In time to come, the success of “Parasite” (2019) may be seen as the game changer that cemented South Korea’s eminence in world cinema. Yet sixteen years earlier, “Oldboy” helped make familiar the term New Korean Cinema to cineasts whose interests stretched beyond Western films.   Sean Sheehan   What […]

Decluttering can make a lot of sense – the average US household is said to contain some 300,000 items – but it has become a new orthodoxy and in doing so has ironically added to the junk in our lives.   Sean Sheehan   Life becomes tidier when you’re not […]

The Hong Kong actor Maggie Cheung remarked in an interview  “The Chinese don’t accord much importance to things of the past, whether it’s films, heritage, or even clothes or furniture. In Asia nothing is preserved, turning towards the past is regarded as stupid, aberrant.”  A sweeping statement but one that […]

Visual representations of race are shot through with racist attitudes and “Decolonising the camera” examines this through a series of case studies.   Sean Sheehan   In 1945, Life magazine – a large-format (36cm by 26cm) and hugely influential publication – produced six pages of photographs showing the horrors that […]

This book, “Letter to Bruno Manser”, is a memorial to Bruno Manser and it begins with a photograph of the mountain that marks his last known location, before he vanished in 2000,  and a letter: “Dear Bruno, if only you knew how many of your friends looked for you at […]