Patrícia Mourão de Andrade offers an impassioned portrait of the actress and filmmaker Helena Ignez, a foundational figure in Brazilian filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s. Long ignored by a national historiography blinded by its own patriarchal distortions, Ignez has only gained recognition in the last fifteen years for her contributions to Brazilian cinema. Moving behind the camera for the first time in 2005, Ignez has created a body of work that brings the anarchic spirit of the Cinema Marginal movement of the late 1960s to Brazilian cinema of the 2000s. This article offers a comprehensive survey and assessment of Ignez’s career, from her first film, O pátio (1959), directed by Glauber Rocha, who became her first husband, to her memorable performances of the 1960s, to her years of political exile, to her recent, late renaissance.

Reduced to temporary guests, victims, threats, or enemies, those who are forced to seek refuge have to navigate a political minefield. To seek recognition in the public sphere is an especially treacherous endeavor under these conditions. Faced with a range of imposed identities–including the refugee label itself–the quest for “more visibility” through documentary images is fraught with contradictions for the displaced. This article considers the ways in which filmmakers and artists with experience of displacement work with documentary methods and forms in the face of these extreme difficulties. As they challenge and seek alternatives to conventional forms of documentary, a range of new expressions and tendencies can be discerned in the wake of “The European Refugee Crisis,” from so-called participatory documentary to essayistic and more experimental approaches. The article discusses, among other films, Purple Sea (2020), Midnight Traveler (2019), and My New European Life (2019).

Abby McEnany’s new comedy series Work in Progress (Showtime) and Hannah Gadsby’s recent standup specials Nanette and Douglas (Netflix) evoke “butch middlebrow,” a contemporary aesthetic and affective sensibility distinguished by the cozy reception it enjoys among straight, white, liberal viewers and critics. McEnany’s and Gadsby’s works have occasioned praise from cosmopolitan gatekeepers like the New York Times and the New Yorker for their self-aware brands of comedy rooted in unvarnished portrayals of butch trauma. Critics ritually insist on the implausibility of Gadsby’s and McEnany’s success, but the popularity of these queer creators’ offerings is not as unlikely as so often presumed. Indeed, the middlebrow butch’s alleged improbability does not render her cultural accolades improbable; it may even ensure them, allowing a new canon of butch respectability to emerge in the light shed by the beacons of aspirational culture.

Film Quarterly contributing editor and Paris correspondent Joan Dupont introduces readers to the films of Michelle Porte, a French director best known for her intimate portraits of writers, actors, and filmmakers. The focus of a retrospective at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris in 2018, Porte’s films offer remarkable access to the private worlds of their subjects, including Virginia Woolf (1981) and Françoise Sagan (1996). Porte is best known, however, for her long association with the celebrated author, playwright, and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. Following their first meeting in 1966 on the set of Duras’ first film, La musica , Porte became Duras’ frequent collaborator, all the while gathering material for her own film, Les lieux de Marguerite Duras (1976). Dupont’s wide-ranging interview with Porte offers insight into the French televisual landscape that supported Porte’s films as well as into her oeuvre and relationship with Duras.

The privatization of Pakistan’s media and television industry over the past two decades, along with the availability of high-speed internet and an easing of censorship, has revolutionized what plays in Pakistani homes. While hopes that this more open environment would encourage a Pakistani new wave have yet to be born out, an episodic series released this summer is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Film Quarterly columnist Bilal Qureshi introduces readers to one of the most exciting voices in the emerging Pakistani film industry, Asim Abbasi, whose über-stylish series Churails (2020−) presents a women’s detective agency that works undercover to obtain justice for the women of Karachi. An extrajudicial feminist fantasy, Churails is remarkably uncensored and unrestrained, and ground-breaking in its exclusive focus on women’s rage.

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich presents her take on festival-going in the time of COVID. While noting the challenges posed by geoblocking and navigating festival schedules across multiple time zones, along with the absence of the excitement and comradeship that provide live festivals with their momentum, she observes that virtual festivals—liberated from geography—offer advantages in terms of access. Surveying the offerings at the Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and DOK Leipzig, Rich highlights feature films and documentaries that offered a welcome escape from her COVID-demarcated existence, from critical favorites such as Nomadland (dir. Chloe Zhao, 2020 ) and Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology series, to discoveries such as Hong Sang-soo’s Domangchin yeoja ( The Woman Who Ran , 2020) and En route pour le milliard ( Downstream to Kinshasa , 2020), by the young Congolese documentarian Dieudo Hamadi.

