IDFA is a staple cultural event in Amsterdam. During my student years, I didn’t get to experience the festival due to COVID, the lockdown, and the strange pandemic rules in the Netherlands. From 2022 onwards, it became one of the weeks I looked the most forward to every November. It’s a ritual, knowing that the priority for those ten days in the middle of each November will be dedicated to watching an excessive amount of documentaries; five, seven, maybe more. Many conventional inspiring formats...

October is a strange month. In the Netherlands, it is the true beginning of the autumn-winter hybrid that will last until March (greyness, wetness, darkness). In Canada, where I grew up, it was the most delightful season of brisk air, colourful trees and blue skies. Luckily, October is also Halloween (my favourite holiday of the year), and in Amsterdam - the Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE). As the season starts to shift, the city knows exactly how to fend off the seasonal depression of its inhabitan...

Riffing off a new Twitter trend, and a fun ten-minute collage exercise on Instagram, I thought why not write about it? When putting this together, I tried to think not just what are my favourite movies, but which movies do I think about the most often, do I recommend the most, or do I get most excited to talk about? Recently, I had also challenged myself to curate my top 10 films of the 21st century, in line with the mega exercise by the NYTimes. They do say: the only thing a cinephile loves to...

There is something almost off-putting about Joachim Trier's films. From the opening shot of any of his films, the viewer is exposed to raw vulnerability. The viewer is immediately made aware that they will be following the story of a hopelessly flawed protagonist. In Worst Person in the World (2020), Sentimental Value (2025) and Reprise (2006), the narration opens the film by “objectively” introducing the protagonists, Julie, Nora, Philip and Erik respectively. The narration foolishly has you be...