A quietly devastating portrait of invisible labour, ageing, and dignity, The Janitor transforms one elderly school caretaker into a universal symbol of the care economy societies depend on but rarely reward. Restrained, deeply humane, and politically astute, it arrives at precisely the moment Britain, Europe, and much of the world can no longer afford to ignore who keeps public life running.
Podcast Episode: Identity and Ambiguity in British Film
Recorded during Raindance Film Festival in Soho, this episode examines a strand of contemporary British and international cinema preoccupied with instability—of form, of history, and of identity itself.
From films that fracture and re-edit historical memory to documentaries that refuse the demand for clean categorisation, the conversation moves through questions of authorship, visibility, and interpretation. What does it mean when cinema stops explaining the world and starts exposing how it was assembled in the first place?
Across works including WHITENESS, Laundreams, and Let Us Be, the discussion traces a shared refusal: to stabilise meaning, to simplify identity, or to resolve ambiguity into comfort. Instead, these films linger in friction—between archive and fiction, belonging and misrecognition, visibility and understanding.
At its centre is a larger question: not just what cinema shows us, but what it quietly asks us to accept about how reality is constructed at all.
In this episode, we step into the shifting terrain of Intersex Visibility and Ambiguity — where identity is not a headline, but a lived reality shaped by medicine, culture, and silence. Through voices from Let Us Be, we explore what it means to exist beyond rigid categories, and why visibility alone is no longer enough. This is a conversation about bodies, belonging, and the uncomfortable power of not fitting neatly into definition.
WHITENESS is a 105-minute multi-form cinematic work premiering at Raindance Film Festival 2026. Conceived by Alessio Cappelletti, the film fuses narrative fiction, archival propaganda, animation, satire, and Southern Gothic horror into a single destabilised structure.
Rather than telling a unified story, it unfolds as four formal collisions—each revealing how images construct, distort, and reassemble historical truth.
From upper-class satire (And That’s That), to WWII propaganda (Teamwork), to banned racist animation (Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat), and culminating in Southern Gothic horror (Wretched Earth), the film traces how ideology survives through repetition, aesthetic framing, and cultural memory.
Ambitious, fractured, and deliberately unstable, WHITENESS rejects narrative closure in favour of structural tension, positioning itself as one of the most formally radical selections at Raindance 2026.
LAUNDREAMS is a British short set in a Sheffield laundrette on the hottest day of the summer, where two young women attempt to stage a reunion with a friend who left for London—only for the plan to collapse into absence. What follows is a quietly precise study of class aspiration, emotional stagnation, and the myth that leaving home equals success, reframing the everyday space as a site where belonging and ambition quietly collide.
Following the screening, I asked D’Avilla and Lyss Ball why Let Us Be feels so necessary now. The film offers not a thesis but an encounter: a meeting with minds of uncommon lucidity, whose apprehension of life resists the coarse machinery of classification and the consolations of dogma. The Director’s response revealed the film’s beating heart:
“Acceptance can sometimes still feel distant. It can mean: I allow you to exist, but I may not really want to know you. Understanding is deeper. It requires listening, humility, and the willingness to change the way we see someone. To be accepted is important, but to be understood is to feel truly seen.”
The achievement of Let Us Be is that it refuses the thin virtue of tolerance and moves towards something sterner, more exacting, more humane: understanding. It insists that visibility is not enough, that a life is not redeemed by being merely permitted to appear, but by being apprehended in its inward complexity, its contradictions, its irreducible singularity. Few documentaries leave one with a question so grave, so necessary: not whether we permit one another to exist, but whether we have learned to see beyond the categories that would diminish us.
Rarely has a documentary confronted questions of identity, bodily autonomy and human dignity with such intellectual rigour and emotional grace. Let Us Be is at once an urgent examination of human rights and a deeply affecting meditation on what it means to inhabit a self that exists beyond the limits of convention. Refusing both polemic and sentimentality, Viviane D’Avilla’s film illuminates the lived realities of intersex people with remarkable clarity, and it is the kind of work that does not leave the mind once the credits have rolled: it lingers, buzzing with thought, a genuine eureka of feeling and insight. As Lyss Ball, the film’s heroine, suggests, these lives are rendered with extraordinary sharpness in their dual reality, moving through everyday existence while also revealing something larger, braver and more expansive about what it means to be human. That is the film’s groundbreaking conclusion, and one from which we have much to discover.
An exhibition of photographs that refuse resolution. Inspired by Wallace’s infinite key ring, each image is a deliberate attempt rather than a perfected answer—testing failure, light, and meaning in real time. Nothing here unlocks easily, and that’s precisely the point: photography as restless inquiry, where getting it “wrong” is the only way of getting anywhere at all.
