Issue 19 is here. Archives, Gaza, AI, and the price of avoidance
Spring/Summer 2026. Forty-plus reviews, three book essays, and a conversation with Hubert Sauper on the art of information
Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie opens our Spring/Summer 2026 issue by asking why archives keep pulling us back. From Vouvoula Skoura’s poetics of borders to the Venice Biennale’s pavilions of fractured memory, the question threads through the entire issue. When truth and falsehood can no longer be told apart, as Hannah Arendt warned, we stop believing in the real world.
We follow Kamal Aljafari’s 2001 MiniDV journey through a Gaza that no longer exists, alongside Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor, which carries firsthand testimony from Gaza’s hospitals into the indifferent corridors of the US Senate. Gideon Levy’s reporting from inside Israel anchors our book section. Manon Loizeau and Ekaterina Mamontova bring the voices of imprisoned Russian dissidents out from the shadow of the Kremlin, while Zhanna Agalakova traces her own break from First Channel propaganda in A Little Gray Wolf Will Come.
Elsewhere, Marc Isaacs and Chouwa Liang ask what authenticity can still mean once AI begins to mimic the human face. Andreas Pichler unpacks the Musk machine. Nikolaus Geyrhalter watches glaciers vanish in Melt. Maja Tschumi’s Immortals finds the pulse of Baghdad’s youth still beating beneath the rubble of the 2019 uprising. Marc Glassmann reflects on Indigenous filmmaking at Hot Docs, and Hubert Sauper sits down for a long conversation on the art of information.
In our interview, Laurens Korteweg speaks candidly about how the new funding climate is affecting human rights film culture. After twenty years of partnership, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has withdrawn from Movies That Matter. USAID is gone. Festivals across Europe are quietly restructuring. “We need a different appreciation of culture in society,” Korteweg says.
Modern Times Review is part of that same fragile ecosystem. We rely on readers and publish politically serious documentary criticism because we believe it still has something to say about the world we live in.
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