You Are What Irks You
Our new deputy editor, Maxwell Paparella, writes from the Whitney Biennial.
IN THIS NEWSLETTER
Editor’s Letter
Stream the Gotham Television Awards
This Week on Filmmaker
New Releases
Bleak Week, C’est Chic
Festival Deadlines
EDITOR’S LETTER
We have some exciting news to share this week at Filmmaker! I’m beyond pleased to introduce you to our new deputy editor, Maxwell Paparella. I can assure you that this publication is in extremely capable, fastidious hands with him on board: in fact, I first met Maxwell when I was on the other side of the blade as a writer for Screen Slate, during his tenure as managing editor. We worked together on an interview I’d done with Ricky D’Ambrose (and to bring this full circle, D’Ambrose just interviewed Radu Jude for Filmmaker’s spring issue). I was immediately impressed by Maxwell’s ability to recognize a strong idea, then sculpt the most eloquent way of expressing it—the process was about the film at hand, yes, but also the prose itself.
Maxwell and I were colleagues at MUBI’s Notebook and pulled off some fairly adventurous, idiosyncratic features during our time there—our published editors’ dialogue about advertising probably tells you all you need to know about what our Slack conversations looked like on a daily basis. He helped us up our game with commissioned illustrations and comics, and I can confidentially share that his keen eye for art direction is already kicking Filmmaker’s summer issue planning into warp speed. But the best way to get to know him is in his own words. As a writer, he’s covered subjects as varied as the lyrical silent films of Boris Barnet, the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC, and Radu Jude’s AI-slop provocation Dracula (for the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray). In today’s newsletter, he reports back from the Whitney Biennial to share a surreal, beguiling highlight.—Chloe Lizotte
In a dark gallery on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, a 26-minute video plays on a loop. Jordan Strafer’s Talk Show (2026) is in the shape of a television drama, in the same way that something framed on a wall could be said to be in the shape of a painting. Most visitors to the Biennial won’t watch all of that, and their impressions may vary depending on which bits they catch. The central action is bookended by anomalous material, which might even be offcuts from another project. Beneath a stand of palm trees, fronds gleaming metallic and sinister in the night, two men in headlamps dig a hole, overdressed for the task. Elsewhere, amid the detritus of a bar sometime after last call, an unwatched television is tuned to MSNBC, which reports the disappearance of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in a small airplane off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. And then their plane is still in the air, but descending too fast toward the Atlantic. Kennedy’s final words are a flirtation with a radio officer on the ground, to whom he calmly regrets the things he will never get to do, as enumerated on his PalmPilot. Later, in the same bar, on the eve of the year 2000, the actors who play Kennedy and the operator incarnate their disrupted desire in the restroom hallway.
The bulk of the video is something completely different again: a surreal enactment of its titular premise. Before a studio audience, a host asks a panel of confessed rapists, all members of the US military, to furnish psychological explanations for their crimes. She proceeds to issue a form of forgiveness while the survivors look on from backstage. Soon one of the officers (Jim Fletcher, whose face is like a cutting board, lined with previous expressions) takes on the guise of a guru and leads a guided meditation, imploring us to essentially kidnap our inner child and take them away from the site of our earliest traumas. The loop point is ambiguous, scrambling our chronological coordinates.
To emerge from the gallery having seen any fragment of this is probably enough to vex you for a while. Those who watch for the entire duration—and even stick around for a second viewing and a third—may find that the seemingly incongruous parts begin to contaminate each other in the mind, their edges becoming gummy and suitable for adhesion in any number of configurations. “A video work on loop in a gallery isn’t that different from a TV playing a soap opera or a trial in the background,” Strafer has said. “The form permits you to tune in and out.” Anticipating the passive or distracted viewer, the work also rewards (by frustrating) a more concentrated one.
