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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Maybe it’s true that sophisticated cinema has perished, as Hollywood alpha-males Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese recently opined If so, this year’s Doclisboa film festival – at which over two hundred films were distributed across ten days and four central Lisbon theatres – must have been a gathering of the undead The niche pictures on show might be financially underpowered compared to the silver screen behemoths mourned by Scott and Scorsese But were intensity of interest an accepted measure of relevance, the absorbed focus given to these more obscure works could rebuke any claim of film’s plight   In central Canada, where I grew up, finding curious documentaries meant spending hours searching VHS tapes at the local library So it feels significant, when nearly every seat in a grand old theatre is occupied for a documentary on Joseph Beuys, or when droves turn out for a film about a little-known philosopher who spent her time transcribing Rimbaud’s letters Granted, Edmund Cordeiro’s Todas as Cartas de Rimbaud (All Rimbaud’s Letters) (2017) enjoyed a hometown advantage – ‘it’s our Portuguese film,’ said the woman who scanned my press pass, with a cordial pride that melted my adopted Berlin chill Cordeiro’s subject is Maria Filomena Molder, a professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa As the camera follows Molder’s transcribed pages, she moves from Rimbaud through Wittgenstein and Kant, expounding beauty and the sublime The film is less a stringent philosophy lecture than a portrait of thought unfolding in one mind, and as it does, opening the world   Throughout Doclisboa, worlds opened in many dimensions – psychological, social, geographical – prompted by a miscellany of circumstances, and with wildly varying consequences A retrospective of the late Czech director Věra Chytilová formed a kind of festival within the festival, with thirty-three of her works distributed throughout the ten days In a straightforward, news television style, Where Are You Going, Girls? (1993)  recorded female Czech entrepreneurs explaining their work, and the effect of capitalism – newly arrived by way of the Velvet Revolution – on happiness Generally, their enjoyment of autonomy beats out the stress of free

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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poetry

March 2015

Coup & Bell Curve

Elizabeth Willis

poetry

March 2015

COUP   Mallarmé’s gambling astonished everyone even the poets   An acre of paper sold down a river whose...

Prize Entry

April 2015

Smote, or ...

Eley Williams

Prize Entry

April 2015

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision. I shouldn’t mind about the gallery attendant. He is...

feature

May 2011

Why I Write (Rather than Riot)

Gavin James Bower

feature

May 2011

Watching the recent public demonstrations protesting, at times violently, the Coalition government’s budgetary cuts, I was forced to revisit...

 

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