Sukhdev Sandhu

Contributor at The Guardian

Articles

The filmmakers who also cut records

2 weeks ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Sukhdev Sandhu

Many filmmakers’ richest relationships are with the musicians who score their work. The haunting, otherworldly atmosphere of Werner Herzog’s early features owes a good deal to the eerie, almost mystic soundscapes of the German band Popol Vuh. No film by French auteur Claire Denis would be complete without the brooding tristesse and hushed tactility of Nottingham-formed Tindersticks and their charismatic frontman Stuart Staples.
Grand Tour

3 weeks ago | 4columns.org | Sukhdev Sandhu

Grand Tour Sukhdev Sandhu Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s strangely eurythmic reimagining of Somerset Maugham’s 1930 novel The Gentleman in the Parlour. Gonçalo Waddington as Edward in Grand Tour. Courtesy CMPR. Grand Tour, directed by Miguel Gomes, now playing at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City• • •To Asia? A splendid idea. Very, very splendid. Time was when all sorts of Brits would head East. To Calcutta, Bangkok, Rangoon. The hope? Disorientation.
The Possibility of Tenderness by Jason Allen-Paisant review – a Jamaican childhood

3 weeks ago | msn.com | Sukhdev Sandhu

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The Possibility of Tenderness by Jason Allen-Paisant review - a Jamaican childhood

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Sukhdev Sandhu

Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. Some volumes are philosophical, others urgent calls for climate justice. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration.
The very soil of moviemaking

1 month ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Sukhdev Sandhu

What has soil got to do with film? The obvious answer is nothing. Soil makes us think of nature, deep time, the ground beneath us. Film, by contrast, is urban, a modern art form, something to be looked at on a big screen. Soil may be present in movies, but it’s mostly unseen: a drive-by landscape, a backdrop in a Western, an establishing shot that tells us we’re in the countryside. Exceptions?
The era of Akerman

2 months ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Sukhdev Sandhu

Back in 1976, Le Monde hailed Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of cinema”. Such praise was far from universal. During its premiere at Cannes the year before, the French novelist and director Marguerite Duras is said to have stood up, declared “This woman’s crazy”, and stormed out. The sound of audience members groaning or beating a retreat was commonplace.
The Wickedest

Jan 24, 2025 | 4columns.org | Sukhdev Sandhu

The Wickedest Sukhdev Sandhu Caleb Femi’s joyous poetry documents chaos and community at a legendary house party in South London. The Wickedest, by Caleb Femi, MCD, 84 pages, $18• • •Poor, Caleb Femi’s first poetry collection, from 2020, was about boys from the endz. From a public-housing estate in Peckham, South London. A place that, in his telling, was the very definition of hostile architecture. Hungry youths, blades and bullets (everywhere, useless), the staring flatness of CCTV.
Films of the Year: 2024

Dec 26, 2024 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Sukhdev Sandhu

La Chimera made me think of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of Powell & Pressburger. Of how long it had been since I’d been sent on such a vagrant, enjoyable path at the movies. Italy in the early 1980s: Josh O’Connor is a moody, Belmondo-esque archaeologist who—dowsing rod in hand—loots Etruscan tombs with a band of life-loving reprobates. Also on his mind: lost love Beniamina. Squabbles and camaraderie. Costumes and colourful songs. Do they all really know where they’re going?
And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing review - a dying writer’s journal

Dec 26, 2024 | theguardian.com | Sukhdev Sandhu

And the Walls Became the World All Around, its title taken from a line in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, is gashed, keening, forensic. It has been finessed from 13 notebooks kept by the Swedish poet and artist Johanna Ekström who, just a week before she died of cancer in spring 2022, asked her friend Sigrid Rausing to transcribe them with a view to publication. Such an unusual – perhaps even onerous – request.
How Putin kills the news

Nov 26, 2024 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Sukhdev Sandhu

Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends begins with a doomy portent: “The world you are about to see no longer exists; none of us knew what was about to happen.” A parodic tease, no? Something designed to prep us for a science fiction thriller? Alas, it’s the truth. The film, lasting five and a half hours and subtitled Last Air in Moscow, is a work of slow horror.