The vibrant atmosphere of New York City recently hosted a prestigious gathering for film enthusiasts—the Egyptian American Film Festival. This year’s edition highlighted an experimental filmmaker whose work not only won accolades at festivals, but attempted to capture how love can move humans. Fraser Kershaw weaved elements of the artform “Live Cinema’” in his latest film, a project previously developed in close collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola.
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An encounter with the unknown evokes two separate but equally powerful spheres of emotion: fear and fascination. In the film Arrival (2016)by Denis Villeneuve, linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with peacefully bridging the dangerous gap of language between humans and the existentially threatening aliens— named heptapods—that have just landed on Earth. The tension between the two parties is immediate: military outposts, constructed within hours, surround the heptapods’ monolithic ships. Everyone, from the characters to the audience to the film’s poster, is haunted by the same question: “Why are they here?” Louise and her team of scientists, witnessing the aliens within the ship—massive, tentacled deep-sea creatures speaking in pulsating whale calls—find themselves at once terrified and deeply invested in decoding the heptapods’ movement and language. The barrier of mutual understanding in encountering something entirely foreign bars both empathetic communication and material self-evaluation. Yet, as powerful a force as Louise’s fear may be, her fascination with what is unquestionably deemed “other” drives her to make first meaningful contact with the heptapods. This same liminal conflict between repulsion and attraction is what defines early experiences in childhood, including and especially those with film, which not only serve as a demonstration of this contradiction, but a resolution of it.
Continue readingJudging is already underway for the 2024 Masoud Yazdani Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship. Articles under consideration are from these fine higher education institutions:
And it is our pleasure to celebrate this year’s judging panel:
Hannah Davenport is a second-year MA Film Studies student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her academic interests include ideological film criticism and fringe cinema.
Dason Fuller is pursuing his MA in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research primarily focuses on politically charged films in American history. Previously, he has published two reviews for Film Matters and one for the “Cucalorus x Film Matters” collaboration in 2023. After obtaining his master’s degree, Dason hopes to enter into film festival or curatorial work.
Alex T. Romero is an aspiring film scholar and MA student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Returning to academia after seven years in the entertainment industry, Alex is informed by his varied experiences in stage management for competitive dance, production travel coordination, film accounting, and creative producing. His scholastic interests include contemporary Hollywood, East Asian cinema, and the history of labor relations in the American film industry.
K. A. Vale earned their MFA in Film Production in 2023 and is currently pursuing an MA in Film Studies, both from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Their research focuses on the aesthetics of video game adaptations in film and streaming and finding the point where film theory and video game theory converge through adaptation. Upon graduation, they intend to pursue academic writing and publishing while preparing for a PhD in Film and Media Studies. When they are not studying and watching movies, they can be found playing video games and reading LGBTQIA+ fiction.
Jackson Whorton is a graduate student pursuing his MA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His primary subjects of research are the intersections between religion and cinema, including religious expression via cinematic form. He’s also interested in exploring film adaptation and cinematic sociology. He spends his free time reading, writing, and drinking coffee.
Many thanks to our judges for their service!
Expect an early 2025 announcement — in the meantime, happy holidays!
My experience at the twelfth annual Chelsea Film Festival regrettably began, not on opening night, but on the following afternoon. My lack of proper black-tie attire prevented me from attending the opening festivities; and my frugality, coupled with my observation that Chelsea was also holding a matinée screening of the opening film on Friday, was enough to convince me not to rush to the nearby Nordstrom’s to rent a tuxedo. So, I arrived at the East Village Regal at 4PM on Thursday, picked up a program and a press pass, and made my way into the theater where the film that I had scouted out the night before was playing.
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The 12th Annual Edition of Chelsea Film Festival announces its list of winners listed below by award category. It introduced both American and international films to the public.
Continue readingFilm Matters announces an open call for papers from current undergraduates, authors who have been invited to revise and resubmit previous submissions (including authors who did not make it past our prescreening for a previous call), and recently graduated undergraduates for consideration in issue 17.1 (2026).
The deadline is March 1, 2025.
As a reminder, Film Matters is now using MLA 9th edition style, although we will still accept MLA 8th edition formatting — so please prepare your submissions accordingly. Purdue OWL’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide is an excellent resource to consult for help with this.
For more information about this call for papers, please see the official document (PDF):
In addition to your essay text file, submissions should now include our mandatory contributor intake form, which collects author and essay metadata, as a separate attachment; all other identifying information should be removed from the body of the essay text file, as well as the headers/footers, in order to aid the double-blind peer review process.
Submissions and questions should be directed to:
Please note that Film Matters does not accept submissions that are currently under review by other journals or magazines.
We look forward to hearing from you! Submit your film- and media-related research papers today!
Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Sophia Rubino: My article combines two different analytical frameworks, object-relations psychoanalysis and phenomenology, to bring together the unconscious happenings of the mind and how they manifest in conscious choices. To me, this sort of work is only truly meaningful when you consider the subject (in my case, as I highlight, it’s Gustav von Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde) and the identities that dictate their overall societal treatment. The most important factor to me, the one which limits his ability as perceived by others and ultimately himself, is age. My primary objective was to dive into the processes of thinking that lead to the oppression of the elderly, much of these fears of aging and death being a manifestation of assigning moral judgments based on an individual’s ability.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Qingheng Yu: This article discusses the interesting relationship between two Chinese films, The Goddess (1934) and The Flowers of War (2011), produced at different times while featuring the same historical period. I wish to explore the concepts of transnationalism, modernism, and globalization expressed by the two films, which eventually seek to establish a national identity. From a feminist perspective, the investigation of the reception of history over time also raises new questions and insights into the historical events with a wider range of knowledge.
Continue readingThe 12th Annual Edition of Chelsea Film Festival will be presenting 3 Narrative Features, 13 Narrative Shorts, 2 Indie Episodics directed by Latinx Filmmakers.
Continue readingThe 12th Annual Edition of Chelsea Film Festival will be presenting 4 Narrative Features, 3 Documentaries, 26 Narrative Shorts and 2 Indie Episodics, totaling 35 films directed by LGBTQ+ filmmakers.
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