Saturday 21 February, 7pm, The Common Press, London: in conversation with Adam Zmith

Thursday 26 February, 7pm: The Dormouse, Belper (at Reunion Deli)

Wednesday 4 March, 7pm, Mount Florida Books, Glasgow: in conversation with Adam Benmakhlouf

Thursday 5 March, 7pm, Argonauts, Edinburgh: in conversation with Alycia Pirmohamed

Wednesday 11 March, 10 am, London Book Fair, The Salon: ‘Whose Freedom? Power, Equity of Expression, and Rejecting Attacks on EDI’, panel discussion with Selina Brown and Nikesh Shukla, chaired by Josie Dobrin

Monday 16 March, 7pm, London Review Bookshop: chairing Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, in conversation about her book Something About Living

Tuesday 14 April, 7pm, London Review bookshop: chairing Sarah Schulman, in conversation about her book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (link coming soon)

Bad Language is now available to pre-order from Peninsula Press (UK) or Asterism Books (US/Can): it’s a memoir and manifesto about language, power, violence and resistance (and a little bit of magic). It’s the most intimate & radical book I’ve written and I can’t wait for it to be out in the world. You can read an extract looking at shibboleth, a word that tells us a lot about how power uses words against us, in the wonderful Wasafiri magazine.

Join us Weds 12 November, 6.30pm at Burley Fisher Books London to launch it (free, booking essential). I’ll also be at No Alibis Belfast as part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival on Tues 18 November, 6.15 pm (£5 or free access ticket, in conversation with Stacey Gregg) and Bookhaus Bristol on Weds 26 November (£7, in conversation with Noreen Masud), with more events lining up for 2026.

And The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin is the second Le Guin collection I’ve co-edited with Sarah Shin for Silver Press – this is very different to Space Crone, collecting Le Guin’s wonderful hand-drawn maps with reflections, poems, interviews and recipes from contributors Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, and Marilyn Strathern. The exhibition runs at the AA until 6 December.

Raising funds for #Valentines4Palestine, an indie bookstore and publisher fundraiser for PEN International’s Writers at Risk fund. You can get The God File direct from me: please send £2/£4 postage (UK/ROW) + ur donation (anything is welcome!) via Paypal, and leave your address in the note. If you don’t have Paypal, email me and we can sort it out. It will also be available in store at Burley Fisher Books, London for £5.

The God File is designed by Loose Associations and printed by Loose Associations and Barely Printing.

*

An essay on art, bodies and fascism

In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it.This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.

A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.

How might we continue the joyous riot?

Praise for A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing

‘This book is a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon. I believe we’re living in a time of fresh erasures, systemic violences working that global pandemic to take some other bodies out. Looking so freshly at the history of queerness, sexual deviance and the long long coordinated erasures of colonialism, bigotry and transphobia the essential non binary nature of art opens up right here like the wildly singing flower it is and So Mayer’s compelling version makes sense, makes me listen.’ – Eileen Myles

‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a reflective, creative walk through some of the worst – and best – people of the last hundred years, looking at the power of images and their relationship(s) with text. In a time of rising fascism, So Mayer highlights ways that artists have found strategies of resistance, and offers hope in historical analysis.’ – Juliet Jacques

‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing links together everyone and every thing from Magnus Hirschfield to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jewish primary school, Thatcher, AIDS, Ursula Le Guin, the Third Reich, and gender politics into an essay that is both readable and urgent. Only So Mayer could pull off such a feat – and link it all up to queer cinema from Derek Jarman to Paris Is Burning. A book of thoughts for an emergency – that is to say, for today – that is absolutely worth reading with haste, but not in a hurry.’ – B Ruby Rich

In further incredible news, Truth & Dare is now available in North America, alongside A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, thanks to fantastic indie champions Asterism. You can order direct from Asterism, and the book has also been sited in the wild at Powells, Portland OR (support bookseller unions!), Ursula K. Le Guin’s local and favourite bookstore so this is beyond imagining.

As does hearing the same evening that SPACE CRONE is in the 2024 Locus Awards‘ top ten Non-Fiction titles, as voted for in a public readers’ vote.  Locus, like so many magazines, is the home and nebula of so many short fiction writers, and it’s a huge honour to know that SPACE CRONE has connected with their discerning readers. We can’t wait for the hybrid awards ceremony on 22 June (virtual tickets available!), where Connie Willis will be a fierce feminist guest of honour.

