At Caligari, we have decided—just as we did in 2024—not to cover the festival. Not out of indifference or disinterest, but out of respect for cinema. Because for us, cinema is a space for thought, not a fairground of entertainment. And because the festival, as it currently stands, does not provide even the minimal conditions for critical engagement. Its current logic does not invite reflection or dialogue, but rather condescension. In that context, to participate would be to accept the game of complacency—where everything is celebrated and nothing is discussed.
“In The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt takes her poetics of silence to the extreme: what drives the story is not what the characters say, but what they leave unspoken. Through minimal gestures, pauses, and empty spaces, she constructs a narrative in which subtext replaces dialogue, revealing social, emotional, and political tensions without the need to explain them.”
“The excessive use of narrative coincidence, in that context, is a symptom of a deeper illness: the loss of faith in dramatic causality. There is no longer any trust that a well-told story can, on its own, hold the audience’s attention.”
