🎙️ New Podcast | London Is Burning: Raindance, Heatwaves & the Art of Controlled Chaos: A record-breaking London heatwave. A city on the edge of combustion. And a film festival that refused to cool down. Raindance 2026 turned the West End into a pressure chamber of ideas, ambition, and cinematic risk. First-time directors outnumbered expectations, not headlines. Conversations replaced branding. And the Canon Lounge beneath BAFTA became the real currency exchange of independent film. From sun-scorched red carpets to late-night revelations in darkened cinemas, everything felt heightened, urgent, and uncomfortably alive. Supported by Variety, under Denise Parkinson’s renewed leadership, the industry finally paid closer attention. Nothing here was passive. Nothing was safe. And nothing — not even the heat — could outshine the urgency of the stories being told.
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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.
Arthur Sopin & Andreas Rod’s No, It Is Not; Not Always (DT500mag, London) is a sharp post-conceptual rupture disguised as an exhibition — where portraiture, performance, and moving image collapse into controlled instability. Born from a 150+ artist open call, it reframes eccentricity as structure, not exception, and turns identity into a flickering system rather than a fixed subject. Positioned between Venice Biennale discourse and post-internet fatigue, it doesn’t explain the contemporary condition — it destabilises it, elegantly and without apology.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Photography today is abundant, immediate, and largely forgettable. This exhibition begins from that condition, not in resistance to it, but in recognition of it: documentary image-making no longer delivers certainty — only negotiated versions of it.
NO, IT IS NOT; NOT, ALWAYS reframes contemporary photography as a space between witness and performance, sincerity and construction. Drawing on the emotional proximity of Nan Goldin, the formal control of Richard Avedon, the rigor of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the performative downtown sensibility associated with Maripol, the exhibition treats the photograph as an unstable encounter rather than a fixed record.
Here, the camera is not neutral. It participates, stages, distorts, and occasionally reveals in spite of itself. Identity appears as something performed under observation, never fully resolved.
Against a culture addicted to clarity, this work insists on ambiguity as a method. Documentary photography, in this reading, is not a failed truth — but a contemporary one.
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