Media, Art, and Culture ISSN 1918-4026 Intermedias Review is an independent publication based on reviews of art, media, and their interconnections. We…
Susanne Rostock’s *Following Harry* explores the extraordinary political legacy of Harry Belafonte and his influence on generations of artists and activists. Moving from the civil rights movement to contemporary struggles against racism and injustice, the documentary emphasizes solidarity, nonviolent resistance, and collective responsibility. Although its celebratory approach leaves important questions unanswered about the personal and professional costs of Belafonte’s activism, the film offers a powerful reminder that the struggle for social justice remains unfinished.
Bart Schrijver’s The North follows two longtime friends undertaking an ambitious walking expedition across the Scottish Highlands. Adopting an observational, almost documentary-like approach, the film explores the tensions between physical companionship and emotional distance, revealing how masculinity, professional responsibilities, and changing expectations can challenge a longstanding friendship. Although its restrained cinematography occasionally misses opportunities to capture the landscape’s extraordinary beauty, the film offers a perceptive and quietly melancholic reflection on the difficulties of maintaining emotional intimacy.
Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility (2026) offers a more restrained and naturalistic interpretation of Jane Austen’s celebrated novel, emphasizing economic insecurity, social conventions, and romantic disappointment. Despite its attractive cinematography and competent performances, the adaptation struggles to reconcile its realistic ambitions with the emotional demands of the story, making the hardships of romance more convincing than its enchantment.
My review of Kátia Mesel’s Recife de Dentro pra Fora (1997), a remarkably beautiful short film that transforms the Capibaribe River into a poetic portrait of Recife’s cultural identity, social inequalities, and environmental struggles. Inspired by João Cabral de Melo Neto’s O Cão sem Plumas, the film brings together powerful imagery, poetry, and the voices of Geraldo Azevedo, Elba Ramalho, and Zé Ramalho. Recently restored in 4K and presented at the Brazil Film Fest Toronto 2026, the film stands as both a declaration of love for Recife and an important work of Pernambuco’s cinematic and cultural memory.
My review of Allan Deberton’s *Gugu’s World (Feito Pipa)*, a delicate and moving coming-of-age drama set in the dry landscapes of Ceará, Brazil. With an extraordinary performance by Yuri Gomes, the film introduces a boy whose exuberance, femininity, and confidence transcend conventional gender boundaries. While his grandmother’s fading memory threatens the freedom she has nurtured, his father struggles to accept him as he is. Beautifully observed and emotionally sensitive, the film creates a remarkable protagonist whose vitality and complexity sometimes exceed the dramatic strength of the story surrounding him.
My review of Guga Paes and Cainã Souza’s D’un autre monde: Moh Dafok, a colourful, funny, and beautifully produced portrait of a Brazilian drag queen who transforms Montréal into her personal stage. Dynamic images, animation, humour, and Moh Dafok’s extraordinary charisma make the short immediately engaging, even as its promise to reveal the person behind the extravagant persona remains tantalizingly unfulfilled.
My review of Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Night Stage (Ato Noturno), a queer drama-thriller connecting acting and politics through ambition, masculinity, desire, and the dangerous need to be seen. Bold in its characters’ behaviour yet surprisingly conventional in its aesthetic choices, the film explores two men whose professions depend on carefully performing public identities while their desires continually threaten to destabilize them.
My review of Felipe Scholl’s Streets of Gloria (Ruas da Glória), an uneasy queer drama about grief, desire, class, and the fear of solitude. Moving between the streets of Rio, its nightlife, and Gabriel’s memories of his grandmother, the film follows a young man drawn toward a world far removed from his privileged background as he searches for belonging, intimacy, and another way of understanding himself.
Explore my reviews from the Brazil Film Fest Toronto 2026, from contemporary Brazilian features to short films highlighting the growing cinematic connections between Brazil and Canada.
The King of the Internet becomes most compelling when Daniel Nascimento is understood not simply as a gifted hacker or a young criminal, but as a digital-age version of the Brazilian malandro. Fabrício Bittar transforms jeitinho into hacking and technological knowledge into power, creating an entertaining portrait of the early Brazilian Internet in which ingenuity, ambition, and playful transgression gradually give way to manipulation, exploitation, and crime.
Digger is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s grotesque theatrical satire of capitalism, climate catastrophe and political power, with a radically transformed Tom Cruise playing an oil magnate whose world gradually reveals itself as performance.
