Cinema Ritrovato is a nine-day festival at the Cineteca di Bologna that celebrates new restorations of widely unseen archival cinema. Maggie Hennefeld recounts her experience as a spectator and participant in the June 2025 edition, where she filled her festival docket with unruly visions of feminist and women-made cinema. Her viewings included French comedies by Coline Serreau, anti-colonial films by Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon) and Sumitra Peries (Sri Lanka), silent-era melodramas accompanied by live music, sizzling Nordic noirs, and Katharine Hepburn’s feminist acrobatics featured in a retrospective curated by Molly Haskell. Hennefeld concludes with a reflection about how Serreau’s rousing call to “smash the patriarchy” uncannily echoed her own participation in a panel that followed a screening of Karen Pearlman’s archival film Breaking Plates (2024), in which “cinema’s first nasty women” come back to life to galvanize a feminist revolution.

Acclaimed for her female-driven documentaries, Ukrainian Iryna Tsilyk turned her lens toward the male experience of war and becoming in Rock. Paper. Grenade (2022). In this profile and interview, Tsilyk discusses the nascence of national identity in post-Soviet Ukraine, musical ouroboroi, and the creative liberties she took while adapting Artem Chekh’s novel Who Are You? into her first filmic foray into fiction. At the heart of this film is Tsilyk’s commitment toevery generation of Ukrainian, including those that have served the Soviet state.

This experimental essay explores Barbara Loden’s film Wanda (1970) as a haunting and time shifting work of American independent cinema with a nascent feminist force resident in its descriptive aesthetic of exposure. Written in 2018 on the occasion of the inaugural screening of the cineclub The Machine That Kills Bad People at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), the text is reprinted here with a new introduction by the author on the occasion of “Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden,” a season of screenings curated by the author at BFI Southbank, London, in June 2025.

This essay argues that the popularity of the recent blockbuster film adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked lies in the film’s sustained investigation of people’s painful and self-destructive need to seek approval from false sources of authority. By placing the psycho-social rivalry of two talented but flawed young aspiring sorceresses at its center, the movie argues that genuinely solidarity between them is fundamentally undermined by their individual desires to be seen, recognized, deemed popular or talented by figures of illegitimate authority like the corrupt Wizard of Oz.

This essay introduces the contributions to Special Focus: Hong Kong Cinephilia Reimagined by providing an overview of the history of cinephilia in Hong Kong. It synthesizes recent primary research on the remarkably energetic, experimentally-oriented film culture that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, with the rise of independent publications, film societies, and amateur filmmaking. The history of Hong Kong cinephilia is, at its most striking, a history of endeavors to meaningfully disrupt hegemonic systems of production, distribution, and exhibition. The pursuit of otherwise unavailable viewing experiences encompassed several factors, including the construction of material alternatives to dominant economies of the moving image and the creation of new networks, relations, and organizational forms for the making, screening, and discussion of films.

San Sebastian’s 72nd edition featured a number of gloomy films that nevertheless celebrated resilience. Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Huo Xin’s Bound in Heaven, and Lola Arias’s Reas all presented grim stories with triumphant strains of endurance. Sean Baker’s Anora is celebrated as one of the year’s outstanding films.

Halina Reijn’s film Babygirl (2024) explores the problem of “role-work,” wherein a subject’s personal expression and ideological beliefs are recast as performance of labor, resulting in a specific form of neoliberal alienation. Despite the film’s sadomasochistic seduction plot, filled with steamy sex scenes designed to appeal to the gaze, Reijn’s film demands attention to the auditory, retraining its audience to discern the difference between performed displays of desire and feminist political virtue, and authentic expressions of need and identification. This discernment opens up possibilities for “role-play” which allows neoliberal subjects to reconcile themselves with forbidden desires in ethically and emotionally positive ways.