I don’t want to say there’s anything symbolic about this, and I don’t want to say there isn’t. It was a moment of attention, a flow between me and the world in which boundaries disappeared, surfaces and depths interchanging like a four-dimensional Möbius strip. It was brief and ridiculous, and included shouting across the street at neighbours and strangers to look up, and a happy new year. Falling back into calendar time, social time, marked out like a chess board of fixed movements and conquests. And perhaps that’s fitting because, haunting the rainbow like its prismatic double is its symbolic double, or two of them. There’s the hopeful one where there’s gold at the end, in Irish folklore (and reality, as Celtic tribes of the La Tène culture appear to have made bowl-shaped gold coins that, from the Middle Ages onwards, could be washed to the surface of fields in heavy rain, catching both water and the light). Both promise and wishful thinking, it speaks to the ambivalent feelings that ends, and the journeys to them, offer, the balance of hope and doubt expressed in some people’s pressing need to make new year’s resolutions. No gold without getting to the end of the rainbow; getting to the end of the rainbow often means no gold.

And perhaps that’s because in Eurowestern culture, the rainbow is also the symbol of a specific promise, one that has been kept or broken according to your theological stance – because it’s God’s promise, to Noah, of no more floods. Dove with an olive branch, etc. As the genocide in Gaza and climate chaos intertwine at the end of 2023, it’s hard to look up at a rainbow and believe in anything at all, except ends.

*

This is my final tinyletter, thanks to Mailchimp “sunsetting” (their word) the tiny, inexpensive platform that they acquired in 2011, and which has remained free to use and free to read throughout its existence – free, too, of data-scraping, with no analytics for users or grabby forms for readers. A platform that was neither monetised nor datafied could hardly survive when users could instead be leveraging themselves and their users’ info on the ‘chimp or similar. As a newsletter service with limited archival visibility, Tinyletter was a modest enterprise – and unsurprisingly could not compete in a world where platforms thrive by monetising Nazi content.

So into the sunset I go, fading like a rainbow. I started writing these essays just over eight years ago, in response to an acceptance for publication in early 2016 that (and this is an overused phrase) changed my life, from the writer, editor and legend Roxane Gay, for the anthology Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, which was published in 2018. The deadline for submission was Christmas Day, 2015, and I remember seeing the call for submissions on Facebook in the middle of an events-related meltdown month and thinking, “Yes, sure, that sounds relaxing, I’ll write a long essay about being a sexual abuse survivor and give it a title I can’t pronounce, all in the week leading up to Xmas.” I wrote it behind my own back, bit by bit in exhausted snatches, fractured with the tiredness of two precarious teaching gigs, a book tour of largely unpaid events and delayed trains, poorly-paid freelance writing and unpaid feminist film organising. I submitted it probably minutes before the deadline. And then, with cPTSD non-functional memory that is both blessing and curse, I forgot it existed.

So when I got the acceptance, it was a startlement. I also knew, at that point in early 2016, that I had to leave academia (not that I was exactly in academia, after ten years of hourly-paid jobs across nearly a dozen institutions) or I would kill myself, whether slowly or immediately. The acceptance was an “oh fuck” moment, a realisation that I couldn’t keep writing behind my own back and disclaiming it. Either I was a writer, one about to be published in a high-profile transatlantic anthology by a writer I desperately admired, or I was not. Being a writer meant doing two things: writing, and being honest – about writing, and in what I was writing. It was bound up with being a survivor, with piecing a way through the world on a path of broken words that hopefully some others could, or might, follow.

