Film Matters Magazine

What would it be like if your child disappeared one day?

What would it be like to have everyone call your grief a lie?

What would it be like to pick up the shattered pieces, and begin to move on?

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, North Korean spies purportedly kidnapped Japanese citizens for reasons never made clear. And while this is now a thing of the past, something that happened generations ago, an important question about humanity still lingers: why is it that we treat these headlines as just words until they significantly affect us?

Stolen is about just such a headline. But it’s told from the perspective of the family that loses a boy to such a kidnapping. A modern re-imagining of these true accounts, director Taka Tsubota’s indie film explores how the incendiary nature of media exacerbates the lives of an already grieving family, and how they are reduced to tools or mere talking points among pundits, politicians, and laypeople. The sad truth of the matter is that we love thy neighbor only if it bodes well us.

Stolen, then, is about shedding a light on what is otherwise just a headline, on the family that may otherwise just be a talking point, on the humanity that lies beneath a trove of inhumanity or, at best, negligence. It is about each of the family members dealing with this loss in their own way, despite the political and diplomatic debate that their son’s disappearance sparks on the international level.

This is a film that will be released worldwide through Amazon Prime, and for those residing in Los Angeles, an L.A. premiere will be held at the Japanese American National Museum on February 7, 2020. Join the director and everyone who worked tirelessly on this indie Japanese film to engage in a story about a tragedy most may not have heard of. Something real, intimate, and human. Something that may otherwise just be a headline.

Stolen trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JU1w5oUdkc

Get your tickets here: https://stolen2020.eventbrite.com

Follow @fortune8official on Instagram for the latest information. 

Film Matters is pleased to announce, officially, the release of issue 10.1, our first issue of 2019!

In this issue, you will find these peer-reviewed feature articles:

• Rediscovering Paris, Rediscovering Identity: An Exploration of Sounds and Voice in Cléo from 5 to 7 by Anne Billingsley
• Film Noir Heroes and the American Dream: Examining Contradictions in American Ideology through Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence by Sean Carson
• The Stigmatization of Queer Black Women in Television by Thomas Cruz
• Space Sirens: The Portrayal of Women in French New Wave Sci-Fi by Gabrielle Despaigne
• Off-Script: Toward a Revolutionary Arab Cinema by Safwat Nazzal
• Celebrity Theorists and the Filmic Embodiment of Thought by Edouard Saakashvili
• Manipulating the Masses with Modernism: The Weapon of Abstraction by Chamberlain Staub
• “Movies Are Supposed to Move, Stupid”: Examining Movement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée by Grace Wallace
• Filmic Architect or Architectural Filmmaker?: Examining the Relationship Between Space and Cinema in the Work of Michelangelo Antonioni by Nashuyuan Serenity Wang
• Generational Horror: A Comparison of Tim Curry’s and Bill Skarsgård’s Portrayals of Pennywise in Stephen King’s IT by K. M. Wise

A guest-edited dossier — Fake News — by Amanda Ann Klein (East Carolina University):

• Fishing for Fake News by John Cordova
• Fiction and Reality: The Characters and Characterization of Fox News by Madeline Daniel
• When Covering Too Much Results in Not Covering Enough: An Essay on NBC News by Cara Hairston
• Intentions of the HuffPost by Ida Misghina
• Fake News: CNN’s Digital Trends by Kylee Pearl

As well as book, film, and DVD/Blu-ray reviews by:  Evan Amaral, Catherine Traci Colson, Alexis Dickerson, Lily C. Frame, Matt Johnson, Alexandria Rose Moore, Andrew P. Nielsen, Ashley R. Pickett, Cheyenne Puga, Ashley R. Spillane, Karl Watkins, Andrew Ryan Wentz, Adam Wiener, and Emmett Williams.

For more details about this issue, please visit: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/fm/2019/00000010/00000001

We’re always looking for new undergraduate authors! So if you are interested in publishing, get in touch with us today.

Judging for the 2019 Masoud Yazdani Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship has officially begun, thanks to the hard work of our volunteer judges:

Charlie Michael received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. In general, his work focuses on popular film and media industries with a particular focus on French and Francophone cinema. His first monograph, French Blockbusters: Cultural Politics of a Transnational Cinema, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019; he co-edited a book with Tim Palmer, Directory of World Cinema: France (Intellect, 2013).

Alison Taylor teaches film studies and ethics at Bond University in Queensland, Australia. Her film course, “Sex, Love and the Movies,” focuses on gender representation, sexuality, and censorship across significant moments in film history. Research-wise, she’s interested in European art cinema, particularly the intersection between representations of extreme violence within otherwise ordinary, everyday settings and narratives. Her first monograph, Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. Currently, she is writing about the performance style and career of French legend, Isabelle Huppert. 

Tom Ue researches and teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, intellectual history, and cultural studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press) and the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press). Ue has held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.

This is Tom Ue’s second term of judging for Film Matters, incidentally, not to mention his various guest-edited dossier contributions to our print issues!And we are particularly thankful to Masoud Yazdani Award regular, Michael Benton (Humanities Professor at Bluegrass Community & Technical College), for his help in judging the essay mentored by Alison Taylor this year. We couldn’t do this without you, Michael and Tom!

Film Matters is incredibly grateful to the 2019 judges for the service they are providing! And we look forward to announcing the results late 2019/early 2020.

So please watch this space!