Martine Syms's The African Desperate is now showing exclusively on Mubi in the series Debuts and Glitch Zone: Films by Martine Syms.When the college campus is deployed in film or in fiction, it is usually a symbol of possibility: the point at which the world is said to open up. But in Martine Syms’s debut feature, The African Desperate, the college campus feels like the claustrophobic vortex where possibility goes to die. The film’s protagonist, Palace, played brilliantly by the artist and poet Diamond Stingily, is in the last 24 hours of her low-residency Mfa program. Her final critique, supposedly celebratory, is less about her work and more about her teachers’ projections onto it. The day that follows is all anticlimax, like the slow afternoon hours still colored by bad morning sex. Much of the film’s tension is sustained by negation. Palace is consistently forced to say no: to her classmates,...
- 11/16/2022
- MUBI
As 2022 winds down, like most cinephiles, we’re looking to get our eyes on titles that may have slipped under the radar or simply gone unseen, so—as we do each year—we’re sharing a rundown of the best titles available to watch at home.
Curated from the Best Films of 2022 So Far list we published for the first half of the year, it also includes films we’ve enjoyed the past few months and some we’ve recently caught up with. While our year-end coverage is still to come, including our staff’s top 50 films of 2022, this streaming guide will hopefully be a helpful tool for readers to have a chance to find notable, perhaps underseen, titles of late.
Note that we’re going by U.S. releases and that streaming services are limited solely to the territory as well. If you want to stay up-to-date with new titles being made available,...
Curated from the Best Films of 2022 So Far list we published for the first half of the year, it also includes films we’ve enjoyed the past few months and some we’ve recently caught up with. While our year-end coverage is still to come, including our staff’s top 50 films of 2022, this streaming guide will hopefully be a helpful tool for readers to have a chance to find notable, perhaps underseen, titles of late.
Note that we’re going by U.S. releases and that streaming services are limited solely to the territory as well. If you want to stay up-to-date with new titles being made available,...
- 11/15/2022
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
The African Desperate (Martine Syms)
Early into Martine Syms’ The African Desperate, Mfa finalist Palace (Diamond Stingily) sits for her last exam in an upstate New York art school tucked deep in the woods. It’s the end of a three-year voyage, the kind of moment that should trigger swaths of pride and relief. But Palace, a Black student in an exceedingly white college, is frustrated, tired, on the verge of a breakdown. Her art has already shown at the Venice Biennale, a feat her all-Caucasian examiners don’t really know how to respond to. Even after they christen her a Master of Fine Arts, the mix of animosity and envy lingers acridly in the room. “There are lots of female artists...
The African Desperate (Martine Syms)
Early into Martine Syms’ The African Desperate, Mfa finalist Palace (Diamond Stingily) sits for her last exam in an upstate New York art school tucked deep in the woods. It’s the end of a three-year voyage, the kind of moment that should trigger swaths of pride and relief. But Palace, a Black student in an exceedingly white college, is frustrated, tired, on the verge of a breakdown. Her art has already shown at the Venice Biennale, a feat her all-Caucasian examiners don’t really know how to respond to. Even after they christen her a Master of Fine Arts, the mix of animosity and envy lingers acridly in the room. “There are lots of female artists...
- 10/21/2022
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
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