In a world that increasingly overturns geographic specifics, is attention to space a new mode of artistic dissent? Michael Pattison considers the question in light of two new landscape documentaries.
Cut loose from Arts Council funding, this year’s edition of the North East’s invaluable arts biennial forged on with its exploration of socialist pasts and futures against a distracted and hostile climate, writes Michael Pattison.
The Berlin Film Festival jury’s top prize choice was a distinct(ive) surprise, but 2018 included a breadth of finds to write home about, to judge by this straw poll of our correspondents.
The prolific Ukrainian director’s latest crowd canvas studies a corner of Berlin that is forever Red – the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park – with his usual canny abstraction, says Michael Pattison.
Milan Marić brings a commanding wit to his portrayal of writer Sergei Dovlatov in the new dense and formally rigorous film from Alexei German, Jr, writes Michael Pattison.
The beatboxer and sound artist is accompanying John Grierson’s silent documentary on a tour of British fishing towns. He tells Michael Pattison how he channels the sound of the deep and the distant past for each performance.
Manchester-born and -blooded crime writer Tom Benn tells Michael Pattison about the cinema that influenced his screenplay for a kitchen-sink horror set during the satanic abuse panic of the early 1990s, which premieres at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.