video essay film festival 2022

The Best Video Essays of 2022

Sit back, relax: you might learn something.

Published January 6, 2023 Features , Lists , Movies , TV By Meg Shields Disclaimer When you purchase through affiliate links on our site, we may earn a commission.

This article is part of our 2022 Rewind .  Follow along as we explore the best and most interesting movies, shows, performances, and more from this very strange year.   In this entry, we explore the best video essays of 2022.

2022 has, inconceivably, come to an end. And in the spirit of reflection and gratitude, it’s time to appreciate the thing that had our back when times were tough; the thing that helped us wind down after a long day at work; the thing that made that first cup of coffee in the morning go down just a little easier: video essays.

This year, I had the pleasure of once again curating The Queue , a thrice-weekly column dedicated to highlighting short-form video content about films, television, and the craft of visual storytelling. As a result, the focus of the video essays below is movies and TV shows — if you’re wondering why there are no video essays on speed running mechanics or broadway musical drama, that’s why!

There were, it must be said, a heck of a lot of top-shelf video essays this year that fell outside the scope of this list (including, but not limited to, Jacob Geller’s poetic eulogy to sea monsters ; People Make Games’ anthropological exploration of VRChat , and Jenny Nicholson’s sarcastically long portrait of Evermore , the theme park that tried to sue Taylor Swift).

Once again, I had a doozy of a time narrowing down a short list of this year’s selections. So if you could all stop making such good #content, that would be great (just kidding, never stop). I want to sincerely thank all the essayists I’ve covered this year for their hard work. I hope I get to continue seeing you in my feed in 2023 and beyond.

Bergman Island: Art, Love, and the Unbearable Process of Making

French director Mia Hansen-Løve embraces the notion of autobiographical filmmaking. And the video essay above does a beautiful job illustrating how her first English-language film,  Bergman Island , draws attention to the process of its own making without sacrificing its own story. I love how this essayist unravels the tapestry of the film’s twisty relationship with metatext with tangible examples and accessible language.

This video essay on the metatextuality of Mia Hansen-Løve’s  Bergman Island   is by  Broey Deschanel  a self-described “snob (and YouTuber) whose video essays cover everything from new releases like Licorice Pizza  and  Euphoria  to camp classics like  Showgirls . You can subscribe to their YouTube account  here  and you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Realism and Fantastic Cinema

We’re living during an interesting time in visual effects, where more often than not, realism is the goal. The following video essay offers a convincing gospel that preaches a different approach, which proposes that “fantastic cinema” that actively doesn’t chase photorealism or expose its own trickery is different, special, and worth fighting for. If you’ve found other arguments against  modern CGI unconvincing — or if your love of practical effects starts and stops with fetishism — I urge you to give this a look.

This video essay on why the pursuit of realism in special effects is hurting the fantasy genre is by APLattanzi , a freelance filmmaker and illustrator who hails from the Philadelphia area. You can subscribe to them on YouTube  here . Their essays cover a large swath of topics, from film scores to short films. You can also find them on Letterboxd  here .

Gen Z needs more slacker movies

In all fairness, this video essay is preaching to the choir: I’m a huge sucker for slacker movies. And if for  whatever reason you’re not, this essayist articulates something that feels True about what the sub-genre offers to the 2020s, an age where we’re increasingly bumping up against the political spirit of fucking off and the price of who can afford to do nothing.

This video essay on why the younger generation (I’m dating myself, whoops!) need some new slacker movies   is by  Niche Nonsense , a video essay channel that provides, well, just that: niche nonsense. The channel was only created in mid-December of 2021. And you can get in on the ground floor and subscribe here .

Leslie Cheung & Hong Kong LGBT Cinema

Love letters are contagious, and if you’re unfamiliar with Hong Kong star Leslie Cheung , this is a great introduction to one of the greatest LGBTQ+ icons in film history and how he left his impact on the Queer Hong Kong films that came in the wake of his trailblazing.

These videos on the impact of Leslie Cheung on Hong Kong queer cinema is by  Accented Cinema , a Canadian-based YouTube video essay series with a focus on Asian cinema. You can subscribe to Accented Cinema for bi-weekly uploads here . You can follow them on Twitter  here .

The Secret Ingredient That Makes Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ So Great

When people say that modern superhero movies feel soulless, you don’t always get a lot of concrete examples or arguments as to why this is the case aside from a general feeling . Luckily, the above video essay takes the time to nail something specific about why Sam Raimi ‘s Spider-Man   trilogy feels so much more sincere and front-the-heart than modern, irony-poisoned Marvel fare.

This video essay on why everyday people make Sam Raimi’s  Spider-Man  films feel so special is co-written by  Patrick (H) Willems  and  Siddhant Adlakha .  You can find their own directorial efforts and their video essays on their channel  here . You can also find Willems on Twitter  here . And you can find Adlakha on Twitter  here .

The Lion King and Disney’s Sequel Curse

Frankly, I didn’t know that I  needed  an hour-long defence of The Lion King 1 ½ until it was sitting in my YouTube subscriptions. The Disney animated feature-length sequel landscape is, by and large, pretty mid. And while  The Lion King 2  is one of the better ones out there,  The Lion King 1 ½  is in a class all of its own. If you’re not familiar, the sequel takes place during the events of the first film, but it’s told from the perspective of Timon and Pumba. The following video essay does a stellar job describing why it rules, how it ties into Shakespeare, and why it’s a great example of self-aware filmmaking.

This video on the incredible Disney sequel  The Lion King 1 ½  is by Jace, a.k.a   BREADSWORD,  an LA-based video essayist who specializes in long-form nostalgia-heavy love letters. Impeccably edited and smoother than butter, BREADSWORD essays boast an unparalleled relaxed fit and an expressive narrative tone. Long essays like this take a lot of time to put together, and somehow BREADSWORD makes it all look effortless. You can subscribe to them on YouTube  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Twin Peaks Actually, ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, But For Real)

This is, quite frankly, one of the most lucid explanations of “why  Twin Peaks is the way it is” that I’ve ever seen. Maybe its my small screen ignorance showing, but the idea that TV reflexivity is the key that unlocks Twin Peaks really feels capital-t True. The above is the first of a two-parter, and will hit harder if you’ve seen all three seasons and  Fire Walk With Me . I’m also a massive fan of how this essayist choses to frame their work; the Socratic dialogue is alive and well.

This video essay on what Twin Peaks is about, actually, is by Maggie Mae Fish , a Los Angeles-based comedian, actress, and culture critic who releases short films and video essays on her  YouTube account . Fish has been featured on College Humor, Screen Junkies, and JASH. She was also a former lead actor and writer at Cracked.com. You can follow Fish on Twitter  here .

Nothing But Trouble is a Very Weird Movie

Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Nothing But Trouble  with your own two, God-given eyes, you may still have heard rumblings of its notorious status. I appreciate that this video essayist takes the time to give complicated stories — like the making of this movie and why it came to be thought of as a massive bomb — the time they deserve to breathe and speak for themselves.

This video essay on why  Nothing But Trouble  is good, actually comes to us from  In Praise of Shadows , a video essay channel run by Zane Whitener  and based in Asheville, North Carolina. The channel focuses on horror, history, and retrospectives. Under their “Anatomy of a Franchise” banner, they break down horror properties including  Tremors ,  The Stepfather , and  Re-Animator,  in addition to  The Hills Have Eyes . You can check out the series’ playlist  here . And you can subscribe to the In Praise of Shadows YouTube channel  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Why The Bear Hits So Hard

There’s a special bond between cooking and the moving image and Hulu’s The Bear  is the latest piece of pop culture to bring the two art forms together. I love how this video essay balances its analysis of the technical and scripted aspects of the show to explain the controlled chaos that defines the feel of the show. Breakdowns like this, that do as much showing as they do telling, are really what the video essay format is all about.

This video essay on the appeal of  The Bear  is by Virginia-based filmmaker and video editor  Thomas Flight . He runs a YouTube channel under the same name. You can follow Thomas Flight and check out his back catalog of video essays on YouTube  here . You can follow him on Twitter  here .

Under The Skin | Audiovisual Alienation

While I do think that  all  movies partake in non-verbal storytelling (they are moving  pictures, after all), I do think some films are more non-verbal than others. This isn’t to say that these films aren’t about  anything or that, more disparagingly, they are “just vibes” (yeesh). Case in point: this thoughtful analysis of Under the Skin , a film that uses non-verbal storytelling to put us in the shoes of an alien visitor trying to make sense of the confusing, predatory, and often beautiful human world.

This video essay on how  Under the Skin  uses non-verbal storytelling to explore the question of what it means to be human   is by  Spikima Movies , a Korean-Canadian who’s been dropping gems on YouTube since 2019. You can subscribe to Spikima’s channel for more incredible essays  here . And you can follow them on Letterboxd  here .

How a 10-year-old girl wrote Japan’s most insane horror film

Just when I thought that House   was starting to slip into that special category of movies that have been “talked to death,” someone goes ahead and makes a video essay like this. I adore the messy human stories behind canonized films. And the way that this video essayist describes the father-daughter relationship behind the deeply personal making of House  is impeccable, even if you’re already familiar with the general beats.

This video essay on the uncanny origins of the 1977 horror film  House   is by  k aptainkristian, a YouTube-based video essay channel that peddles visual love letters to filmmakers, musicians, and syndicated cartoons. The account is run by  Kristian T.   Williams , whom you can follow on Twitter  here . You can subscribe to kaptainkristian, and check out their back catalog on YouTube  here .

Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor

Given that conversations on labor and animation are becoming more and more prescient and pointed, this video essay feels like a must-watch. This essayist’s analysis is deeply insightful, compelling, and well-argued. The idea that animators on Laika films are in-universe Lovecraftian gods tickles my brain something fierce.

This video essay on the self-reflexive industrial allegory of Laika studios is written and directed by  Mihaela Mihailova . It is produced by Alla Gadassik and edited by Gil Goletski, with Jacqueline Turner providing the narration. The end of the video credits the Vancouver-based Emily Carr University of Art and Design for support. Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of the essay collection Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft  (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Why This 1950s Studio Made Movies Backwards

We love a gimmick. And we especially love a gimmick that produces some wildly kick-ass movie posters. This video essay offers a lucid explanation of how AIP cracked the code for making B-Movies: poster first, movie later. Has this principle of making a film from a marketing perspective mutated into something more insidious over time? Yep. Will that make me any less charmed by exploitation cinema? Nope. Look, someone  had to make the movies that play at the drive-in while teens suck face in the back of their parents’ Cadillac.

This video on how American International Pictures marketed their films backward is by  Andrew Saladino , who runs the Texas-based  Royal Ocean Film Society . You can browse their back catalog of videos on their Vimeo account  here . If Vimeo isn’t your speed, you can give them a follow on YouTube  here .

Why Did Spaghetti Westerns Look Like That?

On the one hand, this is something of a biased pick because I eat Spaghetti Westerns for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On the other hand, this video essay does a really solid job honing in on one specific aspect of the sub-genre and asking: why? I love laser-focused topics like this, and the fact that it’s about one of the most iconic shot types in genre cinema is just icing on the cake.

This video essay on Sergio Leone’s filmography and how he perfected the use of the close-up shot is by  Adam Tinius , who runs the YouTube channel  Entertain the Elk . They are based in Pasadena, California. You can follow them on YouTube  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

The Catharsis of Body Horror

Frankly, the fact that this video essay managed to stay online for as long as it has (thus far) without getting sent back to the shadow realm by YouTube’s AI censor bots is a straight-up miracle. Luckily, as of writing this, the essay is still live and absolutely worth your time, especially  if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t vibe with body horror. There’s no shame in having likes and dislikes. But this essay very clearly articulates why body horror is a lot more than the sum of its goo-covered, fleshy parts.

This video essay on the catharsis themes of body horror is by  Yhara Zayd . They provide insightful deep dives on young adult content from  Skins  to  My Best Friend’s Wedding . You can check out more of their content and subscribe to their channel on YouTube  here . If you like their stuff and you want to support them, you can check out their Patreon  here .

Tagged with: 2022 Rewind The Queue

Meg Shields

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The video essay: "back to theaters".

The Video Essay  is a joint project of MUBI and FILMADRID International Film Festival. Film analysis and criticism found a completely new and innovative path with the arrival of the video essay, a relatively recent form that has already its own masters and is becoming increasingly popular. The limits of this discipline are constantly expanding; new essayists are finding innovative ways to study the history of cinema working with images. With this non-competitive section of the festival both MUBI and FILMADRID will offer the platform and visibility the video essay deserves. The seven selected works will be premiering online from June 6 - 12, 2022 on MUBI's Notebook. The selection was made by the programmers of MUBI and FILMADRID.

Back to Theaters by Victoria Oliver Farner

In cinematic language, narration is articulated according to the size of the human in the   shot composition: full-length in the context of the landscape, and then only the eyes, which appear in front of us with an unknown magnificence. "Back to Theaters" returns the viewer to a non-privileged place.

En el lenguaje cinematográfico la narración se articula en función del tamaño que ocupa el humano en el plano: de cuerpo entero en el contexto del paisaje y después solo sus ojos, que aparecen con una magnificencia desconocida. “Back to theaters” devuelve al espectador a un lugar no privilegiado.

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The best video essays of 2023

Our annual poll spotlights 181 unique video essays, nominated by 48 international voters, showcasing the breadth and depth of current videographic practice.

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Now in its seventh annual edition, the Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year surveys the online sphere, film festivals and audiovisual research in almost equal measure. Its primary purposes are to mark notable works and keep track of the various schools of thought concerning what video essays can or should be, and how they can communicate to a range of audiences.

The poll was conducted with the assistance of 48 voters from 17 countries, including academics, critics, online creators and festival curators. Together, their 260 nominations include 181 distinct titles. Given the scope and abundance of recent video essays, even an extensive poll can only provide a cross-section of the topics, forms and rhetoric of their contemporary practice – a limitation many voters noted in their submissions. Of the nominated works, 47% were created by male video essayists, 39% by female, with several from non-binary creators and mixed teams. Around two-thirds feature voiceover, with the majority presented in English, although 14 languages feature in the overall poll.

The nominations saw a relatively equal split between essays created for YouTube and those created for academic research, with 50 YouTube and 47 academic videos (or entire series). Publicly available videos’ viewership varies broadly, from 9.5 million views (for MyHouse.wad ) to the low double digits; participants were keen to highlight new and underseen works as well as celebrating the achievements of established creators. Festival films or installation pieces also proved popular, with 53 arthouse shorts, features and documentaries nominated. Also present, although in a smaller proportion, were self-published Vimeo works or collaborative projects unaffiliated with a specific institution. However, within the yearly S&S poll for video essays, there seems to be a slight decline both in independently produced and published Vimeo content, and in video output by cinephile magazines, while the academic sector is slowly but constantly expanding.

The average runtime was 27 minutes, with most around the 15 minute mark – although a few marathon nominations like Will DiGravio’s Against Polish and Adam Curtis’ TraumaZone (three and seven hours respectively) stick out. Three videos were one minute long or shorter.

Leading the nominations, Maryam Tafakory and Johannes Binotto tie for 10 nominations, with Tafakory’s split-screen work chaste/unchaste and Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series coming out on top. A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek received nine nominations, the most for a single work. Returning essayists of note include Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Barbara Zecchi and Ariel Avissar, while new entrants with multiple nominations include Occitane Lacurie (three noms for Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone) and James DeLisio (four nominations for Cinema in Pain: Decoding “Mad God” ).

It is worth noting that some videos appear in consecutive polls: among them, Misek’s History of the World According to Getty Images and Galibert-Laîné’s GeoMarkr are now available online, while in the 2022 poll they were occasionally mentioned, but less widely seen. It is often the case that videos travel in festivals or are viewed in conferences and among peers before being made public. While the current poll has several dozen videos to which we cannot presently direct our readers, we hope that in the near future many will be similarly available with unrestricted access.

Videographic collaborations make up a number of nominations in this years’ list. Once upon a Screen: Vol. 2 , edited by Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, returns with two nominations for its second instalment. Moving Poems , also curated by Kreutzer, received five nominations, chiefly for Desiree de Jesus’ a raisin in the sun. And the 169 Seconds series, commissioned by Danish journal 16:9 to celebrate its 20th anniversary, received three nominations, including returning essayists Catherine Grant and Jason Mittell. Independent videographic community The Essay Library also features with one nomination for Lara Callaghan’s contribution to the When Essay Met Library collaboration.

A number of essays were published through new academic journals, including Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft with five videos nominated; other new entrants include Teknokultura and Feminist Media Histories. [in]Transition, Tecmerin and NECSUS are by now certified in making the works they publish visible among videographic researchers.

Independent streaming service Nebula has continued to grow its base of creators, many of whom are video essayists. Out of 50 unique YouTube videos, seven were also published on Nebula. Three of these were directly cross-posted, another three were Nebula First (published earlier than YouTube), and one nomination – We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel – was a Nebula Plus video, meaning it includes extra content beyond what is available on YouTube. Lily Alexandre’s Nebula-first essay Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era received three nods, bringing the total number of Nebula nominations up to nine.

Billed as a creator-first streaming service , Nebula aims to give its creators the freedom that they cannot find on YouTube. Many video essayists have joined Nebula after finding their work coming up against YouTube’s advertiser-friendly guidelines, restricting the discussion of mature topics. In February 2023, Maggie Mae Fish launched her series Unrated exploring sexuality in film, and Broey Deschanel followed suit in November with the Taboo on Screen series. There’s an oft-noted divide between ‘Vimeo-style’ essays – with their more academic leaning and longer clip length – and YouTube essays – with their quick cuts and careful stepping around automatic copyright claims . This gap may be quickly closing, although whether a Nebula style will arise remains to be seen.

Although content creators can make money through AdSense and sponsorships on YouTube, many turn to community donations and subscriptions to fund their work. Forty-one of the nominated YouTube works included a link to Patreon, Ko-fi or PayPal in the video description. One nominated video, Brad Troemel’s The Literalists , is available exclusively on Patreon, with only a trailer uploaded to YouTube.

Vimeo essayists have also encountered in greater force the problems that have plagued YouTube essayists for years. Formerly a safe haven for video essays containing copyrighted materials, Vimeo has enacted a slew of copyright claims, viewing restrictions and takedowns on well-known video essays in recent months. This brings to mind Fandor’s 2016/2017 removal of multiple video essays from their channels in response to the threat of copyright claims, ringing alarm bells about the mixed potential of the Internet as an archive for videographic work. The long-running TV Dictionary project is just one example with multiple claims, despite its clear origin in academic research practice.

Nostalgia and memory, pop culture and cinephilia – sometimes mixed together – loom large in this year’s list, due in part to some popular academic series including Indy Vinyl for the Masses (curated by Ian Garwood) and the Screen Stars Dictionary (curated by Tecmerin and Ariel Avissar). Gender as spectacle makes its appearance in several videos, from the mainstream end of the spectrum (max teeth’s The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine ) to critical discussions of star personae, cinema’s archetypal female protagonists as well as filmmaking/media practices (Morgane Frund’s short films, among other titles), to direct references to Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler at the other end.

As with all other areas of discourse this year, AI featured in multiple videos, usually more as a thematic concern than as a videographic tool (although text-to-speech and some generative techniques feature in the list). Futurism more generally, whether dystopian or utopian, was a common theme in the YouTube nominations.

Interrogation of the video essay form itself continues to stimulate discussion within the field, including the drawing to a close of Johannes Binotto’s popular Practices of Viewing series. While this self-reflexivity was first noted in the 2021 poll , it was seen more on YouTube in 2023, with videos ranging from assessing the state of the video essay landscape to dispensing advice about how to be a successful video essayist . Harris Michael Brewis, better known as hbomberguy, released a nearly four-hour exposé of plagiarism on YouTube with a particular focus on video essays. The video passed two million views within 24 hours of its publication.

While there are certainly great videos that remained unmentioned even with such dedicated teamwork on behalf of all voters, the present survey should be a solid starting point (and, in a few years’ time, a reminder) of the state of video essays in 2023. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Full list of voters

Ariel avissar, johannes binotto, philip józef brubaker, nelson carvajal, ben chinapen, isabel custodio, will digravio, flavia dima, chloé galibert-laîné, jacob geller, tomas genevičius, libertad gills, catherine grant, maria hofmann, oswald iten, delphine jeanneret, miklós kiss, jaap kooijman, evelyn kreutzer, occitane lacurie, colleen laird, kevin b. lee, adrian martin, daniel mcilwraith, dayna mcleod, queline meadows, carlos natálio, clare o’g ara, alan o’l eary, michael o’n eill burns, julian ross, josé sarmiento hinojosa, jemma saunders, dan schindel, shannon strucci, scout tafoya, max tohline, irina trocan, ilinca vânău, ricardo vieira lisboa, adam woodward, barbara zecchi, all the votes.

Film theorist, curator, and video essayist , Queen Mary University of London and Národní filmový archiv

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

A timely meditation on how even public domain images ‘we all know’ can become unattainable when they find themselves in the thrall of commercial archives and data banks. A powerful call for paying attention to copyrights after Vimeo started taking video essays down.

Machines in Flames by Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser

Part desktop documentary, part evocative experimental film, this philosophical video essay succeeds in enacting the ‘detective logic of the digital’ like few other works I have seen. By jumping between the indistinct traces of CLODO , a terrorist group that bombed computer companies in 1980s France, it denies the pretension that the desktop interface is there ‘for us’ to make content readily available and uncovers the fundamental lack and self-destructivity of contemporary visual regimes.

Twisties! by Alice Lenay

A fascinating extension of the videographic impulse into a live performance. Lenay uses Zoom software to embody the experience of participating in the 1996 Summer Olympics and shakes our notions of audiovisual archives as well as the politics of individual and collective bodies.

Notes from Eremocene by Viera Čákanyová

Who would have thought that an essay film on blockchain and artificial intelligence could be so intimate and touching? Čákanyová achieves it through a catalogue of experimental techniques that turn photochemical as well as digital images into emblems of an indistinct future in which we yet have to find our place.

Teletext Revival by Karin Spišáková and David Scharf

A whimsically inventive video essay that resurrects the early 2000s’ teletext interface not just for its nostalgic appeal but chiefly for its unique temporality and inclusiveness.

Back to the Ruins by Jáchym Šidlák

A rare piece of videographic criticism that reworks a short Czechoslovak non-fiction film from the 1940s. Images of post-war reconstruction are poetically deconstructed to give voice to overlooked details and actors that shaped the spectacle in the first place.

Divine Horror by Kryštof Kočtář and Matouš Vaďura

A truly visceral experience that makes us sense how close experimental film, horror, and videographic criticism can be.

• Back to list of voters

Video maker and media scholar at Tel Aviv University

Arbitrary Motion: Accidentally/On Purpose by Farzaneh Yazdandoost

Yazdandoost’s video, exploring the use of the arbitrary motion of fur in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and other stop-motion films, is an absolute treat, start to finish. It was made under the mentorship of Catherine Grant, as part of a wonderful videographic symposium held in Hanover late last year, where I first got to see it — and was published earlier this year in the ZfM blog Videography, which followed that symposium. Don’t miss it — and also check out her shorter, lovely video, Wes Anderson’s Trains .

The Accented Sound of Camp by Barbara Zecchi

In another video first presented at the Hanover conference and published this year on the ZfM blog, Zecchi offers a 4-part exploration of the use of Italian accents in Hollywood films. Starting from House of Gucci, it examines various screen representations of Italians and Italian Americans and the political and ideological dimensions of the accented voice (following Zecchi’s previous work on the subject). It is insightful, entertaining and highly inventive, experimenting with a diverse range of videographic techniques and forms of voiceover.

Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes by Alan O’L eary

One of the explicit inspirations for Zecchi’s video above, O’L eary’s is a tour de force of parametric criticism, or what he calls a form of “cyborg scholarship”. It is a fascinating and highly generative piece, and remains playful throughout; O’L early must have had a lot of fun while making it, like a child playing with Lego. It would be difficult to explain here just what the video does with its subject material (three narrative films made about the 2008 financial crash); luckily, O’L eary has already done that himself, in the accompanying creator’s statement, which you should definitely read prior to watching the video if you want any chance of figuring out what the hell is going on!

Moving Poems: A Raisin in the Sun (1961) by Desirée de Jesús

Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems collection, which pairs poems with moving images, has generated some remarkable works over the past couple of years. This video by de Jesús is one of the standout pieces. It places the 1961 adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun in dialogue with Langston Hughes’s “Harlem”, from which its title was derived. It is an intelligent and complex piece, employing multiple, dense layerings of image, sound and text, and will benefit from repeat viewings. Check it out, as well as the other pieces in the collection – and consider contributing your own.

