WHITENESS: Raindance’s Most Ambitious Multi-Form Film Blurs the Line Between Cinema, Archive and Propaganda

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 Review: Raindance Short Turns Britain’s ‘Leaving Home’ Myth Into Quiet Disruption

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.

LET US BE, and the Question Modern Britain Still Struggles to Answer: Can We Live With Ambiguity?

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.

Exploring Identity in LET US BE: A Documentary Review from the 34th Raindance Film Festival, London

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.

Joe Corre: Burn After Reading

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.

The Scandinavian Cool Girl Who’d Rather Make You Dance Than Talk About Herself:

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.

Cupid Carries a Gun. Norway Doesn’t Do Loud. It Is Dangerous.

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.

Exclusive Report: DT 500 Mag’s Epic Descent Through Alphabet City!

Here, life pulsates with an intensity that defies seasons; summer heat radiates through every alley and courtyard. Amongst the throng of locals and wanderers, chance encounters become narratives. A casual wait for a friend might lead to tales from a dog-walking local who once shared moments with Jimi Hendrix. A cigarette shared with a street-dweller unveils a Thanksgiving-style confession of a barroom brawl with Patti Smith. Even a trip to the local deli might yield unexpected encounters with drag artists offering more than a meal.

Unveils Mick: NYC’s Own Fashion Dynamo: MICK SZAL

NEW YORK CITY, NY — Mick, the epitome of New York City’s fashion scene, emerges as a beacon of resilience and creativity, challenging stereotypes and redefining success in the competitive world of modeling. With over seven years in the industry, Mick’s journey from a small-town upbringing in Delaware to the vibrant streets of the Lower East Side showcases her unwavering determination and magnetic charm.

Illuminating Unity: The Refraction of Spiritual Depth through Photographic Art#ROOM8:

Welcome to “Illuminating Unity: The Refraction of Spiritual Depth through Photographic Art.” Today, we embark upon an intellectual and visual odyssey, examining the profound interconnectedness of the world’s venerable religions. It is posited that the depth of any great faith, whose roots delve into axial time, is more akin to the depths of another faith than to its own superficial manifestations.

THERAPEUTIC DENIM NYC

HE ESTABLISHED WWW.CACHOFALCON.COM AS A WAY TO SHOW HIS WORK AND MEANS TO CONTINUE GATHERING STORIES FROM OTHERS. FALCON DISCOVERED IT WAS MUCH EASIER FOR PEOPLE TO SHARE THEIR DARK EXPERIENCES WITH A STRANGER. HE RECEIVED MANY ANONYMOUS EMAILS FROM PEOPLE TELLING THEIR STORIES OF LOSS, HOPE, REGRET, AND LOVE, WHICH IN COMBINATION WITH HIS OWN PERSONAL STORIES, BECAME THE BASIS FOR A MASSIVE COLLECTION OF DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS.