“Nothing Inside”: On Pablo Larraín’s El Conde (2023)
This man who watches you returns from hell […]; he is hollow, he is full of air. Dry hands hold him upright from behind, like a house of cards being[…]
Author: Eduardo Frajman
Eduardo Frajman grew up in San José, Costa Rica. He graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and received a PhD in political science from the University of Maryland. His peer-reviewed articles, essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared in numerous publications, academic and literary, online and in print, in English and Spanish He lives in Illinois, where he teaches humanities and philosophy at Oakton College and the College of Lake County.
Dance · Drama · Exile and Displacement · Poverty · Theory
Dancing Diagonals: Movement and Far-Away-Ness in Fernando Frías de la Parra’s Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019)
One of Frías de la Parra’s masterstrokes is to highlight the similar ways in which Monterrey and New York (otherwise such radically distinct cities) are brimming with diagonal lines: in[…]
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Activist & Political · Directors · LGBT & Queer
Seeing Double: Two New Films by Jayro Bustamante – Temblores and La Llorona
Despite their focus on timely sociopolitical matters, the films are almost never didactic (the final act of Temblores is an exception), because Bustamante is too keen to explore and shed[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Essays
Lost Dreams of Brazil: Petra Costa’s The Edge of Democracy (2019)
E em cada paso dessa linha / pode se machucar. Azar! / A esperança equilibrista / sabe que o show de todo artista tem que continuar. And on each step[…]
Chronicler(s) of the End of the End: On Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s Pájaros de Verano (Birds of Passage) (2018)
“The root of oppression is loss of memory.” – Paula Gunn Allen1 * * * The end of the world is a mansion in the middle of the desert. A[…]
Mother Nature: Ramón Salazar’s La Enfermedad del Domingo (2018)
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
Godot’s Never Coming: Almacenados’ Anti-Absurdist Vision of the Workplace
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
Black Soil: Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015)
And some are pretty enough / And some are poor indeed; And now again the people / Call it but a weed. – Alfred Lord Tennyson. “The Flower” * * *[…]
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