Patrick Gamble

Since forming in 2020, bar italia, have released a steady stream of music. Throughout that time the group have ruthlessly preserved their anonymity; rarely granting interviews or sharing images of themselves online. However, that’s all about to change following the release of Tracey Denim, the band’s first release for Matador Records.

For the Pop issues of The Skinny I wrote a brief capsule about James Gray's Ad Astra and how it's the perfect example of why popular films don't need to be brainless or unambitious.

In English, YIAN translates as ‘swallow’. It’s a fitting metaphor for an album that majestically soars to blissful plateaus, but the inspiration behind the title of Lucinda Chua’s debut comes from the name her parents gave her to preserve a link to her Chinese heritage.

When Daniel Kasman covered the Locarno Festival on Notebook in 2017 he hit upon a great way of engaging with standout work. In his introduction, he explained that he would be “looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes…that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.” This seemed like a great way to engage with the creative work in a milieu like a festival - to concentrate on that which lingers rather than attempting to highlight everything. As such,

It’s hard to imagine a better title for Kate Shilonosova’s latest album than WOW. The Russian songwriter, best known as Kate NV, has always approached music with a childlike curiosity; her compositions wavering between a genuine post-internet pop and the iconoclastic product of outsider art.

“Are you a good guy, or a bad guy?” asks Smiley (Wang Yiwen), the adorable young daughter of Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), the middle-aged divorcee at the centre of Zhang Lü’s The Shadowless Tower. A failed poet-turned-food critic living in the cramped apartment he inherited from his mother, Gu’s life is in disarray, which is probably why his his daughter is currently being taken care of by his sister Wenhui (Li Qinqin). He isn’t offended by his daughter’s question though, after all, he’s been asking it about his own father since he was five years-old.

Although Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO has been favourably compared to Au Hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson's 1966 masterpiece in which he parallels the mistreatment of a young farmer’s daughter with a donkey who is brutalised and exploited, the veteran Polish director’s latest is very much its own beast. The film follows EO, a grey donkey named after his distinctive bray, who is forced to embark on a heart-wrenching odyssey across Europe after a group of animal rights protestors shut down the circus where he works.

I wrote the booklet essay for SecondRun's Blu-ray release of Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki's El Mar La Mar.

Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras has made a career out of documenting individuals who stand up to powerful forces. Her previous subjects include Edward Snowden (Citizenfour) and Julian Assange (Risk), so it’s perhaps no surprise that she was drawn to Nan Goldin, a photographer who has revolutionised the art world in more ways than one.

For ALT/KINO’s end of year review I wrote some words about Joanna Walsh’s book ‘MISS-COMMUNICATION.’ Ojoboca’s ‘Instant Life’, Janis Rafa’s ‘Lacerate’, Jason Sharp’s performance at Cafe Oto and the Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol installation in the Chilean Pavilion at this year’s Biennale.

In 2015, during his widely debated TED talk, American entrepreneur and visual artist Chris Milk described Virtual Reality as “the ultimate empathy machine.” Since then it has become an emergent and rapidly evolving medium in non-fiction filmmaking, but can VR really influence the way we think as individuals, and as a society? How can artists use this technology to create change in the world today? Those were the questions at the forefront of the Expanded strand at this year’s London Film Festival.

ALT/KINO is covering the Experimenta strand of this year’s London Film Festival via a series of correspondences between Patrick Gamble and Sophia Satchell-Baeza. In the third of these missives, Patrick reflects on the obfuscation and emergence of narratives within and around films screened.

ALT/KINO is covering the Experimenta strand of this year’s London Film Festival via a series of correspondences between Patrick Gamble and Sophia Satchell-Baeza. In the first of these messages, Patrick discusses some of the films in the programme ‘Some Say the Devil is Dead.'

Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, begins on 17 July 2014, the same day a passenger airliner was shot down over the occupied Donbas region. The loud explosion we hear at the start of the film, however, has nothing to do with the horrific deaths of the 298 people onboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but a misdirected mortar hitting the home of Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna), a heavily pregnant woman living near the Russian border.