Murtada Elfadl

3 weeks ago | variety.com | Murtada Elfadl

Director Monica Strømdahl’s “Flophouse America” provides a visceral documentation of poverty in America. Flophouses are cheap, run-down motels where many people are forced to live when they cannot afford better housing. For her feature documentary debut, Strømdahl spent many years touring such places in America and taking photos of their inhabitants. Then she met Mikal, whose story she tells in “Flophouse America,” and decided stills were not enough.

3 weeks ago | variety.com | Murtada Elfadl

Gorgeously rendered in picturesque cinematography, “Always” offers a meditative and patient look into the life of an adolescent poet in rural China. But the poetry is not limited to the protagonist’s words, which appear as intertitles throughout the film; it is also there in the images captured of him, his family, classmates and his small village and its people.

4 weeks ago | variety.com | Murtada Elfadl

Shot in 2019 and set entirely in the Mozambican city of Inhambane, “Balane 3” has a kinetic rhythm that brings the city to vivid life on screen. Director Ico Costa, who has made other documentaries in Mozambique, has a roving camera that manages to tell a place’s story through its people while never identifying anyone by name or following them in the traditional cinéma vérité style.

1 month ago | variety.com | Murtada Elfadl

“Queen of the Ring” starts in the middle of a wrestling match, as an athlete musters all their determination to take control of a pivotal career match-up. The film then goes into flashback to tell the story of said athlete, Mildred Burke (Emily Bett Rickards), a female pioneer in the male-dominated professional wrestling world.

1 month ago | anothergaze.com | Murtada Elfadl

Nothing has been as persistent as the universal sense of grief we have experienced over the last few years. A grief that cannot be pushed away or remade into fuel for something else and whose collective nature ensures no escape. Two films by the promising visual artist Leena Habiballa transform this affect into a historical and political question, grounding it in a genealogy and ecology of social relations.