A Link to my Substack, The Other Gaze

 Here is a link to my review of Maiken Baird's documentary, Edward Said: Between Worlds, that screened at NYFF: https://mariagarciawrites.substack.com/p/edward-said-between-worlds-2026

 It's early fall . . . 

So I'm covering the New York Film Festival, as I have for decades as credentialed press. It was not a banner year, in part because the country is in no mood for celebration on the verge of the midterm elections, and in part because the majority of films ran to 3 1/2 hours or more. I also speak for some of the foreign critics, especially from our neighboring Canada with whom I shared wonderful conversations. On my first day I watched five films and could not remember the first one at the end of that day. 

I felt more keenly this year how privileged a lifestyle I have, although I am among the middle class that are struggling to maintain that status. I rushed from a national park vacation to NYFF and at first felt sorry to be back. One of the early films at the press screenings was Naza. I will never forget the silence in the Walter Reade theater afterward. Most of us remained in our seats for several minutes. I reached for my handkerchief. I found I could not shake off the cold that had seeped into my body. As happens when one is in shock, I remembered something I had long forgotten, a professor of mine who admonished me for displaying emotion after watching a difficult film. It was Marcel Ophuls' classic, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), that is about Vichy France and the Holocaust. 

I think it was on the minds of many in the room as we witnessed another holocaust unfolding on the screen, not in pictures but in the testimony of members of the Israeli military. Yuval Abraham, the Israeli journalist I interviewed last year for my Cineaste feature on No Other Land, spoke with his subjects on a rooftop at night so that they would remain anonymous. As I write this the film has had its New York premier and may also be screening online. I am not sure how long it will take me to write about it; I have started many times and stopped.

Perhaps this is the shadow that I felt lingering over this year's NYFF. It has not has not diminished.