Unsteady (for Elisabeth Bronfen) by Johannes Binotto

I will not say much about Binotto’s touching tribute to his former teacher and close friend, Elisabeth Bronfen, who retired from Zurich university this summer. You should simply watch it (all the way to the very end) and smile.

Watching the Rehearsal by Jason Mittell

Why leave scholarship to chance? You’d better watch Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal before watching this one; and while you’re at it, watch some of Professor Mittell’s previous pieces, where he established some of the ideas and approaches he’s developed here in elaborate and unexpected ways; specifically, this and this .

Mast-del مست دل by Maryam Tafakory

This last one is unfortunately not available for viewing online, and has been making the festival round this past year – go and watch it if you get the chance. Is this a video essay? I don’t know. Here is how Tafakory describes it: “A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.” Anyone who’s seen her previous work (and if you haven’t, you’re missing out), would recognise these themes and ideas that she has dealt with before. Here, she approaches them from a radically different aesthetic, masterfully blending clips from existing films, original footage, a scripted narrative and original score, to mesmerising and moving effect.

Media studies scholar, bricoleur, project leader videoessayresearch.org

No representative overview, no proper summaries. But a collection of echoes, reverberations of works I have seen this year and which keep playing in my head.

Moving Poems: Eine Erinnerung [A Memory] by Evelyn Kreutzer

“Sometimes I still picture myself.” Part of Evelyn’s fantastic Moving Poems initiative, yet a whole universe of its own. It pierces me. Everything in it. The artefacts of the video signal that devour the image, the high pitched hiss of the TV , the calm and sober voice that speaks of memories which sound innocuous but frighten you, and then the look on this face I recognise and which I have never seen like that.

With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive + Introduction by Katie Bird

“I keep thinking about gestures”.

Katie Bird’s haunting video essay and its bittersweet introduction makes us keep thinking, keep wondering, about the weight and value of labour, of film labour, scholarly labour, of what it means to hold, a camera, a child, a body, yourself, and how we can continue by letting go.

Film Thought 5. Kuchar at Kmart by Will DiGravio

“In such places, he finds the people, the ones like my family, and friends, and neighbours from home…”

A videographic haiku, from one loving observer to the other, beautiful, personal, careful, vulnerable. It makes me fall in love with the filmmaker it portrays, with the people the filmmaker met, and with the person who made this video.

“How did you get it? I ask — They don’t know.”

An analysis of, as well as an act of resistance against visual capitalism going rampant. We need to fight a system that is already well ahead in co-opting, privatising, watermarking, and sealing the archives, depriving more and more people of their past, their collective memories. This video essay is an emergency call and a road map.

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, and Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

“Ain’t it beautiful?” Playful. Painful. So precise. I cannot choose among the works of Dayna but I feel particularly connected to this one because I cannot separate it from all the conversations we had around it. Here is a beautiful artist and thinker driving at high speed to where video essays usually do not dare to go. Please take me with you, I will sit on the backseat.

Super Volume – A Tactile Art by Cormac Donnelly

“Intention re-situates to the hands and fingers.” Abstract and visceral at the same time it is this experimental video essay that made me suddenly and fully understand and feel what “working with sound” could mean, how it feels to grasp what cannot be touched. When you see it, everything vibrates.

mini_essay_5 (Body Parts) by Occitane Lacurie

“Balayez vers le haut pour afficher plus.”

Occitane’s mini-essays (what an understatement!) show iPhone navigation as a method of thoughts taking shape. Scrolling, clicking, touching, feeling through images and associations, a flow of intertexts at the tip of your invisible finger. You better be careful with what you open next. In this one I feel seen by all these bodies, dismembered, scattered, commodified. Looking through the mirror stage and back again. And what about this little screen in my hand? Part of my body or not?

Video essayist/experimental filmmaker

The 169 Seconds Series

I couldn’t pick only one video essay from this stellar series, so I nominate the entire body of work from 2023. I love the length requirement, which results in some creative interpretations of the source material.

It’s a Zabriskie Zabriskie Zabriskie Zabriskie Point by Daniel Kremer

A personal, feature-length essay film about Death Valley and its importance to the history of cinema as well as its longstanding resonance with the filmmaker. Kremer has admirably unearthed many underground and lesser known works that were filmed in this desert and included them here, to my delight. Kremer’s playful juxtapositions between the two main films is humorous and well-edited.

Memories of “It” by Kathleen Loock

Loock entwines her own experience growing up in a reunified Germany with the 1990 TV movie version of Stephen King’s It. A surprising association, but one that is fully realised and supported with her examples. Loock’s observations enrich the popular horror story as well as educate the audience about complications resulting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The Thinking Machine #64: Inkblot by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Two cosmically intertwined tragedies from different films are synchronised beautifully in this succinct video mashup.

Webby Award-nominated video essayist, writer and television producer

Fire Film Supercut by Daniel Pope

The supercut, often an overlooked subgenre of the video essay, is much harder to pull off than it seems. When done right, you almost don’t even notice the splice. This supercut is, pun intended, fire.

New Beverly Cinema — October 2023 by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith has cut a lot of the New Beverly’s monthly previews and to me, they’re pure video essays, on a pure pop-level. This one for October, a la Halloween, is especially captivating.

An electric and gripping use of animation and multi-screen to really get its thesis across. McLeod understands the exciting heights of the video essay form and has all the cylinders firing here.

YouTube creator /video editor and essayist

Why Tom Cruise’s Run Matters by Scene It

Scene it is a fairly new channel I came across, I found his content very refreshing as a new voice in the more standard “film essay” area.

string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard by acollierastro

This video came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s mind who saw it. An intriguing title, with a clearly stressed out person and also The Binding of Isaac in the thumbnail? What’s going on? Within 1 minute the purpose becomes clear; this woman who has very strong opinions and credentials will break down exactly what happened with the String Theory phenomenon while simultaneously stumbling through a playthrough of the vintage roguelike indie darling Binding of Isaac. A premise so absurd and hilarious (dare I say groundbreaking?) that you instantly want to watch and listen. It’s very informative and HIGHLY entertaining for the joke of the idea alone. I’m glad this took off because it was worth it. This is probably my most firm nomination out of the group.

Attack the Block: A Subversive Masterpiece by Kay and Skittles

Coming from very very early 2023; this one about John Boyega’s first leading role stood out for me; a beautiful look at an indie darling from one of my favourite creators breaking down the politics of crime in poor communities.

YouTuber ( Be Kind Rewind ) and film critic

Art Without the Artist (and Other Horrors from the Machine) by Dan Simpson, Eyebrow Cinema on YouTube

AI became a hotly contested subject in 2023, with studios eager to capitalise on its apparent ease and speed, and artists fighting to establish guardrails for its growth and use. Dan Simpson argues for the integrity of the artist over the dispassionate, surface-level results AI often prompts. It’s a rallying cry for those of us who advocate and appreciate the work of creative human beings.

We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel

Big Joel’s essays always stand out for their fluency in art history. Here, he weaves several works together, connecting material as disparate as Jenny Holzer and Godzilla in a stunning exploration of what words mean, contradictions, and subjectivity.

The Literalists by Brad Troemel

I’ve yet to find a better interpreter of online culture than artist Brad Troemel, whose work satirises some of the internet’s most exasperating modes of expression. In fact, he so effectively mocks these aesthetics that his work often goes viral, with choruses of the terminally online taking it, well, literally (a recent post about the unionisation of the Taylor Swift fandom comes to mind). In addition to these posts, he creates video essays outlining his observations of online behaviour. In The Literalists, he takes a look at “millennial cultural liberalism” and the inclination to scrub content clean of any possible offence, connecting the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s to the modern, flawed reasoning that it is morally bad to watch films with immoral characters. His essays are available exclusively on his Patreon, but it’s well worth at least a month’s subscription to binge them. You won’t regret it.

The Four horse_ebooks of the Apocalypse by Grace Lee/What’s So Great About That?

Everything happens so much. It’s an iconic tweet, an evergreen feeling, and the subject of Grace Lee’s exploration of the apocalyptic unease of modern life. She charts the decline of the relatively literal disaster film with the rise of a looming, paralysing belief in our pre-determined doom. It’s a fascinating topic, made even more compelling given that Lee is the best editor of video essays on YouTube.  

Host of The Video Essay Podcast; assistant editor, Cineaste; PhD candidate, University of Amsterdam

Each year, it gets more difficult to be a viewer of video essays; it is a beautiful and frustrating thing. More people are making them. They are longer. They screen at festivals, and in varied corners of the internet. Below are a few of the video essays that have resonated with me this year. Rather than try and explain why I picked them, I will instead attempt to describe something in each work. Here’s hoping it might inspire you to give them all a watch.

Joséphine Baker Watches Herself by Terri Francis

[3:43] On the left, Joséphine Baker performs in the famous skirt made out of bananas. On the right, a clip from a 1968 CBC interview with Baker. Below, a translation on screen: “No, it’s about work. You have to work hard.” A video essay that grows richer with each rewatch.

Apostles of Cinema (Tenzi za sinema) by Cece Mlay, Darragh Amelia, Gertrude Malizana, Jesse Gerard Mpango

“I like quality films. And I like difficult films,” says DJ Black. But if it is bad, “I can’t dub it.” [04:51] An incisive documentary about film culture in Tanzania.

watch me sleep: self-surveillance and middle-aging queer performance anxiety by Dayna McLeod

There’s a moment in the second minute I felt throughout my whole body. A revelation.

Void by Kevin Ferguson

The persistence of Robert Duvall’s bald head, especially at [00:13] and [04:46].

Why the Internet Loves Buster Keaton by Don McHoull

I imagine Don’s masterful montages of the internet’s response to Keaton’s artistry, and also that of Fayard and Harold Nicholas, playing on the wall of a gallery.

moving poems: a raisin in the sun (1961) by Desirée de Jesús

Water ripples. Sidney Poitier, playing with his lighter, gestures for a drink. His finger points to the text on screen, “in the sun?” Off-screen dialogue plays. [00:26] A harmonious blend of sound, image, and text.

Miss Me Yet by Chris Bell

Each episode begins with George W. Bush raising his middle finger to the camera, a gesture that becomes more grotesque and poignant the more one watches.

Film critic, programmer ( BIEFF )

A fleeting list — quite heterogeneous, and I must admit I’m not sure whether all of them are “ontologically” video essays, as definitions seem to become increasingly porous — of films that I discovered together with my colleagues at BIEFF during our work for this year’s editions.

Home Invasion by Graeme Arnfied

Simply stunning. Perhaps the best zero-budget film in many years — which affords itself the very rare “luxury” of playfully engaging with the legacy of Harun Farocki. You’ll never look at a doorbell with the same eyes after this film, not ever again.

Dear Gerald by Jasper Rigole

Rarely does the perspective of film archivists — with its particular way of looking at film, and its entire universe of both material and ethical dilemmas — actually transpire in film. Jasper Rigole’s short (aside from spotlighting his delightful IICADOM archives, a true goldmine for home movie enthusiasts) does exactly that, while also bringing into question the spectatorship of archival footage.

GeoMarkr by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Guillaume Grandjean

Galibert-Laîné, brilliant as usual.

Bliss.jpg by Emily Rose Apter and Elijah Stevens

Some of the world’s most famous (digital — in all senses of the term) landscapes, reexamined, almost à la Richard Prince, or rather, a y2k take on the method of James Benning — brought back into materiality through 16mm film.

The Film You Are About to See by Maxime Martinot

Despite all the hand-wringing in recent years, content warnings are by no means something new to cinema — and the double helix-like structure (going both backwards and forwards throughout the history) of Martinot’s incisive and irreverent short reveals this to the fullest, together with excavating the various mores and taboos that cinema was transgressing at various times in modern history.

Gods of the Supermarket by Alberto Gonzalez Morales

I’m a sucker for any and all films that use ‘Wicked Game’ on their soundtrack. Especially so if they’re found-footage essays on queerness and bodybuilding culture.

Dancing at My Parents’ Wedding by Andreea Chiper

Finally, a pick from the local scene, still very much emergent — a tender exploration of personal videographic artifacts, as seen through the eyes of the child that knows how life is going to work out for those captured on a seemingly innocuous wedding tape.

Filmmaker and senior researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design

Having once again decided to nominate for this poll only makers whose work I discovered this year, I realise that the five videos that I want to highlight are works I watched in the presence of their authors. Not only did their films inspire me, but I was moved by all five Q&A sessions, for very different reasons. This may testify to a growing need for personal connection through videographic practices, in the midst of a media landscape that grows more cluttered and anonymous by the day. I also want to salute the engagement of makers who are committed to accompanying their creations in person and helping them reach an audience, even when economic or political circumstances are not favourable. My list is non hierarchical.

Artistes en zone troublés by Stéphane Gérard and Lionel Soukaz

Lionel Soukaz’s video diary Journal annales is not only a milestone in the history of French experimental cinema, it is also an essential piece of LGBTQIA + heritage. There is something extremely moving about the care and tenderness with which Stéphane Gérard approaches this audiovisual document, as he edits a new short portrait of Soukaz’s late lover Hervé Couergou from the thousands of hours of footage Soukaz shot, making this testimony to the history of the «années sida» and the evolution of the gay movement accessible to a new generation of spectators, artists and activists.

Ours / Bear by Morgane Frund

A personal exploration of the complex power dynamics between a male filmer and female filmed subjects, when the camera is suddenly turned towards he whose gaze had hitherto remained unchallenged. Frund’s video essay is uncomfortable in the best sense of the word, and leaves its viewers with more questions than answers, providing a starting point for an essential conversation about gender, class and generational differences, and the ethics of documentary.

Personne n’était sympa / Nobody Was Cool by Hélèna Villovitch and David TV

The film is a moving and hilarious evocation of a walk through the streets of Paris on 1 May 1986, based on the filmmakers’ memories and a wide range of audiovisual archives. Images and sounds are saturated, superimposed, iridescent; facts and fantasies merge in a hallucinatory stream of real and fabricated memories, to which a final twist gives a whole new meaning.

Dreams About Putin by Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez

Based on a selection of actual dreams that the filmmakers collected online, this essay explores how the figure of Vladimir Putin has crept into the psyches of Russian citizens since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Disturbing, violent, absurd, the dreams are narrated in voice over and accompanied by a visual score created with the 3D graphics program Unreal Engine, interspersed with bizarre and equally absurd archival footage of Putin. A nightmarish response to a nightmarish war, waged both on the frontline and on social media.

Non-alignés: Scènes des archives Labudović / Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels by Mila Turajlic

A portrait of Tito’s official cameraman Stevan Labudović, this feature-length essay film exhumes previously unseen archival footage from the 1961 Belgrade conference to explore the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. As educational as it is politically sharp, the film accounts for the difficulties faced by Turajlic in working with unprocessed, barely identified archives, and offers Labudović an opportunity to share his personal and often humorous take on this turning point in the history of world politics.

YouTube-based video essayist writing about the intersection of games, culture, art, and politics

Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era by Lily Alexandre

Alexandre’s dissection of how algorithms are morphing our artistic tastes is insightful and biting. Although viewers may expect a video about AI , more time is spent on how humans are more than willing to start producing AI -esque content by hand in order to serve the tastes of their perceived audience. The real star of this video is the production, however. Alexandre speaks as a kaleidoscopic projection of Subway Surfer, minecraft montages, and other “sludge” is projected onto their face. As interesting as the essay’s script is, the viewer’s eye will inevitably slip to the endless stream of meaningless attention-grabbing clips – just as Alexandre intended, I imagine.

History of Handedness in Video Games by Face Full of Eyes

Equal parts essay and visual compendium, Face Full of Eyes’ video contains a dizzying amount of clips from hundreds of video games, all answering the same seemingly inconsequential question: how do the game’s characters handle guns with their dominant and non-dominant hands? The answer for any particular game isn’t important. The point of the video is instead that no decision is meaningless when creating art. In a created world like a video game, everything is a chance for storytelling— even the choice to depict how a left-handed person might have to reload a right-handed gun.

Four-Byte Burger by Ahoy

The experience of watching Ahoy attempt a perfect replication of a digital illustration from 1985 somehow captures the energy of a 21st-century sculptor attempting to re-carve Michelangelo’s David. While he starts with modern Photoshop tools, the latter half of the video is a deep dive into save file formats and 40-year old display technology; a crucial realisation in the video comes from a monitor’s changing colour tone when turned to portrait orientation. The fact that all this is in service of a delightfully whimsical picture of a burger? Even better.

Film critic, kritikosatlasas.com

This video essay gives additional meaning to the idea that cinema is a warehouse of memory.

The Thinking Machine #73: Revealing Leone by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Video essay exploring Sergio Leone’s technique of “revealing”. But revealing what was hidden in the scene is also the most interesting feature of the video essay. This video “opens the doors” with a wonderful rhythm and music.

Practices of Viewing: Description by Johannes Binotto

A video essay that doesn’t use any film footage, but which is still very interesting to watch and listen to. A video essay about a description technique that can make you see things better than any images.

Some Thoughts Occasioned by Four Desktops by Ariel Avissar

A video essay made as a response and as a dialogue with the other four video essays, each of which uses desktop documentary form in different and unique ways.

Sensuous and Affective by Oswald Iten

Using various techniques, it explores how cinema affects us through audiovisual experiences and how video essays can reveal this.

Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue by Stephen Broomer (Art &  Trash)

Many important avant-garde films were made in 1929, Joris Ivens’ Rain being one of them. This video essay shows what an amazing and groundbreaking film it is.

Memories of It by Kathleen Loock

Relationship between collective and personal memory, It (1990), VHS , the fall of the Berlin Wall – all of these somehow connect to my personal experience, interest and history, which, as this video shows, is not entirely unique.

Audiovisual essayist and professor of film at the University of Reading

Although it may not have been where I first encountered them, all of my nominations appear in two consecutive issues of [in]Transition. This is a reflection of the quality of work being published by the journal, rather than a lack of imagination on my part.

‘Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?’ George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

A follow up to the video essay on George Hoyningen-Huene’s work published in Movie last year, this piece again draws on archival research to sharpen our perception of production design choices, this time in relation to the potential of a muted colour palette.

This video was mentioned a couple of times in last year’s poll but has since been published. A brilliant interweaving of gaming, Chris Marker and reflection on the politics of Google Street View.

Mad Men’s ‘Babylon’: Mapping Out a Musical Metaphor by Ariane Hudelet

A compelling tracing of multi-stranded connections in an end-of episode musical montage: expertly and elegantly done.

Eye-Camera-Ninagawa by Colleen Laird

Graphically striking, temporally inventive, technically dazzling, formally compelling, surprising throughout.

I downloaded this film from its dedicated website, before the option to stream became available, and watched it without reading anything about it, thereby experiencing the full impact of its dramatic payoff.

Filmmaker, videoessayist, researcher and critic

It is exciting to finally be able to engage with Joséphine Baker’s media presence through film historian Terri Francis’ research and video essay. I had been waiting to see this video essay for some time so I was very happy to see it published in the journal Feminist Media Histories this year.

“Why this accent?” Barbara Zecchi takes a closer look -or listens more carefully- to the accents employed in House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021) in order to explore (and undo) Hollywood representations of Italians. This video essay builds off her previous work on the subject of the accented video essay, with a once again playful and creative, as well as thought-provoking result.

Roberto Cobo: Screen Stars Dictionary by Catherine Grant

This video essay is part of the Screen Stars Dictionary, published by Tecmerin and edited by Ariel Avissar and Vicente Rodríguez. Although there are so many great ones to choose from, I am highlighting this one because in it Catherine Grant gives us the special opportunity to remember and rediscover the “rare” and wonderful late Mexican actor Roberto Cobo (1930-2002).

chaste/unchaste by Maryam Tafakory

A beautifully crafted and compelling video essay from filmmaker Maryam Tafakory which cuts together images from 32 films, spanning three decades, in order to dissect the binary of chaste/unchaste women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Practices of Viewing: Ending by Johannes Binotto

The final video essay in Binotto’s series titled Practices of Viewing. These videos are made with so much care and love for the artistry of filmmaking that we will surely come back to them with time, as these gestures of film viewing begin to transform and, in some cases, even disappear.

Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) by Khavn De La Cruz

Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) and National Anarchist: Lino Brocka’ are two masterful works made by filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz about Filipino film history through the recycling of archival materials. Both are fascinating films, made in a video-essayistic spirit, that will hopefully circulate widely after their premiere this year at IFFR .

A fresh take on the beloved film Thelma & Louise by video essayist and artist Dayna McLeod in which the final suicidal leap is transformed into a deep dive of the vagina (using an endoscopic camera)! Soon to be published in the special issue, ‘Right to Rage: Subjectivity and Activism’ edited by Barbara Zecchi and Diana Fernández Romero, in Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements (forthcoming). Final note: I promise to see everything that Dayna McLeod makes (which also goes for everyone else on this list).

Freelance film scholar and video essayist

In my opinion, it was an excellent year for video essays and so it was especially hard to make a selection for this poll. I used three parameters in the composition of my list: I had to choose works by different essayists from those for whom I voted in 2022; and my selection could only feature personal favourites in the field of videographic criticism, that is, a specific film, television and screen studies subset of the “video essay”. The videos also needed to be already published and freely available online, which ruled out a lot of great works for which I will undoubtedly be voting next year. I’m betting that 2024 will be an even more excellent year for video essays!

Shah Rukh Khan. Screen Stars Dictionary by Ritika Kaushik

This was the video essay I most enjoyed watching in 2023! It was part of a joint venture inaugurated this year in which I was delighted to participate - The Screen Stars Dictionary , launched by the Spanish audiovisual essay journal TECMERIN in conjunction with video-essay entrepreneur extraordinaire Ariel Avissar, whose own contribution to the dictionary (on Tom Cruise ) I also really loved.

Creative Geography, Creative Connections: Candyman by John Gibbs

An ambitious and highly significant work, published in Movie , that is the perfect match of videographic critical form and content. I am simply in awe of John Gibbs’ audiovisual research and composition here. A great and powerful model for future work on the performativity and facticity of film and television locations.

The Responsive Eye, or, The Morning Show May Destroy You by Catherine Fowler

Fowler’s magnificently inventive video essay on the two television series The Morning Show and I May Destroy You compared the relational technique that each takes to sexual abuse using a ‘feminist videographic diptych’ method. Her video formed part of a brilliant special issue on that method that she proposed, produced and guest edited for [in]Transition, the peer-reviewed journal I co-edit, which was full to the brim with similarly urgent and powerful feminist works using multiscreen and other juxtapositional procedures.

This was the most original work of those I loved this year, and one I was fortunate to follow the making of while it was in progress. Academic film and TV studies video essays have taken a very performative and embodied turn in recent years, but Mittell characteristically pushes this even further into the realm of extremely ambitious, very entertaining and deeply insightful pastiche. I can’t wait to see where his videographic approaches to televisual reflexivity will take him, and us, next.

A superbly made, genuinely risk-taking work that asks and answers ongoing urgent questions about the circulation of public domain images and films. We were delighted to publish Misek’s work at [in]Transition, where it headed a huge and very strong issue featuring numerous other works I would have loved to select for my best-of-the-year videos had it been a Top Twenty list, rather than a Top Seven one.

Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España by Barbara Zecchi

Zecchi gets my vote for Video Essayist of the Year for her prolific, always brilliant videographic work. This particular video, published in issue 9(4) of the journal Feminist Media Histories, is extraordinary. As the editor of that journal Jennifer Bean wrote of it in her marvellous introductory essay for the issue of FMH , “[Zecchi’s] voice as well as her embodied, emotive presence on the screen are intrinsic features of a project that deploys videographic tools to sustain what she calls a ‘practice-based counterarchive’ capable of reversing the ongoing ‘dispossession’ of women’s contributions to media history.” Terri Francis’s remarkable 2019 video essay Joséphine Baker Watches Herself is also published in the issue’s exploration of the potential of videographic criticism for feminist media historiographies, alongside powerful new work by Celia Sainz.