Film Quarterly columnist Manuel Betancourt discusses the disorienting experience of watching El puto inolvidable: Vida de Carlos Jáuregui ( Carlos Jáuregui: The Unforgettable Fag , 2018), Lucas Santa Ana’s documentary portrait of the Argentine gay rights activist Carlos Jáuregui . He notes how Jáuregui’s decades-old calls to action resonates with the fight for dignity for LGBTQ people chronicled in documentaries like Bixa travesty ( Tranny Fag , Kiko Goifman and Claudia Priscilla, 2018), Rainha da Lapa ( Queen of Lapa , Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat, 2019), Indianara (Marcelo Barbosa and Aude Chevalier-Beaumel, 2019), and Lemebel (Joanna Reposi Garibaldi, 2019). Watching these documentaries in tandem provides an opportunity to see how different visions of radical queer politics can be incorporated into the spheres of the domestic, the activist, and the aesthetic, thus helping their subjects and audiences to imagine a brighter, more equitable future.

The 2019 Hong Kong protests witnessed not only sustained physical demonstrations by locals, but also a swell of online digital media that recorded and remixed conflicts between protestors and police. By documenting key moving images that circulated throughout social media and the film festival circuit, White’s essay reorients Hong Kong film studies’ relationship with the digital. Although cinema played a secondary role in the 2019 protests compared to digital media, numerous intertextual linkages demonstrate the productive potential of considering the two together. Special attention is given to the cops-and-robbers genre, a linchpin in local film history and a frequent form of choice for Hong Kong-mainland China coproductions. While the troubled representation of police in 2019 and beyond suggests that the future of the genre is unstable, the ingenuity of recent digital media demonstrates Hong Kong’s enduring potential for moving image innovation.

British and American television shows frequently deploy rape and sexual assault to juice up characters’ backstories or titillate viewers, but they rarely focus on how one assault impacts multiple people’s lives or how intersectional oppression further traumatizes assault survivors. FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott suggests that this may change in the wake of Michaela Coel’s incendiary series I May Destroy You (BBC One and HBO, 2020), which has answered a need for more artistically ambitious television about black life and for feminist-of-color critiques of rape culture on television. Hailing the series for its formal innovations as well as its generic and political interventions, Benson-Allott argues that I May Destroy You elevates its genre, and television more broadly, by contesting their prior shortcomings.

In an impressionistic, episodic appreciation, Janaína Oliveira reconsiders the legacy of Black Brazilian filmmaker Zózimo Bulbul. She argues that Bulbul’s status as a pioneer for black Brazilian cinema does not reside in historical chronology, but rather in the aesthetic and narrative advances accomplished by his short film, Alma no olho ( Soul in the Eye ), in which he also starred. Having endured almost forty years of neglect by the Brazilian film establishment, Alma no olho is now being taken up again as a reference point by a new generation of Black Brazilian filmmakers.

Ivone Margulies examines the output of Filmes de Plástico, a celebrated independent production company from Contagem, Minas Gerais. Her article focuses on two feature films: Temporada ( Long Way Home , dir. André Novais Oliveira, 2018), and No Coração do Mundo ( In the Heart of the World , dir. Gabriel Martins and Maurilio Martins, 2019.) The essay defines two forms—the portrait and the vista—used to articulate the relationship between individual and a broader social world in the films’ realist aesthetic.

Two recent films made by Guajajara people show how cinema allies with indigenous groups to confront the environmental destruction underway in Brazil. Guardians of the Forest follows a large group of young Guajajara, Awá-Guajá, Ka'apor, and Tupi-Guarani peoples assembled to resist the constant and increasing invasion of their lands by loggers and land grabbers ( grileiros ). Where Guardians makes the devastation visible on screen, depicting a growing concentration of forces on the verge of a violent outbreak, The History of Chants is dedicated to the mysteries of the preserved forest, experienced like the modulations of a chant, the paths of a dream, the breath of a shaman.

In the twentieth century, the Black Brazilian filmmakers who managed to accumulate a substantial body of work were few and far between, with a striking number of Black directors succeeding in making only one or a handful of films. Juliano Gomes examines how this landscape has changed in recent years, prompted by a new generation of film school graduates and reflected in landmark events such as the “Soul in the Eye” program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018, in which at least a quarter of the program’s films were made by students. His article focuses on two films representative of these changes: Ilha (2018), whose codirectors Ary Rosa and Glenda Nicácio met in the cinema course at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, and Travessia (2017), an award-winning student film by Safira Moreira.

This article articulates how two recent Brazilian medium-length films challenge the category of the “hybrid film,” incorporating reenactment to recompose invisible routines of institutionalized oppression. In Seven Years in May , Affonso Uchôa ( Araby; The Hidden Tiger ) uses collaborative methods to render visible the structure of mass incarceration in Minas Gerais. Shot with a group of young men in Contagem, the film is a tryptic where each part employs a different mode of narrative reconstruction. Directed by a group of first-time Guarani-Kaiowá filmmakers, Ava Yvy Vera retells the murder of their leader, Nisio Gomes, by forty masked gunmen in 2011. The film uses reenactment to infiltrate the present with the past, reviving Gomes through the palpability of his absence. In both cases, aesthetic choices disturb the legibility of events, questioning the authoritative inclination of narrative clarity in both fiction and documentary, as well as the glacial category of the hybrid film.