So the tinyletter was a deep breath, a way to make space for myself to write that honesty: to come out as an abuse survivor before the essay in Not that Bad did it for me. To work at scale and at my own pace, to practice, to share. It took more than a year and nearly the whole alphabet to write the letter (trigger) where I did just that. Because I’m as bad at beginnings as I am at endings. I hate threshold moments, abrupt changes of state (sleep/wake, for example). I will resist starting a piece of writing until it feels more nauseating to be holding back the ideas and phrases than to just get them down. I can panic myself into pretzels for months rather than start a simple task or conversation. I hate taking — that — step —

So I could claim that I’m migrating this letter to a new platform or a blog on my website or something, because I love this form of speaking directly, unadorned, unillustrated, unmonetized, but it means crossing a threshold. Another one, after putting off this final letter for over a month. What was I waiting for? An end to ends? It feels as hopeless to expect capitalist tech bros to have a change of heart as it is to expect genocidal colonisers to end a war. A ridiculous comparison and yet I think the end of tinyletter is a micro-micro-microcosm of the power of corporate colonial capitalism and its extractivist ends, its illogic of destruction, its enclosures and exclusions and refusals. Its love, in fact, of ends.

*

I like that the OED knows its user base well enough to define end (noun, intransitive) as ‘Of a period of time, action, continuous state, series, book, chapter, etc.’ Not a life, but a series, book, chapter, etc. A readerly, writerly definition that does get at how the end of a project feels magnified as a finality, echoing melodramatically with larger endings. That seems weirdly fitting as the OED suggests that end derives from andjo-z the Old Germanic word for, er, forehead. From brow to bow, head to death, a hard bodily limit to the absolute apocalypse: for eight years I have been amazed, over and over, as I write these essays by the English language’s willingness to abstract into catastrophising, to take a body part and make it military or monetary or mortality, to think that the world ends where its mind or skeleton or skin does. Language defined not as mindedness, but as what I beat my forehead against: the wall of colonial capitalist resource extraction, homogenisation and utilitarianism.

So end is end: an uncrossable boundary, bonewall, essence of Eurowesternism, the Christian obsession with death, judgement, heaven and hell which has its own -ology, eschatology, the study of ends: of ends as final, of ends as the settlement of bills, as payments, really. A capitalist logic in which an invoice filed is game over: no after-effects, no aftermath, no consequences and so no accountability. Done. Land appropriated and strip-mined, people and other beings murdered and displaced: end of. Capitalism works by such cold equations, by full stops, no run-on sentences or piled-up clauses, no conjunctions or connective tissues. No relations.

Perhaps the most capitalist of all sentences is “the ends justify the means,” the circular logic that rests on the hidden fact that the ends are means, in the sense not of strategies, but of extractable material resources. That’s evident by the way that the phrase applies to nuclear-like bombing deployed by Israel and the US against Gaza, but not to armed resistance to the occupation. Because the ends of the former are dual, a shell game in which the ends are ends, that is genocide, necropolitics; and grosser still, the ends of genocide are not just extermination but access to land, fossil fuels like offshore gas reserves, and other material resources for exploitation. The ends of Zionism and its backers are really ends: total absolute destruction of people and planet for profit.

*

Soil poisoned, like so many living bodies, with white phosphorus. Sewage treatment and water desalination plants non-operational without fuel. Olive and citrus trees uprooted and burned. Cemeteries bulldozed. Access tunnels flooded with seawater, increasing desertification, salinating soil, and risking overwhelming Gaza’s only freshwater aquifer.

As many commentators have pointed out, these are the destructive actions of colonisers, literally salting the earth. They demonstrate Zionism’s additional fatal alignment with its eschatological Christian form, for which the land is an abstract staging ground for the Final Days. Who needs clean water when you have infantile fantasies of theological mastery?

These disgusting acts are part and parcel of genocide, because the people are the land and the land is the people. They are not the actions of anyone with a relationship to land, to – in London-via-Jamaican slang – ends: where you end a journey; that is, home. Ends, in this sense (unrecognised by the OED), are not finalities but familiarities, openings not closures. They are not boundaries, although the older use of “end” to mean a place (like East End) relates to taking direction from the centre by naming something seen as marginal.

Ends instead entangles community and place, so that land is palpable not as resource or site of conquest, but sustaining relationship. In the face of devastation, ends remakes meaning by linking, by refusing rules and limits, by being at home beyond where or what’s supposed to be. It is exactly topian rather than dystopian, finding hope in being-in-place. Like the beautiful anthology Love at the End of the World: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree from Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory), ends uses ‘end’ to its own gathering ends.