With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive by Katie Bird

Katie Bird’s virtuosic exploration of the affordances of desktop filmmaking to access the sensations of using a physical camera (and its highly original and moving audiovisual maker’s statement) made a magisterial contribution to Kevin B. Lee and Ariel Avissar’s audiovisual essay dossier on the desktop documentary, for the Spring 2023 issue of NECSUS : European Journal of Media Studies. The other entries in the dossier were of excellent quality across the board, and I would particularly point to Ritika Kaushik and Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco’s great video essays for the ways in which, like Bird’s, their work points to how screen capture techniques can be harnessed to investigate very important and highly diverse screen studies research questions. 

Film scholar and video essayist ; University of Minnesota

Kiss me softly | crackly | sharply by Lucy Fife Donaldson

The combination of visuals and sound in this intriguing video forces the viewer into attention, listening and watching carefully while examining one’s own expectations and intimate reactions to individual moments.

Nebular Epistemics by Alan O’L eary

Incredibly dense on a theoretical level, performatively innovative, and yet still accessible and hilarious — what an accomplishment to combine these elements into a coherent whole and convincing argument.

Being Dolls (or Not): Spinning Mothers and Daughters in Elena Ferrante’s Adaptations by Barbara Zecchi

A dazzling watching experience that masterfully interweaves critical argument with audiovisual spectacle; a prime example of Zecchi’s superior sense of rhythm that permeates all her work.

Home Is Bleak. Is Home Bleak? by Delal Yatci

With Yatci’s piece too, rhythm is what captures my fascination. An examination of the home in Turkish films by female filmmakers takes shape by meandering between different film scenes, tied together by beautifully selected sound.

The Body • S05E16 • TPN ’s Buffy Guide by Passion of the Nerd

While I’m a fan of Passion of the Nerd’s entire series on Buffy, the episode on “The Body” weaves together such powerful narratives and meditations on grief and, at the same time, on the effect and personal meaning of media objects and their embeddedness not only in a cultural context but in our own private archives of (media) memories.

Once upon a Screen Vol. 2, Part 2

The second part of Once upon a Screen Vol 2 (edited by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer) seems to have a much more sombre atmosphere in comparison to Part 1 and features another inspiring array of videos based on other creators’ written screen memories. To me, Avissar’s The 39 Shots, Oswald Iten’s Recreated Memories, and Johannes Binotto’s Down a Dark Spiral stand out in this collection of amazing works.

Film scholar , video essayist , animator, PhD researcher

Arbitrary Motion: Accidentally / On Purpose by Farzaneh Yazdandoost

Inventive videographic research about stop motion animation is still rare, but Farzaneh Yazdandoost finds striking images and sounds to draw our attention towards the arbitrary motion of animated fur.

A pamphlet, an act of deliverance, and a moving found (and partly licensed) footage film.

Critics’ Choice 9 : (putting) on Aftersun by Inge Coolsaet

When we see the same film, we each see a different film, especially when that film invites us to inhabit it ourselves. Inge Coolsaet’s refreshingly minimalist take on this idea did the same for me.

“Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?” George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

The wonderfully muted colour schemes of Technicolor movies have always fascinated me. Thanks to the well-researched video essays (the first one came out the year before) by Lucy Fife Donaldson I am now also aware of one of the creators and proponents behind those concepts.

Overflowing with ideas and hilarious moments, this personal multi-part investigation of Italian accents in American mainstream cinema feels a lot shorter than it actually is.

Twisties! A Live Performance by Alice Lenay

The notion of what videographic criticism can do has been constantly challenged for a few years now. Alice Lenay is pushing the boundary further with her fully embodied live video essay performance in which she inserts herself into television footage from the 1996 Olympics, obscuring bodies, revealing camera angles, and the setup’s inherent dissociation.

Lecturer at University of Art and Design HEAD – Genève, co-director Festival Cinéma Jeune Public, curator at Locarno Film Festival and Int. Short Film Festival Winterthur

La Maison by Sophie Ballmer

Sophie recounts the renovation of a house inherited by her partner Tarik in the Vallée de Joux. Attracted by the potential, they began by destroying everything. Then it was time to rebuild. To the weight of the rubble cans was added the weight of their families’ dreams and values. With affection and humour, Sophie deconstructs patriarchy, capitalism and inheritance in an attempt to make room for achievable utopias.

Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black) by Derik Lynch, Matthew Thorne

The film follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch’s road trip back to Country for spiritual healing, as memories from his childhood return. A journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide, back home to his remote Anangu Community (Aputula) to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal, and physical. It is how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed down for over 60,000+ years from generation to generation.

Æquo by Eloïse Le Gallo, Julia Borderie

The sound of an alphorn echoes in the mountains while glaciers are dripping. Far away, on an oceanographic boat, researchers probe the invisible seabed. Geological bodies of salt and ice emerge from the digital depths of a software. They melt and disintegrate in the hands of scientists. The filmmakers place encounters at the heart of their approach, anchoring their creative process in a poetic approach.

Pacific Club by Valentin Noujaïm

In 1979, the Pacific Club opened in the basement of La Défense, the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for Arabs from the suburbs – a parallel world of dance, sweat, young love, and one-night utopias. Azedine, 17 years old at the time, tells us the forgotten story of this club and of this generation who dreamed of integrating into France but who soon came face to face with racism, the AIDS epidemic, and heroin. The film gives visibility to the forgotten, the invisible and reflects on the power dynamics and dominance system within French society. 

Out of the Blue by Morgane Frund

In 2013, an auteur film causes a scandal due to its sex scenes. The filmmaker is 16 and one of the angry viewers. Ten years later, she is ready to settle the score with this film in the form of a video essay. Her film visits ways to tame the ‘male gaze’ and understand her position in a still man-made/thought world.

Tierra de leche by Milton Guillen and Fiona Guy Hall

On New England dairy farms, daily life orbits around the milking parlour. Here, machinery and cows come together as an exploitation mechanism of migrant workers from Central America, consuming their every waking hour and even infiltrating their dreams. The film denounces a terrible reality told in the most poetic and respectful way. 

Not sure what a video essay is, so my choices might be slightly off-topic.

Mickey Takes Acid by AI Generated Nonsense

It is great, very funny, and not sure a human could find all those weird connections.

TraumaZone by Adam Curtis

I heard many people complaining that Adam Curtis’s essay is simplistic, you cannot express the collapse of the USSR in such a short time etc. Maybe it is so, but it is exactly because of this method that he achieves a kind of poetic truth, if I may say so.

Der Elvis by Joe Moritsugu

It is older, but since I never have heard of it, I consider it new. I heard of this filmmaker because two of his films were freeleech on karagarga. This short essay is ahead of its time and has a punk energy not so easy to find anymore.

Video essayist and Subaru nomad. Co-moderator of the wonderful Essay Library .

The “Pay For It” Scam by Carlos Maza

I’ll start my list off strong by fudging the numbers – this video came out in the last months of 2022, and yet Carlos Maza’s work demands a spot in my recommendations. Maza is an online video veteran, previously creating for Vox. His independent work allows him to flex his style: a blend of professionalism that says “this is worth taking seriously and I’ve put in the work” and casualness that says “we’re still going to make a tough topic go down easy.” He tackles some of the most contentious topics affecting our political landscape – this video covers the manufacturing of the “debt crisis” in the minds of the American public. The heart of each video lies in the wrap-up: Carlos has a knack for leaving viewers off with a perfect mix of “this sucks,” and “but I believe in us” and finally, “fuck yeah.”

Cinema in Pain: Decoding “Mad God” by James DeLisio

“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”

This thought-provoking video is an approachable look at a notoriously repulsive film (which I do not say lightly, as a squeamish viewer myself!). It proposes one lens of interpretation: what if a film like Mad God is our best chance as an audience to experience an articulation of pain through art? If pain is incommunicable through words, what sights and sounds, what deviations from expectation, can bring us into that headspace? This examination of the non-straightforward means through which cinema may operate has bent my brain, and I must recommend that you experience it for yourself.

The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine by max teeth

“Men are of course men and cars are cars but women are also cars.”

In the vein of Women Are Not Objects, but Objects Are Still Women, Max takes us through the special cinematic relationships between a man and his car, a man and his car who is also a woman, and a man and another man and a car which is somewhere nearby. The point: how have we learned to signify masculinity on screen? And how does John Carpenter’s Christine induce horror by perverting those signifiers? A cherry on top: this video is hilarious.

As a bonus, I’ll also recommend their video on Hereditary for its crisp, creative, and playful visual style.

The Essential Whiteness of One-Hit Wonders by The Nukes

“Hey Josh, you’re white. Who sang Tainted Love? I answered easily and without thought: ‘Soft Cell.’ But a few have offered me a truth that I, in my whiteness, did not know then, but do know now. Soft Cell’s Tainted Love is a cover.”

This is a tale as old as time, and yet even if you think you know this story, this video is a journey worth taking. Josh from The Nukes takes us on a personal musical tour through the many, many hidden (and not so hidden) ways that the music industry has historically catered to white sensibilities. Interesting, frustrating, and relentlessly funny – make sure to read the chapter markers for an extra dose of “this creator is having way too much fun.”

(Another bonus recommendation: Josh’s “ Is it Impossible to Dad ” is a heartfelt, prescient examination of the gap we attempt to bridge in parenthood – and in all relationships, really. Watch both, enjoy!)

I Watched 151 Celebrity House Tours and They’re Full of Lies by Kendra Gaylord

You might’ve noticed that I lean toward thoughtful, exploratory content that pulls you in with a premise, then surprises you with a run of jokes. Well, in that vein, Kendra’s channel has been a fantastic discovery for me this year. Kendra talks about architecture the way I talk about That One Funny Thing My Friend Did That One Time. Her style feels comfy and inclusionary, like you’re both laughing together.

It’s always fun letting someone take you on a journey through their random obsession, and watching all 151 Architectural Digest home tours probably enters “obsession” territory (and yet, one gets the sense that if not for the video, Kendra still would’ve done this anyway). The impression is less “I self-flagellate for content,” and more “let me give you my best takeaways from a task that you will likely never do yourself.” The difference between the two, I realised, is surprisingly important to me!             

The Importance of Spaces in The Last Black Man in San Francisco by KaiAfterKai

This video is a lovely exploration of the importance of personal connection to space, the ability to self-actualise through space, and connection to history through space, which all feel especially prescient to a generation of young adults who have been gatekept from home ownership.

It feels like listening to a guided meditation tape; Kai is, as always, soothing in their delivery, punctuated by perfect music choices and encapsulated within a flawless structure. This is the essay equivalent of sitting back in a field, relaxing, letting ideas wash over you.

Is the “Off-Grid” Lifestyle a Lie?? by Maggie Mae Fish

Also on the topic of spaces, Maggie explores a trend that may seem like a dream to young people growing increasingly unsure that they will ever be able to afford typical homeownership: off-gridding. Specifically, she calls attention to the way that people discover new lifestyles through the Internet, and whether the people selling that lifestyle are leaving out important details (and why they may be incentivised to do so!).

Following up on her 2022 video on the Netflix show Motel Makeover, this video continues Maggie’s deep dives into the ways in which the lens of “content” turns building and designing spaces into a sales pitch, while unearthing the hidden costs that these shows are not incentivised to reveal.

Associate professor in audiovisual arts and cognition at University of Groningen, NL / co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

Trying to have a full grasp on a year’s videographic output is increasingly becoming an impossible effort. This inevitably leads to a highly personal selection (and possibly less overlap among the featured videos – perhaps Kevin B. Lee will figure that out for us), but it’s also great news as it is due to a rapidly expanding videographic scene and community.

From what I’ve seen, this was one of this year’s most eloquent videographic ruminations on the theory and then applied practice of audiovisual t(h)inkering, brilliantly marrying an appeal for the exploratory research method with its explanatory mode of clear presentation.

Mind Autopsy by Johanna Vaude

(One of the) best producer(s) of supercut mashups these days is Johanna Vaude. Fans can watch her treatment of variously similar criminal investigations in Fincher’s oeuvre until we get our 3rd season of Mindhunters.

Sound Before Picture by Cormac Donnelly

I always enjoy it when someone finds an unexplored cinematic niche (in this case the sounds, full with clues and anticipation, leading the movies in before they even begin) and makes the most out of it through engaging audio(!)visual presentation.

Embodied Visual Meaning [in] Motion by Maarten Coëgnarts

Imagine how challenging it would be to argue for the functioning of abstract dynamic patterns as fundamentals for representing a variety of cinematic drama – a challenge Coëgnarts himself is dealing with in his excellent writing. Beyond its inevitable scholarly qualities, this video’s virtue is how simple it makes such (textually) difficult concepts understandable (in videography).

Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue by Stephen Broomer

Making me want to view the movie they’re studying is one of my (very personal) benchmarks for evaluating the quality of video essays. A 27-minute contemplatively thorough dissection of Joris Ivens’ 12-minute short film Regen [Rain] – that creates an ‘archetypal rainstorm’ out of an 8-month sampling of rainy images – is exactly such a videographic work.

An attentive response, in desktop video form, to the four desktop videos (by Johannes Binotto, Katie Bird, Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, and Ritika Kaushik – wish I could include all these videos in this best-of selection) that were part of the audiovisual section of the Spring edition of the Necsus journal. It does the work viewers normally do when watching and assessing video essays.

Koker in Fragments by Ardeshir Shirkhani and Arshia Shirkhani

A student project for my videographic criticism class, this little ‘screwmeneutic cinemagraph’ pauses the main action and keeps running the peripheral happenings and sound around it. Such tender intervention is not only a lovely tribute to Kiarostami but in fact a brilliant way of illustrating his characteristic “gentle humanism … that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life” (The Criterion Collection for Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy).

Associate professor Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam

Natalia Oreiro by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková

Part of the innovative Screen Stars Dictionary series published by Tecmerin, “Natalia Oreiro” by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková stands out in both topic and aesthetics. The essay breaks with the US -dominance in the study of (global) stardom by focusing on a Latin American star who becomes famous in Russia, Israel, and Central-European countries, thereby calling attention to a transnational movement that is not often addressed in star studies. The playful aesthetics of early 2000 digital culture highlights the importance of the internet in this transnational movement between “periphery” and “periphery.

Published in Feminist Media Histories, “Joséphine Baker Watches Herself” by Terri Francis shows the added value of videographic criticism to more conventional academic work. By connecting archival footage of early stage performances by Joséphine Baker to televised interviews with the iconic star in which she looks back and comments on her own star image, provides space for the Baker’s agency and voice within the narrative of her stardom in a way that could not be done so effectively (and affectively) in a written essay.

chaste/unchaste by Maryam Tafakory Published in [in]Transition, “chaste/unchaste” by Maryam Tafakory effectively challenges the binary that is spelled out in the title. Starting with a four-way split screen and a graphic that looks like a target finder from a rifle (or like a measuring rod), the audiovisual essay presents images of women from Iranian cinema, thereby highlighting how they are continuously scrutinised and policed, yet also how they challenge the omnipresent gaze. Using mirroring and repetition, combined by an uncanny soundtrack, the essay forces viewers (at least me) to question their preconceived notions and binary thinking. And what a surprise when the credits reveal that the footage comes from 32 films! As Maria Walsh concludes in her peer-review of the essay: “This is brave work.”

Postdoctoral researcher and video essayist , Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Just like in past years, I want to emphasise that I do not consider this a or my “best of” list but rather a list of video essays from different sub-genres and platforms that I found particularly interesting this year and with which I aim to hint at the breadth of video essay production.

An evocative and very layered meditation on poetry, drama, film and their (cross-)adaptations. A wonderful contribution to the Moving Poems project, which I’m running on Vimeo.

A dense, rich audiovisual analysis of the two Candyman films (1992 and 2021) that delves deeply into the films themselves but at least as much into questions of urban planning, architecture, and racial segregation in Chicago and beyond.

Extra Local: Extras as Actors in Breaking Away by Jacob Smith

A fascinating analysis of a commonly overlooked type of film labour and performance — extras — that starts and returns to a rich microanalysis and in the meantime provides a thorough historical and conceptual discussion of this form of acting. The video also includes one of the best “plot twists” I’ve seen in video essay work so far!

Why Do We Make Comedies about Existential Dread? by Afterthoughts

A highly entertaining and evocative video on contemporary absurdist, dark, “meme-y” comedy that asks questions like “Why are we so weird and sad right now?” and ponders on realisations like “When I’m alone with my thoughts, I’m alone with y’all’s thoughts.”

Another great piece from Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series – one that I referred to as an “anti video essay” when I first saw it.

Hello Dankness by Soda Jerk

An impressive assemblage of excerpts from all kinds of Hollywood films from the past ca. 40 years, sampled into a dark comedic take on the 2016 US elections and the Trump presidency.

How to Make Money from Video Essays: A Guide to Pitching by Will Webb

An unconventional pick since it’s not a video essay itself but a video about how to make (specifically pitch) video essays but one that I find useful to include here (perhaps as a bonus pick) because it provides insights into the ways in which video essayists produce and monetise their work outside the direct infrastructures of academic institutions.

Video essayist, critique and researcher in visual culture

Cycles of Labor: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, Jiří Anger

Using interfaces familiar to anyone who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, the authors reedit a film that recently won the votes of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of all Times poll: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. I really loved how they manage to produce a feminist and environmental analysis of the film using these layouts, subverting our video-essayistic habits (using cinema as a hermeneutic tool) by calling on videogame grammar to study film.

O fumo do fogo (Smoke of the Fire) by Daryna Mamaisur

Daryna Mamaisur is a Ukrainian artist and a refugee in Portugal. In her essay, she films closeups of her Portuguese handbooks, finding echoes of dispatches her friend sends her from their country – the dots and shapes of the three-colour printing of the old-fashioned books resemble the low-quality videos. I was fascinated by the way Mamaisur films her hands hovering over her desktop covered by childlike images, and how as soon as the editing flips them, the war and its trauma appears.

البحث عن السوري الإرهابي In Search of the Syrian Fanatic by Abou Naddara

The Syrian filmmaker collective Abou Naddara conducted this year a multimedia investigation about an image and a corpse, both hidden underneath layers of French colonial propaganda. The images come from one of the first silent fiction films, The Assassination of General Kléber (Georges Hatot, 1897), depicting the murder of the Napoleonic officer in 1800 by a Syrian student in Egypt. Abou Naddara discovered the remains of the presumed perpetrator, Soleyman El-Halebi, are kept by a French Museum, in its colonial collection and decided to take action: he wrote both a written and a videographic letter to French authorities, asking them to return the body as well as renounce the racist cliché, first printed in visual culture by the 1897 film, of the fanatic Syrian.

Alain Krivine, le trotskisme permanent (Alain Krivine, the Permanent Trotskism) by Usul and Ostpolitik

This video is part of a series created by the French videaste Usul and Ostpolitik, the “Portraits” telling the stories of central figures of French political history in a critical perspective (the series is published for the online channel Blast, continued by Ostpolitik and another youtuber, Modiie; meanwhile, Usul started another series, “Rhinoceros” about the rightisation of media). Together, they also produced “Ouvrez les guillemets” (“Open the Quotes”) (for the online journal Mediapart) about political news. I wanted to cite one of their works for several reasons. One of them is that I find it very interesting how a video essay can engage with social and political criticism through mediatic images – the way Serge Daney, for instance, used to do it in a textual way in Libération. I also wanted to pay a specific homage to Usul, who for the last ten years, is, in my opinion, the most stimulating political video essayist of the French YouTube landscape and draws me to the art of montage and media criticism with his latest series “Mes chers contemporains” (“Dear Contemporaries”).

I Would Like to Rage by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Finally and above all, I wanted to mention a piece by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, whose work in general is of crucial importance to me, and whose I Would Like to Rage, in particular, touched me enormously. As I had the chance to tell them, their work navigates brilliantly the tricky art of self-memeification to address gendered and intimate political issues, escaping every trap set by the internalised (patriarchal) injunctions of concealing the “I” and its revolts.

Assistant professor of Japanese cinema, The University of British Columbia

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, & Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

With this righteous and riotous very close look at Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991), Dayna McLeod continues to be one of the boldest and bravest new practitioners of the video essay. Constructed in three acts, the piece highlights the interplay between actions and reactions, both in the film and beyond to the discourse surrounding it. The end result, and in particular the resulting ending, is a thought-provoking dive into videographic criticism and film scholarship.

Every time I watch a piece by Maryam Tafakory, I am overwhelmed by contradictory emotions. “chaste/unchaste,” Tafakory’s contribution to the ‘Feminist Videographic Diptych’ special issue of [in]Transition, is no exception. The use of uncanny repetition and graphic matches is both mesmerising and agitating, familiarising and defamiliarising, grounding and destabilising. And as always, I’m stunned by the quantity of films Tafakory uses to create the illusion of effortless coherent cohesion.

A Tactile Art by Cormac Donnelly

It’s worthwhile to access Cormac Donnelly’s “second iteration of the Super Volume project” on his Deformative Sound Lab website to read about the process of making a video that is very much about process and processing. While Donnelly considers the piece a representation of a tactile art, what haunts me about the video is the juxtaposition of the ephemerality in the piece—both of the transparent layering of the participants’ hands as well as the audio track itself—with the technology at the intersection of the two: the artefact of interaction. I find this work unsettling in the very best of ways.

Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, and Jiří Anger

With each collaborative work, I find the dynamic duo of Veronica Hanáková and Jiří Anger increasingly enchanting. I can’t help it; I like their style. I was torn between this video and their entry in Ariel Avissar’s new Screen Stars Dictionary project which has some similar formal conceits, but the tongue-in-cheek nature of reframing Jeanne Dielmann’s daily routine as a “The Sim’s”-esque video game was the deciding factor. All too often, scholarly videographic criticism can feel heavy and bleak, particularly with trends in exploring thematised trauma. Here, along with Martin Tremčinský, Hanáková and Anger make a case for serious fun.

Crochet Is Sick by Alison Peirse

A companion piece to last year’s award-winning and frequent festival feature “Knit One, Stab Two,” here Alison Peirse shifts a feminist lens from the needle to the hook, and from the voice-over to the visualised voice, in this work on the role of crochet in horror. Peirse is developing a distinct videographic style and “Crochet” is a prime example of this aesthetic that takes the video essay (and what we think we know about horror) delightfully and impishly up a notch (or three). Note the original soundtrack created especially for the work.

Currently only available on the festival circuit, Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s most recent work is a deeply personal performance of catharsis years in the making. It is also, thankfully, very funny. The video is an inspiring whirlwind through multiple media objects and platforms, a flurry of failed and forced expressions of rage, that sticks its landing and compels us, once again, to rethink what we know about the potentials of the video essay. Details about forthcoming availability are likely to be found on their website in the future.

Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone by Occitane Lacurie

I had the pleasure of seeing this video as a work in progress piece at the ‘In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay’ conference held at the Lucerne School of Art and Design at the beginning of November of this year. Even in an unfinished form, it was still one of my favourite videos I encountered this year, as well as one of the most timely. A desktop video in cell phone portrait mode, and perhaps even edited on one, Lacurie’s remarkable production brings together the personal and the political through the act of “doom scrolling” that involves, among other things, an episode of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” the iPhone menstruation application, text messages, online message boards, demonic imaginations of cell phone home screens, website searches, and an online tarot reading. Forthcoming and not soon enough.

Video essayist , filmmaker , professor

More than ever, the video essays that left their imprint on me were ones which staked a position not only within film and media objects, but in the world at large.

Dreams Have No Titles by Zineb Sedira

When I first saw this at the 2022 Venice Biennale, I didn’t recognise it as videographic, using physically reconstructed movie scenes for what might be called “spatial remix”. Seeing it again this year at the Hamburger Bahnhof, I could appreciate how much care it takes in reconstructing sites of Algerian cinema: not only sets from films set in Algeria, but also spaces where Algerian cinema is screened, preserved and contemplated. The video essay as artistic theme park, in the best sense possible, film history playfully resurrected. (See also: Goddess of Speed , Frederic Moffet)

Pictures of Ghosts by Kleber Mendonça Filho

A deeply personal psychogeographic exploration of film as home, even in the face of a looming societal ruin. Even while keeping within the format of a feature film, it is as expansive as Sedira’s installation, bravely projecting itself into a post-cinematic, post-human finale. (See also: Mast-Del , Maryam Tafakory)

Introduction to “With a Camera in Hand I Was Alive” by Katie Bird

As excellent as — and somehow longer than — the video essay it introduces, it is also a radical new proposition for videographic scholarship. Creator statements are usually written, but instead we have an experimental selfie-video layered with reflections — academic, political, personal — on women’s labour in cinema. (See also: Jill, Uncredited , Anthony Ng)

A scholarly video essay that pursues its research object so thoroughly that it becomes its mirror reflection, art and life entwined in an inextricable dialogue. (See also: Laterally , Maria Hofmann)

An inspired series of interrogations of the Italian accent in Hollywood movies as a contested site of cultural identification. This video asks who cinema really speaks for, and in doing so speaks its own truth back into cinema. (See also: Dressed to Kill Cis Hetero Patriarchy , Nicole Morse)

Feeling Cynical About Barbie by Broey Deschanel

This vlog-style essay brilliantly links two phenomena from the summer — Barbie and the Hollywood strikes — to critique media capitalism’s insidious strategies for possessing and exploiting the cultural imaginary. (See also: A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek)

Games That Don’t Fake the Space by Jacob Geller

Among the video essays occupied with audiovisual form, I especially admire Geller’s vast research and deft navigation through the surprising spatial environments found in video games. (See also: Sensuous and Affective by Oswald Iten)

Film critic

In this list, I have tried to avoid simply listing my friends, and instead tried to cover a little of the diversity of audiovisual essay venues existing today.

