film comment's devika girish on what she's most excited for at cannes and community care & our founder on the best introspective playlists and nyc hammam
monthly recs #38
Each month, we ask a writer to speak about what’s on their mind and share their tabs for our monthly recommendations. This May’s guest curator, Devika Girish, is an editor at Film Comment and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival. She’s also written for The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Village Voice, and many other publications.
In the last few weeks, the word passerby has been on my mind, and not just because the deadline for this contribution has been looming. Recently, as I was walking back home from grocery shopping, I spotted an unconscious man draped across the edge of the sidewalk, his head dangling dangerously onto the road. I wondered how I should intervene. Call 911, and risk putting him in trouble with the state? Try to wake him up myself, even though I have no medical training or resources? By the time I walked over, two young men had gotten there and called the police, who dispatched a fire truck. As the firemen lifted the man onto a stretcher, I asked them, “What happens to him now?”
“We’ll take him to the hospital, he’ll sober up and be released, and probably end up back here in a few days,” one of them shrugged.
I’m a member of an abolitionist group in my neighborhood, the Crown Heights Care Collective, and we are developing summer workshops with the Brooklyn Public Library at Brower Park about building community-based networks of care that do not implicate the police, prisons, or other carceral institutions. Our workshops will involve, in part, bystander intervention training in de-escalation, self-defense, and administering Narcan. But we are also reckoning with the fact that these individual, incident-specific solutions feel incomplete in a world that lacks sustainable and collective care. What networks do we need to not just help that unconscious man in the moment, but also ensure that he does not end up back on the street? What can we do to be more than helpful passersby, and become, indeed, neighbors?
At the City College of New York last Tuesday, the NYPD came tearing down the sidewalk, roaring at passersby who tried to pay witness to the students camped out on university grounds, protesting the genocide in Palestine. At Columbia University, cops outfitted in riot gear arrived in a truck and stormed into a hall occupied by students; an officer apparently fired a gun. One of the pretexts used by university officials for unleashing such unconscionable violence is “trespassing,” a charge meant to remind students that the lawns and buildings that they animate with their bodies and knowledge are not theirs, just as the cops remind us in these moments that the city’s pavements are not ours. The protesters are refusing this—refusing to be passersby in someone else’s world. They are laying claim to a shared world, one which we don’t simply pass through, but build together.
devika girish’s
1. After mass arrests at New York City colleges last week, I attended jail support outside the police precinct where the protesters were being processed. It was a beautiful scene — hundreds of people posted up on the sidewalk. On one side were legal volunteers and medics attending to folks as soon as they were released; on the other side were stands with hot pizza, fresh fruit, and coffee, manned by volunteers in shifts; and in the middle, just a mass of people, cheering on every arrestee as they emerged from the jail, often with sonorous chants of “Free Palestine.” Cars honked in support as they drove by. I stayed from midnight to 7 am, and the crowd had barely thinned. It was an affirming, life-giving, sparkling display of hope and solidarity. I encourage everyone to read up about jail support and show up to gatherings supporting students and protesters arrested for civil disobedience in your city!
2. Film Comment, a publication that I edit, recently launched a collaboration with Empowerment Avenue, an organization that supports incarcerated writers and artists. The first of a series of articles we are partnering on is now up: a piece by Phillip Vance Smith II about how people in prisons stream movies. Check it out here, and also support Empowerment Avenue!
3. The fourth edition of Prismatic Ground, a fantastic, independently curated festival dedicated to experimental documentaries, runs from May 8 to 12 across several venues in New York City and also has an online program free to watch from anywhere in the world. The opening night film is a new restoration of a Palestinian classic, Fertile Memory, from 1981, which will be preceded by a reading by poet Hala Alyan, and followed by a party hosted by DJs Against Apartheid. (Prismatic Ground is one of the few festivals worldwide to have committed to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).
