🎙️ NEW 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.
books
🎙️ NEW PODCAST: 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.
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.
#dt500mag 