Performance: Divine Horror by Kryštof Kočtář and Matouš Vad’ura

Puts the destruct in deconstruction.

The Mechanics of Fluids by Gala Hernández López

A deep dive into online incel culture.

@Concert: Liveness in the Time of Coronavirus by Landon Palmer

An inspired assemblage of awkward moments in a live-but-not-living world.

Searching for Incognita by Johanna Vaude

Another stunning work by this master of the form: the motif of ‘adventuring’ in film, deftly gathered and revealed.

Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight

An extended, thoughtful reflection on ‘metamodernism’ in recent popular cinema.

The Address from Beyond the Grave by Roz Mortimer

Mortimer illuminatingly relates her own filmmaking work to that of other women, films in which ‘spectrality’ is hauntingly tied to historic, socio-political traumas.

Undercurrents: Meditations on Power by Margot Nash

Nash, among Australia’s greatest artists, would probably prefer this to be known as a film, but it has a special relation to the audiovisual essay: a montage from her previous works, it forms a powerful, urgent poem for our times.

Video essayist, filmmaker

Sleeping Sickness: The Downtrodden in Pedro Costa’s Cinema by Alexander Melyan

A beautifully crafted video. It got me lost in the images of Costa’s films all over again.

Great concept, better execution. A very satisfying watch and listen.

Takes me back to my days in foley classes. Brought a smile to my face watching and the odd grimace.

Queer performance-based media artist

What an incredible video essay! This enthralling and meticulously edited piece uses a binary of chaste vs. unchaste to collapse in on itself as a gendered structure of representation in Iranian cinema. Tafakory uses repetition and juxtaposition to emphasise this undoing and mirrors clips of women in grids of four where they are (now) engaged with each other onscreen. She overlays certain clips, which seep into and onto each other as a form of touching, as if to queer the materiality of these clips as well as the newly formed relationships she has created through her editing.

A masterful and hypnotic piece that is seemingly edited on a smartphone that simultaneously demonstrates the source materials and inspiration for the work, while showing the methods and thinking of its construction. Lacurie takes us on an expansive menstruation journey that is personal and political—navigating apps, memes, video clips, and a tarot card reading through the analysis of a fatal penetrative wound on Xena Warrior Princess’s body. A mesmerising video essay from, In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay, Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland. See Lacurie’s other work: https://vimeo.com/lacurieo

A video essay with an ending you can dance to, I Would Like to Rage is smart, tender, and funny. Galibert-Laîné’s thorough and thoughtful practice is fully on display as they take us through various machinations of online and mediatised rage, its performativity, expression, and ownership, and how they experience or rather, attempt to experience rage authentically. A triumph of intelligent vulnerability expressed through an assemblage of self-reflection, video clips, memes, gifs, and Leslie Knope homages, this endearing delight of a video essay is surely coming to a film festival near you.

An impeccable experimental video essay that exaggerates and emphasises the uncanny through foley and feminist intervention. Fife Donaldson aptly mixes and amplifies the sharp edges of ASMR sound artist Julie Rose Bower’s work by replacing the soundtrack for the knife scene in Kiss Me Deadly. Switchblades pop and fist punches snap and crack onscreen through Fife Donaldson’s use of this unique collection of sound, and her use of visual repetition and slow motion. I am particularly drawn to how she lingers on sound during a slow motion shot of the would-be attacker’s descent to the ground as he slides down a wall after the attempted knife fight.

A gong repeatedly sounds as ‘The End’ title text from a variety of films are shown onscreen in several languages. We hear a tapping—a soft clicking that is perhaps his keyboard, our viewership guided by his hand. The way that Binotto has arranged these endings and silenced their corresponding soundtracks are filled with loss as they each mark an ending to a specific film as well as the end of his incredible Practices of Viewing series . Binotto cites Roland Barthes while seemingly articulating his own work ethic: “writing as absolute brings with it a particular existential movement: the drive to finish the work in order to start again”. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Using Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems prompt that asks makers to pair a poem with a media object, moving poems: a raisin in the sun (1961) is a poignant and poetic work that capitalises on affecting performances from the 1961 film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. De Jesús engages Langston Hughes’s short poem Harlem in onscreen text while expertly and artfully using opacity, repetition, movement, dialogue, and match cuts to sound in this stunning and layered poetic video essay.

Jeanne Dielman: On / Off by Dan Noall

A sublime supercut of every time the title character of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns on and off the lights. Noall jumpcuts us through each of the rooms of this film and the quiet bland domesticity of house and sex work with this simple task. Only fans of this iconic film will recognise the importance of Noall’s final shot where Jeanne turns off the light of the kitchen while firmly grasping her silver scissors and shutting the door behind her with a thud.

Video essayist (as kikikrazed ) and community manager for The Essay Library

Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition) by Kirby Ferguson

Kirby Ferguson has revisited this project multiple times since it debuted in 2010, remixing his own work to create new iterations. The 2023 edition, described as “the definitive Everything is a Remix experience” by Ferguson, includes a new part about AI art, also released individually in 2023. Unfortunately, the video currently sits at under 100,000 views on YouTube due to unjust copyright claims that contradict fair use and the remix philosophy.

The PS1 Start-up Tells a Story by Dennis Gallagher

Gallagher’s 40-second essay (really only 30 seconds if you forget the credits) is a perfect example of a video essay with zero fluff. He narrates alongside the PlayStation startup sequence, guiding us through it with a sense of awe. The fantastic digital portal metaphor doesn’t overstay its welcome in this bite-sized treat.

Four-Byte Burger by Stuart Brown (Ahoy)

Brown documents his faithful recreation of his favourite piece of Amiga art, Jack Haeger’s Four-Byte Burger. In the process, he reveals how technological constraints can foster creativity. His passion and personal investment in the original artwork is clear throughout this journey.

The Chaos Behind The Wizard of Oz (and why it turned out ok anyway) by Isabel Custodio (Be Kind Rewind)

Custodio explores the production of The Wizard of Oz through each of its four directors, balancing substantial research with personal evaluations of their filmographies. In my own video essay work, Be Kind Rewind is one of my biggest inspirations. Every video amazes me with the sheer knowledge and passion for film on display. This essay is no different as it juggles the interconnected careers of actors, producers, and directors within the studio system at the time.

Some video essays that rely on literature to examine a film can become too text-heavy, but this essay never feels like that. DeLisio’s careful narration and textured sound design allows him to speak with the film instead of over it. This intelligent, well-edited video cements James DeLisio’s status as one of the most exciting emerging video essayists.

Film teacher and researcher at Escola das Artes in Católica University (O Porto); film programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; film critic at À pala de Walsh website.

Exotic Words Drifted by Sandro Aguilar

At the edge of the word lies silence, hesitation. On the other side of colour, there are bright colours, gray, black and white. This is a film that sits on the other side of the mirror and takes us through the tense and enigmatic reverse side of classic cinema. In Aguilar’s audiovisual essay, everything floats, expectantly, waiting to happen, inaugurating a new order, like a tense relationship between day and night, between the negative and the positive of a film stock.

Audiovisual essays are tools to unlock the imaginary and highlight possible paths and barriers. Misek’s work invites us to understand the struggles to show and hide images in contemporary digital agoras, where public versus private ownership is at stake in order to disseminate controlled versions of history.

Réseau des sens by Mirjam Leutwiler

For each contact, each touch there is a split “I”, a network of sensation. Mirjam Leutwiler’s short audiovisual essay is not only interpreting Michel Serre’s text “The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies”, but also telling us how that network about touching and feeling is underway in the cinematic phenomenology.

Kinoapparatum Remade. A Videographic Montage Experiment. by Johannes Binotto, Maurice Dietziker, Linus Bolliger, Arseni Gavrilov, Kilian Frei, Andrina Moos, Cécile Brossard, Sven Friedli, Mirjam Leutwiler, Jana Schlegel, Melina Hofer, Anja Hubmann, Fynn Groeber, Nora Gruetter.

Kinoapparatum Remade is not only an homage to Vertov, Kaufman and Svilova’s seminal film Man with a Movie Camera. And also not only a reflection on Manovich’s ideas on the film regarding new media. It is all of this but it is also a collective collaborative effort in which we can see that recreation it also followed by actualisation, complementation and creative choices based on movement and form. And these particular choices of the “collective with the moving images” tells us that it is not only a question of past versus incoming future when we look at 1929’s masterpiece.

Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today Will Digravio

Digravio’s original audiovisual essay may work against the idea of perfection and neatness as a possible disguised style. But it is also an exposition of the work involved in the audiovisual essay. In this sense, it enters a loop, a mise-en-abîme where a “meta worker” develops a similar “meta mirror” to better highlight the nature of what is involved when reworking the images and sounds of a film. 

Media and cultural studies graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

The Future Is a Dead Mall — Decentraland and the Metaverse by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

Another long-form triumph from the creator of Line Goes Up – The Problem with NTF s and In Search of a Flat Earth .

Searching for Humanity in Fortnite’s Battle Royale by Jonathan McIntosh (Pop Culture Detective)

A fusion between a “Let’s Play” and a conventional YouTube video essay, this moving autoethnography finds optimism and community in one of the most unlikely online gaming spaces.

Alexandre’s cleverly profound work on gender, sexuality, art, and digital culture never disappoints. Everything Is Sludge, which interrogates the rise of split-screen “sludge content” on TikTok, is yet another home run, and takes particular advantage of the traditional YouTube format. 

Associate professor of film and media in digital contexts at Aarhus University, Denmark; visiting researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, UK ; author of Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism, NECSUS  2021.

There has been so much exciting work to learn from in 2023 that I found it near-impossible to make this selection, even limiting myself (as I have) to ‘scholarly’ video essays. Let me name some makers in addition to the many mentioned below that have impacted my understanding of the practice this year: Ariane Hudelet, Cormac Donnelly, Dayna McLeod, Irina Trocan, Jemma Saunders, John Gibbs, Kevin Ferguson, Liz Greene, Maria Hofmann, Maud Ceuterick, Oswald Iten, Richard Misek, Susan Harewood… My point with this list, which could have been indefinitely extended, is that investigating the possibilities of the video essay is a collective endeavour. Brian Eno has a notion of collective ‘scenius’ (as opposed to individual ‘genius’) which refers to “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene”: it’s this boisterous collective intelligence that I think we’re witnessing with the explosion of the video essay. Can it last? I do worry that the period of expansion, exploration and experimentation will exhaust itself, and that a single preferred mode of audiovisual rhetoric will be asserted or be insisted upon by the journals. I’m relieved this hasn’t happened yet, not in 2023 at any rate. And so my selection (which could easily have been several further sets of seven videos) is intended to indicate some of the striking variety, as well as the quality, of the work being done. Memories of It by Kathleen Loock ‘Memories of It’ mixes film, trailer and documentary footage with personal reflection and interview in order to tease out Kathleen Loock’s traumatic memory of watching (and fast-forwarding) the 1990 adaptation of It on VHS as a child. She links this memory with the condition of the Wendekinder, children like her of the former GDR forced to cope with a new world after German reunification. Does Kathleen over-sociologise her act of retrospectatorship by invoking shared generational experience? Is the video an attempt to contain as well as explain the threat of traumatic eruption? I’ll just have to watch ‘it’ again… Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime by Drew Morton

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is my favourite novel and one joy of my 2023 was encountering Peter Coviello’s Vineland Reread, a book that mixes literary criticism, cultural theory and autobiography to evoke the presence of Vineland in Coviello’s life and teaching. Drew Morton’s account of re-viewing and teaching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at intervals since that film’s release is a similarly rich and joyful intellectual experience – Drew even shares some hard-earned lessons in love. (I recommend comparing the earlier version of the video linked in the creator statement, to see how an adept maker engages with challenging peer review.)

Desktop Documentary by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto’s literally/ironically titled ‘Desktop Documentary’ is expressly a “call to clutter”. As such, it makes me terribly anxious. But this is a brilliantly conceived and engagingly performed piece of explicatory and programmatic rhetoric that draws on YouTube how-to videos even as it nods to the opening of Cléo de 5 à 7. I am happy to grant Binotto’s fiction that his desk has not been curated because I am persuaded by his account of the desktop as recalcitrant technology. And I am especially seduced by his call for productive accident and a-rational research methods that look back to surrealism.

True Enough by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

True Enough might seem a jeu d’esprit compared to Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s longer video essays. But even as it draws on the functional aesthetic of the karaoke video, this adaptation of a text by Will Webb, made for Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer’s Once upon A Screen project, is a work of great refinement. Galibert-Laîné creates a “fictional offscreen space” with beautifully composed filmed footage enlivened by dancing light from an unseen television. The cheerful font and sung accompaniment extend the possibilities of onscreen text and voiceover. As an added bonus (or intrinsic moment), it contains the best Simpsons allusion ever.

This has been a vintage year for multiscreen. Like the videos by Mittell and Arlander discussed below, Colleen Laird’s Eye-Camera-Ninagawa and Adam Cook’s A Cinema of Bodily Sense deploy multiscreen in powerful but contrasting ways. Maryam Tafakory uses it differently again in ‘chaste/unchaste’. The video is a supercut of female faces (plus one big cat and a gas hob) made from thirty-two Iranian films. It stages its imagining of queer desire as a progression from multiscreen to single screen to superimposition. ‘chaste/unchaste’ is a condensed masterclass in how argument can be made in formal terms without the aid of voiceover.

169 Seconds: Trimming Time in Breaking Bad by Jason Mittell

To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Danish film journal 16:9 has been publishing 169-second video essays in a series that features makers like Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, Jaap Kooijman, Catherine Grant, and Barbara Zecchi, with two impressive videos by my Aarhus colleague Mathias Bonde Korsgaard. My favourite is Jason Mittell’s cheeky afterthought to his videographic project on Breaking Bad (it traces Walter White’s story arc through his hairstyles). I like how the application of strict but ludic formal parameters, which Mittell derives from the journal name and video duration, generate a cryptic visual tapestry of the entire series.

Revisiting the Aspen Tree by Annette Arlander

Between 2002 and 2014, artist Annette Arlander recorded weekly visits to locations on Harakka Island near Helsinki in a series of videos. In Revisiting the Aspen Tree, she returns to one such site and embeds those videos in the video document of the more recent visit. Differently from Mittell’s Trimming Time, Arlander uses parameters to dictate a practice that is physical, repetitive and durational. But it reminds me of Will DiGravio’s Rio Bravo project, and like DiGravio’s four-hour Against Polish, it suggests the value of an ‘ambient’ scholarship, in which iterative academic labour is presented in something like real time.

Host and producer at Wisecrack

My selections focus on creators who are pushing the critical boundaries of the video essay format. In particular, these are creators who both utilise critical theory, social theory, and philosophy while also producing videos that are entertaining and accessible. They also make the types of videos that leave you feeling like more questions have been opened than answered. Which, especially on YouTube, is an increasingly rare thing.

Griftonomics: Why Scams Are Everywhere Now by Tom Nicholas

This video might be Nicholas’s magnum opus, and it feels more like a digital documentary than it does a traditional video essay with a runtime of almost two hours. But he earns every minute of the video by not only exploring the growing phenomenon of digital grifters, but by showing how the logic of grifters exists in an ongoing dialectical relationship with the larger economic structures in our world. In this way he arrives at the logical core of the modern digital grifter, and shows how this same logic is at the heart of much of modern culture. He balances this out by also exploring the psychological factors that have made grifter scams and content so popular. Nicholas also deserves credit for working a level of theatricality into this video (and all of his videos) that’s visually engaging without being distracting. In a world of sad ex-grad students making videos about capitalism ruining our world, Nicholas is the relatable and entertaining lad that takes you just as deep without any performative nihilism.

What Red Pill Philosophy Gets Wrong by Then &  Now

2023 was a banner year for content made by reactionary young men utilising various philosophical and political ideas to justify a sense of growing alienation. While it’s easy to dismiss this contingent of creators completely, the harder task is to engage with these trends, openly interrogating their ideological core. And this video does an exemplary job at this task, taking red pill philosophy to task, and in the process, exposing how it offers a shallow simulacrum of actual philosophical responses to complex social problems. The video acknowledges the alienating cultural conditions that produce the “manosphere” while exposing the illogical core at the heart of these ideas. In doing so, Then & Now has created a video that pushes the viewer to not simply dismiss the modern reactionary, but to understand the logic of this movement, and see how this manner of thinking is more common than we might realise. Ultimately, it’s a video that skillfully uses seemingly esoteric and academic ideas to re-frame the contemporary crisis of masculinity while showing us all why we should care.

the parasite class is killing us. by Alice Capelle In this video, Alice Capelle uses the logic of vampire capitalism to show how the modern digital economy increasingly depends on acts of parasitism. She shows how the type of parasitic class relationships exemplified in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is replicated in digital spaces, and in particular, among self-styled business gurus using YouTube videos as a way to repeat the logic of class exploitation in the guise of self-help and business advice. Like most of Capelle’s work, this video utilises her ability to synthesise a French brand of critical social theory with an English-language based digital cultural space. This video feels like a sort of ethnography of the contemporary digital parasite, one that both exposes the exploitative core of their content, while hopefully encouraging us to undermine this logic however we can.

Assistant professor, Leiden University, and film programmer

Ross’s recommendations were submitted without comment.

El juicio by Ulises de la Orden Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image by Adam Piron

Silence of Reason by Kumjana Novakova

Mast-del by Maryam Tafakory

Limitation by Elene Asatiani, Soso Dumbadze

An Asian Ghost Story by Bo Wang

Still Film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Film critic and curator of The Moving Image from Lima, Perú

This year has been particularly scarce in terms of what I’ve seen or experienced in cinema due to various reasons. But here is a small selection of works I deem worthy to be mentioned, all from the fantastic [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.

A magnificent view on the dual nature of the portrayal of women in Iranian cinema.

Through the spirit of Chris Marker, this playful video essay runs the gamut of exploration via the Geo Guesser application and Marker’s cinema.

“Visual capitalism.”

Audio-Visual PhD student at University of Birmingham

Double Takes: A Series of Short Video Essays by Sarah Atkinson

Elegantly simple in their conception and execution; and cumulatively damning.

Insincere Inclusion? Ignorant Appropriation? A Symphony Orchestra Plays South Indian Film Music by Sureshkumar P. Sekar

I listened and I learned. A truly audio-visual piece.

Why Does Gotham Look like That? by Will Webb

An extensively researched and engaging exploration of this fictional city’s screen history.

A fascinating, haptic, personal inquiry that I couldn’t stop thinking about afterwards.

Indy Vinyl for the Masses: Lollipop by Ariel Avissar (curator) Matt Payne, Mingyue Yuan and Charlotte Scurlock

Pure fun and a wonderfully cohesive melding of song, theme (walking) and chosen keyword (kids). Hats off to Ian Garwood too for conceiving this project!

Freelance critic

I was flabbergasted last year when I somehow missed Mark Brown’s Platformer Toolkit , which I’m noting here because I think it absolutely represents a vital step forward for this art. I hope to see more work in interactive essays in the future.

Plenty of essays are about specific issues. This one manages to also embody its own ethos by acting as a conduit to get good-quality public domain imagery into the actual public.

A great rumination on acceptable expressions of anger, mediated through the desktop form in the same way that our emotions are mediated through technology.

The History of the Minnesota Vikings by Jon Bois et al

I think at this point Jon Bois just has a permanent spot in my ballot each year. He continues to innovate and refine his form. No one is making documentaries like this.

Pictures of Ghosts by Kleber Mendonça Filho et al

A beautiful meditation on memory as channeled through both personal and public archives, and the relationship between cinema spaces and their communities.

Brilliant in its simplicity, a Rorschach test that reveals the underlying absurdity of its own premise, and in turn the entire premise of censorious morality.

Nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity; reader in media and performance at University of Huddersfield; founding editor of Journal of Embodied Research.

I am a performance theorist and practitioner who has been working for several years to educate myself in the ways of videographic thought. My selection is eclectic and formally diverse, mostly coming from outside film and media studies.

Peribiophoty by Tom Murray, Karen Pearlman, Stephanie Russo, Hsu-Ming Teo, Rowan Tulloch, Rachel Yuen-Collingridge, Malcolm Choat

This item is from the journal I edit. I chose it from our 2023 video articles because of how it uses a formally simple concept to stage a deep dive into a range of scholarly projects. This is a co-authored video article sharing the research of five academics, who not only speak to the camera about their work but also interact physically with various objects on a sparse kind of set. It is elegantly produced and designed to examine “the personal and intellectual contexts (peri) surrounding academics and their biographies (bio) through audio-visual representation (photy).”

The World like a Jewel in the Hand by Ariella Azoulay

This film is technically from 2022 (I don’t know which month), but since this is my first Sight and Sound poll, I have decided to include it. As far as I can tell, it has primarily been screened in 2023. In the film, scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay explores the complex history of colonialism between Algeria and Israel, with an emphasis on the gradual erasure of the important figure of the Arab Jew. Azoulay manages to put this history in the broader context of European colonialism in Africa and to interrogate the ongoing practices of colonial museums, all through the simple action of touching and talking about a wide array of books, photographs, mezuzot, and other objects on her desk. When I first saw this film, I immediately felt that it brings an extraordinary depth and power to the concept of the “desktop documentary.”

Familiar Phantoms by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind

I have to confess that I have not seen this film, only the trailer. I recently got a chance to see In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and In Vitro (2019) by the same creators. One of the challenges in selecting the “best” video essays from a given year is that so much videographic thought still takes place within the economy of fine arts and is therefore not made available online because it would thereby lose its aura. Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian video artist and filmmaker whose work is powerfully situated and discussed in Gil Z. Hochberg’s book, Becoming Palestine. I am including Familiar Phantoms on my list of selections as the 2023 video work I most wish to see.

A Short Film About Stealing (in Norway) by Pouria Kazemi

I have been able to find very little about Pouria Kazemi online and nothing about this film, which I had the chance to watch when it was submitted to a video festival I co-curated. This short animated video essay is a perfectly composed, brilliantly understated autobiographical statement about the necessity of petty theft under late capitalism. Among the more delightful and poignant touches is that the author’s friends, to protect their anonymity, are given as pseudonyms the names of the Norwegian royal family.

Hold On, This Matilda Musical Snapping 💀💀 by @wonder_kidd

Hold On, This Matilda Musical Snapping was a TikTok / Instagram trend in which a scene of dynamic choreography from the movie version of the musical Matilda is overlaid by various alternative musical tracks. While putting forward a 25-second social media remix as one of the best video essays of the year is certainly pushing the limits of the form, all the key elements are there: a creative and incisive juxtaposition of a video track with a distinct audio track is contextualised by the critical commentary of a textual annotation. The version I have chosen to link uses @wonder_kidd’s remix of Beyonce’s ‘Cuff It’, a choice that (as many of the Instagram commenters noted) effectively brings out the black cultural roots of Ellen Kane’s choreography, in sharp relief against the massively predominant whiteness of the British schoolchildren who perform it. In just a few seconds, this remix gives us both a snapping new version of Matilda and a cultural critique of how black dance knowledges circulate in predominantly white cultural fields.

Video essayist at StrucciMovies , actual play host on Oddity Roadshow

Colleen Ballinger and Commentary Culture by Ro Ramdin

Ro Ramdin’s work is incredible. Always sharply written, insightful, very funny, beautifully shot, and deeply thoughtful under the meticulous aesthetic and entertaining editing style. She’s one of those essayists I am more than happy to watch even if I have zero interest in the subject matter. I chose this video of hers in particular because I found her reflection on her place in the commentary channel ecosystem navigating the “algorithmic nightmare” of YouTube (as she puts it) especially compelling.

Does Fresh Garlic Actually Taste Better than Garlic in a Jar? by Ethan Chlebowski

Ethan Chlebowski has made several videos posing the question of whether more expensive versions of the same ingredient are worth it and why, including on balsamic vinegar, olive oil, parmigiano reggiano, vanilla, and, here, garlic. Each video is a deep dive on the cultural history of how the food is used and why, the basics of the culinary science behind it, and Chlebowski doing several taste tests and then giving recommendations at varying price points. While some of his conclusions are down to personal preference, his videos are nevertheless fascinating and done without judgement or pretension. I’d consider them a must-watch for new home cooks or those looking for a great example of engaging educational content that doesn’t condescend.

Wayfinding Flight Rising Dailies & Accessibility by PSJ ulie

I started a Neopets account in elementary school, over twenty years ago. My interest in Neopets or other pet sim sites has long since waned but I’m still fascinated by the work of Pet Simmer Julie, who crafts in-depth videos on virtual pet games. Her depth of knowledge and passion for these games and communities is immediately evident with any of her videos. This video, for example, helped me understand my own problems navigating real-world attractions that had poor wayfinding, and I’ve thought back to it many times after watching.

Filmmaker , author, video essayist, critic

A perfect capper to Johannes’ indispensable series

It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point by Daniel Kremer

Daniel finally makes his epic, a great odyssey about why we get lost in movies.

Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today by Will DiGravio

With the insouciance of late Godard or Leos Carax’s New Order music video, Will disassembles our need to assemble.

Ozu Without Ozu by Green and Red

Deliciously busy exploration of auteurism.

Once upon a Screen: The 39 Shots by Ariel Avissar

A recontextualisation of what’s in plain sight.

Random Acts of Flyness Season 2 by Terence Nance

Terence and co’s vibrant and deeply necessary attack on commerce and media’s hideous parasitic relationship is an inspiration to all creators. One of the best to ever do it.

Independent scholar, video essayist

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

I remember where I was, shaking my head, beaming, and stifling a gasp, when I realised that Practices of Viewing is our generation’s Ways of Seeing or Histoire(s) du Cinema. A project of this scope, originality, insight and depth of audiovisual thinking may never happen again.

Jill, Uncredited by Anthony Ing

The log line says it’s a subtle, masterful tribute to the nearly-invisible labour of a background actress you’ve never heard of. But really, it’s a ground-up retraining of your whole visual cortex. Squint between the film grains, and you might even find a remake of Rose Hobart that outdoes Cornell.

Non-Euclidean Therapy for AI Trauma [Analog Archives] #SoME3 by neoknowstic

I’ve been meaning to include a mathematics video essay for years, and this one’s a revelation. A horror film starring an AI image generator lost in its own vector space, trying to remember enough matrix algebra to escape from the ‘dream’ of a grotesque face that it can’t stop making.

William Shakespeare’s Course of True Love by Lara Callaghan

Full disclosure: I was a participant in the group project that this essay belongs to, but I had nothing to do with this inspired entry. Unfortunately. I’m so jealous that I never realised that a video essay could parody other genres – in this case, the infomercial – to enclose its insights into an envelope of fleet-footed wit that belies their depth.

Elaine Scarry says pain can’t be expressed in words, but this essay claims that Phil Tippett’s film Mad God offers a counter-argument: maybe using a different system of signification CAN express pain. Magnificently, this essay doesn’t assume that scholars have more authority than artists, and opts instead to orchestrate a coequal conversation between two of them.

Indians from 1967: A Reaction by Ritika Kaushik

A time-capsule doc from 1967 resurfaces recut online and inspires a bevy of reaction videos. Why’d that happen? If we can’t explain why, maybe we can at least reproduce the effect, but with all the tools out in the open. And that’s what this essay does. After a forensics of the recut itself and a cataloguing of the reactions, a little zoom and slow motion unexpectedly imbue me with the same fascination with wonder and impermanence for contemporary online culture.

The AI Revolution Is Rotten to the Core by Jimmy McGee

This is ground zero of visual culture now, and most of us are either too tired to catch up or hoping it’ll just go away. If you don’t know where to turn, turn here. It’s rigorously researched, historically grounded, theoretically canny, sardonically wise, and as quotable as Casablanca. “We need to choose between building a world for money to live in or building a world for people to live in.”

Freelance film critic , film studies lecturer at UNATC  Bucharest

In retrospect, I seem to have compiled a mostly glum list, if not directly referring to contemporary events, at least haunted by them:

Scenes of Extraction by Sanaz Sohrabi

This installation work surveys the history of Iran over several decades, focusing on oil extraction by the foreign company soon to be known as British Petroleum, through a technique called reflection seismography. The challenge, of course, as postcolonial scholarship taught us, is to look beyond the audiovisual self-representation of the company – and the artist accomplishes this extraordinarily well. A voiceover accompanies a collage/montage documenting industrial processes, while the collage in itself operates on the images – which sometimes look like spectral cutouts – workers disconnected from the background, initially black, that slowly takes shape behind them), while at other times these images show their age (for instance, when 1930s maps are juxtaposed with recent CGI ).

Between Revolutions by Vlad Petri

Films about revolutions often – and quite paradoxically – treat the event like a solidly contained point on the historical axis, with a beginning and an end, missing exactly their transformative potential and their collective character. One way to avoid this is to resort to the not-entirely-manipulable archives from the depicted era (and not just in short clips to lend the veneer of truth to fictional reenactments), and Between Revolutions is a pretty convincing demonstration of this strategy. Maria and Zahra are fictional med students from Romania and Iran, trying to figure out life amid social turmoil – but the footage, poems and songs that illustrate their journey existed in the world long before the making of this film, and even when made with obvious artistic or educational intent (not to mention elaborate choreography!), these reworked materials contain some trace or emotional truth of their times.

This Is the End by Vincent Dieutre

By the most expansive definition a “videographic” work, Dieutre’s Los Angeles pandemic film has, I would argue, a family resemblance with Thom Andersen’s survey of polysemic Californian cityscapes. Love, longing and poetry readings (with actors’/directors’ cameos!) interrupt the grim silence of lockdown.

She Asked Me Where I Was From by Aulona Fetahaj

I reviewed this short film for Kortfilm.be.

Incident by Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison is known to be interested in film only when it is analogue and beautifully degraded, and in this respect the CCTV /bodycam-sourced Incident is a long distance from Buried News . The killing of Harith Augustus by the Chicago police was previously examined by Forensic Architecture to persuasively oppose the authorities’ version of the event, but Morrison and Jamie Kalven at the Invisible Institute set out to do something else. The 30-minute film, often showing in split-screen multiple angles and parallel events, only tracks a short span of time, although 1) it seems dispiritingly endless and 2) it already anticipates the community’s reaction to seeing yet another African American killed, while the policemen, in an onlooker’s phrasing, “get their story straight”. Augustus’s lifeless body is present in the frame for a long stretch of the runtime, contrary to the CPD ’s attempt to erase the “accident” from memory, while the eloquent rage of everyone in the community seems tragically rehearsed in similar prior events. The victim’s neighbours don’t get to express solidarity, but the colleagues of the policemen who fired the gun can, and do, help erase criminal guilt.

Makeover Movie by Sue Ding

You’d think this is the second-oldest topic in the feminist book (immediately after suffrage), but makeovers seem here to stay. Just look at what the too-radical teen in Barbie has to go through, or scroll down any social media app on a new account. Luckily, well-informed critiques, spanning many decades of US films, and listing all the problematic tropes implicit in the “makeover” are also competing for our attention. I can only hope that more young spectators see “The Makeover Movie”, where Sue Ding conjures a multiracial telephone slumber party with her girlfriends to understand how these films taught them “not only how to be a woman, but also how to be American”. Teen classics provide most material, but a handful of musicals plus Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale and Vertigo also fit the bill.

Screen Stars Dictionary. Natalia Oreiro by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková

I grew up with Natalia Oreiro in her many disguises on my TV screen only to realise that nobody referred to her in the many pop surveys of Film and Media Studies. Therefore, I owe Veronika and Jiří many thanks and a loud high-five for allowing me to mention her again as a media scholar in my 30s. Autobiography aside, this playful video is a throwback to 2000s TV series, music clips and shows, computer interfaces, and a persuasive argument about how the model-periphery theory of dissemination is a far from rigorous model.

Film programmer and researcher

Where Is Little Trixie? by Carlos Baixauli

A very moving work that packs a lot of wonder and attentive detail in under four minutes, building a bridge between the works of two women filmmakers more than a century apart.

Who Speaks? Possessing Lyotard by Oscar Mealia

It points the way to new possible intersections between philosophy, film research, and video essay formats.

Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?’ George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Packs surprise and captivating visuals into a video essay able to pleasurably unpack original academic and archival research.

Film critic ( À pala de Walsh ) and film programmer (Cinemateca Portuguesa, IndieLisboaIFF)

The latest film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins is an intriguing and exhausting audio play voiced by the director, who plays the four main characters in a court inquiry about film memories, film still photographers, Kodak as a pharmaceutical enterprise, the negative aura of Tom Hanks, boom operators, and the elusiveness of Hollywood as a cultural agent. All of this is put together with a seemingly random selection of film stills. As usual, in Kienitz Wilkins’ work, discourse is moving and images are ecstatic.

Le film que vous allez voir by Maxime Martinot

Maxime Martinot’s 11-minute film is an immensely funny compilation of disclaimer cards presented at the beginning of films throughout history. Edited as a frantic accumulation of non-images, we expect the worst and suffer the anticipation of immoral, violent, or graphic images. Without the images themselves, we are left with an essay on morality and sensibility as they evolve through time and shape the way we see the world around us and ourselves.

Où en êtes-vous, Tsai Ming-Liang? by Tsai Ming-Liang

A 20-minute meditation by the greatest living filmmaker on back pain, the pleasure of sitting, the beauty of chairs and how to paint them.

Chambre 999 by Lubna Playoust

A conceptual remake of Wim Wenders’ Chambre 666, made 40 years later. Cinema has changed, and today’s issues concerning viewership, distribution, and production are radically different from those of 1982. An uneven collection of thoughts that includes a wonderful opening act by Wenders himself as a burlesque doomsday prophet.

Onde está o Pessoa? (Where is Pessoa?) by Leonor Areal

From a few minutes of film, shot in 1913, Leonor Areal loops, zooms, pans, and examines every detail (as in Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son), looking for the poet Fernando Pessoa, who was a cinephile, designed the logo of a movie company, wrote several film scripts, and was never caught on film. Or was he?

Even if Godard is dead, he lives in Maryam Tafakory. Mast-del is a collage of post-revolution Iranian cinema that produces mesmerising film compositions of gestures, textures, sounds, and words. A thin narrative line runs through public images and intimate feelings, delineating a complex web of recollections where memory and film history merge together.

Filmmaker , video essayist . Commissions include Sight and Sound / BFI , Little White Lies, Curzon and Arrow.

As ever, excited to see constant variety within the video essay world. My picks prioritise new creators and formal inventiveness.

MyHouse. WAD – Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod by Power Pak

A masterpiece of recapping, Power Pak’s video is essentially a narrated journey through an ingenious mod. A good recap doesn’t just communicate plot, but also the point of the essay; this does both. Excellent pacing and vocal delivery communicates the tone of the map, and becomes a jumping off point for an analysis of horror in gaming / the oft-discussed topic of liminal spaces. And, a special shoutout to an almost unedited six-minute segment of black and silence in the middle. Commitment to the bit!

Interrogating one of the strangest releases of last year, this essay takes on the unenviable task of articulating how the film articulates the inarticulable (via Elaine Scarry). DeLisio’s commentary includes text elements that are ingeniously expressed in a similar visual language to the film’s (faded, grainy, blurry). As commenter Max Tohline puts it, “not under the knife of Scarry, but in coequal conversation with Scarry”.

Is It Impossible to Dad? by The Nukes

A trademark The Nukes / Josh Geist essay in its analysis of a throwaway family animation property through a serious academic viewpoint – not (just) for the comedy of applying highbrow to lowbrow, but to recognise that even (and maybe especially?) the forgotten parts of pop culture express truths about humanity. Josh reorders his text via its characters’ viewpoints to tell a story about father-son communication – and, perhaps, the impossibility of communication itself.

Alexandre investigates ‘sludge’ content – those splitscreens of a narrated reddit post and a Subway Surfers video, for instance – through a clever visual device. Talk about ‘embodied practice’: hard for me to imagine a more clear example than Alexandre projecting the edited video text onto their own body for the entirety of this video. An interruption a few minutes in from YouTube’s algorithm –a split-screen beer advert no less– just added to the gag on my viewing. And throughout the to-camera presentation, I found my eye drawn off to the Minecraft parkour constantly, in a clever proving of Alexandre’s argument. Behind the overstimulating presentation, Alexandre’s analysis offers an insightful categorisation of a media type inexplicable on the surface but ever-present in the developing digital landscape.

The breezy recap of the man/car binary in the opening moments of max teeth’s essay is authoritative, funny, and thought-provoking – everything a video essay can be, especially on YouTube. And the speed with which that’s just assumed and dropped as we speed into the main matter is a great example of how to explain succinctly. YouTube’s got too many 1hr+ essays – more like this, please.

Seinpeaks by @seinpeaks

There’s a fine line between a shitpost and a videographic work; ironically, the more academic end of video essays (with their lack of in-video explanation due to abstract support, and leaning towards supercuts and split-screens) are more like this than popular YouTube works. Seinpeaks illustrates the fine line beautifully. It’s a long-running project mashing up Twin Peaks and Seinfeld (with guest appearances from other stalwart shows like Always Sunny and Friends). These two shows aired simultaneously and their shared visual language provides a jumping-off point for a surprising collab that draws out the humour in Twin Peaks and the absurdism in Seinfeld.

Editor-at-large and YouTube channel manager at Little White Lies magazine

How Jane Campion Subverts the Violence of the Male Gaze by Carly Mattox

This was an idea pitched to me around focusing on the image of the woman on the street in cinema, especially at night, and especially in films directed by women. It took a little bit of back and forth to nail the structure and pacing, but the tone and central thesis of the piece was rock solid from the outset. I was delighted with how it turned out, and am really excited to see what Carly comes up with next.

Oppenheimer Is the Perfect Christopher Nolan Protagonist by Lara Callaghan

There was a lot published around Nolan’s atom bomb opus, but I’m not sure anything I’ve seen has managed to tap into his preoccupations as a filmmaker as astutely as this.

Adam Driver Driving by Luís Azevedo

This video stemmed from a silly conversation Luís and I had, but I think the result – aside from being superbly edited – speaks to something more serious about how actors choose to present themselves in certain ways on screen.

Professor and director of the film studies programme, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Very hard to limit myself to these nominations only.

Practices of Viewing series by Johannes Binotto

By all means this is the major project in videographic criticism of the year – or I should say of the last three years, since FFW , the first one (I believe) was produced in 2020. A work of art that redefines the boundaries of what’s possible in the medium. Its richness, originality, and creativity combine to create an experience that truly blows the mind. This videographic project is a testament to the limitless potential of form, its academic rigour, and artistry. It’s a visual and intellectual rollercoaster that will leave you in awe from start to finish.

RAWR by Maud Ceuterick

Beginning as a creative spark in an Aarhus workshop, it expanded at Middlebury College to become a true gem. Drawing from Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work, Ceuterick passionately interprets and deforms scenes of female rage, challenging gender norms. This transformative journey echoes Audre Lorde’s call for a radical change through the expression of rage. It’s a brilliant fusion of scholarship and creativity.

This is Not What I Normally Do: An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities by Ariel Avissar

This is THE video essay of the year. A bold departure from convention, this video defies expectations with its remarkable layers of provocation. Meticulously edited and expertly crafted, it pushes the boundaries of videographic criticism, skilfully weaving a captivating tapestry of thought-provoking insights in the field

One of the most captivating sound projects I’ve ever encountered. This video essay ventures into uncharted territory, pairing the audio from the beginning of films with the closing images, creating an extraordinary mosaic of sound and visuals. The result is an auditory and visual tapestry that defies conventional expectations. It’s a seamless blend of the familiar and the unexpected, challenging our perception of film narratives.

169 Seconds: Una mujer reflejada / A Reflected Woman by Catherine Grant

In this brief but profoundly impactful exploration, Catherine Grant manages to distil the essence of the film’s themes, performances, and significance with remarkable precision, a testament to the art of succinct and effective storytelling. It’s a research gem that demonstrates the power of brevity in conveying complex ideas. In just 169 seconds, this video essay is the best piece of research ever “written” on Sebastián Lelio’s film.

This provocative video essay skillfully employs desktop editing on an iPhone to present a feminist perspective on the enduring control of women’s bodies through the dissemination of misinformation about menstruation and the menstruation apps. It is an awe-inspiring blend of resourcefulness, scholarly research, activism, art, exceptional editing skills, and creativity. 

Sensuous and Affective: The Potential of Videography for Studying Audio-Visual Relations by Oswald Iten

A beautifully edited and profoundly insightful exploration of the dynamic interplay between sight and sound.

Emerging voices

The voters had the option to nominate essayists to the ‘Emerging voices’ section as a way to highlight new and exciting talent in the video essay space.

acollierastro (nominated by Ben Chinapen)

[Ben also nominated this creator’s video on string theory in the main poll, and resubmitted his explanation from there to clarify why he was nominating them for Emerging voices.]

This video came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s mind who saw it. An intriguing title, with a clearly stressed-out person and also The Binding of Isaac in the thumbnail? What’s going on? Within one minute the purpose becomes clear; this woman who has very strong opinions and credentials will break down exactly what happened with the String Theory phenomenon while simultaneously stumbling through a playthrough of the vintage roguelike indie darling Binding of Isaac. A premise so absurd and hilarious (dare I say groundbreaking?) that you instantly want to watch and listen. It’s very informative and HIGHLY entertaining for the joke of the idea alone. I’m glad this took off because it was worth it. This is probably my most firm nomination out of the group.

Morgane Frund (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Morgane Frund was born in 1997 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied Film Studies, English and German at the University of Lausanne. From 2019 to 2022, she studied Video at Hochschule Luzern, Design and Kunst, graduating with a Bachelor degree. BEAR (2022), her graduation film, screened in numerous festivals and won several prizes. OUT OF THE BLUE (2023) premiered in competition at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. She is active in the fields of documentary film, video essay and performance arts.

Eloïse Le Gallo and Julia Borderie (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Born in 1989, Julia Borderie and Éloïse Le Gallo have been a duo since 2016. They graduated from Le Fresnoy in 2023. In an exploratory mode, they approach water as a substance that influences the territories it flows through and the bodies that live in it. Taking a poetic, documentary approach, they make the experience of otherness a condition of artistic creation. The camera eye acts as a catalyst for encounters, while questioning the human gestures that shape materials and territories.

At the heart of a mesh of viewpoints and disciplines (craft techniques, geology, chemistry, marine biology, etc.) and at the crossroads of sculpture and cinema, they are interested in the origin of the materials that form a landscape. Recently, their research has led them to question more specifically the complementarities between learned form and sensitive form, working with scientists on objects generated by their cutting edge technologies. [Bio from Le Fresnoy]

Rodrigo Campos (nominated by Evelyn Kreutzer)

Campos participated in a mentorship program I co-organised with Anna-Sophie Pilippi, Maike Reinerth, and Kathleen Loock, as part of the Videography conference in Hanover 2022. There he worked with Barbara Zecchi. The resulting video, published in the ZfM Videography blog this year, is a deeply poetic, affective, and analytically profound investigation of Brazilian colonial screen history.

Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History Collaboration (nominated by Colleen Laird)

A collaboration of 30 makers, the Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History project has been in the works since an original call for proposals in February 2022. Although just a few of the participants are experienced (full disclosure: myself included), the grant-funded project was designed by Alison Peirse to train and mentor new talent from around the globe through a series of online videographic workshops over the course of approximately six months. Thereafter, participants would produce their first video essay and would refine their edits through online peer feedback. As one of the collaborators, it has been my great privilege to see the works of so many new creators grow and evolve and I am excited for their collective debut. The collaboration will be published online in the first quarter of 2023 in the journal MAI : Feminism & Visual Culture .

Carlos Baixauli (nominated by Adrian Martin)

Sometimes, audiovisual essays can do a simple thing very well. Baixauli’s ingenious mix of the silent Falling Leaves (1912) by Alice Guy with Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) hits that spot.

Green & Red (Kasra Karbasi and Mohammad Amin Komijani) (nominated by Adrian Martin)

These Iranian cinephiles pursue very original film analyses.

Martín Vilela (nominated by Adrian Martin)

Like Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return, Chandler from Friends is multiplied and interacts with himself, uncannily. In Argentina, Vilela’s country!

May Santiago (nominated by Dayna McLeod)

A queer Puerto Rican feminist filmmaker, May Santiago’s unique voice and perspective makes her a video essayist to watch out for. She will have new work in Alison Peirse’s Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History ( DWGHFH ) project which will be featured in a special issue of MAI Feminism & Visual Culture in 2024. I was lucky enough to see May’s practice first hand at Embodying the Video Essay, a videographic workshop in Maine this summer and was blown away by May’s spectacularly intricate and layered work. She crafts soundtracks to complement a unique and riveting visual language, combining archive and horror while using herself as narrator and performing subject in front of the camera. Do keep an eye out for May’s work at film festivals and online: https://www.maillim.com/

Svanik Surve ( SUAVE , SUAVE cinema , svanik SUAVE ) (nominated by Queline Meadows)

Svanik Surve has been making video essays steadily for a few years now, but expanded his output in 2023 when he created two new YouTube channels. This year, his work explored Indian culture, international art cinema, and philosophy. His creative, intelligent, and funny videos deserve a much larger audience.

framemygaze (nominated by Queline Meadows)

In my eyes, there is nobody more immersed in the YouTube media and culture video essay landscape than framemygaze, and I say that as someone who runs a Discord server for video essay creators! I’ve found her in the comment sections of countless videos writing detailed notes that reflect her care and close attention to everything she watches. Framemygaze has only released one video so far, but if her deep understanding of the video essay community is any indication, there will be many more great videos in the future.

Alice Cappelle (nominated by Michael O’N eill Burns)

Alice’s videos offer an intriguing perspective at the borders of Francophile and Anglophile culture. She’s a French creator making videos in English, often about topics and phenomena specific to English language digital spaces and culture. This perspective allows her to use the critical force of a French leftist theorist to tackle seemingly vapid and conceptually empty trends and practices. At other times, she’s able to translate the specificity of the French political moment to a broader audience in a way that’s far more accessible than standard news coverage.

Jackson Maher (nominated by Michael O’N eill Burns)

Jackson is an already accomplished editor who in recent years has put himself in front of the camera to create video essays that lure viewers in with analysis of popular media properties, but uses this as the occasion to expose deeper cultural ideologies buried within pop culture. His series of videos on Copaganda does a masterful job at showing us how the logic of policing has infected so much of our culture, down to popular children’s programme Paw Patrol. But maybe most impressively, Jackson does all this while being relatable and curious, never making the viewer feel judged but instead inviting us to dig deeper alongside him.

Lara Isobel Callaghan (nominated by Will Webb)

Lara is a new face on the video-essay scene, with a number of commissions across Little White Lies and the BFI . Although the commissioned work is excellent, I’m highlighting this video from the Essay Library collab, When Essay Met Library, due to its formal inventiveness and cheeky sense of humour. Using Hindi film Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan as a jumping off point, Lara examines Shakespeare’s influence on the rom-com genre through the lens of a 1980s infomercial. William Shakespeare’s Course of True Love: available now!

Jemma Saunders (nominated by Will Webb)

A doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, Jemma’s particular focus on sense of place (and Birmingham especially) comes to the fore in this fascinating essay examining automotive representations of the city. Other works in this vein include Reaching Out Remotely , covering UK soap Doctors’ covid episode, made all the more poignant by its cancellation this year.

Carly Mattox (nominated by Adam Woodward)

I met Carly in late 2022 when I gave a talk to the second year students at NFTS . She reached out to me earlier this year and has since contributed a handful of videos to the LWL ies YouTube channel.

