Sabzian is an international film magazine, hailing from Belgium.Sabzian est une revue de cinéma internationale, originaire de Belgique.Sabzian is een internationaal filmtijdschrift, afkomstig uit België.
Sabzian is a free online magazine that relies on the work of a group of dedicated volunteers.We could use your support. Please consider a donation!Sabzian est un magazine en ligne gratuit qui dépend du travail d’un groupe de bénévoles dévoués. Votre soutien nous aide beaucoup. Pensez à faire un don !Sabzian is een gratis online magazine dat afhankelijk is van het werk van een groep toegewijde vrijwilligers.We kunnen uw steun goed gebruiken. Overweeg een donatie!
Met de kortfilm Dans le noir du temps (2002) componeert Jean-Luc Godard een eschatologisch filmessay, “un film sur la fin de tout”. Verspreid over elf segmenten schikt en herschikt hij filmbeelden volgens nieuwe gedachtebewegingen die samen het einde evoceren van “alles” wat de mensheid heeft voortgebracht. Godard recycleert daarbij beelden uit zijn eigen oeuvre (Made in USA, Le petit soldat, Vivre sa vie), uit de filmgeschiedenis en uit anonieme archieven. Toch is de film meer dan een eenvoudige collage. Door beelden te vertragen, te herfilmen, te vervormen en plastisch te bewerken, laat hij ze oplichten in een poëtische compositie.
After the international premiere of Le journal d’une femme de chambre (2026) at the Cannes Film Festival, Flavia Dima spoke to Radu Jude during a brief break between final rehearsals for his next film about how his films transcend cultural codes and local specificity, his views on adaptation and the usage of ultra-contemporary technologies in cinema, and his growing influence on both Romanian and international cinema. Radu Jude: “Nobody feels under attack because someone takes their violin into the street and is playing, or records themselves singing in the shower and puts it on YouTube. In cinema, by contrast, there is a constant anxiety – perhaps also a fear that cinema is dying. And so any new technology provokes fears, as AI does.”
Perhaps this is the function that computer animation can best assume from film: the creation of a totally administered world, a complete faith in the image. Whatever CGI might lose in its production of likeness and in the spectator’s knowledge of how this image is produced, it gains in this enhanced relation to control. No more rustling of the wind in the trees but merely a simulated wind, what Farocki calls a “new constructivism.”
70 years ago, in 1956, Lionel Rogosin made On the Bowery, a landmark of American cinema and a key work in the revival of American independent filmmaking. The texts gathered here return to this formative period in Rogosin’s career: to his influences, his encounters on the Bowery, his collaborators and his search for a cinematic language. The collection coincides with the retrospective of Rogosin’s films at CINEMATEK, presented in collaboration with Sabzian.
For the past fifty years, John Smith has been making himself at home in the ambiguous realm of image and language. He worked within and parallel to the London Film-makers’ Co-op in his early years, adding to the collective’s structural approach to cinema an equal concern with the construction of narrativity. In all seriousness, he creates a game in every film, deconstructing the givens of words, sound and images, remaking them with humour, even when laughter seems inappropriate. Sabzian spoke to Smith during Courtisane Festival 2026.
She could collect rocks and lace. She could be a harpist or a horsewoman. Lots of elegance, of calm blonde hair. Her first feature film, Mon cher sujet, is a film that talks of women without preciousness or complacency, a musical and essential film. Anne-Marie Miéville often answers questions with a hermetic gracious smile, as if everything we need to know about her is in her film. She’s right, of course. Miéville: “I also have a daughter. In the film, you can see her sing a song she has written; she’s twenty-four. And some months ago, when the film was already finished, my daughter in her turn had a little girl... I start from the principle that we need to talk about what we know.”
Ik heb nooit beslist om documentarist te worden, om me voorgoed binnen een bepaald kader te installeren. Ik heb overigens een hekel aan dat woord: documentarist. Het draagt bij aan de afgrenzing van een genre dat voortdurend is geëvolueerd en waarvan iedereen weet hoe poreus het is, hoe variabel de contouren, welke bijna-bloedband het onderhoudt met het genre dat er altijd tegenover wordt geplaatst: fictie. Beelden zijn immers minder getrouw aan de “werkelijkheid” dan aan de intenties van wie ze produceert.
