Locarno 2026: ‘You Don‍‍‍‍‍‍’t Belong Here’ Wins Golden Leopard

Romanian filmmaker Florin Șerban’s You Don’t Belong Here (Nu E Locul Tau Aici) has won the Golden Leopard at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The jury praised the film’s writing, distinctive vision and cinematic language. Hong Sangsoo took Best Director for Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, while Monica Bellucci won a performance award for Ketticè. In the Filmmakers of the Present competition, Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer received the Golden Leopard as well as the Best First Feature award. Petra Volpe’s prison drama Frank & Louis won the UBS

Rubaiyat Hossain’s ‘The Difficult Bride’ Selected for TIFF 2026

Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain’s latest feature, The Difficult Bride, has been officially selected for the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, where it will be presented in the Centrepiece programme as a North American premiere. The festival will run from September 10 to 20, 2026. The selection follows the film’s inclusion in the Orizzonti competition at the upcoming 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Directed by Hossain, the 87-minute psychological horror film is an international co-production involving France, Bangladesh, Portugal, Norway and Germany. Set in contemporary Dhaka, the film follows a bride-to-be preparing for

‘Mukh O Mukhosh’ at 70: The Birth of Modern Bangladeshi Cinema

Bangladesh marks 70 years today since the release of Mukh O Mukhosh, the film widely regarded as the starting point of the country’s organised feature-film industry. Directed by Abdul Jabbar Khan, it premiered at Roopmahal Cinema Hall in Dhaka on 3 August 1956. The opening show was inaugurated by Sher-e-Bangla A. K. Fazlul Huq, who was then Governor of East Pakistan. Produced under the banner of Iqbal Films, Mukh O Mukhosh was the first full-length Bengali-language sound feature made in East Pakistan, the territory that later became Bangladesh. Its importance lies

Bangladesh Reaches Venice Milestone with ‍‍`The Difficult Bride‍‍`

Bangladeshi cinema has achieved a historic milestone as writer, director and producer Rubaiyat Hossain's fourth feature film, The Difficult Bride, has been selected for the Horizons (Orizzonti) Competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The selection marks the first time a Bangladeshi feature film has been included in an official competition section at the Venice Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious cinematic events. The festival's 83rd edition will take place in Venice, Italy, from September 2 to 12, where The Difficult Bride will have its world premiere. Founded in 1932,

O Captain! My Captain!: Revisiting Dead Poets Society

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.” There is a moment near the beginning of Dead Poets Society that has always stayed with me. John Keating takes his students out of the classroom and asks them to look at old photographs of boys who once studied at Welton Academy. Those boys had plans, ambitions, and futures they probably thought were still far ahead of them. Then Keating leans toward his students ' ...

The Uncompromising Voice of Zahir Raihan

There are artists who record history, and there are artists who become part of it. Zahir Raihan belonged to the second kind. Born on 19 August 1935 in Majupur village of Feni, he became one of the major writers and filmmakers of twentieth-century Bengal. His life crossed the struggles that shaped Bangladesh: the Language Movement, the rise of Bengali political consciousness, resistance to authoritarian rule, and the Liberation War of 1971. Raihan did not separate artistic work from public responsibility. He wrote fiction, worked in journalism, studied photography, made films, ' ...

Zahir Raihan: The Guerrilla Filmmaker

“From among many kinds of work, an intellectual has to find such a work that he can do skilfully, beautifully. Once the battlefield of work has been determined, then the next task is to find the enemy’s power-base in that battlefield and determine the strategy for striking there.” — Solanas and Getino (1971: 47) April 1971. He was secretly helping the freedom fighters. But he was not satisfied. So he said to his elder brother Shahidullah Kaiser, “Borda, I will leave. I will not be able to do anything ' ...

The Prison Without Walls: Inside Roman Polanski’s Cinema

Roman Polanski’s cinema is full of characters who can see the world around them, but cannot always escape the frame through which they see it. I think I understand this because I remember a time when I could not escape the way I was seeing my own life. Ever since I began to understand auteurism, I have looked for recurring ideas and stylistic signatures across a director’s work, the things a filmmaker seems to return to again and again. That is how I came to Polanski and began asking what ' ...