The new issue of Sight and Sound

On the cover: Francis Ford Coppola on Megalopolis and his storied career Also in this issue: Martin Scorsese on the hidden gems of British Cinema – Retro horror – Coralie Fargeat on The Substance – a classic article by Sergei Eisenstein

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The Best Video Essays of 2022, the Sight and Sound poll

 It's fascinating how the art form of the video essay has evolved. The Sight and Sound poll of the best video essays has been released . 

Here's one of my favorites, Wickham's Flannagan's Maschinenmensch :

Maschinenmensch by Wickham Flannagan, Batuhan Buldu & Ruya Nese from Sanarchy Collective on Vimeo .

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Video Essay Film Festival 2022, the winners

Tuesday July 5 th  was the closing day of the third Video Essay Film Festival (VEFF), the event that celebrates one of the most innovative forms of critique of the audio-visual within the MAXXI’s 2022 Cinema programme.

A jury chaired by the director and screenwriter Enrico Vanzina with members Irene De Vico Fallani (MAXXI), Veronica Flora (Medfilm Festival), Alessandra Fontemaggi (Fondazione Cinema per Roma) and Massimo Sebastiani (Central Editor in Chief ANSA) awarded three prizes in the VEFF Competition section (Best Video Essay, Video Form Award, Video Content Award), and one in the VEFF Classic section (Best Video Essay).

Best Video Essay  THE KENNEL – DIARY OF A DREAMER  by Demetrio Giacomelli 

Best Video Essay for Form THE ACTOR’S BODY: A SPATIALIZATION TOOL IN PAOLO SORRENTINO’S FILMS  by Lucrezia Gandolfo

Best Video Essay for Content ( ex aequo ) RIDING HORSES, RIDING BICYCLES. HORSES, BICYCLES AND SHIFTING HEROES by Edoardo Spallazzi, Federica Di Giampaolo

Best Video Essay for Content ( ex aequo ) SCORSESE’S VOICE OVER  by Lorenzo Mandile

Special Mention THE EDDY: SHOOTING JAZZ IN THE WORK OF DAMIEN CHAZELLE  by Beatrice Ambrosio

VIDEO ESSAY CLASSIC For the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the VEFF decided to invite fans, scholars, film lovers and students of film schools and universities to try their hand at a video essay on the cinema of this great filmmaker.

Best Video Essay Classic FIGURE  by Gianluca Abbate and Angela Prudenzi 

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2022 Film Critics Workshop Video Essay Commissions

Film Critics Workshop 2022 participants

One of the great pleasures of attending a film festival is engaging with the multitude of responses to the films being exhibited, whether they be instantaneous responses overheard whilst filing into the foyer after a screening, or snatched chats with fellow cinephiles over a drink should one’s schedules allow enough time for this. As the leader of the Cinema Rediscovered 2022 Film Critics Workshop I had the additional privilege of prolonging this period of discourse with this year’s cohort, seeing them develop their ideas about the programme into a collection of video essays. During the course of the workshop, the group heard from guest speakers Catherine Grant, Jessica McGoff and Charlie Shackleton, each with their own differing approaches to tackling the same problem: how do we go about using film as a medium to comment on films themselves? The eclecticism of the results is in part a reflection on this, as well as on the diversity and wide scope of the festival’s programme.

- Film historian, programmer and video editor Jonathan Bygraves

Jo Reid ’s An Elegy to Intertitles examines the aesthetic and narrative functions of intertitles in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and on how the film represents a swan-song for the silent era which was in the process of passing.

Lara Callaghan ’s All the President’s Men responds to the festival’s Pre-Code season by linking the coming of the Hays Code with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s notion of the Imperial Presidency, a linking of cultural censoriousness and political authoritarianism which carries a vital resonance with our present times.

Part of the festival experience itself was the inspiration for Chay Collins ’s Queen of Time : A hot take overheard after the screening of Queen of Diamonds (1991) is used as a launching point to examine the thematic and formal parallels between the work of director Nina Menkes and Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s own chef d'œuvre Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

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A thematic aspect of the festival’s programme which resonated strongly with the group was the way cinema can be used to challenge the dominant cultural paradigms of the medium. Amaya Bañuelos Marco ’s Speaking Nearby focuses on two documentaries which screened at the festival: Trinh T. Minh‑ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959). Elegantly locating visual parallels between the two films, the essay also locates a deeper resonance between them in their uses of formal strategies to liberate themselves from the mediated gaze associated with the documentary traditions they ostensibly reside within.

Releasing the cinematic image from its traditional hegemons is also the subject of Joy Hunter ’s A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies , which looks at how Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) serves as a correction to the racial biases of the Hollywood myth-making machine.

In Esther Okorocha ’s Pat’s Political Awakening , Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981) is reconfigured through the lens of a quotation from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider , foregrounding the polemicism within the film’s narrative.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Doveton ’s Social Mobility and Black Performativity On Screen expansively positions both of the above films alongside Wendell B. Harris’s Chameleon Street (1989) within a framework of Afro-Pessimism, paralleling the destructiveness of their protagonists’ strivings for socialized bourgeois conformity.

Each of us comes to a piece of art with a different set of eyes, a different history of life experiences behind us, and we each can gravitate towards different aspects of the same shared viewing experience. The jazz world of Paris Blues (1961) is an anchor point for Daniel Turner ’s Blue in Green , an intricate interweaving of disparate media which poignantly explores his own journey of cinematic and musical discovery, and how it has been shaped by those closest to him. Video essays, as with other more traditional forms of criticism, lie in a space between the subjective and the objective, at once interrogating works and revealing a part of ourselves, our passions, our ways of seeing the world. Just as these pieces reflect the diversity of the festival’s programme, so too do they reflect the diversity of the individuals who made them.

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Watch: every frame a painting's video about the 'sustained two-shot'.

"You can just point the camera and let the scene play out... Let the actors do what they do: tell the story." There is a brand new cinema video essay out this week from the iconic YouTube channel known as " Every Frame a Painting ". They originally ran from 2014 to 2016 ( we posted many back then ) then stopped for a while. Now they're back preparing to release a short film called The Second . This video essay is about " The Sustained Two-Shot ," which they use in their short film . The two-shot is a filmmaking / cinematography technique of framing two actors in conversation together. Sustained means it keeps going through the scene - with major examples referenced from films like Pulp Fiction , There Will Be Blood , The Dark Knight , Good Will Hunting , La La Land , The Big Lebowski , and many other classics. There's also a famously long one in Steve McQueen's Hunger . If you're a filmmaker or just want to learn more, this is a must watch video essay .

›  Posted on August 28 in To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Quick Teaser Trailer for 'The Second' Short Film + Video Essay Series

"Understood?" There's a new video essay series + short film premiering soon that you might want to take a look at - unveiling soon up in Canada. The Second is the short film that is part of a new series created by filmmakers / editors Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou . It's premiering at the 2024 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal this summer. The festival adds: "Vancouver-based creators of the wildly popular YouTube video essay series Every Frame a Painting —which has amassed 2 million subscribers—are coming to Fantasia! From YouTube videos to Netflix series ( Voir ) and indie features to animation studios, the duo have worked on projects big and small, for themselves and others. Join them for the world premiere of their short film, The Second , starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ethan Hwang , and an exclusive lecture about its making, the 'one for us, one for them' ethos, and how they’ve charted their careers." No other details are available on the additional video essay series, but the short is about a duel involving a father and son. Have a look below.

›  Posted on July 4 in To Watch , Trailer , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: 'Why Movie Fonts Matter' Video Essay feat. Marie Boulanger

"In most films, the title screen is the first character you see. Those letters are literally the first characters you see." Almost everyone can identify a movie by its font . From Back to the Future to The Terminator to Gone with the Wind to The Godfather , these fonts and logos are an important part of the movie's identity. This entrancing video essay titled Why Movie Fonts Matter is a fascinating dive into the world of fonts, design, and branding. Does the font really matter? Yes it does. Absolutely. It may seem irrelevant, but it's an important choice that filmmakers make. This video essay is edited by Leigh Singer, featuring designer Marie Boulanger narrating her thoughts about movie fonts – created for the Little White Lies movie magazine. We all know the hilarious SNL sketch with Ryan Gosling choosing the Papyrus font for Avatar ( watch here + the sequel ), but this goes beyond the comedy into the reality of why fonts really matter. It's worth a quick watch.

›  Posted on June 25 in To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch This: Fascinating 'Why It Feels Like the End of VFX' Video Essay

"It's a game called, 'Find What's Wrong With This Shot.'" Here is another must watch new video about the current state of the VFX industry in cinema. It's a 20 minute video essay created by Crafthive called " VFX r u ok? Why It Feels Like the End of VFX ." The creators take a cold, hard look at what's happening with visual effects (aka CGI and/or VFX) and all of the problems right now, from creative executives to financial struggles to bad filmmakers, and everything else going on. They explain that nowadays VFX has been turned into a commodity, they're "more artisan than artists" now, which isn't a good thing. Yes they even touch on A.I., crypto, Marvel, and all these other dangerous topics. It's not looking good... If you're wondering why, this is a great place to start. This video is also a nice complement to the 'No CGI' is Really Just Invisible CGI video essay series that debuted last year. The Phil Tippett quote they include in this (8:55) is fantastic. I'm glad they're talking about all this and being so blunt about how screwed up the whole movie industry is now.

›  Posted on May 28 in To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: Mesmerizing 'The Colors Of Luca Guadagnino' Supercut Video

"I am a film director, and I work with a visual language, with a visual medium. And I try to make virtue of the use of this visual medium. And I try to make sure what I do speaks the language of cinema." – Luca Guadagnino . His latest film Challengers ( final trailer here ) is finally landing in theaters for everyone to enjoy this week. In celebration of this release, the UK movie magazine Little White Lies and video editor Luís Azevedo have created a supercut highlighting " The Colors Of Luca Guadagnino ." It's a quick video at just 2-1/2 minutes featuring shots from almost all of his films, showing how he works his way through hot and cold colors depending on the mood. No matter what, his film always have vivid colors. Guadagnino's exceptional filmography includes: The Protagonists (1999), Melissa P. (2005), I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), Call Me By Your Name (2017), Suspiria (2018), Bones and All (2022), and Challengers (2024) as well as Queer (2024) next. That deep red scene in Suspiria is totally unforgettable.

›  Posted on April 22 in To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: Director Wim Wenders & The Road Less Traveled Video Tribute

"When I can make place and story cross, and then have a character that belongs [in] that place, then I feel I have a movie." This lovely video tribute to the acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders is also a look back at his Road Trilogy and many beloved films over his 50+ year career. This video from Little Whie Lies and video editor Luís Azevedo is framed around his latest creation Perfect Days , which already opened in theaters (and earned him an Oscar nomination ) and is now streaming on Mubi. "Wenders' restless spirit is evident across a filmography invariably characterized by the possibilities of travel. Meditations on identity and displacement, his road movies began in Germany before taking to the freeways of the [USA] for some of cinema's most profound explorations into the American condition. Burning rubber across continents, this collection brings together some of the legendary German filmmaker's greatest works. So pack your bags and buckle your seatbelts for an adventure along cinema's international highways with the one and only king of the road." The road trilogy: Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road (1976). Enjoy.

›  Posted on April 17 in Feat , To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: 'The Colors of Alex Garland' Cinematography Retrospective

Another gorgeous new supercut video created & edited by the talented Luís Azevedo. The Colours Of Alex Garland (it's spelled "colours" because Little White Lies is a UK film magazine) is a supercut looking at the many colors and images in Alex Garland movies – a sci-fi visionary. They created this for the upcoming release of Alex Garland's latest movie Civil War , opening in theaters worldwide this April. Civil War is the fourth movie he has directed, following Ex Machina (2014), Annihilation (2018), and Men (2022); he also directed the series "Devs" (2022) for FX / Hulu. Before getting into directing, Garland also wrote the scripts for 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2010), and Dredd (2012) - though none of these are included in this supercut. The video also uses the "ambient" color mode feature where a solid color appears around the video in the middle of the frame. Just makes me want to watch all of these movies again.

›  Posted on March 26 in To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: Superb Baseball Movie Montage - Take Me Out to the Ball Game

"How about you and I be honest about what each of us want out of this – I want to milk the last ounce of baseball you got in you." Who doesn't love baseball movies?! America's past-time has made for some great cinema, with hundreds of beloved movies over the years dedicated to the sport. There's a baseball movies montage going around social media recently (it's embedded below) posted by the "Baseball History Nut" account saying: "Someone made a baseball movie montage and it actually deserves an Oscar. Thank you to whoever made this." The version posted on Twitter is actually a cut down version of a " Baseball on Film " video created by a YouTube user named "Adam K" that first appeared around 8 years ago . (They're always digging up content from the past.) Even though it may be an older video, still worth a watch. From comedies like Major League and The Sandlot , to classics like Field of Dreams and For Love of the Game , to modern favorites like Moneyball , shots from every good baseball movie are included. It's an emotional watch. Enjoy.

›  Posted on February 28 in Feat , To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: Berlin's Iconic Cinema 'Kino International' Celebrates 60 Years

One of the most iconic movie theaters in middle of the city of Berlin, Germany is the Kino International . This classic one-screen movie palace is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The cinema was originally built and opened in 1963, the gem of East Germany's DDR (German Democratic Republic) when the country was still split. It's located on Karl-Marx-Allee (see Google Maps ) in Mitte, a few blocks from Alexanderplatz. In addition to hosting a special 60 years celebration, Yorck (the chain that now owns & operates the cinema) is hosting screenings over the next few months of classic films that premiered there. Kino International will also be closing in February 2024 (after the next Berlin Film Festival which shows films there) for a two year renovation and update. This is why they're bringing attention to this beautiful cinema venue right now, as it will only be open for a little while longer before it shuts down for a good while for a complete refurbishment.

›  Posted on November 22 in Feat , Short Film , To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: VFX Video Discusses How 'No CGI' is Really Just Invisible CGI

"The phrase is: 'grounded in reality.'" There is a popular trend within Hollywood nowadays to promote the idea that a movie has "no CGI" or limited VFX shots in it, as a way of saying it's pure and real and practical and not all fake . But is this actually true? Not really. The most recent example of this was with Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer - here's the original news story , followed up by the movie's lead VFX artist debunking this . There's an entire YouTube video going around called 'No CGI' is Really Just Invisible CGI made by a Danish VFX artist / movie geek who digs into this topic and debunks it all piece-by-piece. It's a really fascinating and honest video that definitively and coherently debunks this claim. It's an important video for the movie world now because it's important we discuss what's actually going in Hollywood - not only all the effort and artistry of VFX workers all around the world, but also the truth about how filmmaking works. It's worth taking the time to watch these and learn more about what's going on in the Visual Effects industry.

›  Posted on October 30 in Featurette , To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

Watch: 'Adam Driver Driving' Supercut Video Just in Time for 'Ferrari'

"The windshield wiper blade starts to squeak. The rain has stopped." Don't forget your seatbelt. Enjoy this mesmerizing supercut video featuring " Adam Driver Driving ". Edited by the talented Luís Azevedo, this supercut was released by Little White Lies and is meant to be a tie-in with the upcoming release of Ferrari . Believe it or not, 39-year-old actor Adam Driver has been in tons of films where he's driving. This features footage from: "Girls", White Noise , The Dead Don't Die , House of Gucci , This Is Where I Leave You , Logan Lucky , Paterson , While We're Young , and BlacKkKlansman . I love that he includes one of his poems from Paterson (one of my all-time faves) and the way he integrates the back-and-forth Gucci convo. Hilarious. Another great supercut from Azevedo, always editing some of the best cinema videos on YouTube nowadays.

›  Posted on September 26 in To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

From TIFF: Another Slick 'The Cinema of Christopher Nolan' Supercut

"Making something disappear isn't enough... that's why every magic trick has a third act." Another great video retrospective. The Toronto Film Festival (aka TIFF) posted this on Christopher Nolan's birthday a few weeks ago (was on July 30th). "From his enigmatic debut feature Following , which screened as part of TIFF's Discovery programme at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, to the boundary pushing Oppenheimer this supercut is a celebration of Christopher Nolan's visionary storytelling and his unparalleled ability to blur the lines between reality and imagination." It was edited by Toronto-based Adam Schoales, and is a nice compliment to Luís Azevedo's " Hearing Nolan " supercut. Though I wish it was longer! More more more. I'm a huge fan of Oppenheimer and most of Nolan's movies ( here's my ranking ). Enjoy TIFF's perfectly edited " The Cinema of Christopher Nolan " video below - watch in fullscreen for the best experience. Let's go.

›  Posted on August 9 in Feat , To Watch , Video Essays | Comments

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Home Resources Free Guides Video Essays Guide About The Video Essays Guide

VIDEO ESSAYS GUIDE

Introductory guide to video essays, about the video essays guide, about bartolomeo meletti.

Bartolomeo Meletti works as Head of Knowledge Exchange for CREATe, the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy University of Glasgow. In this capacity, he has led the development of CopyrightUser.org, an independent online platform intended to make UK copyright law accessible to everyone.

Previously, Bart was the Education and Research Executive of Learning on Screen. In this capacity, he co-authored this Video Essays Guide.

Bart also worked at the British Film Institute and the Digital Catapult on secondment from CREATe, and held research and media production positions at CIPPM, the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (Bournemouth University), where he is currently a Visiting Fellow; and at CEMP, the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (Bournemouth University).

In 2015, and alongside Professor Ronan Deazley, Bartolomeo received the Arts and Humanities Research Councils (AHRC) Award for Innovation in Film. This was for their work 'The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair', the first episode in 'The Game is On!' webseries.

About Estrella Sendra

Estrella Sendra is Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Education (Festivals and Events) at King’s College London. She is a researcher, educator, journalist, and festival worker interested in the relationship and collaboration between research, practice and pedagogy. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, nominated to the King’s Education Awards in 2023 and recipient of the SOAS Director’s Teaching Prize for Inspirational Teaching (2020). In 2022, following her organisation of an event for Black History Month, she was awarded the ‘Outstanding Experience University of Southampton Festival Digital Engagement Pioneer Awards’. In 2024, she was the recipient of the King’s Engaged Research Network Awards in the International Collaboration category for her research project on ‘Decolonising Film Festival Research and Curating African Cinemas’ .

She is the co-author of the ‘Introductory Guide to Video Essays’ , available at Learning on Screen (2020) and the author of ‘Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research’ (2020) . She is an associate editor in Screenworks, the peer-reviewed online publication of practice research in screen media . Her most recently published video essays include ‘ Film as Sound Art: Embracing Love through Extra-diegetic Sound in Nadine Labaki’s Caramel ’ in Open Screens (2023) and ‘ Displacement, Intimacy & Embodiment: Nearby Alain Gomis’ Multi Sensory Cinema ’, in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image (2022).

Her research interests are festivals, film, screen media and creative industries in Africa and artistic research, with a particular focus on video essays. Since 2011, when she directed Témoignages de l’autre côté , an awarded documentary about migration, she has been developing a regional expertise in Senegal. She is the Co-Principal Investigator of the research project ‘ Decolonizing Film Festival Research in a Post-Pandemic World ’, funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund, Government of Canada [NFRFR-2021-00161].

• Becker, C. and Copple Smith, E (eds). ‘Teaching Dossier: The Video Essay Assignment’, Cinema Journal: The Journal for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies , Vol. 1, Issue 2, Spring/Summer 2013: http://www.teachingmedia.org/the-video essay-assignment-cinema-journal-teaching-dossier-vol-12/
• Butler, J. et al. (2015). ‘Teaching with Video in the 21st Century: Clips, Essays, Full Length Films and TV Programs.’ Workshop at the Society from Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, March 2015. In The Audiovisual Essay . Available online [03.08.20]: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/resources/how-to-guides/teaching-with-video/
• Callahan, Vick and Kuhn, Virgin (2016). ‘Introduction to Issue 11: The Video Essay: An Emergent Taxonomy of Cinematic Writing.’ In The Cine-Files , Issue 11, Fall 2016. Available online [03.07.2019]: http://www.thecine-files.com/introduction-issue11/
• Cox-Stanton, Tracy and de Free, Allison (2020). 'Special Issue on the Scholarly Video Essay: What makes a Video Essay Scholarly?'. In The Cine-Files , Issue 15 (Fall 2020). Available online: http://www.thecine-files.com/what-makes-a-video-essay-scholarly/
• Cox-Stanton (2014). ‘Welcome to Issue 7, ‘The Video Essay: Parameters, Practice, Pedagogy.’ In The Cine-Files , issue 7, fall 2014 [05.09.2019]: http://www.thecine-files.com/issue7introduction/
• Crofts, Charlotte & Nevill, Alexander (2018). 'Publishing screen media practice research: evolving processes of contextualisation, peer review and future proofing in Screenworks.' In Media Practice and Education, 19(3): 283-297.
• Diélcio Moreira, Benedito and Pinto de Oliveira, Pedro (2019). ‘New ways of Communicating Science: The Audiovisual Scientific Essay Experience.’ InTecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Videoessays , 2, July 2019. Available online (29.07.19): https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/en/journal-2-4/
• Dovey, Lindiwe (2020). ‘On Teaching and Being Taugh: Reflections on Decolonising Pedagogy.’ In PARSE-Intersections , (11). Available online (29.06.20): https://parsejournal.com/article/on-teaching-and-being-taught/
• Dovey, Lindiwe and Awachie, Ifeanyi (2019). Decolonising pedagogy video. Produced by Chouette Films. September 2019. Accessed (3.07.20): https://screenworlds.org/resources/decolonising-pedagogy/
• Fyfe, Greer and Ross, Miriam (2015). ‘How-to Video Essays’. The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, February 2015. In The Audiovisual Project website. Available online (03.08.20): https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/resources/how-to-guides/how-to-video-essays-by-greer-fyfe-and-miriam-ross/
• Garwood, Ian (2016). ‘The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticsm.’ In NECSUS, Autumn 2016. Available online (03.07.20): https://necsus-ejms.org/the-place-of-voiceover-in-audiovisual-film-and-television-criticism/
• Glisovic, Smiljana, Berkeley, Leo & Batty, Craig (2016. 'The problem of peer review in screen production: exploring issues and proposing solutions.' In Studies in Australasian Cinema, 10(1): 5-19.
• Grant, Catherine (2016). ‘The audiovisual essay as performative research.’ NECSUS: Available online (07.09.19): https://necsus-ejms.org/the-audiovisual-essay-as-performative-research/ (2014). ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking.’ In aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image , 1(1): 49-62.
• Grant, Catherine and Kooijman, Jaap (2019). ‘New Ways of seeing (and hearing): The audiovisual essay and television.’ In NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies , Spring 2019. Available online [03.07.2019]: https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/
• hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom . New York: Routledge.
• Keathley, Christian (2014). ‘Teaching Videographic Film Studies.’ In The Cine-Files , issue 7, fall 2014. Available online (06.10.2019): http://www.thecine-files.com/keathley/ (2012). ‘Teaching the Scholarly Video.’ In Frames Cinema Journal , 1(1). Available online [06.10.2019]: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/teaching-the-scholarly-video/
• Mcwirther, Andrew (2015). ‘Film criticism, film scholarship and the video essay’. In Screen, 56(3): 369-377. Available online [02.07.20]: https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/56/3/369/1860953?redirectedFrom=fulltext
• Mistry, Jyoti, and Sakota, Tanja (2017). ‘Filmmaking as research: Pedagogy and practice.’ Journal of African Cinemas , 9 (2-3): 113-118.
• Mulvey, Laura (2006). Death 24x a second: Stillness and the moving image . London: Reaktion Books.
• Myers, Andrew (2012). ‘Click Here to Print This Video Essay: Observations on Open Access and Non-Traditional Format in Digital Cinema and Media Studies Publishing.’ In Special Issue ‘Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?’ Frames Cinema Journal, 1. Accessed (02.09.2019): http://framescinemajournal.com/article/click-here-to-print-this-video essay/
• Rascaroli, Laura (2017). ‘Framing: Looking for an Object, or The Essay Film as Theoretical Practice.’ In How the Essay Film Thinks . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 165-186
• Sendra, Estrella (2020). ‘Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research’. In Damásio, M. J. & Mistry, J. (eds.) (2020) International Journal of Film and Media Arts GEECT, Special Issue Mapping Artistic Research in Film, 5(2): 65-81. Available online (13.11.20) here .
• SOAS Podcasts (2020). ‘Video Essays as a Creative Method of Assessment’. School of Arts SOAS Podcasts Series, 2. Available online (27.05.20): https://soundcloud.com/soas-university-of-london/videoessays?fbclid=IwAR3wNehcivYJF5k8lXCiBpN8UNKKOkds3YGY_S9uWm03Pgv-iu9PtWGNYeI
• Solomon, Matthew (2019). ‘Audiovisual Pedagogies. Introduction: the inexhaustible text’. Screen, 60(3): 449-454. Available online (29.10.20): https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/60/3/449/5571246?redirectedFrom=fulltext
• van den Berg, Thomas, and Kiss, Miklós (2016). Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video . Available online (07.07.2020): https://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion/index
• Witt, Michael (2017). ‘Taking stock: Two decades of teaching the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism.’ In NECSUS, Spring 2017. Available online (29.10.20): https://necsus-ejms.org/taking-stock-two-decades-of-teaching-the-history-theory-and-practice-of-audiovisual-film-criticism/

How to contribute to this guide

We welcome any feedback you may have on this guide, as well as further contributions to make it as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Please get in touch with:

• Bartolomeo Meletti : [email protected]
• Estrella Sendra : [email protected]· www.estrellasendra.com

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The best video essays of 2022

10 videos that will entertain you and make you feel smarter. What’s not to like?

by Daniel Schindel

If you buy something from a Polygon link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

An educational and argumentative style has exploded in popularity across video platforms over the past few years, part of the broader wave of explainer-based content in social media. It’s gotten to the point where the form now constitutes an extremely wide tent covering an incredibly deep well of works — or, in the parlance of one subgenre, a gargantuan iceberg . We now see everything from wordless editing experiments to vlogs with occasional image wallpapering called “video essays.” (It’s gotten to the point where one of my favorite videos released last year waded into these definitional weeds, to thought-provoking results.)