Antes, as imagens estavam no mundo. Hoje, é o mundo que se banha em um oceano de imagens. Nosso mundo real, material e único; tecido e transbordado por imagens reais, imateriais, numeradas (constituídas de números), inumeráveis. Para observar o cinema contemporâneo é preciso inscrevê-lo no contexto desse exponencial aumento quantitativo e qualitativo da potência das imagens, interrogar o papel que ela desempenhou e continua a desempenhar.
Tenho uma boa notícia para todos: o cinema está em crise. O que, de certa forma, não é novidade, pois tem estado continuamente em crise ao longo da sua existência.
Wie steun ontvangt, stelt zich zelden vragen bij wat er zich in zo’n commissie afspeelt. Wie geen steun krijgt, leest de feedback aandachtig, maar blijft vaak met het gevoel zitten dat het dossier niet goed begrepen werd. Commissiewerk verschijnt dan als een black box: je stopt er iets in en er komt een beslissing uit, zonder dat helemaal helder is hoe die precies tot stand kwam.
De regisseur van Der letzte Mann is Murnau. Het werd hoog tijd dat hij de weg vond naar de dichter Carl Mayer. Zo kwam een film tot stand waarbij regisseur en auteur elkaar perfect aanvullen. Murnau is een van de weinige regisseurs van wie het inlevingsvermogen de eigen creatieve drang niet belemmert. En als daar dan, zoals in dit geval, ook nog een cameraman bij komt met de voorstellingskracht van een Karl Freund, krijg je een hoogstaande, “kunstzinnige” film.
CINEMATEK has been selected as one of twelve finalists in the Heritage Tombola, a project organised by the National Lottery, Prométhéa, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage and museumPASSmusées. Their project, “10 Decades of Belgian Cinema,” aims to digitally restore twelve films spanning a century of Belgian film history – from the 1910s to the 2010s, crossing languages, genres and artistic movements.
From September 15 to October 15, L’Alliance New York presents Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned, a film series programmed by Michael Witt and previously presented at the ICA in London, exploring the unrealized projects and ideas that shaped Godard’s cinema.
Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán passed away in Paris on 15 September at the age of 85. Born in Santiago in 1941, he devoted much of his life and work to preserving the memory of Chile’s recent history.
To conclude the retrospective on Jacques Tati, the Budascoop in Kortrijk will be holding several screenings of Playtime (1967), a feature film which the director himself described as the ultimate expression of his personal style. Monsieur Hulot (Tati’s fictional alter ego) finds himself in a hypermodern version of Paris which has fallen prey to the uniformity of the contemporary age. Naturally, Hulot gets hopelessly lost in this alienating environment; he pins his only hope on an American tourist named Barbara, who shows glimpses of individuality and, more importantly, of creativity.
In Innocent Sorcerers, a Polish drama from 1960, a girl is presented as the object of desire. She is seen through the eyes of a womanizing doctor who also plays the drums in a jazz band, conveniently providing him with an opportunity to pick up girls. He has difficulty reading this particular young woman, however, as she persists in a mysterious and stubborn attitude – starting with her name, which she refuses to share. For this one night, they both decide to take on different names: they will be “Pelagia” and “Bazyli” to each other. In Bazyli’s room, they play games and have conversations, activities that become interchangeable over the course of the night.
Preceded by a lecture on pre-expressionist and expressionist film, De Cinema is screening Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926) by animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film, drawing inspiration from several stories from One Thousand and One Nights, which Reiniger weaves together in her recognizable, fairytale-like style. The main plot line is the love story between Prince Achmed and Pari Banu, the ruler of the land of Wak Wak, who is brutally abducted, chased down by demons and ultimately sold to an emperor. Luckily, with a little help from a benevolent witch, Achmed is always willing to fight for his true love.
