A new video essay from Mark Rappaport about movies in movies, and how the screen watches us just as we watch it.

Video Essay: Mark Rappaport on The Empty Screen

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Sasha Waters is director, producer and editor of the new documentary <a href="https://kinolorber.com/film/mary-oliver-saved-by-the-beauty-of-the-world" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World</a>, which opens through Kino Lorber on July 3, and the 2018 doc Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, which was released theatrically by Greenwich Entertainment. Born in Brooklyn in 1968, Sasha makes non-fiction films about outsiders, misfits and everyday radicals. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and video. Past projects have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Pacific Film Archive, as well as on the Sundance Channel and international cable and public television. She is the Chair of the Department of Photography + Film at Virginia Commonwealth University, the #1 public college of art in the U.S. (Image by Steven Cassanova for VCUarts.)

Sasha Waters Freyer

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Nick Dawson talks with filmmakers, musicians and comedians whose work he loves, avoiding the mundane, predictable questions they&#8217;ve heard numerous times and instead asking substantive, thoughtful questions that get to the heart of who they are.

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Malin Barr is a Swedish director, writer, and actor working between Los Angeles and Stockholm. Her directorial debut, the short film <a href="https://www.malinbarr.com/work" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sauna Sickness</a>, premiered in competition at Sundance Film Festival 2026, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. A darkly comedic psychological drama-thriller that explores self-doubt, manipulative love, and self-preservation, it follows a young woman whose romantic New Year’s getaway with her boyfriend in the mountains turns into an icy nightmare when they accidentally lock themselves out in the cold. As an actor, her recent credits include the Netflix series Bad Thoughts and the upcoming feature El Tigre, and her previous work includes Honeydew, starring opposite Sawyer Spielberg, as well as The Beta Test and A Wounded Fawn. Malin is bilingual in Swedish and English, and also speaks French.

Malin Barr

Never as Alone as We Think We Are

Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer whose latest film, <a href="https://www.thefilmcollaborative.org/films/stateoffirsts" target="_blank" rel="noopener">State of Firsts</a>, about Rep. Sarah McBride, is playing in theaters across the US from June 26. His documentary features The Nest (with Julietta Singh) and State of Firsts both premiered in 2025, at Hot Docs and Tribeca, respectively. His documentary feature Framing Agnes was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. The film has played more than 100 festivals internationally and is distributed by Kino Lorber. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, which was presented at Cannes Docs, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, Chase directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories which are now streaming on Netflix; his episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing. He is the co-author of three non-fiction books, including the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice with Mike Hoolboom and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. His latest book, Vantage Points, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle. (Photo by Amos Mac.)

Chase Joynt

A Trans Lens, a Cinema of Defiance

Ash Mayfair&#8216;s new feature, <a href="https://www.filmmovementplus.com/videos/skin-of-youth-trailer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Skin of Youth</a>, an all-consuming love story between a transgender singer and a dog-cage fighter set in 1990s Saigon, Vietnam, is out now on Film Movement Plus from June 26. She was born in Vietnam and educated in the UK and the US. Ash received a BA from Oxford University for English Literature, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London for theatre directing and received an MFA in filmmaking at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her first feature, The Third Wife, was released by Film Movement in 2019 and is now available through leading digital platforms and Film Movement Plus. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the NETPAC Jury Award, and also won awards at the San Sebastian, Milano, Chicago, Minsk, Kolkata and Cairo film festivals.

Ash Mayfair

Transgender / Transcendence

Avalon Fast’s new film <a href="https://darkskyfilms.com/film/camp/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CAMP</a> hits theaters on June 26. They hail from Vancouver Island, BC, and their first film, Honeycomb, which was selected for the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival and went on to screen at Boston Underground, Calgary Underground, Etheria LA, Fantasia, and many more. In 2026, they premiered Drinking and Driving &#8211; co-directed, co-starring, and co-written with Jillian Frank &#8211; at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. In addition to writing and directing, Fast recently starred in Louise Weard’s cultural breakout trans DIY epic Castration Movie Anthology, co-starred in prolific young filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s sapphic horror The Serpent’s Skin, and appeared in Jane Schoenbrun’s recent Cannes sensation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Avalon Fast

Everything is Ending, Everything is Ending

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Mark Rappaport’s film include From the Journals of Jean Seberg and Rock Hudson’s Home Movies. Since 2014, Rappaport has made 20 video essays ranging from 10 minutes to an hour, including one for Talkhouse, <a href="../video-essay-mark-rappaport-on-the-empty-screen/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Empty Screen</a>. His new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Book-Dreams-Mark-Rappaport/dp/6086733902" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Book of Dreams</a>, a mesmerizing collection of almost 100 photomontages, is now available to buy. Four collections of his essays and fictions — all about film — The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much, (F)au(x)tobiographies, and The Secret Life Of Moving Shadows — Pt 1 and Pt 2 are available as e-books.

Mark Rappaport

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