*

And end shares its roots with ‘and’: and as a boundary marker, a holder of contradictions, cumulative and carrier baggy. I remember being told not to start a sentence with ‘And,’ and not to tell stories using ‘and’ as a conjunction, known as parataxis and opposed to syntaxis, which uses other ‘more sophisticated’ conjunctions such as ‘because’ that imply linearity and causality, whereas ‘and’ “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” like the “single catastrophe” perceived by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History (from the ninth thesis of his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as translated by Harry Zohn).

The Angel of History does not perceive discrete boundaries between events that render them narratable, debatable; rather, a constant and singular storm, an originary catastrophe – which Benjamin calls progress – that shatters all meaning. The insistence on a future orientation, on linear movement forward is an eschatology, a belief in endings and only endings.

The ends of resistance are resisted, whatever their means, because they are not an end but a beginning: liberation. Those who cling to power perceive liberation as an end because it is the end of their exclusive grasp on authority, including their say-so on what is an, or the, end. Liberation says that ends are beginnings, again. That it’s OK to begin again, rather than grip to the linear narrative of progress, of reification and institutionalisation, of history as something always behind us, done and dusted rather than alive in the present as both trauma and possibility.

January holds a reminder of this in its name, taken from Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways (ianua: door), frames, and endings – including the beginning and end of war. The gates of a building in Rome dedicated to him were opened during times of conflict, and closed to mark peace. Janus is two-faced: a reminder of possibility and transition; but also that peace, so-called, is also war by other means. When Rishi Sunak’s government took umbrage at a peace march happening on Armistice Day, it was a stark reminder that, for the Allied Nations, the Armistice of World War I marked not the end of hostilities but their continuation through vicious territorial acquisition by the victors, including Mandate Palestine. Power calls an end in order to pursue its own ends, its own continuity.

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In “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” an essay published in Protean Magazine, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi names the continuity and, precisely, the true endpoint that counters it:

Between 1936 and 1939, Palestinian fellahin revolted against the economic deprivations imposed by the British Mandate and a growing Zionist movement in Palestine. Their revolt involved coordinated general strikes and violent resistance to the beginnings of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. In response, the British instituted a set of policies which would become the 1945 “Defence (Emergency) Regulations”, which allowed British officers to bring about the full repressive strength of empire to bear on Palestinian peasantry to brutally destroy the revolt. After the Nakba, these regulations served as the basis for much of the state of Israel’s legal governmental structure.

For seventy-five years, then, Palestinians have existed—violent or not, political or not, active or not—in a state of revolt. We are legally defined as such; the law and its human enforcers across the globe act accordingly. This means that as long as Palestinians have lived under the colonization of the Zionist state, and until Palestinians are no longer subject to a state whose definitional contours are premised on their existence as essentially threatening others, the revolt has been, and is, in progress. It is a daily lived thing, and Palestinians have always labored to define its shape for themselves: the Great Revolt, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the March of Return, the Unity Intifada, the myriad forms of resistance both minute and maximal, spontaneous and organized, armed and unarmed—these are part of the long and ongoing essential Intifada, a long and ongoing revolution that has taken many forms and will continue to evolve, and whose endpoint is liberation.

Existence and persistence are resistance. Palestinian life is a ‘state of revolt… whose endpoint is liberation.’ That life is emplaced, people and life entwined, as Tbakhi writes in the subsequent (and my favourite) section of the essay, in which liberation is land: a location not a date.

The long middle is not a condition of time; we might be nearer to the end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation than defeat, but our experience and our actions exist within the frame we can see, the frame of the long middle. Liberation is the end, but it is a geographical end rather than a temporal one, a soil and not an hour. We move towards it— sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always. It is the location by which we orient our movement. We know it because it gets closer, not necessarily because it comes sooner.

(And liberation moves too, it has its own sort of agency, it can dance a little, as you stare through the hole in the fence you’ve just cut you might feel a hand on your shoulder, someone standing by your side like a friend, liberation letting you know what it feels like, that you’re going the right way.)

End appears three times in the first paragraph; within the parentheses, it becomes ‘friend’: a being who resists the dominant dictum of linear time. Here is another kind of angel, an angel of agency, an angel who exists in the continuity of place, a true continuity where fences are holes because soil is the ends. Sniff it.