“BODY UTOPIA” dismantles, with unnerving elegance, one of contemporary culture’s most expensive delusions: that the self is something that can be refined into exit. Moving through the polished interiors of aesthetic privilege—from Mayfair restraint to Upper East Side perfectionism to Scandinavian minimal cool—it exposes the body not as a vessel of identity, but as its most unforgiving condition. No matter how meticulously styled, edited, or conceptually rebranded, the body refuses transcendence. It remains stubbornly present, absurdly unnegotiable, the only space you cannot relocate from. In this sense, utopia is not elsewhere—it is simply the fantasy that you could ever leave yourself.
Joe Corre: Burn After Reading
★★★★★★★★★☆ (9/10)
The son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood has no interest in preserving punk—he wants to rescue it from nostalgia. In a blisteringly sharp interview, Joe Corre defends burning £5 million worth of punk memorabilia, dismantles Britain’s cultural establishment, skewers John Lydon with characteristic venom, and argues that rebellion cannot survive once it becomes a museum exhibit. Intelligent, provocative and gloriously uncompromising, this is less an interview than a declaration of war against commodified dissent.
IElegant, provocative and intellectually dressed to kill, Role Play reminds us that fashion reaches its highest form not when it sells clothes, but when it quietly dismantles certainty. The garments may change. The performance never ends.
MAI: The New Face of Scandinavian Cool ★★★★★★★★★☆ (9/10)
Forget the clichéd Scandi aesthetic of beige cashmere and designer bicycles. DJ Mai Schaarup represents the Denmark tourists rarely see—disciplined, emotionally restrained, fiercely creative and quietly rebellious. From Copenhagen’s underground clubs to solitary studio sessions, she proves that true Nordic cool isn’t performed. It’s simply lived. A sharp portrait of the modern Scandinavian heroine, where fashion, music and authenticity meet without ever asking for attention.
A practice where anatomy is not metaphor but material, and mortality is neither abstracted nor softened for comfort—Morten Viskum arrives with work that refuses the decorative instincts of contemporary culture.
At the exhibition, where concept too often floats free of consequence, his work anchors itself in the uneasy weight of what remains: bodies, memory, and the ethics of looking. Neither provocation for spectacle nor irony for distance, it is a sustained confrontation with presence itself—what it means to see, to remember, and to accept the material reality of life once it is no longer lived.
James Lazar Braathen’s show at Oslo’s Vigeland Museum resists the polished language of “Scandinavian fashion” and instead reclaims a distinctly Norwegian identity—colder, sharper, and psychologically charged. Set among Gustav Vigeland’s monumental sculptures, the collection becomes a dialogue between permanence and fragility, stone and skin, stillness and movement.
Rather than offering exportable Nordic minimalism, Braathen presents clothing as tension: worked fabrics, intentional abrasion, and silhouettes shaped by weather and resistance rather than trend. The result is a show that treats fashion not as lifestyle branding, but as confrontation with space, body, and national identity itself.
SOHO REZANEJAD: WHEN COPENHAGEN STOPS PLAYING NICE
Scandinavia has mastered polished pop. Soho Rezanejad has little interest in behaving.
Born to Iranian parents in a refugee camp outside Copenhagen, the musician has become one of the Nordic underground’s most compelling voices, blending industrial electronica, cinematic soundscapes and haunting vocals into music that refuses easy definition.
In this exclusive feature, Rezanejad reflects on identity, artistic freedom, exile, collaboration, and the creative communities quietly reshaping Copenhagen’s cultural landscape. Through intimate conversation and striking photography, the feature explores the city beyond its postcard perfection—where independent venues, artists and experimental musicians continue to redefine what Scandinavian music can sound like.
Part cultural portrait, part music profile and part visual essay, this is Copenhagen through the eyes of one of its most fearless artists.
THE VILLAGE EFFECT
What happens when two young creatives arrive in New York with one suitcase, a camera, and no intention of behaving like tourists?
Everyone tells you to visit New York. Almost nobody tells you how to read it.
Over one unforgettable summer, a young photographer and creative producer wander between the East Village and West Village, discovering a city where every block feels like a film set, every stranger has a story, and fashion becomes the language of survival.
This isn’t another New York guide. It’s a stylish portrait of downtown through photography, fashion and cultural curiosity—where artists, musicians, hidden bars and legendary vintage stores collide with the effortless glamour of Manhattan.
Sharp, witty and visually driven, The Village Effect explores why New York remains the world’s greatest muse—and why the best thing you’ll ever bring home isn’t a souvenir, but a new way of seeing.
Fashion. Photography. New York. One unforgettable summer.
Mick Szal is part of New York’s new modelling ecology—not as a breakout story, but as a working presence shaped by repetition, rejection, and creative adaptation. Based in the Lower East Side, she moves through the fashion system with a rare clarity about its mechanics, where silence often replaces feedback and visibility is never guaranteed. Rather than mythologising her career, she describes modelling as process: unstable, physically demanding, and intermittently creative. What emerges is not a traditional success narrative, but a portrait of a model who understands the system from within it—and continues to navigate it without illusion..
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