Rushes | Trump’s Tariff on Foreign Films, an Australian Microcinema Renaissance, Hamaguchi in Paris

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NEWS

Holes (Andrew Davis, 2003).

• President Trump announced on social media that he would be instituting a “100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”  The film industry continues to ponder the precise meaning and scope of his declaration, which came after a meeting with actor and “special ambassador to Hollywood” Jon Voight. In response, California governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a $7.5 billion federal film tax credit for motion-picture productions.
• A passionate microcinema culture has emerged in Australia, attracting audiences to watch alternative and experimental films in “independent theatres and ad-hoc spaces such as warehouses, community halls and even pubs.”
• Over 1,500 UK actors, writers, and other industry professionals have signed an open letter in support of trans rights after the country’s supreme court ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex. ​​“We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK,” reads the letter, which proclaims that the industry must urgently work to protect their colleagues from discrimination and harassment.
• Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos declares that the movie theater model is outdated because “most of the country cannot [walk to the cinema].” Meanwhile, director Rian Johnson wants his latest Netflix feature, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025), in as many theaters for as long as possible. “We’ve seen if you put a movie people want to see in the theaters, they are going to show up for it,” Johnson says, “and that experience of being in a full house and having that experience is so important. It’s something that I love and I want more of in the world.”

DEVELOPING

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021).

• Ryusuke Hamguchi’s next film, All of a Sudden, to be produced in Paris, will star Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira as a Japanese theater director and a French nurse, respectively. The script, cowritten with Léa Le Dimna, is based on You and I – The Illness Suddenly Get Worse, by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono, a real-life correspondence that Hamaguchi calls “an encounter between two souls.” He is currently in Paris, preparing for the shoot and “trying desperately to learn French.”   
• Meanwhile, Asghar Farhadi is set to direct his next film, Parallel Tales, in Paris this fall. It will be his second French-language film following The Past (2013) and will also star Virginie Efira, as well as Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Casse. Catherine Deneuve will reportedly make a special appearance.
• Brad Pitt will star in Edward Berger's next film, The Riders, an adaptation of the 1994 Tim Winton novel of the same name, which follows a father trying to discover the whereabouts of his wife after she abandoned their young daughter at the airport. Filming will commence in 2026.
• Pop star Charli XCX will star and produce the next film by Takashi Miike through her new production company Studio365, which has lined up a wide array of projects, including a mockumentary, The Moment, in which XCX will also star; Gregg Araki’s new erotic thriller, I Want Your Sex; and Cathy Yan’s Art Basel–set thriller The Gallerist.

REMEMBERING

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978–79).

• Dara Birnbaum has died at 78. The American video and installation artist was best known for her pioneering 1970s work that critiqued and interrogated the mass media, especially television. Her piece Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) deploys, appropriates, and remixes scenes of Lynda Carter’s portrayal as the eponymous superhero to examine gendered imagery in popular culture. Other notable works include Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), a single-channel video constructed of footage of female celebrity introductions on Hollywood Squares (1966–80); PM Magazine/Acid Rock (1982), with appropriated footage from the news magazine show PM Magazine and a Wang Computers commercial; and Arabesque (2011), which retraces the romantic and artistic relationship between Robert and Clara Schumann through selections of their performances found on YouTube. Her work is in museum collections around the world.
• Karen Durbin has died at 80. The American journalist and editor was the editor-in-chief of The Village Voice from 1994 to 1996, the second woman to hold that position in the paper’s history. During her tenure, she attempted to wrest the Voice’s coverage toward more diverse, contemporary viewpoints across culture and politics. She had been at the Voice full time since 1974 as a writer and assistant editor before becoming a senior arts editor in 1979. After quitting in 1996 over differences in editorial strategy, she worked as a film critic for The New York Times and other publications.

RECOMMENDED READING

Hurlevent (Jacques Rivette, 1985).