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On Twitter (proof, perhaps, that users can defy the world-conquering tech bros’ illusion that they can ‘control’ any space or platform that is used by the public), poet Alina Pleskova posts the last two pages of a long poem by June Jordan, one of her best-loved, “On A New Year’s Eve.” You can hear Jordan read it on KPOO San Francisco in May 1977 here, or read it here. In The Paris Review, Claire Schwartz describes it as “a poem, that refuses the overwhelmingness of enormity, calling us back to the possibility of our life-size actions,” a poem that opens up into presentness and precarity as an antidote to totalising narratives.

These words from the gathering end of the poem, piling un-wreckage upon un-wreckage, found me immediately, heart-filling with oxygen and evergreens:

I read the papers preaching on
that oil and oxygen
that redwoods and the evergreens

that trees the waters and the atmosphere
compile a final listing of the world in
short supply

but all alive and all the lives
persist perpetual
in jeopardy
persist
as scarce as every one of us
as difficult to find
or keep
as irreplaceable
as frail
as every one of us

Feel how “short supply” constricts your breath after that unreeling list of living that com-piles, that is turned into piles and lists linked by the word “final.” To say that something only ends is a form of the final solution, an arrogant and hard-headed belief in finality. Don’t let those alliterative ‘l’s lull you into listless manufactured consent – take a deep breath with the vowels of “all alive” as ‘l’ is relit into a living force “perpetual,” even if “frail.” Jordan replaces listing with lives, compile with frail, a fiercely gentle dismantling of the seemingly totalising power of colonial capital.

It’s difficult to give up the power of endings, entrenched as they are in dominant narrative schema; to believe in ends as a home, a place we can come to and sit with, a place of jeopardy that therefore calls on our persistence, our going on after the end: not the end as a fantasised destination, a wished-for pot of fairy gold, but – cut your hole in the fence and feel it – the ends we hold in our hands, the breathed-in-and-out real.

Here is my top ten films of all time: the first gives, among other things, the game away that these are all imagined films, what Girish Shambu has termed a ‘speculative cinephilia’. #2 emerges from my work as a researcher on the podcast The Film We Can’t See, which informed my sense of an unseen cinema far broader, more inclusive and thus more aesthetically, technically and culturally dynamic than the cinema we can see. #6 and #8 are known and documented unfinished projects by historical filmmakers (of which I could have included many dozens more), some are entirely imaginary projects by historical filmmakers, and in some cases I have taken historical individuals and imagined them as directors.

#0 is the only film directed by an imaginary director, although starring a real actor, and it is also not entirely imagined by me, but an extension or Part 2 of Julie Dash’s film Illusions (1982), perhaps the foundational work of reparative speculative cinema, with thanks to Karen Alexander for her discussion of the film at Cinema Rediscovered.

Cinema Redirected? This list is far from definitive, and in fact intended to invite other contributions, as we all make our own speculative cinemas.

Changing film history changes history: and yet we live with/in the history we have. Part of the challenge has been seeing these films through and in the gaps, thinking about why they have been ‘lost’ – not only in terms of not being made (which they weren’t) but, if I wish to commit to their existence, why they have not changed the world as we know it, due to the various ways in which even artistically, critically and/or commercially successful films can lose their visibility, especially when made by filmmakers from marginalised communities.

0. Mignon Dupree, Windtalkers (1944)

Dupree’s first fiction feature stands out as both an astonishing technical achievement whose poignant and despectacularised battle scenes equal those in Come and See, and a powerfully argued narrative that led to an amendment to the GI Bill, reneging its accommodation of Jim Crow laws. Esther Katon’s breakout romantic lead role as Julie, the head nurse, was cruelly denied an Academy Award nomination, while her co-lead, Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels, received a nomination for his performance as Joe, the lead codetalker – but in the category of ‘supporting’ role, which both he and Dupree refused to acknowledge. While some contemporary critics question the casting of a Mohawk actor in a Navajo role (and that character’s tragicised fate), the film remains extraordinary for casting all its Indigenous characters with Indigenous actors, many of them non-professionals drawn from USO staff and servicemen, who deliver outstanding performances under Dupree’s skilled direction. The loss of her brilliant career to a vicious McCarthyite investigation incited by her former colleague remains one of the most profound tragedies of Hollywood cinema. John Woo’s 2002 film is not a remake, but borrowed the title unacknowledged.

