Raindance FIlm Festival

🎙️ Podcast Episode: The Lost Art of Attention: Ashanti Omkar on Cinema, Curiosity and the Stories That Shape Us

What if you’ve been watching films all wrong?

In an era defined by endless scrolling and fractured attention, film critic and broadcaster Ashanti Omkar poses a disquieting question: what do we lose when we no longer truly watch?

In this DT500 MAG LONDON DISPATCH conversation, she reframes cinema as more than entertainment — as a form of philosophy, empathy, and heightened perception. From the enduring cultural impact of *The Matrix* to the evolving role of film festivals, criticism, and global storytelling, Omkar explores how cinema continues to shape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.

At its heart, this is a reflection on attention itself — and on why the most powerful films still ask for something increasingly rare: the willingness to slow down, and really see.

THE RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: The Lost Art of Attention: Ashanti Omkar on Cinema, Curiosity and the Stories That Shape Us: LONDON

In an age of second screens and algorithmic feeds, London-based critic, broadcaster and cultural curator Ashanti Omkar argues that the real crisis facing cinema is not access, but attention. Audiences have never had more films and series at their fingertips, yet the patience required to experience them fully is under pressure. Drawing on her work across BAFTA juries, festival stages and interviews with actors and filmmakers, Omkar makes the case for curiosity, deep listening and the human encounters that streaming platforms cannot replicate. In a city that remains both a major global media market and a home to enduring cultural institutions, she explores why British film culture — with its tradition of rigorous criticism, public-service values and live festival conversations — still offers a distinctive counterweight to the increasingly fragmented attention economy.

🎙️ Podcast Episode: London Is Burning: Raindance and the Art of Controlled Chaos.LONDON

🎙️ 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.

THE RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: London Is Burning: Raindance and the Art of Controlled Chaos. LONDON

London sweltered under a record-breaking 34°C heatwave as the Raindance Film Festival returned for its 34th edition, transforming the West End into a charged collision of rising talent, restless ideas, and beautifully unpolished ambition. Between sun-scorched red carpets, packed Piccadilly screenings, and an unusually vital industry hub beneath BAFTA, the festival reaffirmed its reputation as Europe’s most defiantly independent cinematic force — where first-time directors outnumber expectations, conversations matter as much as premieres, and global voices arrive long before the industry learns to pronounce them. Supported by Variety under the renewed leadership of Denise Parkinson, this year’s edition felt sharper, hotter, and more necessary than ever: a week of cinematic discovery unfolding in a city that itself seemed on the brink of combustion.

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

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.

THE RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: 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.