4. I’m off to the Cannes Film Festival next week, and there are two films I’m particularly excited about: Payal Kapadia’s new movie All We Imagine As Light and Mehdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown. Kapadia’s 2021 documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, is, for me, one of the defining works of political cinema of this decade, a mix of fiction and nonfiction that contends with the beauty and brutality of student protests in India. Mehdi Fleifel’s short I Signed the Petition is streaming on Criterion Channel, and is a surprising, thought-provoking disquisition on the politics of boycotts and petitions, especially for Palestinian artists. Check them out and keep your eyes peeled for their new films!
5. Recently I’ve read/been reading three books that have helped me navigate, in different ways, the present moment. I love Kaveh Akbar’s poetry, lyrical and flinty in equal parts, and his new novel, Martyr!, is a lovely interrogation of purpose-making through art. Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything, about the workers movement in 1960s Italy, burns with a Gramscian optimism of the will and offers a model for an alliance between the artist—the novelist, in this case—and the radical. And Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic, a biography of Frantz Fanon, is a lucid and deft account of a life lived passionately among the contradictions of revolution.
*paid subscribers can scroll down for more recs from Devika, including the best corn soup in Crown Heights, a great new album combining “Carnatic Indian music, experimental jazz, electronic genres, and protest rhythms,” and the surprising movie she calls “better than anything Fellini ever did.”
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6. Next week at the Cannes Film Festival, Meryl Streep is set to receive the honorary Palme d’Or award for her incredible body of work. In that spirit, we’ve been inspired to revisit some of her favorite of our films. We love her work with Mike Nichols, especially Angels in America and Heartburn (in which Streep provides both a great performance and great outfit inspo). We also love her in Defending Your Life, directed by Albert Brooks, and of course, Kramer vs. Kramer, directed by Robert Benton (actually, that one’s also pretty great for outfit inspo — especially her trench coat).
7. The seasonal switch has us changing up our beauty routine and focusing more on cleansing that can handle sweat and heavy-duty sunscreen. We love this all-natural shea butter and pink kaolin clay soap from passerby partner Mater, and for a really deep clean, Renée Rouleau’s Triple Berry Smoothing Chemical Peel, as recommended by passerby and beauty expert Hallie Gould who swears by it.
8. And with that switch, we are tapping into our transitional wardrobe. Sheer clothes seem to be everywhere and fit the bill. This sheer long-sleeve and its matching skirt from Silk Laundry are great layering staples (spotted this second-hand alternative from Ozbek). The La Perla lingerie that Monica Belluci wears in the underrated 90s gem The Raffle could be what’s under. We also love this skirt from the Soeur x
collab, this versatile dress from Kye Intimates (from has great styling ideas for this one), and we found a great dress from a deep-cut Issey Miyake sub-brand for one lucky size L on The Real Real ($57!). Inspired by , we’re wearing our sheer outfits with slingback shoes — we like these, these, and these (if you want more advice from Liana, read our guide to cleaning out your closet).9. If you’re in NYC, tonight, Eiko Ishibashi will be at Le Poisson Rouge, performing the incredible music from Drive My Car (a hit at Cannes a couple of years back, when it won best screenplay). Or go see Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest at Film Forum (maybe make it a mother-daughter date for Mother’s Day).
10. You could also gift your mom a class for the two of you to take together. The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research just announced their upcoming courses and many of them are online, so you two could split a bottle of wine and some snacks while taking class on your couch. We like the sound of this class on Greek mythology, or you could learn a new-to-you language, like Ancient Hebrew or Classical Arabic through their Critical Language Studies program. (don’t forget: partner-level passerby subscribers get 20% off all BISR classes).
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#fashion “This Los Angeles Apparel dress fits what you’re looking for; I live in my white and black ones during the summer. It’s made of thick and structured cotton and is a-line so it doesn’t stick to your body. I’d recommend sizing up by one or even two sizes, the whole line runs so tiny“
#conversations “Something like this! There are different brands, but I think it's a specific type of light/level of brightness that simulates sunlight and can make you feel better (and also help with setting circadian rhythm if you do it when you wake up).“
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