1. Alice Nuvalinga, ‘Avannarleq’ (1922)

Despite – or because of – its brevity and efficiency, this moving, witty and beautiful one-reel, single-take film is a foundational documentary, not least in its contestation of the Flahertys’ Nanook of the North (1922). As well as being both a direct and sideways critique of that film, it was made with camera and stock purloined from that invasive production. During breaks in the Flahertys’ laborious set-ups, Inuk performer Nuvalinga (who plays ‘Nanook’s wife’) rapidly learned cinematography, and worked with Allakariallak (‘Nanook’) to devise a very short film drawing on their expertise in front of camera, one that could include as many community members as wished to be involved, in order to craft a message to their descendants, who have reserved the right to show the film only within community and approved settings. Recent screenings in programmes by First Nations curators, in some cases featuring a live improvised score by Inuit artist Tanya Tagaq, have shown the profound and abiding influence of Nuvalinga’s dynamic staging, stunning sense of natural light, and framing of beloved faces and places. ‘Avannarleq’ is technically translated as ‘north’, but its meaning of ‘the right direction’ is clearly at play in Nuvalinga’s corrective to the Flahertys’ exploitative approach.

2. Sergei Eisenstein, Fuck! (1932-35) (Блядь!/Biyad’!)

Shot in Berlin, Paris, London and New York in 1932, but not finished until 1935 as post-production proved complex, costly and controversial, with the original American developing house at one point threatened under Comstock laws, this legendary film did for cinematic and lived sexuality what Strike! (Стачка/Stachka, 1925) did for cinematic and lived radical politics. Screened only in private venues in London, Moscow and Paris on release, the film was unseeable for years due to censorship, and its content was the subject of intense speculation. It was known to have led to Louise Brooks’ brief third career in France (foreshortened by the outbreak of war), as both a performer and a screenwriter collaborating with Colette, Jean Cocteau and Josephine Baker, among others. Eisenstein’s better-known subsequent collaborations with Paul Robeson after his relocation to the USSR are clearly influenced by the collaborative liberatory development of this first project. Due to the survival of a partial soundtrack lifted from a damaged print, the film earned a deserved reputation as Eisenstein’s first successful sound film. Sadly, its co-screenwriter with Brooks, Magnus Hirschfeld, died just weeks before its premiere in Paris, and (as reported by H.D. in her diaries) a subsequent English-language print had an opening intertitle dedicating the film to ‘Mutter Magnesia’.

3. Marilyn Monroe, Burning the Crucible (1958)

Considered the first Hollywood feminist film, Monroe’s adaptation of her ex-husband’s play is a necessarily radical reimagining in which Abigail turns on John Proctor by reaching out to Elizabeth (an incendiary Method performance by an unrecognisable Monroe in full Puritan garb), and, as the girls chase out the male judges, Tituba becomes the rightful leader of Salem. For a long time, it was best known for its Oscar-winning score by Ella Fitzgerald, her first public foray into composition which arose through conversations about the play between the two friends during her El Mocambo residency. Letters show that it was Fitzgerald’s pursuit and inspiration in developing what she initially titled ‘Tituba Sings’ that led Monroe to question Miller’s behaviour and seek out support for her addictions. Winning the rights to the play in the divorce, Monroe was able to make good on her desire to produce and direct, with new research arguing that the film’s roman à clef relates not just to her relationshiop with Miller, but – in the character of the judges and priests – to her own devastating experience of Hollywood sexism (and of her collaborator’s experience of racism), which defeated all further attempts at collaboration between the friends, leading to Monroe’s severe depression in 1962. Post-#MeToo, the film’s visionary brilliance has been recognised, and the film’s 2022 accession to the Library of Congress will hopefully lead to further screenings and publications that interpret it outside the prurience that too often marks Monroe studies.

