The
Journal.
Long-form criticism, filmmaker essays, and dispatches from the festival circuit — written for people who take cinema seriously and refuse to confuse coverage with commentary.
Read the Journal
A note before you read.
The Journal does not publish news. It does not rush. We are not interested in being first to a story — we are interested in being the publication a reader returns to a year later and still finds correct.
What you will find here is criticism that takes a position. Filmmaker essays that resist the polite, on-the-record version of events. Festival reporting written by people who watched the film rather than the panel. We commission slowly. We edit hard. We do not publish anything we could not defend in a room of people who disagree with us.
Our writers include former programmers from Sundance, TIFF, and Cannes; working critics who have bylines in Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound, and Film Comment; and filmmakers who would rather be making their next picture than explaining the last one. They are paid. We believe in that.
If you are a cinephile, welcome. Read slowly. If you are a filmmaker with a picture you want written about — with care, with dissent, with the long view — then send it to us. The worst we can do is ignore it well.
— Hana Okafor, Editor-in-Chief
Recent criticism, festival reports, and filmmaker essays worth your evening.
Four pieces from the past fortnight — long enough to sit with, short enough to finish before bed.
-
Festival ReportThe Last Honest Festival
On Raindance's thirtieth edition, why the programmers stopped pretending, and the small British films that earned the privilege of being argued about afterwards.
-
Filmmaker EssayI Was Told Not to Say This
A director's account of the year she made the film everyone in her life asked her not to make — and the price of refusing to edit herself into someone palatable.
-
CriticismAgainst the Soft Consensus
Why the most praised films of the season are saying the same thing in the same way — and what criticism is for when everyone has agreed to be polite.
-
InterviewA Conversation with Jonas Halpern
The reclusive director on refusing the streaming offer, the editor who saved his last film, and why he will never make a picture in Los Angeles.
The voices behind the pages.
Critics, programmers, and filmmakers who write in long form — and who agreed, for the sake of this masthead, to be introduced.
-
Editor-in-Chief
Hana Okafor
Former TIFF programmer and contributing editor at Film Comment. Has been wrong in print, on the record, more often than she would like — and prefers it that way.
-
Critic-at-Large
Theo Brennan
Writes the monthly column Against the Soft Consensus. Bylines in Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound, and the New York Review of Books.
-
Senior Festival Reporter
Devi Marchetti
Covers the European and Asian festival circuit for the Journal. Former programmer at the Busan International Film Festival; refuses to file a dispatch she would not stand behind.
-
Contributing Filmmaker
Adaeze Iwuji
Writer-director of two features acquired by international distributors through the I AM EIGA pitch rooms. Writes for the Journal on the question of who gets to tell which story, and at what cost.
Criticism that refuses to take a side is not balance — it is cowardice wearing the mask of professionalism. A magazine that publishes only consensus has stopped being a magazine and become a press release.
Read the Journal weekly — or, if you’re a filmmaker, send us the work you want written about.
Two doors. One leads to the next dispatch in your inbox; the other leads to the submission desk where 2,300+ films premiered on the platform last year.
Members read the full archive. Filmmakers submit at iameiga.com/submit.