This growth makes rounding up a mere 10 exemplary videos a bigger challenge each year. My guiding principles when formulating this list were not just depth of insight, originality, and diversity of subject matter and creators, but also trying to find video essays that truly make the most of both parts of that name — which demand visual attention and engagement. The essays are listed in order of release date.

Climate Fictions, Dystopias and Human Futures by Julia Leyda and Kathleen Loock

As the prognosis around global warming gets more urgent, pop culture has been taking notice, and “cli-fi” has emerged as its own storytelling genre. Leyd and Loock use the recent Don’t Look Up as a starting point, questioning what role — if any — films like these can hope to have in affecting actual activism and reform on climate change. How strong is the connection between art’s power to move us and tangible action?

Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb by Secret Base

No one is making documentary content quite like Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein, and the rest of the crew at Dorktown. Bois is an artist who paints with data points and historical detritus, editing all this material together in a way that feels more forward-thinking than almost anyone else making films today — whether for the internet, television, or theaters. An epic four-part series on Dave Stieb, an also-also-also-ran of baseball history, sounds ridiculous. And yet Dorktown turns him into one of the most compelling characters of the year.

[ Ed. note: Secret Base is part of SB Nation, which along with Polygon is part of Vox Media. This played no part in including the video.]

Deconstructing the Bridge by Total Refusal

This is perhaps the least “essay-like” video on this list. It’s more of a university-level lecture, but set in the least academic forum imaginable: a session of Battlefield 5. Such unusual ventures are the modus operandi of Total Refusal , a “pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla” which has used The Division to explain urban design , Red Dead Redemption 2 to explain class , and much more. Within the Battlefield 5 map is a re-creation of Dutch city of Nijmegen, the site of a decisive battle during World War II. Total Refusal takes viewers on a survey of the area in a virtual form, and in the process they delve not just into the history involved but also the entire concept of war tourism and re-creations, questioning how culture remembers these events.

Why Panzer Dragoon Saga Is the Greatest RPG Nobody Played by Michael Saba

If this doesn’t send the 1998 Sega Saturn game Panzer Dragoon Saga to the top of your must-play list, then I don’t know what to tell you. More than an intriguing look at a game that was incredibly ahead of its time and took years to find its audience, this video is a treatise on a pressing issue within gaming. See, if you want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga , you will almost certainly have to pirate it, which might stir ethical qualms in some. Saba mounts an impassioned defense of piracy as a form of archival practice and game preservation. Even if you disagree with such a conclusion, the problems he highlights within the industry cannot be denied.

Nice White Teachers, Bad Brown Schools: Hollywood’s Pedagogy on Urban Education by Yhara Zayd

Yhara Zayd makes her third consecutive appearance on our annual video essay list, and for good reason. Not content to retread ground covered by other pop culture video creators, she finds both novel subjects and interesting lenses on them. Here she scrutinizes the “inspirational” story trope of well-intentioned white teachers making a difference in urban environments, seen in the likes of Dangerous Minds and The Ron Clark Story . Most incisively, she contrasts the conventions of this genre with the stark realities and lived history of actual outsider intervention in nonwhite education.

Intimate Thresholds by Desiree Garcia

Less than four minutes long, this essay is nonetheless entrancing, thanks to Garcia’s continually inventive editing. Instead of a drawn-out exploration of the theme of female artistic competition in film, she contrasts two examples through visceral juxtaposition: 1940’s Dance, Girl, Dance and 2010’s Black Swan. With split screens, hazy picture-in-picture, precise cuts, and some remarkable use of captions, the essay makes its ideas intuitively felt rather than explaining itself through lecture.

Instagram Hates Its Users by Jarvis Johnson

The long story made short is that Instagram has continually sabotaged any actual enjoyment of using its app through trying to imitate whatever new trend has come down the cultural pipeline. But the long story, as relayed by Johnson, is so much more entertaining. We often forget the direct relationship between interface design and user experience, but this is a terrific deep dive into how that process works, pinned to an easy-to-grasp timeline of Instagram’s calamitous history.

Fixing My Brain With Automated Therapy by Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller is exceptionally good at drawing in a web of disparate sources to discuss ideas you might not have even thought about before. Here, the story of “ the first chat bot ,” the 2019 visual novel Eliza, and the app-based 2021 game UnearthU are used to explore the use of artificial intelligence in modern therapy. But as the title suggests, Geller goes one step further, testing out several different therapy apps that purport to help you improve your mental health without the need of any human therapists. His results, and what they suggest about the true intention behind these apps and the way therapy is incorporated into contemporary society, are… well, disquieting.

Parking lots are everywhere and nowhere by What’s So Great About That?

The concept of “liminal space” is currently popular in online culture discourse. But Grace Lee seldom tackles a topic from the same angle as everyone else. With reference points as wide-ranging as Seinfeld, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” and the work of artist Guillaume Lachapelle, she discusses how parking lots appear in media, and in a wider view how they and similar urban-industrial spaces figure into our everyday lives. Lee’s essays demand your attention like few others; look away and you’re liable to miss a great little visual gag. Because of this, despite her videos seldom going longer than 15-20 minutes, they often pack in much, much more information than you’ll expect.

How Degrowth Can Save the World by Andrewism

Andrew Sage describes himself not just as an anarchist but as “solarpunk” — focused on solutions for a sustainable future for humanity. In this video he elucidates one of the key features of the destructive capitalist status quo: the idea of unlimited economic and industrial growth. Insistence of “degrowth” practices can often elicit fears of some vague loss in one’s standard of living. But Sage debunks this and many other arguments against degrowth, while building a more inspiring and hopeful vision for an environmentally sound, egalitarian existence.

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14 Chloé Galibert-Laîné and the Video Essay: A New Avant-Garde?

• Published: September 2024
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The recent history of the video essay—forms of cine-scholarship presented audiovisually—offers new ways of learning about film history from works that are themselves part of film history. Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s video essays, available at her website, use combinations of voice-over narration, visual text, film clips, YouTube postings, music, and enacted dialog to explore traditional films, modern internet debates, and computer games. Specific foci of her video essays include James Benning’s feature film READERS (2017), Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives (2017), Penny Lane’s The Pain of Others (2017), and in GeoMarkr (2022) , the videogame GeoGuessr and Chris Marker’s essay films.

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SFFILM Festival Unveils 65th Lineup, from Michelle Yeoh Tribute to ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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SFFILM Festival, San Francisco’s premier celebration of film, has unveiled its 65th lineup for this year’s return to in-person festivities. The 2022 program features more than 130 from 56 countries, with 56 percent helmed by female or non-binary filmmakers and 52 percent directed by BIPOC filmmakers. The 2022 Festival will run April 21–May 1, with tickets on sale now at sffilm.org . Screenings will take place at venues across the Bay Area, including the storied Castro Theatre and UC Berkeley’s BAMPFA.

While the festival features a variety of world and North American premieres, it will also serve as a Bay Area launchpad for a number of festival favorites, like Sundance darling “ Cha Cha Real Smooth ” (which Apple TV+ will roll out later this year), John Boyega–starrer “892,” NatGeo volcanologist documentary “Fire of Love,” Terence Davies’ “Benediction,” Claire Denis’ “Both Sides of the Blade,” Venice Golden Lion winner “Happening,” Sundance Best Director winner “Palm Trees and Power Lines” from Jamie Dack, and much more.

But also noteworthy are festival tributes to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star Michelle Yeoh , Jenny Slate and “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” avant-garde video essayist Trinh T. Minh-ha, and more.

Curated by a collective of festival programmers, the lineup includes spotlights and jury competitions including Bay Area Voices, Cine Latino, Global Visions, SFFILM Supported, and the Golden Gate Awards with cash prizes. There are 14 Bay Area-specific stories, with seven films receiving financial and professional support through SFFILM Makers, the artist development program of SFFILM. The full lineup is below.

Opening Night: Stay Awake Jamie Sisley (USA 2022, 94 min) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

Thu, Apr 21 7:30 PM CASTRO

Rarely conveyed in the headlines decrying the opioid epidemic are the personal struggles of addicts’ daily fight for sobriety and the hopeful resilience of their families. For teenagers Derek (Fin Argus) and Ethan (Wyatt Oleff), the situation is all too familiar as they pace the streets searching for their painkiller-dependent mother, Michelle. This Is Us star Chrissy Metz delivers a nuanced portrayal of guilt and shame that fearlessly digs into the trauma of recovery, while newcomers Argus and Oleff infuse the film with vulnerability and unexpected humor. First-time feature director Jamie Sisley masterfully builds a relatable world full of characters that vibrate with authenticity in this powerful, SFFILM-supported drama that will stick with you long after you exit the theater.

Centerpiece: 892 Abi Damaris Corbin (USA 2022, 103 min)

Wed, Apr 27 7:30 PM CASTRO

When a routine transaction turns into a bank heist, two employees find themselves at the whim of a man pushed to the limit. John Boyega delivers a riveting performance as former Marine Brian Brown-Easley who holds up a Wells Fargo in feverish desperation after his monthly disability check fails to arrive. At turns verbose and volatile, Brian just wants to be heard in hopes Veteran Affairs will issue his payment. Abi Damaris Corbin directs with clinical precision, packing every scene with emotional complexity and each frame with relentless tension, as 892 reveals the plight of a forgotten veteran crushed under the wheels of bureaucracy. Featuring the final performance of the late Michael K. Williams, this true story will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Closing Night: Cha Cha Real Smooth Cooper Raiff (USA 2022, 107 min)

Sat, Apr 30 7:00 PM CASTRO

Andrew is a sweet, talkative, and deeply ambivalent 22-year-old. Fresh out of college and living with his mother (Leslie Mann), Andrew finds his reckless charm makes him the ideal go-to party starter for the bar and bat mitzvahs in his Long Island hometown. Andrew soon befriends single mother, Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Lola, and their lives become deeply entwined during the endless revelry of coming-of-age parties. As Andrew falls for a homelife that has no room for him, he is forced to face his desires and motives. Cooper Raiff writes, directs, produces, and stars in this hilarious, unexpected, and buoyant story about the people we love and the loves that define us.

MUSIC + FILM

32 Sounds Sam Green (USA 2022, 95 min)

Sun, Apr 24 7:30 PM CASTRO

Festival favorite Sam Green returns with this immersive documentary, a poem in audio and images that explores the effect of sound on our lives, narrated by the filmmaker with a live score by JD Samson.

Land of Gold Jon Else (USA 2021, 82 min)

Thu, Apr 28 7:30 PM CASTRO

Soprano Julia Bullock mesmerizes in this entrancing documentary that brings to vivid life John Adams’ and Peter Sellars’ opera Girls of the Golden West and the Gold Rush era that inspired it. SFFILM’s free screening of Land of Gold is presented in partnership with SF Opera and the Castro Theatre, both celebrating their centenary anniversaries. The film will be preceded by a performance from members of the Opera’s Adler Fellows program, a multi-year residency for opera’s most promising young artists. This is a Community Screening with free admission. RSVP required at [sffilm.org].

Persistence of Vision Award: Trinh T. Minh-ha

Fri, Apr 29 7:00 PM BAMPFA

Filmmaker, writer, composer Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work runs the gamut from feature films to multimedia installations to books. Her many awards include the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art; the 2006 Trailblazers Award at MIPDoc in Cannes, France; and the 1991 AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award. This year’s POV program will feature Trinh T. Minh-ha in conversation with Rizvana Bradley, Assistant Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, followed by the North American premiere of Minh-ha’s latest film, What About China?

What About China? Trinh T. Minh-ha (USA/China 2021, 135 min) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

UC Berkeley professor and experimental filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha fascinates with this video essay examining the mercurial nature of China nearly half a century after the Cultural Revolution.

Sloan Science on Screen Award: Linoleum

Tue, Apr 26 7:30 PM VICTORIA

Linoleum is the SFFILM Festival recipient of the Sloan Science on Screen Award,. Presented through a partnership between SFFILM and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the prize is part of SFFILM’s Sloan Science in Cinema initiative, which enhances public understanding of science through the language of film. This program will feature a post-screening discussion with director Colin West, star Jim Gaffigan, and a noted scientist.

Linoleum Colin West (USA 2022, 101 min)

When a satellite falls from the sky, Cameron (Jim Gaffigan) finds his life upended. This sweet, quirky film leads to unexpected places, as Cameron searches for meaning and adventure amongst the stars.

A Tribute to Jenny Slate

Fri, Apr 22 7:30 PM CASTRO

An actor, voice performer, and comedian, Jenny Slate spent a season on Saturday Night Live (2009-2010) before achieving viral success with Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2010), the first of three animated shorts. Over the last dozen years, Slate has successfully juggled roles in big-screen features, such as Obvious Child (Festival 2014), for which she received a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination; Landline (Festival 2017); and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) with parts in series like Parks and Recreation and The Great North and voice work in Big Mouth and Bob’s Burgers. Join us for a conversation with Jenny Slate and a screening of the big-screen feature of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022).

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Dean Fleischer-Camp (USA 2021, 90 min)

Poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, this feature expansion of the beloved web series features the titular mollusk (voiced by Jenny Slate) looking after his Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) and ruminating on his home life and missing family. Recommended for ages 9 and up.

A Tribute to Michelle Yeoh: In Conversation with Sandra Oh

Fri, Apr 29 6:00 PM CASTRO

Michelle Yeoh is recognized as one of the greatest and most successful actresses. From martial arts goddess to Bond Girl, Yeoh has graced the screen in myriad Hollywood blockbusters and shattered convention.

Yeoh’s extensive filmography is a collection of iconic roles, from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, to Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, and John Chu’s romantic comedy, Crazy Rich Asians, the highest-grossing romantic comedy in the U.S. in the past 10 years. Additionally, she recently joined the Marvel stratosphere when she starred in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, one of the highest grossing films of 2021.

The acclaimed actress is poised to have a remarkable 2022, as she will soon be seen in the highly-anticipated Daniels’ feature, Everything Everywhere All At Once for A24, premiering opening night at SXSW 2022. She will also reprise her role from James Cameron’s Avatar and will be seen in the forthcoming sequels as well as Paul Feig’s The School for Good and Evil and The Witcher Blood Origin for Netflix.

Rotten Tomatoes ranked Yeoh as the greatest action heroine of all time. She has been featured in People magazine’s annual “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” issue and the BBC featured her on their list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world.

In 2016, Yeoh was appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations and is actively involved in sustainability and environmental efforts.

SPECIAL SCREENING

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

Mon, Apr 25 7:00 PM CASTRO

Veteran Hong Kong martial arts icons Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat face off against newcomer Ziyi Zhang over a stolen sword in Ang Lee’s electrifying epic. Set in the 19th century, during the last days of the Qing Dynasty, Lee’s breakthrough film is an exhilarating blend of lush visuals, awe-inspiring action, and romantic adventure. A cinematic phenomenon, the film boasts an exquisite cast; Peter Pau’s luminous, Oscar®-winning cinematography; Tom Yip’s costume and Oscar-winning production design; and Yuen Woo Ping’s breathtaking fight choreography with its spectacular, gravity-defying wirework. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards®, including Best Director and Best Picture, it won four, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score for Dun Tan’s vivid compositions. Twenty-two years after its release, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, screening at the Festival in glorious 35 mm, retains its power to thrill.

SCHOOLS AT THE FESTIVAL Since 1991, the Schools at the Festival program introduces students ages 6 to 18 to international film and the art of filmmaking while promoting media literacy, deepening insights into other cultures, enhancing foreign language aptitude, developing critical thinking skills, and inspiring a lifelong appreciation of cinema. This section is programmed exclusively for teachers and students.

DOCUMENTARIES: INTERNATIONAL

Children of the Mist Diễm Hà Lệ (Vietnam 2021, 93 min)

Fri, Apr 22 5:30 PM VOGUE Sat, Apr 23 3:00 PM BAMPFA

Living in isolation from the modern world in the mountains of Vietnam, feisty Hmong teenager Di must decide if she will succumb to tradition or bravely choose a different fate.

The Devil’s Drivers Mohammed Abugeth, Daniel Carsenty (Qatar/France/Lebanon/Germany 2021, 93 min)

Mon, Apr 25 8:30 PM ROXIE

“On the left side is Israel; on the right side is Palestine.” Drivers Hamouda and Ismail risk prison or worse to smuggle Palestinian workers into Israel through gaps in the border wall.

La Guerra Civil Eva Longoria Bastón (UK/USA/Mexico 2022, 102 min)

Sat, Apr 23 12:00 PM VICTORIA Sun, Apr 24 7:45 PM BAMPFA

The legendary boxing rivalry between Mexican Julio César Chávez and Mexican American Oscar De La Hoya sets the stage for an examination of identity, tradition, and nationality in Eva Longoria Bastón’s gripping documentary.

Midwives Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing (Myanmar/Canada/Germany 2022, 89 min)

Amidst Myanmar’s escalating civil war, a Buddhist midwife and her Muslim apprentice overcome personal and professional differences to care for their patients at a village clinic in this nuanced documentary.

Mon, Apr 25 6:00 PM ROXIE Sun, May 1 2:30 PM BAMPFA

No Simple Way Home Akuol de Mabior (South Sudan/Kenya/South Africa 2022, 85 min) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

Sat, Apr 23 8:30 PM VOGUE

First-time filmmaker Akuol de Mabior examines the legacy of her father, John Garang de Mabior, revered as the founding father of South Sudan.

Nothing Compares Kathryn Ferguson (UK/Ireland 2022, 97 min)

Fri, Apr 29 8:45 PM VICTORIA

Profiling Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor’s speedy rise to fame and ensuing controversial stances, this documentary serves as an essential reminder of just how ahead of her time she was.

DOCUMENTARIES: USA

Bitterbrush Emelie Mahdavian (USA 2021, 91 min)

Sun, Apr 24 5:30 PM VICTORIA

Seasonal cattlewomen Hollyn and Colie contemplate their itinerant lives as they herd livestock through the majestic mountain ranges of the American West in this illuminating observational documentary.

Black Mothers Love & Resist Débora Souza Silva (USA 2022, 102 min) WORLD PREMIERE

Fri, Apr 29 8:30 PM ROXIE

Wanda Johnson and Angela Williams, mothers of young Black men victimized by police brutality, come together and build a network of community-led support, mutual aid, and healing in this trenchant documentary.

The Exiles Violet Columbus, Ben Klein (USA/Taiwan/France/China 2021, 96 min)

Sat, Apr 23 3:00 PM VICTORIA Sun, Apr 24 2:00 PM BAMPFA

Never-before-seen footage of Chinese dissidents enmeshed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and their bittersweet reflections 30 years later anchor this hybrid of cine-memoir and archival excavation focused on Who Killed Vincent Chin? documentary firebrand Christine Choy.

Fire of Love Sara Dosa (USA/Canada 2021, 93 min)

Sat, Apr 23 1:00 PM CASTRO Sun, APR 24 5:00 PM BAMPFA

A couple’s passion for one another is inextricably bound with the explosive geology that is their life’s work in this stunning documentary portrait of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft narrated by Miranda July.

I Didn’t See You There Reid Davenport (USA 2022, 76 min)

Fri, Apr 29 6:00 PM VICTORIA Sat, Apr 30 3:00 PM BAMPFA

Oakland resident, filmmaker, and disability activist Reid Davenport reflects on matters of visibility, family, and the freak show in his latest personal documentary, winner of Sundance’s Directing Award for US Documentary.

The Janes Tia Lessin, Emma Pildes (USA 2022, 101 min)

Sat, Apr 30 6:00 PM VICTORIA

Timely and fascinating, this examination of a 1960s-era underground abortion collective is a meditation on national anxieties and a capsule of unsung heroes.

Jeannette Maris Curran (USA 2022, 78 min) WORLD PREMIERE

Sat, Apr 23 3:15 PM ROXIE

Filmed in striking vérité, this portrait of competitive bodybuilder and queer single mother Jeannette unfolds as a nuanced story about coping with trauma in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub shooting.

Master of Light Rosa Ruth Boesten (USA/Netherlands 2022, 84 min)

Sun, Apr 24 2:45 PM VOGUE

Classical painter George Anthony Morton strives for success while struggling to reacclimate to his Kansas City hometown and reconnect with family members after a period of incarceration.

Mija Isabel Castro (USA 2022, 88 min)

Thu, Apr 28 5:30 PM VICTORIA

Young Mexican American music manager Doris Muñoz strives to support her undocumented family while defining her own career as a musician and discovering new talent in singer-songwriter Jacks Haupt.

Navalny Daniel Roher (USA/Germany/Russia 2022, 98 min)

Sat, Apr 23 4:30 PM CASTRO

During a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August 2020, someone poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a deadly nerve agent. This riveting documentary explores the question of who tried to kill him and why.

Riotsville, USA Sierra Pettengill (USA 2022, 91 min)

Sun, Apr 24 12:30 PM VICTORIA Sun, May 1 4:30 PM BAMPFA

This stunning essay film employs a treasure trove of archival US military recordings and 1960s broadcast TV as the foundation for a piercing interrogation into the origins of the militarization of American police.

Sell/Buy/Date Sarah Jones (USA 2022, 97 min)

Sun, Apr 24 5:30 PM VOGUE

Tony Award®-winning performer and playwright Sarah Jones transforms and updates her solo show into a richly empathetic hybrid documentary as she travels the country to interview real-life sex workers. Executive produced by Meryl Streep.

The Thief Collector Allison Otto (USA 2022, 94 min)

Fri, Apr 22 5:30 PM VICTORIA

A surreal 20th-century mystery unfolds in this fascinating documentary that unpacks the audacious 1985 heist of a Willem de Kooning painting from an Arizona museum and its shocking recovery 32 years later.

TikTok, Boom. Shalini Kantayya (USA 2022, 90 min)

Sat, Apr 30 3:00 PM VICTORIA

For young people, TikTok is the most popular platform for creating personalized content. But behind the cute videos lurk issues of censorship and data mining. This documentary deftly explores both sides of the TikTok boom.

We Feed People Ron Howard (USA 2022, 90 min)

Sat, Apr 23 5:30 PM VOGUE

Acclaimed director Ron Howard helms this uplifting documentary profiling renowned chef José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen, his nonprofit dedicated to feeding people in the wake of natural and humanitarian catastrophes.

NARRATIVES: INTERNATIONAL

Benediction Terence Davies (UK 2021, 137 min) U.S. Premiere

Fri, Apr 29 4:00 PM BAMPFA Sat, Apr 30 3:00 PM CASTRO

Terence Davies separates man from myth in his masterly portrait of acclaimed antiwar poet Siegfried Sassoon, employing archival footage, gleefully catty dialogue, and an artful crosscutting between the different eras of his subject’s fraught and complex life.

Both Sides of the Blade Claire Denis (France 2022, 116 min)

Sat, Apr 23 8:00 PM CASTRO

Master director Claire Denis reunites with Juliette Binoche to tell the passionate story of a woman torn between two men. Co-starring Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film is scored by Denis regular Stuart Staples.