4. Sara Gómez, Una Palabra Más (1979)

It took Gómez five years to make her second fiction feature, as she balanced recovering her health and raising her children with setting up a school-within-a-school to focus on teaching Afro-Cuban women, who had been underrepresented at ICAIC. Several of her students crewed on Una Palabra Más, which refines the docufiction hybrid of De Cierta Manera not least through the audacious sung-through voice-over. Its keystone street dance scene, with its protagonists passing on an urgent message between themselves as they move through its non-professional cast of hundreds has been oft-imitated, but never bettered. Despite being hard to view after its initial, rapturously-received run on the international feminist film festival circuit, its playful, loving narrative of three generations of women living and working together, as a framework for depicting (while critiquing) the revolution’s complex feminisms, including around women’s sexuality and motherhood, was widely written about, with a particularly notable essay by B. Ruby Rich that has been cited by Jennie Snyder Urman as a key influence on Jane the Virgin. The film was also championed, remembered and quoted in her biodocs by Agnès Varda, who kept in touch with her assistant director from Salut les Cubains (1963); she described their conversations about reproductive justice and film narrative as central to her development of L’une chante, l’autre pas.

5. Grunwick Collective, We Make Film (1979)

This literally striking documentary is both an intimate record of labour activists in their own words, and a reflexive deconstruction of the industrial processes of film, shown from the inside. Its use of still photographs, working structurally through multiple genres from family snapshots to sporting news to crime scenes, as the connectors between the two strands remains unique in British documentary, and gives the film its haunting power. Unable to be distributed to cinemas due to the uncleared soundtrack of Lata Mangeshkar songs (some taped at her 1974 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall), the film screened widely at union and community meetings. An incisive roundtable discussion between Stuart Hall, Susheila Nasta and Laura Mulvey, transcribed for publication in New Left Review, led to its widespread adoption on film and media courses in the early 1980s when it was made available on VHS for community and educational use via Concord Media. But the film was taken out of circulation when the filmmakers, who were never publicly named, were investigated and secretly blacklisted under the Major government of the early 1990s. Never digitised, this key moment in British film history is only viewable via Cinenova on Umatic video. It deserves a full and respectful restoration, under the supervision of the surviving members of the collective.

6. Michael Powell, A Wizard of Earthsea (1984)

Unquestionably the defining fantasy film of all time, and the only great wizarding film made at a British film studio. While its animatronic dragon set new standards – who doesn’t  remember Yevaud’s fiery final blink, or the incredible aerial ‘dragon ballets’ – it was the explosion of its cinematic magic, reviving and revisiting techniques from The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, that made the film both a popular and critical success in its day, both on screen and on VHS, as did a stunning debut performance from Tilda Swinton in the somewhat attenuated role of Arha/Tenar. The protagonist Ged, the outcast wizard who undergoes a long struggle after a deep failure, is clearly a resonant figure for Powell; like Ged, the director did achieve a return, thanks to this film, to the full embrace of the cinematic establishment. A planned sequel adapting The Farthest Shore proved difficult to finance and was, all too poignantly given the book’s plot, halted by Powell’s death, with the lack of a sequel leading to an attrition in viewing. A complex rights situation means that the film has only recently been restored and digitised, with a Bluray release making the film available for the first time in over 20 years – possibly prompted by an image widely circulated on social media a few years ago, showing a young Yamada Naoko clutching her bootleg dubbed VHS copy. It’s been recently announced that Yamada will become the first female director at Studio Ghibli, with an adaptation of Tenar and The Other Wind, the fourth and fifth books of the Earthsea trilogy, tentatively titled Dancing on The Dragon’s Tongue (2025).

7. Park Nam-Ok, 의 딸/The Daughter (2002)

Few filmmakers have a career as remarkable as Park’s, with two major fiction feature films separated by nearly five decades. The Daughter is the embodiment of mature style, a film that both shows the influence of her time spent in Hollywood, by utterly rejecting and dismantling its narrative language. Inspired by Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda, 2001), Park used the innovations of mini-DV to shoot a stunning companion piece to her first film The Widow(1954). Its surprise impact on the international festival circuit kickstarted a new wave of Korean women directors, who turned to centring older women character actors to stunning effect. Park’s use of restored material from her older film to create the main character Joo’s memories of her mother is electrifying, at once a sophisticated reflection on Park’s own decades of longing to make cinema, and a reconsideration of the auteurist oeuvre as a biographical project. Due to The Widow’s lack of presence in the Anglosphere, The Daughter (strictly, The Daughter of) has remained largely underknown until the Wachowskis’ recent citation of its cinematic flashbacks as an influence on Matrix Resurrection, which generated considerable interest in an upcoming Bluray release of the English-subtitled high-quality digital transfer made briefly available via the Korean film archive during the first year of the pandemic.

