Rushes | Panahi Clinches Festival Trifecta, Eno for Gaza, “The Day the Clown Cried” to Have Its Day

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NEWS

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025).

• After being imprisoned multiple times over the past fifteen years in his home country of Iran, Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or for his latest film, It Was Just an Accident (2025) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Panahi is only the fourth director in history to win all three major festival awards: the Palme d'Or, the Venice Golden Lion, and the Berlin Golden Bear.
• Brian Eno, who famously composed the Windows 95 start-up chime, penned an open letter to Microsoft denouncing the company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and pledging to donate the fee he received to the victims in Gaza.
• Swedish actor Hans Crispin has disclosed that he stole a complete workprint of Jerry Lewis’s unreleased Holocaust comedy, The Day the Clown Cried (1972), and has held a copy of the film in a bank vault since 1980. This revelation comes on the heels of journalist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee’s viewing of five hours of the film’s footage held by the Library of Congress after a nine-year embargo following its donation in 2015. Lee has confirmed that the library does not have a finished copy of the film.
• Over 400 items from David Lynch’s personal archive are up for auction. Highlights include Lynch’s personalized director’s chair, his own Black Lodge–style red curtain and zig-zag rug, and eleven different versions of the screenplay for his unfinished film Ronnie Rocket: The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence. The auction officially begins on June 18, but the public is welcome to bid on items in advance.

DEVELOPING

• Alex Garland is set to direct a live-action adaptation of the acclaimed fantasy video game Elden Ring for A24. The film will be produced by George R. R. Martin, who provided the world-building for the original game.
• Michael Bay will direct a film based on the viral YouTube series Skibidi Toilet, which “follows a war between toilets with human heads coming out of their bowls and humanoid characters with electronic devices for heads.”

REMEMBERING

Vengeance Is Mine (Michael Roemer, 1984).

• Michael Roemer has died at 97. The American independent filmmaker emigrated to America in 1945, having escaped his native city of Berlin when the Nazis came to power. He attended Harvard University, where he directed A Touch of the Times (1949), which is thought to be the first feature film ever made by a student. He went on to make two independent films in the 1960s: the working-class drama Nothing but a Man (1964), which won two awards at the Venice Film Festival, and the crime comedy The Plot Against Harry (1969). Neither film was widely distributed in the United States, receiving acclaim and attention only decades later. His subsequent two features revolve around end-of-life care and only aired on public television: the documentary Dying (1976) and the narrative Pilgrim, Farewell (1980). Roemer taught at Yale University from 1966 until his retirement in 2017. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and penned the book Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative (1997). Roemer’s final feature, Vengeance Is Mine (1984), about a troubled woman returning to her childhood home only to be embroiled in the simmering family dysfunction next door, was also released on public television to a muted response only to receive widespread acclaim upon the theatrical release of its restoration in 2022. The New York Times’s Wesley Morris describes the film as “a masterpiece of direction.”
• Marcel Ophüls has died at 97. The German-born, American-based filmmaker, son of Max Ophüls, was best known for his landmark two-part documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which chronicled the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II and dismantled the myth of widespread French resistance. He won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), about the life of the eponymous Nazi war criminal from his early childhood through his eventual imprisonment for crimes against humanity. His other films include A Sense of Loss (1972), about the Troubles in Northern Island, and The Memory of Justice (1976), an investigation of war crimes which examines both the Nuremberg Trials and the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. In the last decade, Ophüls had been working on a new film with director Eyal Sivan about the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it is unclear whether the film was completed.

RECOMMENDED READING

Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968).

