Sight and Sound: the December 2024 issue

“Like the neorealists before her, Payal Kapadia is an urban film poet. In Sight and Sound in 1950, chafing against the neorealist tag, Vittorio De Sica argued that his real goal in films such as Bicycle Thieves (1948) was not simply to capture reality but to “transpose [it] into the poetical plane”. He did not see any future in neorealism unless it “surmounted the barrier separating the documentary from drama and poetry”. 

What swept away the audiences who saw All We Imagine as Light in Cannes was precisely this lack of separation. The meditative and lyrical manner in which Kapadia films Prabha’s story during Mumbai’s monsoon season uncovers poetry in banal, everyday spaces and objects, from congested train carriages to hospitals to clothes on a rooftop washing line. 

The number of ways Kapadia finds to capture the colour blue alone demonstrates her remarkable talent, not to mention the way her film encompasses a plea for tolerance, a critique of rampant urban development and an ode to underappreciated labour while also savouring the delights of romance and friendship.”

— Isabel Stevens in her cover feature, an exclusive interview with Payal Kapadia for All We Imagine as Light

Audiences and critics at Cannes were swept away by Payal Kapadia’s first fiction feature All We Imagine as Light, the moving story of the lives of three women as well as a thrumming, lyrical portrait of contemporary Mumbai. She talks about reality and fiction, filmmaking in India and where hope can still be found. Words by Isabel Stevens, portrait by Thomas Laisne.

Beneath the religious trappings, and the backdrop of the eternal city, Edward Berger’s Papal thriller Conclave asks secular and highly topical questions: what sort of leaders do we want? How should we treat our opponents? By Catherine Wheatley

Conclave’s director Edward Berger and its star Ralph Fiennes discuss the nuances of ambition, the complexity of the Catholic Church and the intimate manner in which they set about capturing the world view of Fiennes’s character Cardinal Lawrence. By Catherine Wheatley.

Andrea Arnold’s first fiction film since American Honey in 2016, Bird blends social and magic realism to tell a violent but hopeful fable about a 12-year-old girl struggling to navigate a difficult start in life. The director explains the surprising image that prompted the story and the liberation she feels in giving free rein to her unconscious. By Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

Having made his name in films by Yorgos Lanthimos and Christopher Nolan, the actor Barry Keoghan gained wider recognition with blistering turns in The Banshees of Inisherin and Saltburn. As Bird is released in the UK, he explains the ‘discovery and flow’ he relishes in his roles. By Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, a gut-punching musical about a Mexican cartel boss undergoing gender reassignment surgery, might sound like a radical new direction for the director, but it chimes with his films’ tireless fascination with self-reinvention. He explains why musical drama has always been in his stars. By Mary Harrod.

In this issue, we revisit an illuminating interview with the Ethiopian director Haile Gerima; explore the vexed issue of Black hair and make-up on set; and outline films by Black women that made their mark at this year’s London Film Festival.

Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima was one of the driving forces of the African cinema liberationists of the 1960s. A crucial move to the US in the 1970s led his exploration of colonialism’s legacies to new fields, making him one of the few filmmakers to carry those radical visions into a global future. In 2025, his magnum opus Black Lions, Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa will be released. In anticipation, the BFB revisits his 1995 conversation with UK filmmaker Onye Wambu, breaking down the fundamentals of ‘a black cinema politic’.

In 2023 British actors Ann Ogbomo and Cherrelle Skeete co-founded the film and TV-focused campaign Hair and Make-Up Equality Now, a call to action to rectify industry failures to implement culturally competent standards, resulting in countless indignities endured on set by African and Caribbean diaspora performers. In conversation with the directors of the documentary Untold Stories: Hair on Set, Fola Evans-Akingbola and Jordan Pitt, Ogbomo outlines the progress being made on the issue.

Grace Barber-Plentie, a programmer for the BFI London Film Festival and the BFI Flare: LGBTQIA+Film Festival, reflects on work by Black women filmmakers at this year’s LFF.

The complex business of nominating each country’s films for the Oscar for Best International Feature – one of the top prizes in world cinema – is littered with deserving films being snubbed due to politics or biases. By Guy Lodge.

New films by Eugène Green, Claire Denis, Xavier Dolan and Rebecca Zlotowski. By Thomas Flew.

The old eat the young, figuratively and literally, in zombie series Generation Z. By Thomas Flew.

Picking the brain of the director of Eraserhead, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks and other classics on a variety of subjects including Idaho forests, why musicians areso happy and his longtime transcendental meditation practice: ‘It’s possible every human being’s birthright is to one day enjoy supreme enlightenment’. By Sam Wigley.

Maggie Smith’s lethal comic talent was undeniable, but she always knew when to hold back the jokes. By Pamela Hutchinson.

The Substance takes its place in a long line of films that have failed to rise to the challenge of #MeToo. By Nicole Flattery.

A Very British Coup has some chilling resonances for modern British politics. By Andrew Male.

Gena Rowlands’s dazzling and dangerous performance in A Woman Under the Influence is one for the ages. By Jessica Kiang.

A good magazine is a membership card to a club – and a manifesto. Long may they live. By Mike Williams.

Harmony Korine’s 1997 debut was hailed on release as the last word in style and the calling card of an extraordinary cinematic talent. Three decades on, although it hasn’t quite lived up to the hype, it remains a slick, beguiling and beautiful film. By Hannah McGill.

A subversive, erotic drama set in Victorian New Zealand that isn’t The Piano? Jane Campion’s drama grabbed all the attention at the time, but with its operatic emotions and rippling currents of desire, this queer Kiwi take on the Victorian sensation novel deserves more notice. By Carmen Gray.

A London retrospective of the work of the prolific South Korean director over the past 15 years offers a rare opportunity to see more than 20 of his delicate, deceptively simple features examining themes of memory, time, creativity and infidelity. By Jordan Cronk.

Over more than half a century working with some of the greatest directors in the world – from Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol to Claire Denis and Michael Haneke – Isabelle Huppert has never ceased to challenge herself and her audiences with subtle, sometimes lacerating explorations of complex, enigmatic characters. In 2016, in a wide-ranging discussion, she looked back over her formidable career. By Nick James.

F.W. Murnau and his great scenarist Carl Mayer ensured that the happy ending imposed by the studio on their otherwise tragic tale of a hotel doorman is anything but a consolation. By Pamela Hutchinson.

Our critics review: Rumours, All We Imagine As Light, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Piece by Piece, Snow Leopard, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, The Contestant, Heretic, The Piano Lesson, Conclave, No Other Land, In Her Place, Nightbitch, A Place Without Fear, Memories of a Burning Body, Joy, Favoriten, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Witches, Blitz, Bird.

Our critics review: Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials, Watership Down, The Oblong Box, Panic in Year Zero!, Lost Highway, Slap the Monster on Page One, Back from the Dead, Scarface, Häxan, Funny Girl. 

Our critics review: A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda; Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistence in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1980.