8. Sarah Maldoror, Un Portrait de Madiba (2004)

Redefining the biographical documentary much as The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003) redefined the talking head, Maldoror’s authorised portrait of Nelson Mandela is a conversation between two great revolutionaries and artists (and ageing bodies), a complex interweaving of decolonial histories across Maldoror’s experience of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Algeria and France, and Mandela’s of South Africa. An honest consideration of the difficulties of turning ideals and desires into practical governance, and a penetrating look at the shift from radical to national and international hero, Maldoror’s film also sets a standard for documentary integrity in its refusal to hagiographise while retaining a sense of rigorous respect. A recent videographic essay on the political aesthetics of green and gold in the film, shown in relation to the colour patterning in Maldoror’s earlier Sambizanga, provides a fascinating auteurial read of a film that plays stringently and strategically with the question of authority. Made for ARTE with a focus on televisual exhibition, the film is best known in France and la Francophonie, not achieving the international profile of Errol Morris’s work. The recent restoration and reappraisal of Maldoror’s oeuvre, under the guidance of her daughter Annouchka de Andrade, will hopefully lead to a wider release of this extremely significant film.

9. Tayf, طيف / Tayf (2015—

Taking its name from a Mashrou’ Leila song, this ongoing collection of anonymised short films embodies the dual meaning of its title – ghost/shadow, and spectrum – in collectively exploring LGBTIQ+ spaces, their erasures, memories, reflorescences, diasporas and destructions across the Arabic-speaking world. Apprehended inaccurately the West as a ‘YouTube’ film (and often described as the ‘first great YouTube crowdsourced film project’), the film and initial filmmaking collective actually innovated a non-commercial platform that defied government surveillance as well as corporate social media companies, allowing filmmakers to ‘dead drop’ and edit films securely using blockchain. Travelling as memes, GIFs and clips alongside the ever-growing anthology (which currently stands at around 47 hours of films or film, given that they can be watched as individual entries or as the constantly-changing edit via the collective’s YouTube channel but also via other, more secure platforms given that it is unclear how much YouTube edits or removes at any moment), Tayf has been described as both a moment and a movement, a transformational digital project whose collaborative aesthetics of exchanged objects and matched gazes prefigure the TikTok make-up brush challenge and influenced a generation of queer audiovisual image-makers.

10. Albertina Carri, Autobiografía de Rojo (2024)

Shot on expired 35mm and hand-developed, Carri’s latest film is yet another shape-shifting move after Las Hijas del Fuego (2018). While retaining that film’s concern with queer sexuality and landscape, its visionary incorporation of hand-drawn animation and shimmering sound palette make the film a summative statement not only of her own work but of the buena onda and the new New Queer Cinema. At once an adaptation of Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse and a response to, and expansion of, the narrative’s use of Buenos Aires and of the history of the dictatorship, Carri’s film has been hailed for its revitalisation of political aesthetics in narrative cinema, including its creative soundtrack by trans feminist sex work activist and musician Sasha Sathya. A decolonial tango explosion, Sathya’s opus incorporates aspects of the characters’ dialogue and Geryon’s voice-over into songs that are sometimes diegetic and sometimes extra-diegetic, reflecting the presence of music in the poem. Logan Rozos’ transformative central performance as Geryon added a Silver Bear to the film’s Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the 2024 Berlinale. 3D printed copies of Geryon’s red wings (designed by Santiago Artemis) were the must-have costume at 2024 Prides worldwide, demonstrating the film’s rapid accession to queer cult status.

*Mohamed (who wrote one of my 2022 faves, You Must Believe in Spring) at Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh

*Sam at Burley Fisher Books in London

Champions Blackwell’s Manchester put Cipher Press’s whole 2023 catalogue behind door 3 of their Advent Calendar

And given that the book starts in a local library and has a story about a sentient library, I’m massively chuffed to be on Leeds Libraries’ Best Reads of 2023!