• “Screen Slate is the farmhouse [from Night of the Living Dead, 1968]—a modest, beautifully utilitarian gathering place and outpost for civilization after the undead emerge to wreak havoc.” For Ssense, Ross Scarano profiles the New York– and San Francisco–based listings website and publication, which has been operated independently for nearly fifteen years.
• “We came into this project expecting more miscastings than not. When our analysis found that most films were accurately cast, it was unexpected and empowering!” For The Pudding, Dorothy Lu and Anna Li pen a visual essay and data set that surveys the representational accuracy of Asian American casting in Hollywood productions.
• “The creative impoverishment of much auteur art is closely aligned with the fate that can befall many directors today, who, under even greater pressure to offer a legible ‘brand’ to studio executives obsessed with existing IP like Barbie (2023) or Minecraft (2025), might confuse art for artifice, and style for substance.” For ArtReview, Claudia Ross examines dispiriting gallery exhibitions from popular contemporary filmmakers, including Yorgos Lanthimos and Harmony Korine.
• “Even as his style has seemed to become even more ornate, the subjects he has been tackling feel more and more as if they’ve been ripped from the headlines.” For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri interviews director Wes Anderson about the development of his style, the topicality of his recent films, and expanding his worldview ahead of his new film, The Phoenician Scheme (2025).

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Only Lover Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).

• London, through June 8: LUX presents Isabel Barfod: How Much Air Lungs Can Hold, an exhibition around the Glasgow-based artist’s new film of that title, a “meditation on Black aquatic experiences.”
• New York, June 10: Le Poisson Rouge presents Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem live in concert. The filmmaker and experimental composer / lute player initially met on the streets of New York over twenty years ago and have regularly performed and produced records together since 2011. Their best known collaboration is the score for Jarmusch’s vampire drama, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
• San Francisco, June 12 through October 11: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents Viaje a la luna (A trip to the moon), a group exhibition inspired by the lone film script written by renowned Spanish surrealist artist Federico García Lorca. The exhibition uses the bones of the unfinished project as a jumping-off point, drawing parallels between the far-Right political context of its creation in the late 1920s and present day reactionism.
• London, June 15: London Experimental will host the 2025 edition of its “anti-festival” recognizing and honoring experimental film at the Bird House Brewery in South London. The festival promises “No programming. No competition. No prizes. Free to watch.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Arbelos has released a trailer for the new restoration of The Sealed Soil (1977), the earliest surviving complete feature film directed by an Iranian woman, Marva Nabili. In The New York Times, J. Hoberman describes the film as a “hidden landmark” and “an act of clandestine resistance.” The film concludes its New York run on June 5 but will continue onto Vancouver and Toronto later in the month.
• Sony Pictures Entertainment has released a trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s new crime thriller Caught Stealing (2025). Based on the novel by Charlie Huston, who also penned the screenplay, the film stars Austin Butler as a former baseball player who finds himself caught up in the 1990s New York underworld, running past such bygone landmarks as Kim’s Video and such anachronistic storefronts as a Coco’s Bubble Tea. The film will be released on August 29.
• Several Futures has released a trailer for Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré’s documentary 7 Walks with Mark Brown (2025), which follows the titular paleobotanist as he explores Normandy’s flora across seven locations. The film will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on June 20 alongside a weeklong retrospective of the filmmakers.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo, 2017).

• Our coverage of the Cannes Film Festival includes dispatches, interviews, capsules, ballots, and more.
• “When a person tries to live true to themselves, they are bound to encounter an enemy.” Blake Simons interviews Takashi Miike about his latest film, a changing industry, and queer subtexts.

• “The most effective criminals are those who pretend to act in the public interest.” Robert Rubsam looks at recent action cinema for representations of how the United States makes its own enemies.
• “A picture oozing with such prestige needed a poster to match.” Adrian Curry tells the story of Thomas Hart Benton’s work on the promotional campaign for John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

WISH LIST

• Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: An Anthology, a collection of foundational texts from Colectivo Los Ingrávidos alongside “newly commissioned essays and critical reflections by thinkers in experimental and decolonial cinema,” is available to purchase from Public Knowledge Books.
• The Archival Impermanence Project, a compendium of restorationist/filmmaker Ross Lipman's writings and analysis of historical and contemporary archival practices, is available to purchase from Sticking Place Books.

EXTRAS

Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980).

• London on Location is an ongoing, scene-by-scene survey of London shooting locations—organized by decade, title, and location.
• A petition has been organized to save London’s Genesis Cinema, a nineteenth-century cultural landmark under threat of demolition.