Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Out of the Ruins: An Interview with Azza El-Hassan

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 7d

Excerpt from the interview with Azza El-Hassan:

"What is cinema at the end of the day? It’s the ability to create your own logic of what is happening in front of you, to reorganise the world and see it in different ways. [...] Cinema is what says: No, let’s look at the little details. Let’s look at it in a different way. Let’s see what it’s doing to us, and to you, the one who is watching.”

Excerpt from the interview with Azza El-Hassan:

“I’m trying to put things back into use, because what the Israelis are doing is destroying stuff so we can no longer use it. For example, they keep saying now that they are bombing Gaza so that it will no longer be inhabitable. Well, what if it remains inhabitable, even if they keep bombing it? This is the idea: you try to put things back into use in order to eject the effect of violence and to have continuation in your life.”

1 2

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 7d

“There is an archive that is lost, but there’s an archive that replaces it, which is made in the present.”

Indigo Bailey talks to Palestinian filmmaker Azza El-Hassan, whose work KINGS & EXTRAS screens at our Bridge of Solidarity fundraiser event Oct 11.

tinyurl.com/y3pmu75w

The Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and liberatory archivist discusses buried histories, resisting the temporality of the news cycle, and her upcoming documentary, ‘The Lost Film of My Mother.’

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 9d

"The beauty of [Dwayne Johnson's] work in THE SMASHING MACHINE arises from just how unshowy it is; the star electing to play the melancholic rhythms of Kerr’s everyday life just a downbeat quieter than one would expect."

- Kevin Bui

Review: Hitting Rock Bottom in ‘The Smashing Machine’

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 9d

"Kerr’s stop-and-go career momentum and the film’s aspirations as a somewhat conventional sports biopic create a friction, placing excess weight on the shoulders of its movie star attraction."

Read Kevin Bui on Benny Safdie’s THE SMASHING MACHINE.

tinyurl.com/327pm43s

In director Benny Safdie’s first solo feature, Dwayne Johnson embodies the contradictions of mixed martial artist Mark Kerr with a strikingly light touch.

Gaza Fundraiser: Kings and Extras - Digging For A Palestinian Image + Here & Elsewhere

1 1 1

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 19d

Doors open at 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start at Static Vision HQ: 47 Melville Road, Brunswick West.

You can read more on the individual films and purchase a ticket at the link below:

checkout.square.site/buy/HQZM2KAU...

STATIC VISION AND ROUGH CUT PRESENTA mutual aid benefit film screening of Azza El-Hassan's Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004) & Jean-Luc G...

checkout.square.site

Gaza Fundraiser: Kings and Extras - Digging For A Palestinian Image + Here & Elsewhere

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 19d

All funds raised will be donated to Bridge of Solidarity, an anti-capitalist, grassroots mutual aid organisation providing food and necessary goods to some of Gaza's most vulnerable, including people without phones, English skills, social media, wealthy or living relatives.

1 3

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · 19d

On Oct 11, we're co-hosting a mutual aid benefit screening of Azza El-Hassan's KINGS AND EXTRAS: DIGGING FOR A PALESTINIAN IMAGE & Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's HERE AND ELSEWHERE (ICI ET AILLEURS) in partnership with writer Dylan Rowen and Static Vision.

tinyurl.com/4tmeshzp

STATIC VISION AND ROUGH CUT PRESENTA mutual aid benefit film screening of Azza El-Hassan's Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004) & Jean-Luc G...

Festival - Emerging Writers' Festival

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Sep 11

PS. the Emerging Writers' Festival launches today!

Explore their full program at the link below:

emergingwritersfestival.org.au/festival/

Explore the 2025 Emerging Writers' Festival program, and grab your tickets! Running 11-18 September.

emergingwritersfestival.org.au

At the Cinémathèque: ‘Stranger Desires’

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Sep 11

"Each man is alone in his position. No outsider is concerned about their whereabouts. The chef continues to linger in this limbo, existing on the outskirts of his sanctuary while another man revels in it."

- Laetitia Um

1 1

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Sep 11

Our first piece in collaboration with the Emerging Writers' Festival x @melbcinematheque.bsky.social is a work of short fiction by Laetitia Um—a response to the Cinémathèque's recent Seijun Suzuki season that explores the troubled psyche of a side character in BRANDED TO KILL.

tinyurl.com/mu2ajak9

In a work of short fiction commissioned as part of our collaboration with the Emerging Writers’ Festival, Laetitia Um unearths latent desires in Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Branded to Kill’ (1967).

EWF at the Cinémathèque - Emerging Writers' Festival

1 2 2

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Sep 2

Rough Cut is proud to be partnering with the Emerging Writers Festival and @melbcinematheque.bsky.social to publish three responses to Cinémathèque seasons by emerging writers during EWF 2025 and beyond.

We'll kick off with the fest on Sep 11—watch this space! 💌🎥📝

tinyurl.com/ysmzzmmd

Three writers absorbed by the inter-disciplinary, creatively respond to three unique seasons at Melbourne’s coolest film society: The Cinémathèque.

1 3

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 28

Excerpt from the interview with Kalu Oji:

“I was trying to capture a truth that I see around me […] When you’ve moved out to a country like Australia, there are expectations. There is a mental juggling of mind and spirit that’s required to succeed, or even just to stay afloat.”