• “Therefore, at the beginning of a film, I know that I can head into production, rightly or wrongly, when I have … on the one hand, the list of sequences, but also a kind of mental outline. And in this case, the mental outline was the two poles that never met, because the one is positive and the other is negative.” For the Serge Daney in English blog, filmmaker and critic Ted Fendt translates the transcripts of two episodes from Daney’s weekly radio show, Microfilms, featuring Jacques Rivette.
• “For 500 years people have struggled to oppose, repair and reverse colonial and imperial wounds and damages. We cannot allow ourselves to disregard this resilience, which today is emblematised in Palestine, or to reproduce the imperial epistemological violence that has always pressured its victims to move on and forget about the crimes waged against them.” For ArtReview, Yuwen Jang interviews filmmaker and professor Ariella Aïsha Azoulay ahead of the premiere of her new work One Thousand and One Jewels – Unlearning Imperial Plunder III (2025) about rejecting colonial thinking and reclaiming a lost world amidst our digitally mediated experience.
• “To place [Godard’s] posthumous films in the realm of the autobiographical, to my mind, limits their interest. Instead, one might take them for what they are, fragments of a future ‘that will never exist,’ but which nonetheless point us in a different direction.” For Sabzian, Jonathan Mackris unpacks Jean-Luc Godard’s posthumous works and how they offer access into the filmmaker's “working process, his thinking about films, and his working relationship to his collaborators in the last two decades of his life.”
• “Talking of means and ends, I think the primary reason why the New Wave films have that rough edge to them is that they cannot afford the polish. Polish is really a matter of time, and in films, as we all learn sooner or later, time equates perfectly with money. With true Gallic flair, the New Wave has turned this lack into a virtue.” E-flux has republished Satyajit Ray’s 1965 essay “Film Making,” which reflects on the challenges he faced in his early work and how to balance creativity with material constraints.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS 

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955).

• London, through May 11: The Open City Documentary Festival presents the fifteenth edition of its annual nonfiction showcase, focusing on “cinema as an act of resistance.”
• New York, May 9 through 31: The Japan Society presents “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I,” the first of a two-part retrospective of the prolific filmmaker, the “fourth great master” of Japanese cinema, celebrating the 120th anniversary of his birth. The series will continue next month at Metrograph.
• New York, May 15 through 27: The Museum of Modern Art presents “The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim’s Films,” a survey of the avant-garde filmmaker’s works, from his early shorts through his acclaimed feature-length film cycle, the Elective Affinities. The series coincides with the publication of The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films, in which the filmmaker reflects upon the evolution of his work and the development of experimental cinema in the twentieth century.
• Toronto, through May 2: TIFF Cinematheque presents “Flights: Vietnam on Film,” a showcase of films from the country and its diaspora in honor of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Volleyball (Foot Film) (Yvonne Rainer, 1967).

• ​​E-flux, in collaboration with Video Data Bank, presents Five Easy Pieces (1966–69), a collection of Yvonne Rainer’s first five short films, which distill her “ongoing preoccupations: the deconstruction of spectacle, the primacy of the everyday, and the latent drama of minimal gestures.”
• A24 has released a trailer for Benny Safdie’s first solo film The Smashing Machine (2025), a biographical sports drama about former wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, out October 3.
• Warner Bros. has released a trailer for Weapons (2025), the new horror film from Barbarian (2022) director Zach Cregger, about the aftermath of a mass disappearance of schoolchildren in a small community. The film stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, and Alden Ehrenreich and will be released on August 8.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

April (dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024).

• “You can call that non-real, or fantasy, or magic—it doesn’t matter. It’s my way of dealing with the unbearable reality of everything.” Leonardo Goi interviews Dea Kulumbegashvili, director of April (2024), a film whose moments of intense realism are interrupted only by the mysterious creature at its center.
• “The question of disaster is suspended between the loss of the world as it was and the world that is nearing existence; these worlds exist simultaneously.” Perwana Nazif shares an essay on an exhibition by François Pain, one of the first French video artists and a close associate of Francesc Tosquelles, Jean Oury, and Félix Guattari during their years at La Borde, the radical psychotherapy clinic where the so-called “mad” and “normal” lived together among resistance fighters, refugees, and dissidents.
• “Children are known to make movies on the sly, when the adults have their backs turned.” Sophia Satchell-Baeza surveys the vast and appropriately unruly canon of underage auteurs.
• “I hope I will be able to go to Gaza and make those films that I wanted to make as a child.” Maria Kruglyak speaks with the Gazan filmmaker Mohammed Almughanni, whose work documents and dramatizes the lives lived under apartheid.

WISH LIST

Slow Action (Ben Rivers, 2011).

• June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive (2025), Onyeka Igwe's exploration of Pan-African film via the curator and film programmer’s “private collection made public,” is available to purchase from Lawrence Wishart.
• Urthworks (2025), a “visual novel” by Ben Rivers, is available to preorder from MACK. The book draws upon his trilogy of films that imagine “the future of a planet at three stages after environmental collapse” and features texts by author Mark von Schlegell alongside observational images from real locations and fabricated environments.
• Reflections: On Cinematography—Roger Deakins’s memoir of his 50-year career, featuring never-before-seen storyboards, sketches, and diagrams—is available to preorder from Hachette Book Group ahead of its release on November 11.

EXTRAS

• Jeff Goldblum and Brain Dead have collaborated on the perfume Goldblooming, a “rich, captivating scent that opens with bold top notes of sandalwood, tobacco leaf, leather, and white musk.”