**Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie, 1980)

As Earth rotates another 90 degrees around the sun (all the while continuing to gyre in a malicious circle of ethnonationalism and AI-powered ecocide), Senses of Cinema, as ever, places its hopes on the serious and eclectic discussion of film at the hands of some of our era’s brightest thinkers and theorists.

In this, our 115th edition, the assembled contributions are as diverse and surprising as they are rigorous and original. The issue opens with an intellectually (and affectively) exciting 12-text dossier, “My Formative Queers: Stories of the Music Videos that Made Us Queer,” edited by longtime friends of the journal Patrick Kelly and Stuart Richards. Mirroring the richness of the audio-visual artefacts under examination, the pieces range from intimate introspection to peer-reviewed precision, from first-person origin narratives to academic historiography – and often both in the same intoxicating swoop. Or, as Kelly, Richards, Stayci Taylor, and Cerise Howard describe in their editorial introduction: “using memory as a key device, several of the essays in this dossier employ an autoethnographic approach … to better understand the significance of music videos in the formation of queer identities, weaving intimate autobiographical details with political sensibility.” In interlacing subjective experience and sociocultural analysis (the personal and the political), these essays adopt a sensibility at the core of Senses; for that and for all their insight and labour, we thank the editors and authors.

Our Features section is next to carry the torch of eclectic and serious cinematic thought. Independent American filmmaker Jon Jost writes eloquently about two recent films by French-Belgian duo Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter whose non-fiction work is “cinema (that) touches the soul.” Martin Blažíček presents an innovative vision of city symphonies, placing them, in a heavily political reading of modernity, within a new framework: symphonies of infrastructures. Two splendidly written and culturally anchored texts, by George Kouvaros and Xinyuan Wang respectively, analyse the most recent films by Víctor Erice and Bi Gan, along with their oeuvres at large. Ömer Kulak revisits Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 masterwork Leviathan in an attempt to bring the film in conversation with the writings of Lukács, Arendt, and Adorno. Writing from Thessaloniki, Betty Kaklamanidou historicises Maria Plyta, Greece’s first female director, long excluded from academic and critical canons. Abel van Oosterwijk approaches the question of national cinema differently, by interrogating discourses of Calvinism’s supposed disastrous effect on Dutch filmmaking past and present. And finally, Jean Isabel Magcamit studies how some manga and anime shōnen fans queernarrate narratives intended otherwise, giving them new meanings.

In our Interviews section, Cristóbal Escobar interviews the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, a collective founded in Mexico in 2011 that “centres (their) audiovisual practice in collaboration, anonymity, and locality.” In another interview co-authored with Senses of Cinema collaborator Amanda Barbour, Escobar and Barbour speak to Chilean-raised, Montreal-based multimedia artist Malena Szlam, whose work radically recasts the natural world using Indigenous knowledge and western science “to reimagine the relationship between humans and the environment.” Also interviewed is Claire Denis on Le cri des gardes (The Fence, 2025), Philippe Lesage on Comme le feu (Who by Fire, 2024), Syeyoung Park on The Fin (2025) and Christoph Hochhäusler on *La mort viendra *(Death Will Come, 2024). In a twist on the interview format, Australian filmmaker Christian Byers, whose latest film Death of an Undertaker (2025) is set in a funeral home, engages in a dialogue with Australian writer Ivan Cerecina on ideas of death in cinema.

Our Festivals section once again teems with eye-opening dispatches from the circuit. Longtime Senses of Cinema collaborator Cerise Howard reports from the 59th Karlovy Vary Film Festival, an edition haunted by the passing of KVIFF president Jiří Bartoška, while Jaimey Fisher, writing from Locarno, finds an intriguing balance between challenging art films and more commercial titles, a curatorial strategy the Swiss festival has pursued since artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro assumed office in 2020. Elsewhere in Europe, Carmen Gray weighs in on a few standouts from San Sebastián’s official competition, including Claire Denis’s latest, The Fence. Neil Young, in turn, focuses on SSIFF’s retrospective on American dramatist and writer Lillian Hellman: “a leftfield and commendable decision” at a time when “any retrospective of cinema made before 1980 will usually be dominated by male directors,” and “a female emphasis will usually necessitate a focus on major stars.” We’re always partial to critics pushing their coverage into uncharted waters; Olivia Popp, covering the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, offers an oral history of the edition as stitched together from memories and impressions of other guests and colleagues. Marc Raymond reports from the Busan Film Festival, whose 30th iteration was a possibly “more star-studded and celebrity-focused affair than in recent years,” but proved relatively underwhelming. Last but not least, Dirk de Bruyn recounts his trip to Albuquerque’s Experiments in Cinema, an indispensable showcase for experimental cinema that places as much emphasis on its intriguing slates as it does on the thought-provoking post-screening chats between filmmakers and spectators.

The Indian giant Guru Dutt and Japan’s cine-theatrical enfant terrible Shuji Terayama are our two Great Directors holistically spotlighted in this issue by Ashish Dwivedi and Keoni Tsotsoros respectively. Denis Lavant, meanwhile, is the Great Actor explicated by Indigo Bailey, whose essay intriguingly notes that “to observe Lavant’s brilliance is to abandon certain presumptions about what it means to act well … With his ruffled complexion and sphinxish facial manoeuvres, Lavant is a welcome alien within a medium that too often favours smoothness and legibility.”

Closing this issue, we present you a quite special Book Reviews section. Just like in the last two years, we chose a classic film theory book to think along the evolution of the discussions it opened. This time, our selection was a recent classic, *The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses *(2000), and Laura U. Marks accepted our invitation to write about it herself! The result is both a history of the publication and an intellectual biography of the author. Besides that, we tried our hand at a new exercise: to glance at relevant publications outside the Anglosphere, an effort we are willing to make every year from now on. In this first occasion, two of our editors, Abel Muñoz-Hénonin and Nace Zavrl, review books published in Peru and Serbia respectively: Isaac León Frías’ comprehensive historico-critical study of late 20th century Latin American cinemas and doplgenger’s extraordinary collection of anti-colonial texts on moving images.

With 40 articles and the customary rich haul of Melbourne Cinematheque Annotations, this packed issue – our last this calendar year – will hopefully hold you over until late January, when Issue 116, featuring the hotly anticipated outcome of our annual World Poll, will see the light of day. Until then, we wish this eclectic, global assembly of films and ideas energises you in ways us editors and writers could not have even imagined.