Excerpt from the interview with Kalu Oji:

“Maybe in the films I make, the children are this beautiful reflection of the parent and of this inner child; this thing that was once really rich and vivid and lively in the parent that, through what they’ve gone through in their life, they have put on the back shelf or had to suppress.”

Piecing it Together: An Interview with ‘Pasa Faho’ Director Kalu Oji

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 28

“This film is an artefact, and that’s how I wanted to make it; that’s how I want it to feel.”

Michelle Huang speaks to PASA FAHO director Kalu Oji about collaboration, intergenerational love and learning, and refusing assimilation.

tinyurl.com/4xpjxjbh

Michelle Huang speaks with the filmmaker and TEN DAYS collective member about collaboration, intergenerational love and learning, and refusing assimilation.

“Embracing the Possibility of Failure”: An Interview with Emily Browning

1 1 3

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 19

Excerpt from the interview with Emily Browning:

“I remember doing interviews at Cannes, and things have changed a lot now, but honestly, it was the Australian journalists who were asking the shitty questions. I remember I got asked, ‘What do you think your young fans are going to think of this?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. I mean, I’m an adult.’ I was barely one, but technically I was. I do remember people trying to shame me for it.”

Excerpt from the interview with Emily Browning:

“For a long time, I was terrified of the industry in a lot of ways, and I’d be in this push and pull of doing a job and then hiding for a while. [...] I judged myself for a long time for not being better at planning what the arc of my career should look like. But I’ve finally accepted the fact that I did things the way I needed to do them.”

1 3

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 19

"I saw this very narrow version of Hollywood, and I didn’t like it."

Emily Browning talks to @connordalton.bsky.social about the joys and anxieties of her most formative roles, from her breakthrough in GHOST SHIP to her latest turn in the homegrown rom-com ONE MORE SHOT.

tinyurl.com/334699jy

The Australian actor reflects on the joys and anxieties of her most formative roles, from her breakthrough in ‘Ghost Ship’ to her latest turn in the homegrown romantic comedy ‘One More Shot.’…

Indigo Bailey on resisting the film industry’s regime of complacence.

Reposted by ROUGH CUT

the Curb @thecurb.com.au · Aug 8

This piece from Indigo Bailey @roughcutfilm.bsky.social is essential reading, especially ahead of MIFF kicking off.

roughcutfilm.com/2025/08/08/c...

Closing the Curtains

roughcutfilm.com

2 4

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 8

"While a smugness about the safeguarding of cinema sui generis proliferates, more difficult questions about the capacity of the moving image to propagandise, erase, or oppose mass political violence—Why cinema? What cinema? Whose cinema?—hover unanswered."

- Indigo Bailey

2

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 8

"The current escalation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a critical juncture which marks blatant cultural as well as humanitarian crises—including a crisis for the moving image."

Indigo Bailey on rejecting regimes of silence and complicity in the Australian film industry.

tinyurl.com/3jud2hwh

Closing the Curtains

Indigo Bailey on resisting the film industry’s regime of complacence.

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 1

Excerpt from interview with Pascal Bonitzer:

“I always approach things backwards. And in this case, I never felt I was ready until the moment someone asked me to.”

Excerpt from interview with Pascal Bonitzer:

“[Rivette] asked me to write scenes during the shoot. Sometimes solo, sometimes with others, I wrote while the film was being made, in direct contact with the actors and crew, close to the shoot itself. It’s very rare; it hardly ever happens like that. And it was a great liberty, and a great pleasure.”

Historical Imagination: An Interview with Pascal Bonitzer

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Aug 1

On the site today, Philippa Hawker interviews the prolific screenwriter, director, and Cahiers du Cinéma critic Pascal Bonitzer about his new art world-set feature THE STOLEN PAINTING.

Now in Australian cinemas courtesy of Palace Films 🖼️

tinyurl.com/2tuczmc6

Philippa Hawker speaks with the prolific critic, screenwriter, and director about his latest art world-set feature, the intuitive turns in his career, and collaborating with auteurs including Jacqu…

At the Cinémathèque: On Delphine Seyrig, Alain Resnais, and Remoulding Memory

1 2 1

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Jul 7

The Melbourne Cinémathèque screens films on Wednesday nights at ACMI in Federation Square. Screenings are presented in partnership with ACMI and supported by VicScreen.

Full program and membership options—including discounts for students—are available on ACMI’s website.

2

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Jul 7

"In MURIEL, Seyrig portrays Hélène as a gesture of surrender, evaporating into her surroundings as a modest mist. She is her own showroom, harbouring relics of the past which beg to be relinquished [...] situated at that throbbing point of tension between past and present."

1 2

ROUGH CUT @roughcutfilm.bsky.social · Jul 7

"Seyrig's performances [...] teeter on the threshold between person and place."

Jamie Jungyoon Tak writes on LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD & MURIEL, OR THE TIME OF RETURN, which screened together as part of the recent Delphine Seyrig season at the Melbourne Cinémathèque.

tinyurl.com/nnu7uw8y

In two Resnais films screened this June as part of the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s season ‘Rebellious Muse: Delphine Seyrig as Actor, Director and Activist,’ Seyrig wavers between the mislaid past and…