they (still) shoot pictures, don't they?

no one asked, so here are (some of) my fave films of the 21st century not on the NYT list of the 100 "best" (whatever that means) movies, which—can we be honest?—is super 20th century in its Euro-American colonial outlook and lack of imagination and adventure. to be fair, i'm more New Yorker in my taste, and the list's design looks nice.

limited to one film per director, in a rough order of faves (lots on my watchlist, still, of course):

- Ten/ده (Abbas Kiarostami)

- Happy as Lazzaro/Lazzaro felice (Alice Rohrwacher)

- Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)

- Fire at Sea/Fuocoammare (Gianfranco Rosi)

- Tropical Malady/สัตว์ประหลาด (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

- Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier)

- All We Imagine as Light/പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം (Payal Kapadia)

- Great Freedom/Große Freiheit (Sebastian Meise)

- First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)

- A Rifle and a Bag (Arya Rothe, Isabella Rinaldi & Cristina Haneș)

- Black Coal, Thin Ice/白日焰火 (Diao Yi-nan)

- Transit (Christian Petzold)

- Manta Ray/กระเบนราหู (Phuttiphong Aroonpheng)

- Paddington 2 (Paul King)

- Stranger by the Lake/L'Inconnu du lac (Alain Guiraudie)

- An Elephant Sitting Still/大象席地而坐 (Hu Bo)

- Season of the Devil/Ang Panahon ng Halimaw (Lav Diaz)

- Behemoth/悲兮魔兽 (Zhao Liang)

- Distant/Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

- Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes)

- Baran/باران (Majid Majidi)

- Year Without a Summer/Berkelana (Tan Chui Mui)

- Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier)

- Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly/Babi buta yang ingin terbang (Edwin)

- Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell/Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng (Phạm Thiên Ân)

- Werckmeister Harmonies/Werckmeister harmóniák (Béla Tarr)

- Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy/偶然と想像 (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)

- Flight of the Red Balloon/Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

- Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir)

- Satan Jawa/꧋ꦱꦺꦠꦤ꧀ꦗꦮ (Garin Nugroho)

- The World/世界 (Jia Zhangke)

- Last Life in the Universe/เรื่องรัก น้อยนิด มหาศาล (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)

- The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros/Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito)

- Ilo Ilo/爸妈不在家 (Anthony Chen)

- To Singapore, with Love/星国恋 (Tan Pin Pin)

- Goodbye, Dragon Inn/不散 (Tsai Ming-liang)

- A Fantastic Woman/Una mujer fantástica (Sebastián Lelio)

- God’s Own Country (Francis Lee)

- Bright Future/アカルイミライ (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

- Nobody Knows/誰も知らない (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

- Osama (Siddiq Barmak)

- The Return/Возвращение (Andrey Zvyagintsev)

- In the Claws of a Century Wanting/Sa Palad ng Dantaong Kulang (Jewel Maranan)

- Clean (Olivier Assayas)

- Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream/Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Frank Beauvais)

- The Image Book/Le Livre d’Images (Jean-Luc Godard)

bye badalu

june 2023: i just had a bad break-up on the road, in, of all places, spain. you and another good producer friend happened to be in madrid for work, and you offered to meet up, despite us only hanging out at film festivals before.

you bought me ice cream, at a cute, pastel parlor. along the cobblestone way, you pointed out cafes that used to be bookstores, Airbnbs that were record stores, the madrid you knew that had moved on from you and vice versa. that long afternoon's combination of sweetness and distraction helped alleviate my pain; also, your prescient advice that i wasn't yet ready to hear.

we talked: about our ventures to europe (yours successful, mine not), your travel magazine-worthy place in bali, films, books, and music we liked and hated, your DJ career, party days, founding of the Q! Film Festival (Southeast Asia's first queer festival), upcoming films (i should have raved more to you about your films; how you nurtured the new generation of Indonesian/SEAsian filmmakers), plans, hopes, dreams, but also contentment.

we said bye-for-now and hugged in a sprawling square; you were off to an early dinner, i was off somewhere crazy, probably. you seemed so small walking away, looking down, going about your own little way. it was like the world didn't know your goodness, the sheer size of it.

just found out you walked away forever as i was the middle of the road. i had to stop. the sky was so blue. sparrows were on their way home. it was like the world got smaller.

goodbye, John Badalu. you weren't anywhere near done with your work and life and happiness, but i'm grateful for your generosity and caring and humanity. missing u, thanking u.

Everywhere I go, every smile I see / I know you are there smilin' back at me / Dancin' in moonlight, I know you are free / 'Cause I can see your star shinin' down on me

to gertjan (mr. g)

Gertjan Zuilhof (1955–2025)

Gertjan Zuilhof, or mr. G as i called him, the preeminent programmer of Asian and African cinema and a burgeoning filmmaker himself, passed away on 3 March; i didn't find out till the middle of the month over coffee with a friend.

IFFR, the film festival he was "the heart" of programming at for a long time, paid tribute to him, and i can only add a few words:

mr. G and i met in 2018 at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF); i knew of him as the programmer almost all independent SEAsian filmmakers had showed their films to first, and admired his curation over the years, especially Forget Africa (what a title!). i had also seen his cameo in Tan Chui Mui's short "A Night in Malacca" (2013) and immediately recognised his shock of hair in real life.

over Covid, job losses and gains, and an endless stream of pictures, mr. G and i stayed in touch over Facebook and caught up at festivals, bars, and cafes in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Berlin. we originally met at his curated programme SEA of Sadness, which travelled, in sensitively modified form, to my $ingapore in 2019. beyond the great title again, the landmark programme opened my eyes to the cinemas of Roxlee, The Maw Naing, and Ismail Fahmi Lubis, as well as reaffirmed my love for Thunska Pansittivorakul, Ho Yuhang, and Edwin—experiencing Edwin's Hortus (2014) on 16mm is up there for me with encountering Jarman on the big screen.

mr. G and i last saw each other in 2022, when we visited the Rijksmuseum's REVOLUSI! exhibition. i recall being stimulated and endlessly going on about anticolonialism, but it was mr. G who spotted the error in the exhibition's map, labelling the entire Borneo as Indonesian territory. "not everything is about colonialism, you know," he said over drinks. i was going to make a video essay in response to that... maybe one day.

besides programming, mr. G was also a special artist. his sketches, like the one he sent me above, captioned "Hair has little to do with identity," picture discordant, animal-like shapes taking over sense, lines, and emptiness. i still have one of his original drawings, done on hotel stationery, somewhere precious. mr. G was also actively beginning to make and write films: his debut feature premiered posthumously at BAFICI in April.

discussing SEA of Sadness with another friend in 2018, the question came up: Do we need another white guy programming our films? i think mr. G was acutely aware of his positionality, particularly when it came to pan-African cinema, and at least for this programme, his outsider-insider nature and extensive friendships in the region helped cast a light on otherwise easily overlooked films. who else could have programmed Khavn's confrontational Alipato: the Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016) next to Liryc dela Cruz's Notes from Unknown Maladies (2017), a B&W observation of his grandmother dying? Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) is a given, but who else would not have dismissed Aline Magrez's short "No'I" (2016) as a tourist film, and shown it for the minor revelation it is?

i'm sad we never got to say a proper goodbye; i'm thankful we got to be friends. thank you, mr. G, for the visions.

the last two pics we exchanged. i was in Manila (left), mr. G was in Berlin.