Several films emerged as major highlights, particularly Fjord, Elsinore, On Behalf of My Son, Soumsoum, A Good Little Soldier, Minotaur, Coward, and Bitter Christmas. The festival’s audience awards also intersected closely with my coverage: La Bola Negra received the People’s Choice Award, while Elsinore won the International People’s Choice Award, with Possible Love and The Assassin(s) recognized as runners-up. The success of two films centred on gay lives and histories was particularly meaningful, reflecting the openness of Toronto audiences to queer stories told through very different cinematic and historical perspectives.
La Gradiva follows French high-school students in Pompeii as buried desires, family histories, sexual tensions, and questions of identity surface among the ruins. Marine Atlan transforms archaeology into a powerful metaphor for adolescence and repression.
Habeas Corpus is an intense, technically efficient series with strong cultural relevance. Its greatest achievement is bringing the courtroom drama into a distinctly Brazilian context through a social issue of real urgency: wrongful convictions, procedural failures, and the fragility of trust in the justice system. That subject feels particularly timely in Brazil today, at a moment when the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) itself is under intense public scrutiny amid allegations, internal disputes, questions surrounding judicial conduct, and highly contentious proceedings broadcast live on television. In this context, a series about failures within the judiciary acquires a resonance that goes well beyond its individual cases: it inevitably speaks to a society increasingly questioning how justice is exercised, represented, and trusted.
Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend traces Gilles Villeneuve’s early years, from snowmobile racing and financial struggle to the threshold of Formula 1. Yan Lanouette Turgeon delivers a polished and accessible Quebec biopic, anchored by Rémy Goulet and Rosalie Bonenfant, even if its portrait remains more precise than psychologically adventurous.
My review of Bahman Ghobadi’s *Trees Are Watching*, a striking environmental horror film starring Eva Green and set in Mardin, Turkey. Blending supernatural beliefs, family trauma, and ecological destruction, the film imagines trees as guardians of the dead and repositories of cultural memory, raising the unsettling possibility that nature might eventually retaliate against human violence. Drawing on Ghobadi’s reflections at TIFF 2026, I explore how his film transforms the conventions of supernatural horror into a disturbing fable about environmental destruction, inherited trauma, and the fragile relationship between humanity and the natural world.
The Assassin(s) works so well because it remains both politically ser
ious and highly entertaining. It is at once a historical drama, investigative film, action thriller, and political conspiracy story. The constant accumulation of information, the newsroom battles, the censorship, the police investigation, and the uncertainty around the assassination attempt give the film an unusually strong rhythm.
The film clearly belongs to the tradition of Slow Cinema, and at times recalls the work of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and the broader aesthetic associated with Taiwan’s Second New Wave: long durations, sparse action, quiet spaces, and a focus on everyday gestures rather than conventional plot development. But unlike the strongest examples of that tradition, The World Before never develops a sufficiently distinctive visual or emotional point of view.
Written and directed by Stéphane Brizé, A Little Good Soldier (Un bon petit soldat) returns to the world of work that has defined several of his films, including The Measure of a Man (2015), At War (2018), and Another World (2021). Once again, Vincent Lindon inhabits that universe, here playing the company boss opposite Alba Rohrwacher as Carla, the film’s central character. This time, however, Brizé moves away from the serious, socially engaged realism of those earlier dramas toward something closer to dark comedy and scathing satire. The film remains concerned with work, hierarchy, pressure, and institutional violence, but irony and sarcasm create a more detached, psychologically charged, and sharply critical tone.
My review of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s *Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars*, a remarkably beautiful and fluid Chadian film that transforms African oral traditions, ancestral knowledge, and spirituality into an extraordinary cinematic experience. Through Kellou, a young woman confronting prejudice and patriarchal authority, the film explores the intimate connections between nature, the living, the dead, and the invisible world. Rich in cultural memory and poetic imagery, *Soumsoum* masterfully brings together mythology, contemporary social concerns, and inherited wisdom without ever becoming didactic, revealing the extraordinary expressive possibilities of cinema.
My review of Ferit Karahan’s *Djinn Wedding*, an ambitious Turkish family drama that combines Anatolian folklore, patriarchal traditions, and magical realism in a story of inherited trauma and buried family secrets. Set against striking mountainous landscapes and unfolding across three periods in the lives of four siblings, the film explores marriage rituals, family obligations, and a mysterious curse. Yet despite its powerful imagery and intriguing symbolism, abrupt narrative transitions and unresolved dramatic threads frequently undermine its emotional impact, creating a film whose mysteries are often more frustrating than illuminating.