The Box Lorenzo Vigas (Mexico/USA 2021, 93 min)

Sun, Apr 24 5:00 PM ROXIE

A simple trip to recover his father’s remains evolves into an eye-opening introduction to the insidious world of factory labor for teenager Hatzin when he meets local promoter Mario.

Costa Brava, Lebanon Mounia Akl (Lebanon/France/Spain/Sweden/Denmark/Norway/Qatar 2021, 106 min)

Sun, Apr 24 12:00 PM VOGUE Sat, Apr 30 5:30 PM BAMPFA

Set in the near future but reflecting on current crises in present-day Lebanon, this tense debut portrays three generations of the Badri family, who have retreated from the chaos of Beirut to a rural homestead.

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future Francisca Alegría (Chile/France/USA/Germany 2022, 93 min)

Thu, Apr 28 8:30 PM ROXIE

In her debut feature, director Francisca Alegría creates a magical realist tale of familial legacy and loss, set against a backdrop of environmental decline.

The Employer and the Employee Manolo Nieto (Uruguay/Argentina/Brazil/France 2021, 110 min)

Sun, Apr 24 8:30 PM VICTORIA

In this slow-burning drama, the dynamics of money and power play out between two young fathers in the wake of a tragedy on a Uruguayan farm.

Fire on the Plain Zhang Ji (China 2021, 113 min)

Sun, Apr 24 8:45 PM VOGUE Thu, Apr 28 8:00 PM BAMPFA

The son of a local gangster and daughter of a factory worker conspire to flee their desperate lives as a serial killer runs rampant in this Chinese social realist neo-noir.

The Gravedigger’s Wife Khadar Ayderus Ahmed (Finland/Germany/France 2021, 83 min)

Sun, Apr 24 8:00 PM ROXIE

A loving husband takes to the road to ask for financial help from extended family when chronic kidney disease threatens his wife’s life in this warm and humanistic drama.

Happening Audrey Diwan (France 2021, 100 min)

Fri, Apr 22 7:00 PM BAMPFA Sat, Apr 23 6:00 PM VICTORIA

A bright literature student in 1960s France refuses to let an unwanted pregnancy shatter her life, and seeks an illegal abortion in this powerful drama adapted from Annie Ernaux’s memoir.

Hatching Hanna Bergholm (Finland 2021, 87 min)

Wed, Apr 27 8:45 PM ROXIE

A young gymnast copes with her mother’s overwhelming demands by caring for a large, mysterious egg. When it hatches, things quickly get out of hand.

The Hill Where Lionesses Roar Luàna Bajrami (Kosovo/France 2021, 83 min)

Sat, Apr 23 2:45 PM VOGUE

A trio of lifelong Kosovar friends facing dead-end futures hatches a wild plan that promises an ecstatic moment of freedom and maybe much more in this luminous coming-of-age tale.

Hit the Road Panah Panahi (Iran 2021, 94 min)

Fri, Apr 22 8:30 PM VOGUE Sat, Apr 23 5:30 PM BAMPFA

In Panah Panahi’s auspicious feature debut, an eccentric family takes a road trip through sun-drenched Iranian landscapes as they accompany their eldest son to a mysterious destination.

Întregalde Radu Muntean (Romania 2021, 104 min)

Wed, Apr 27 8:45 PM VICTORIA Sat, Apr 30 7:45 PM BAMPFA

Wryly funny and suspenseful, this Cannes hit portrays a trio of Romanian aid workers whose SUV gets stuck on a logging road in remote Transylvania.

Lo Invisible Javier Andrade (Ecuador/France 2021, 85 min)

Sat, Apr 30 9:15 PM VICTORIA

In her opulent home in the Ecuadorian countryside, Luisa sinks further and further into a forlorn state brought on by a bout with postpartum depression.

Klondike Maryna Er Gorbach (Ukraine/Turkey 2022, 100 min)

Fri, Apr 22 8:30 PM VICTORIA Sun, May 1 7:00 PM BAMPFA

Armed conflict hits home in the most vivid way imaginable when mortar fire decimates one wall of the farmhouse belonging to married Ukrainian couple Irka and Tolik in this striking drama based on real events.

Mars One Gabriel Martins (Brazil 2022, 115 min)

Fri, Apr 22 8:45 PM ROXIE Sat, Apr 23 7:45 PM BAMPFA

Featuring four vibrant characters from working-class Brazil, this tender film is a delightful portrait of a mutually nurturing family who dares to dream.

Neptune Frost Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams (Rwanda/USA 2021, 105 min)

Sat, Apr 23 8:45 PM ROXIE Wed, Apr 27 7:00 PM BAMPFA

Replete with mind-altering visual and sonic imagery, this Afrofuturist mélange of music, poetry, and resistance is hypnotic and visionary in its depiction of a genderqueer community of hackers and techno poets.

Private Desert Aly Murituba (Brazil 2021, 121 min)

Mon, Apr 25 8:30 PM VICTORIA

In this passionate melodrama reflecting on toxic masculinity, a police officer from southern Brazil facing brutality charges travels north to find his internet love Sara, only to be shocked by her flesh-and-blood reality.

Sonne Kurdwyn Ayub (Austria 2022, 88 min)

Sat, Apr 30 5:00 PM ROXIE

When three teenage girlfriends make a home music video to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” their moment of uninhibited camaraderie becomes an unexpected viral sensation in Vienna.

Sublime Mariano Biasin (Argentina 2022, 97 min)

Sat, Apr 23 9:00 PM VICTORIA

Irresistible garage rock enhances this winning coming-of-age tale as teenage bass player Manu, swept up in a cascade of emotions and hormones, falls in love with his BFF and bandmate Felipe.

Sun & Daughter Catalina Razzini (Bolivia/Spain/Germany 2021, 84 min)

Sat, Apr 23 12:00 PM VOGUE

At Lake Titicaca in the mountains of Bolivia, 10-year-old Lucia concocts a mythical reunion with her father, who is away working in La Paz.

Utama Alejandro Loayza Grisi (Bolivia/Uruguay/France 2022, 87 min)

Sun, Apr 24 3:00 PM VICTORIA Thu, Apr 28 6:00 PM BAMPFA

A long drought parching their Bolivian highlands homeland endangers an elderly Quechua llama herder and his wife’s way of life in this intricate examination of the relationship between land and humanity.

Wet Sand Elene Naveriani (Switzerland/Georgia 2021, 115 min)

Sat, Apr 30 12:00 PM VICTORIA

A granddaughter returns to her reclusive grandfather’s seaside village in Georgia after his suicide to organize his funeral only to discover his long-suppressed secret love in this meditative drama about small-town prejudice.

NARRATIVES: USA

Emily the Criminal John Patton Ford (USA 2022, 97 min)

Fri, Apr 29 8:30 PM CASTRO

Aubrey Plaza delivers a pitch-perfect performance as a woman driven by desperation to join a fraud ring who discovers she has a talent for crime in this taut thriller, leavened by bursts of mordant humor.

Montana Story Scott McGehee, David Siegel (USA 2021, 113 min)

Thu, Apr 28 8:30 PM VICTORIA

Haley Lu Richardson and Owen Teague are magnificent as estranged siblings who return to their dying father’s ranch in this incredibly moving drama about healing and moving forward.

Over/Under Sophia Silver (USA 2021, 88 min) WORLD PREMIERE

Sat, Apr 30 2:00 PM ROXIE

Tweens Violet and Stella spend idyllic summers at camp and the beach. As time passes, personalities and bodies evolve in this thoughtful and elegiac indie drama about the everlasting bond of female friendship. Recommended for ages 11 and up.

Palm Trees and Power Lines Jamie Dack (USA 2022, 110 min)

Wed, Apr 27 5:30 PM VICTORIA

Director Jamie Dack depicts the thrills and dangers of adolescent sexuality in this story of bored 17-year-old Lea, who meets a charismatic but potentially dangerous man twice her age.

MID-LENGTHS

American Justice on Trial Andrew Abrahams, Herb U. Ferrette, II (USA 2022, 40 min) WORLD PREMIERE

Fri, Apr 22 6:00 PM ROXIE

This gripping documentary revisits the 1968 Huey Newton trial, one of the most important moments in American judicial history that changed the court system. Screens with For Love and Legacy (dir. A.K. Sandhu) and Men Who Talk (dir. Cristin Stephens). Total runtime 74 min.

Ayoungman Holly Fortier, Larry Day (Canada 2021, 38 min) WORLD PREMIERE

Wed, Apr 27 6:00 PM ROXIE

In the wake of the racially motivated murder of 24-year-old Kristian Ayoungman, the Siksika Nation comes together in this portrait of unity and resilience. Screens with Anshan Diaries (dir. Charles Dong) and My Duduś (dir. Tom Krawczyk). Total runtime 74 min.

Mud Water My-Linh Le (USA 2021, 31 min) WORLD PREMIERE

Fri, Apr 29 5:45 PM ROXIE

Myth, naturalism, and performance blend in this lively chronicle of a Bay Area dance crew preparing for a major battle in turfing, a dance style originated in Oakland. Screens with The Door of Return (dir. Kokutekeleza Musebeni, Anna Zhukovets) and Listen to the Beat of Our Images (dir. Audrey Jean-Baptiste, Maxime Jean-Baptiste). Total runtime 76 min.

My Dear Aragon Yao (Portugal 2021, 30 min) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

Sat, Apr 23 6:00 PM ROXIE

Shifting between observational footage, paper puppetry, and poetic symbolism, a young Chinese filmmaker explores expressions of sexual identity in this essay about queerness, immigration, and performance. Screens with cosboi (dir. Gosha Shapiro) and Blue Veil (dir. Shireen Alihaji). Total runtime 50 min.

The Time of the Fireflies Mattis Appelqvist Dalton, Matteo Robert Morales (Mexico/USA/Belgium 2021, 52 min)

Sat, Apr 30 7:30 PM ROXIE

Miguel left his family behind in Mexico 13 years ago. Now, trapped between his memories and his determination to provide, he struggles to forge a path in New York. Screens with Busan, 1999 (dir. Thomas Kim) and Fanmi (dir. Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers, Carmine Pierre-Dufour). Total runtime 77 min.

Sat, Apr 23 12:00 PM ROXIE

Eight stories weave the connective tissue between one’s identity and the family that helps shape it, for better and for worse, as seen through the eyes of lost children, wayward adults, and those enduring uncontrollable forces demanding who or where we’re supposed to be. Total Runtime: 97 min.

Alma y Paz (dir. Cris Gris) Dear Chantal (dir. Nicolás Pereda) Half-Day (dir. Morgan Mathews) How Small! (dir. Charlene Xu) My Parent, Neal (dir. Hannah Saidiner) Nasir (dir. Nasir Bailey, Jackson Kroopf) Some Still Search (dir. Nesaru Tchaas) tough (dir. Taylor Ferguson)

Tue, Apr 26 5:30 PM ROXIE

Bodies dance, flesh becomes pliable, cycles repeat, and hey, does that face in front of you look familiar? This mix of animated and new visions shorts upends traditional approaches to storytelling, and features work from Latvia, France, China, French Guiana, the UK, and the US. Total Runtime: 84 min.

Anxious Body (dir. Yoriko Mizushiri) Don’t Get Too Comfortable (dir. Shaima Al Tamimi) Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung) (dir. TT Takemoto) Isn’t It a Beautiful World (dir. Joseph Wilson) Life Is a Particle Time Is a Wave (dir. Daniel Zvereff) Norma (dir. Max Weinman) Sierra (dir. Sander Joon) Still Life (dir. Conner Griffith) Thanks Again! (dir. Yifan Jiang)

Sun, Apr 24 2:00 PM ROXIE

From the sleepy suburbs of northern California to the vibrant streets of Panama, dramatic and oftentimes fateful occurrences transform the lives of a young indigenous woman, the daughter of the first Black Miss Panama, a New Orleans hair stylist, and more. Total Runtime: 93 min.

BABYBANGZ (dir. Juliana Kasumu) Holding Moses (dir. Rivkah Beth Medow) Long Line of Ladies (dir. Rayka Zehtabchi, Shaadiin Tome) Miss Panama (dir. Lamar Bailey Karamañites, Pascale Boucicaut) Tuesday Afternoon (dir. Pete Quandt)

Thu, Apr 28 5:30 PM ROXIE

Our past has something to say, if only we are prepared to listen. From distant loves to cryogenic preservation, this collection of narrative and non-fiction shorts from around the world features stories of the past made present again. Total Runtime: 102 min.

Another Life to Live (dir. Ian Adelson, RJ Brown) Charlotte (dir. Zach Dorn) Hannah’s Biography (dir. Patricia Lee) Letter to a Pig (dir. Tal Kantor) Love, Dad (dir. Diana Cam Van Nguyen) Masquerade (dir. Olive Nwosu) My Grandmother Is an Egg (dir. Wu-Ching Chang) Successful Thawing of Mr. Moro (dir. Jerry Carlsson)

Tue, Apr 26 8:30 PM ROXIE

Hailing from all over the world, this eclectic mix of films takes its protagonists on journeys that grant them a better understanding of who they are. From realistic to surreal, each short is as riveting as it is compelling. Total Runtime: 103 min.

All Nighter (dir. Hardik Sadhwani, Ritviq Joshi) All the Crows in the World (dir. Yi Tang) Be Somebody (dir. Edelawit Hussien) Empty Hands (dir. Paolo Marinou-Blanco) Enjoy (dir. Saul Abraham) Live (dir. Baggio Jiang)

Shorts 6: Family Films

Sat, Apr 23 10:00 AM CASTRO

Providing a little something for everyone, this captivating collection of animated, documentary, and narrative shorts spans the globe. Taking us from the moon’s surface to the sacred lands of the Navajo Nation, these films find moments of deep connection in unexpected ways. Recommended for ages 5 and up. Total Runtime: 71 min.

Battery Daddy (dir. Seung-bae Jeon) Dream Carriers (dir. Esmeralda Hernandez) Intervals (dir. Mitchelle Tamariz) Mama Has a Mustache (dir. Sally Rubin) The Ocean Duck (dir. Huda Razzak) ‘Ohana and ‘Āina: Connecting Family, Farming, and Freedom (dir. Jade Onaka, Joel Serin-Christ) Mr. Spam Gets a New Hat (dir. William Joyce) Space Race (dir. Shane Dioneda) The Trails Before Us (dir. Fritz Bitsoie)

Shorts 7: Youth Works

Sat, Apr 30 11:00 AM ROXIE

With resilience, determination, and consideration, young filmmakers breathe life into filmmaking’s future. Through cerebral period pieces, zany parallel futures, and deeply personal and innovative recollections of growing up, this mix of animation, narrative, and documentary introduces a bold yet nuanced approach to storytelling. Recommended for ages 10 and up. Total Runtime: 69 min.

Avi: From the North (dir. Avi Maksagak) Beth (dir. Ava Bounds) Freshman Year (dir. Bea Hammam, Sydney Kaufman) Honeybee (dir. Emilio Vazquez Reyes) Incursion (dir. Noah Lillywhite, Kai Willey) Moments (dir. Hurshida Sherkulova, Evgeniya Papina) Performance Anxiety (dir. Shaina Ocampo) Pho (dir. Ethan Chu) Think Like a Filmmaker (dir. Eli Berliner) Unzipped (dir. Jenna Miller)

ONLINE EVENTS

CROSSINGS: Navigating Visibility

Tue, Apr 26 4:00 PM VIRTUAL AT SFFILM.ORG

Accessibility in the American film industry is limited, inconsistent, and frequently nonexistent. Too often, our colleagues are overlooked or marginalized to the point of invisibility. Beyond identifying growth areas and increasing representation on screen, how can we create a fully accessible film industry? Join us for this special discussion where we explore radically needed shifts to industry standards, economic paradigms, and creative inclusivity. Featuring Dawn Valadez (filmmaker), Emily Smith Beitiks (Associate Director, Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University), Lawrence Carter-Long (Director Of Communications, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), Reid Davenport (filmmaker, Festival 2022), and Asha Phelps (Administrative & Operations Manager, IFC Center). Moderated by Kristen Lopez.

SHIFTING LANDSCAPES: The State of Cinema

Wed, Apr 27 6:30 PM VIRTUAL AT SFFILM.ORG

Filmmakers are no strangers to challenges. From the devastating impact of the global pandemic to momentous changes within the media industry, the last few years have altered the future of cinema and storytelling. Join us as we gather influential industry professionals and impassioned thought leaders to discuss the state of cinema today and tomorrow and explore innovative strategies and opportunities for filmmakers to endure and thrive. Featuring Ryan Werner (Head of Marketing and PR, Cinetic), Karin Chien (Producer), Molly O’ Brien (NBCUniversal, Head of Documentary), and Sonya Childress (Color Congress). Moderated by Zaki Hasan.

KEEP IT BRIEF: Short Films on the Rise

Wed, Apr 27 4:00 PM VIRTUAL AT SFFILM.ORG

Once thought merely as steppingstones to feature films, short films are pushing their way into today’s crowded media landscape and distinguishing themselves from their “taller” counterparts with vivid and concise storytelling. With the abundance of short film festivals, online offerings, streaming services, and public television, there are more ways than ever to view shorts, but is this sustainable for filmmakers seeking funding and audiences seeking content? This panel’s distinguished guests will delve into the current and future state of short-format cinema. Featuring Nicolás Pereda (Dear Chantal); director Adrian Burrell whose short, The Game God(s), is streaming on The New Yorker; Natalie Jasmine Harris whose short, Pure, is streaming on HBO Max; Christine Kecher, the Senior Commissioning Editor for the New York Times’ Op-Docs shorts channel; and Diana Sánchez Maciel, the Head of Programming and Acquisitions for the online short film platform Argo.

Archival Footage in Documentary Filmmaking

Tue, Apr 26 5:00 PM VIRTUAL AT SFFILM.ORG

Key elements in documentary filmmaking, found and archival footage recontextualize history in exciting and innovative fashion, whether bringing to light the real story of the 1971 Attica Prison uprising or showcasing an all-but-forgotten 1969 Harlem music festival. The filmmakers taking part in this talk have employed this material to narrate the lives of volcanologists, spin the stories of musicians, and revisit the career of an outspoken filmmaker and her involvement in Chinese politics and culture. Expected panelists: Violet Columbus and Ben Klein (The Exiles, Festival 2022), Sara Dosa (Fire of Love, Festival 2022), Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, 2021), and Penny Lane (Listening to Kenny G, 2021).

MOVIE MAGIC: How the Music Gets Made

See sffillm.org for date + time

Music looms large in making a film; a score or a soundtrack is as integral to capturing a viewer’s attention and emotions as the imagery onscreen. What is the relationship between music and the larger story? How do a director and composer collaborate to create a mood? How does music work within the larger soundscape of a film? This panel will explore these questions and more as it delves into the alchemical effect of music on film. Featuring Isabel Castro (filmmaker, Festival 2022), Helado Negro (composer, Festival 2022), Saul Williams (musician and filmmaker, Festival 2022), Academy Award-nominated composer Emile Mosseri, and more.

HOMEBASE: A Spotlight on Bay Area Talent

Mon, Apr 25 4:00 PM VIRTUAL AT SFFILM.ORG

The Bay Area is the film industry’s hidden gem. In what is sure to be a lively and insightful conversation, local filmmakers and film organization leaders will highlight their exceptional work, discuss the Bay Area film scene’s shifting landscape, illuminate how the community rooted here shapes the creation of art and film, and share insights and resources that have strengthened their work. Featuring Morgan Matthews, Débora Souza Silva (filmmaker, Festival 2022), Patricia Lee, Adam Bergeron. Moderated by Rosa Morales.

Golden Gate Awards Ceremony

Join us for a virtual presentation of the 2022 SFFILM Golden Gate Awards. Including our juried awards for shorts, mid-lengths, documentaries, new directors, Cine Latino, and other special designations, this live-streamed event will feature SFFILM staff and filmmakers from the festival. Also, don’t miss repeat screenings of the award-winning films.

Saturday, April 30, 11 am (Online Only)

FAMILY WORKSHOPS

Family Workshop: Disney+’s Sketchbook WORLD PREMIERE

SUN, MAY 1 1:00 PM THE WALT DISNEY FAMILY MUSEUM

In the new instructional documentary series Disney+’s Sketchbook, making its world premiere at SFFILM Festival, Disney+ viewers receive an intimate glimpse into the lives of talented artists and animators. Each episode focuses on a single artist teaching us how to draw a single iconic character from a Walt Disney Animation Studios film. As we learn the steps to drawing these characters, we also discover that the artists themselves each have unique stories to tell about how they joined Disney and their chosen character. This workshop will include two full episodes featuring artists Gabby Capili and Eric Goldberg. A Q+A with the artists and the directors behind the production will follow. Gabby and Eric will finish with a live drawing activity featuring some of their favorite characters. Be sure to bring paper and pencils with you to draw along. Presented in partnership with the Walt Disney Family Museum. Recommended for ages 7 and up. Ticket price does not include museum admission. Total Run Time (TRT) 90 min

Family Workshop: Drawings, Books and Movies: The Short Films and Large Whimsies of William Joyce

Sun, Apr 24 11:00 AM ROXIE

Artist William Joyce has worn many hats throughout a creative career that has included authoring and illustrating 50 bestselling children’s books, pioneering in digital animation, and founding an Academy Award®-winning studio. In this workshop, Bill will present a few SFFILM favorites, including the Oscar®-winning The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore. He will also screen his latest creation, Mr. Spam Gets a New Hat, offering a peek behind the curtain as he explains how he and his partners at DNEG Animation and Epic Games crafted this silent, Technicolor wonder that celebrates creativity and the films of yesteryear. The program will finish with Bill leading a live drawing activity featuring some of the favorite characters he has created. Be sure to bring paper and pencils with you to draw along.

Recommended for ages 7 and up.

Total Run Time (TRT) 90 min

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Johnny Depp addresses media frenzy over his and Amber Heard's legal battle

Johnny depp seemingly referred to his june 2022 defamation lawsuit against ex amber heard while promoting his new film, joking that parts of his life turned "into a soap opera.", by sabba rahbar | e online • published september 24, 2024 • updated on september 24, 2024 at 5:48 pm.

Originally appeared on E! Online

Johnny Depp  is reflecting on having aspects of his personal life play out in the public. 

While promoting his latest directorial venture, "Modi - Three Days on the Wings of Madness," at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" star discussed how he related to the film's subject, Amedeo Modigliani, adding that they had both gone through a number of ordeals in their lives — which for Johnny included his high publicized split from ex  Amber Heard .

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"Each has their story," Depp told reporters during a Sept. 24 press conference per  The Hollywood Reporter . "Sure, we can say that I've been through a number of things here and there. But, you know, I'm alright."

And while the 61-year-old — who shares daughter  Lily-Rose , 25, and son Jack, 22, with ex  Vanessa Paradis — is aware that others have "been through a number of things" as well, he joked, "Maybe yours wasn't — didn't turn into a soap opera. Televised, in fact," seemingly a reference to  his and Amber's 2022 defamation trial , which was live-streamed each day.

Photos: Viral Moments From Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's Defamation Trial

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"We all experience and go through what we go through," Depp added. "And those things that we are able to live and remember and use, these are your stripes. You never forget them. So to see these people all teetering on the verge of earning their stripes, desperate to speak but unable to, in a way."

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The "Finding Neverland" star has rarely spoken about his June 2022 defamation trial against his former wife, in which he was  awarded $10.4 million in total damages  after a jury found Heard liable for defaming Depp for a 2018  Washington Post  essay. While the 38-year-old hadn't named him directly in the piece, she referred to herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse." ( Heard herself was awarded $2 million  in in compensatory damages after the jury found that Depp's lawyer had accused her of perpetrating a "hoax.")

In December 2022, Heard — who is mom to 3-year-old daughter  Oonagh —made the decision to settle the defamation lawsuit,  writing on Instagram at the time , "It's important for me to say I never chose this. I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed."

She added, "I make this decision having lost faith in the American legal system, where my unprotected testimony served as entertainment and social media fodder."

Following Heard's decision,  Depp's lawyers said in a statement to E! News  that they were "pleased to formally close the door on this painful chapter for Mr. Depp" and that he would be donating $1 million paid to him by Heard's insurance to charity.

Prior to the 2022 decision, a judge in the High Court  had ruled against Depp  in his 2020 libel case against The Sun.

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