Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters is pleased to amplify the TOC of 16.2, jointly edited by students at Chapman University and the University of North Carolina Wilmington, with support from the University of Utah. In this issue, you will find the following feature articles, peer reviewed by Chapman University, on the theme of “The Body”:

• Portrait of a Lady On-screen: Self-Portraiture through Self-Reflexive Documentary in Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers by Bridget Bell
• Lolita in the Lens: Pleasure and the Male Gaze in Lolita’s Film Adaptations by Kae Cohen
• Rewriting History and Cultural Memory: The Influence of The Birth of a Nation on Southern Identity and Racial Narratives by Joseph D’Andrea
• From Scream Queen to a Queen of the Screen: The Star Persona of Jamie Lee Curtis by Faith Hardie

These open-themed feature articles, peer reviewed by the University of North Carolina Wilmington:

• Opening the Archival Closet: How Practices of Archiving and Collecting Queer Films Shape Public Memory by Ronja Blight
• Visual Essayists in a Contemporary Climate and a Digital Future by Jemima Kent
• Skin Shields: Bodily Modification as Political Resistance in the Trans Horror Films of the 2020s by Carol Liddle
• How to Make People Care: Documentary Viewing, Connectedness to Nature, and Conservation Efforts by Emma Soncini
• Polluted Blood: Exploring the History of the Representation of Menstruation On-screen by Yeliz Zaifoglu
• Anatomizing Hiroshima mon amour (1959): Deleuze’s Cinematic Fossil as an Instrument of Human Rights Advocacy by Vernita Zhai

A featurette:

• Finding the Deserted, Screening the Forgotten: An Interview with Deserted Films by Holley Anne Brabble

These book reviews:

• “Keep ‘Em in the East”: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance, Richard Koszarski (2021) by Laura Marcy
• Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror, Kartik Nair (2024) by Izzie Barrett

DVD/Blu-ray reviews:

• Blue Velvet (1986) by Lauren Cavalieri
• A Film You Don’t Watch, But Feel by Dylan Limp

Not to mention a special editorial remembering Paul Ramaeker:

• Editorial: Remembering Paul Ramaeker (1968–2025) by Liza Palmer and Tim Palmer

Congratulations to all our authors, mentors, and anyone helping to will this issue into being! For more information about this issue, please visit: 

https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/fm/16/2

Are you an undergraduate author who wants to be published in Film Matters? Then we want to work with you! Please check out all the different ways you can publish with us.

Film Matters is particularly pleased to celebrate the winner of the 2025 Masoud Yazdani Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship, as determined by our volunteer panel of judges: Francesca C. DiBona for her FM 15.2 (2024) article “Feedback, Fugitivity, and Overexposure: Monique Walton’s Dark Matters and the Criterion Channel’s Afrofuturism Collection.” Francesca is a Cinema and Media Studies PhD student at the University of Southern California. She holds an MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies from Queen’s University. Her work focuses on fugitive approaches to obstructed, decayed, and preserved images, with special attention to their presence in Afrofuturist, experimental, and sensory filmmaking practices. Her archival work with the HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive at USC and the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University has been a primary influence on her scholarship.

Our judges also recognized Sarah Dean with an honorable mention for their FM 15.3 (2024) article “Humanoids in Transition: Corrupted Binaries, Fluidity, and Embodied In-between.” Sarah is a working-class film programmer and aspiring researcher from London, UK. They hold a first-class BA in Film Studies from King’s College London and an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies with distinction from the University of Cambridge. Their research interests include trans and queer film aesthetics, autoethnographies, and representations of class on-screen.

The Masoud Yazdani Award would not be possible without the tireless (and cheerful!) work of our judges, who selected our 2025 honorees after a rigorous judging period this spring. Please join us in thanking:

Devin Glenn is a filmmaker and media scholar pursuing an MFA in Film Production at the University of Utah (2025-2028), expanding upon his MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California (2022-2024). His interests reside at the intersection of feminist studies, queer theory, and cultural analysis. As a published writer in Film Quarterly and presenter at national conferences hosted by UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and the American Society for Aesthetics, Devin engages in research and creative practices that explore embodiment, memory, and community through scholarly inquiry as well as active directing, screenwriting, and editing. Across his work, Devin is passionate about bridging scholarship and production—approaching film as both an artistic medium and a critical framework.

Daiyaan Hutson is an English instructor and aspiring film scholar at West Georgia Technical College. His interest in film studies began during his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of West Georgia, which led him to studying the road movie in particular. Outside of that genre, he also is interested in ephemeral and sponsored films produced during the Cold War, the New Hollywood, and the Japanese New Wave. He joined Film Matters as an advisory board member in 2024.

Merritt Mecham is a Marketing and Communications Specialist for the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing for Film & Television from Emerson College. Her writing has appeared in Bright Wall/Dark Room, RogerEbert.Com, The Female Gaze by Alicia Malone, and City Weekly, Salt Lake City’s Alt Weekly newspaper. Prior to joining the College of Fine Arts, Merritt worked for the U’s Film & Media Arts Department, Sundance Film Festival, and KSL NewsRadio. Outside of work, Merritt is an avid movie-theater-goer and enjoys collecting hobbies—from beading to cooking to embroidery.

Nora Price is a filmmaker, dancer, and experimental musician based in Salt Lake City, UT. She trained with the Milwaukee Ballet Academy and Second Company and is currently a Film & Media MFA and Screendance certificate candidate at the University of Utah, from which she also holds a degree in Linguistics. She has been a performing member of SB Dance since 2023.

Mihir Pyakuryal is an MFA candidate in Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah. His creative and scholarly interests lie at the intersection of global cinema, sound-driven storytelling, and film theory. As a filmmaker, his work often engages with the emotional textures of everyday life, drawing from transnational experiences between Nepal and the United States. In addition to his creative practice as a filmmaker, he teaches and mentors students, with a particular interest in helping emerging filmmakers develop their voices. His films and scholarship draw on transnational experiences, reflecting an ongoing interest in how cinema can capture the textures of everyday life and cultural identity.

Each year Film Matters – in fond remembrance of Masoud Yazdani, founding chairman of Intellect and a key person in the establishment of our journal – revisits the peer-reviewed feature articles from the prior volume year with the help of graduate student judges. We approach this undertaking with enthusiasm, an opportunity to celebrate the innovative and passionate texts we publish, products resulting from the unique collaborative work of emerging undergraduate film scholars, their mentors, and the Film Matters publication process. The honorees receive book awards from the field of film studies, in recognition of their achievement. For more information, please visit: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/masoud-yazdani-award/.