omen"

by Cláudio Alves

Immigrant stories manifest across multiple Oscar submissions this year. There's Sweden's Opponent and Australia's Shayda, with their focus on Iranian expats trying to rebuild in another nation, as well as a vital narrative thread in Germany's Teachers' Lounge. The films from Italy and Belgium turn their gazes to Sub-Saharan Africa, though their perspectives are inverted. Io Capitano considers an odyssey from Senegal to the Italian shore, while Omen starts with a Congolese immigrant looking back to his origins. One is a journey in search of a new life, the other a reflection on an old life left behind. 

Each proposes a cinema hinged on the tension of modern realism and folkloric tradition, dictating wild tonal swerves and keeping in line with many of the most interesting African films in recent memory…

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Review: "Orlando, My Political Biography"

by Cláudio Alves

The future of cinema is in non-fiction. Though conventional narrative cinema still dominates the mainstream, it's within the documentary realm that the medium's most radical innovations tend to manifest, paving a path to the seventh art's tomorrow. That said, to consider cinema in binaries may be holding on to an outdated model. The way forward could entangle the cinema, as Iranian and Portuguese filmmakers have done for decades. In that regard, Orlando, My Political Biography is the future of cinema dressed in ruffs, non-binary, and transgressing past neat categorization.

Philosopher turned director Paul B. Preciado rejects structural dualities in search of something somewhere between academism and anarchic theater, a reflection of his and his subjects' essential queerness…

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