Matt Turner

Matt Turner is a writer and programmer based in London. He has written for places including MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, Variety, BOMB Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail, and runs the experimental film screening series LOST FUTURES.

Articles by Matt Turner

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Scottish documentaries look to the world

Without bluster but with a determinedly international outlook, Scotland’s documentary industry is pointing to the future, report Chloe Trayner and Matt Turner.

Friday, December 13, 2019

Unfiction
Animistic Apparatus: cinema for the spirits

From Thailand to Berwick-Upon-Tweed, a group of artists are curating outdoor film screenings for non-human audiences: projecting movies in the black of night to the natural, and supernatural, world, writes Matt Turner.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Features
Reclaiming failure: Zia Anger’s My First Film performance

When the filmmaker offered a live text commentary on a ‘failed’ work at Sheffield Doc/Fest, the process was breathtakingly intimate as it revealed the true costs of working in this industry, writes Matt Turner.

Friday, June 21, 2019

Festivals
Japanese experimental documentary now

For its 2019 edition, Sheffield Doc/Fest spotlights the latest shapeshifting nonfiction cinema to emerge from Japan. Matt Turner sees the boudaries pushed.

Saturday, June 8, 2019

Features
Art within the machine: how machinima turns the camera on videogames

People having been making movies out of videogame graphics since the technology first allowed players to press record. Whether fan homages shared online, pointed critiques or gallery pieces, these works are part of a thriving and fast-evolving practice, writes Matt Turner.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Features
Blackout: sliding out of obsolescence

The last Kodak carousel slide projector was manufactured in 2004, but artists continue to be inspired by them, as this exhibition of lost memories and forgotten pasts revealed, reports Matt Turner.

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Festivals
Can a documentary festival help open up Central Asia?

The new Central Asian Documentary Festival wants to give voice to the former Soviet ‘stan’ republics, despite pressures that make it easier for foreign filmmakers to represent the region, reports Matt Turner.

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Festivals
Los Otros: building an experimental film community in the Philippines

Filipino directors Shireen Seno and John Torres tell Matt Turner why they consider hosting workshops and curating screenings to be as central to their practice as producing new films.

Friday, November 23, 2018

Interviews
The fabric of freedom: Laura Huertas Millán’s ethnographic filmmaking

Rooted in anthropology and documentary practices, the distinctive films of the French-Colombian filmmaker and artist explore complicated structures of freedom, writes Matt Turner.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Sight & Sound articles
Nathaniel Dorsky’s Arboretum Cycle: the photosynthesis of film

The artist-filmmaker captures a rare sculptural quality of light in his latest work, which comprises seven films of plant life in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, plunging the audience into the undergrowth, writes Matt Turner.

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Features