Talk Show is the final installment in a trilogy. Loophole (2022) and Decadence (2024) revolve around the courtroom and aftermath, respectively, of William Kennedy Smith’s 1991 rape trial, for which Strafer’s mother served as a member of the defense team when the artist was an infant. Writing about a previous body of work, it seemed to me that Strafer produces autobiographical accounts “devoid of shame or sentiment.” In this trilogy, she departs from a personal coincidence to trace the hopelessly intertwined strands of sexual violence, celebrity, and state power, though the result—uncomfortably—is closer to a costume ball than a condemnation. If we were to take up these parts, Strafer seems to ask, what would still shock us, and what would cease to?
It is never clear in what proportion Strafer’s provocations are earnest or ironic. Talk Show’s trespass into irresolute political and social commentary is unlike anything else the Biennial has recently permitted, conforming to neither the self-regarding stridency we have come to expect from the exhibition nor the pretty, polite tone of this year’s edition, apparently intended to signal a break from prior doctrine. I’ve yet to speak with anyone who knows quite what to do with it—a bafflement that should serve as the highest recommendation.—Maxwell Paparella
Third Annual Gotham Television Awards: Stream Live Monday at 7 PM ET
The 2026 Gotham Television Awards will be livestreamed on The Gotham’s YouTube channel this Monday, June 1! Red Carpet coverage via YouTube begins at 6:30 PM ET / 3:30 PM PT while the ceremony begins at 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT.
The Gotham Television Awards will also stream live through TEGNA network affiliates across 51 markets throughout the country. TEGNA streaming apps are available to local audiences on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV.
Nominees in twelve categories include Pluribus, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Big Mistakes, Beef, DTF St. Louis, Half Man, People We Meet on Vacation, I Love LA, Lord of the Flies, The Chair Company, and more. Tributes will feature FX’s Love Story, Kerry Washington, Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Stranger Things‘ Matt & Ross Duffer.
This Week on Filmmaker
In this week’s Considerations column, Tyler Coates delves into the splendid blend of horror and comedy that just might propel the new Apple TV series Widow’s Bay—which, intriguingly, was originally conceived as a Parks and Recreation spec script—to Emmy-winning excellence. That is, if voters aren’t too creeped out to vote for it in the Outstanding Comedy Series category.
NEW IN THEATERS & STREAMING PLATFORMS
Kane Parsons becomes the youngest director to helm an A24 feature with Backrooms, an adaptation of his liminal YouTube series of the same name that stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. Payton McCarty-Simas’s stirring essay on the film’s distinct brand of “digital nostalgia” will be sent out to Filmmaker newsletter subscribers early next week.
Filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler, Argentine-born and Swiss-raised, gives her protagonist in The Currents a similar background: Stylist Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) finds herself traveling from Switzerland back to her country of birth on a sudden whim.
Following her acclaimed 2022 doc Fire of Love, Sara Dosa’s new film utilizes the personal archives of Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason to meditate on the ephemeral nature of familial artifacts and glaciers melting due to climate change. In other words: Time and Water.
NEWEST WEB ARTICLE
Bleak Week, C’est Chic
By Chris Cassingham
The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the festival’s first 33 film–strong slate of repertory classics like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Come and See (1985), Winter Light (1963), Funny Games (1997), Breaking the Waves (1996), and Sátántangó (1994), this visceral quality was front and center as an organizing principle, even if the films weren’t united by much besides their baseline dreariness and arthouse bonafides. Now entering its fifth and most curatorially focused iteration, Bleak Week has grown from a local phenomenon into a worldwide event: a 73-city, nearly 100-theater expansion begins in June, an invitation for programmers from around the world to interpret the series’ broad definition of “bleakness” for their own audiences.
Read more here.
FESTIVAL DEADLINES
New Orleans Film Festival
Extended Deadline: May 29, 2026
Event Dates: Oct. 22-27, 2026
Indie Memphis Film Festival
Regular Deadline: May 29, 2026
Late Deadline: June 26, 2026
Event Dates: Nov. 5-8, 2026
Montclair Film Festival
Regular Deadline: May 29, 2026
Late Deadline: Jun. 19, 2026
Event Dates: Oct. 16-25, 2026
So pleased to run into random praise of the AC’s Bleak Week