Blair

“Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Gaza City, Jabalia, Nuseirat, Deir al Balah, Khan Younis. There are names that become inseparable from the great crimes committed there.” —Blair McClendon @__seab on With Hasan in Gaza, premiering at Metrograph from May 29.

I wrote about Kamal Aljafari's With Hasan in Gaza and the gap between archival films and history. Thanks to Kelli for having me. metrograph.com/with-hasan-in-…

@jeremypgordon Yeah, I was invited to the sight and sound list and it was way clearer what was being asked, who was asking, and what I was arguing for/against. I don’t think the guardian list would even make sense to me if I was answering for exactly the reasons you said.

Importance of community: The Sight and Sound poll is a decades-long tradition with ~1,600 front-facing voters, many of whom are in casual dialogue with each other; the Guardian poll was a random project (as many lists are, these days) with ~170 semi-identified voters

Stepped away from the after party for the premiere of the Mrs. dalloway adaptation and the kebab place is playing a video explaining supply chains and Iran’s battle strategy in Hormuz

Sagely, dialectically: I support both the speech rights of the protestors and the baton rights of the police officers

We're pleased to debut the trailer for Kamal Aljafari's 'With Hasan in Gaza,' one of the year's best documentaries, which opens @Metrograph on May 29: thefilmstage.com/kamal-aljafari…

Film Comment is back! and so is the archive

Our first quarterly digital issue, the Summer 2026 issue, is now live, with a cover story by Blair McClendon (@__seab) on Boots Riley (@BootsRiley)'s I Love Boosters! filmcomment.com/article/full-s…

@BigMeanInternet I think it’s fine to dislike where money comes from (though I wish there were an actual living *and* distribution in the kind of small scale projects people idealize), and I don’t think anyone has to make a movie, but mostly people are incorrect about how power is distributed.

@BigMeanInternet I also think people are a little confused about film labor. As was shown in the trades reactions to the Sinners deal, it’s uncommon for a director to own a well financed movie. They don’t often have final cut. We call it theirs, because we do that with artists, but it rarely is.

Seen some crazy confusion re: Boots Riley, just in basic terms. A worker does not "finance" their boss or capitalist investors, even if they profit off the work, which of course they expect to.

Last year I was asked if I was interested in working on an adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway set in Nigeria and shot on 35. It was an easy decision. ✌️🏿

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says toll from Israeli attacks on Wednesday rises to 357 dead

Oman’s foreign minister says Iran agreed to “zero enriched uranium stockpiling.” Within hours, Israel hits Tehran

🚨 The final number of dead at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, is 108 school girls, a spokesperson for the Iranian Red Crescent Society said — more than half of the roughly 170 students who attend the school. It remains unclear whether the strike was carried out by the U.S. or Israel. A CENTCOM spokesperson said they were “looking into” the reports. Drop Site reported from the site of the massacre, speaking with families who lost their daughters. The school was reduced to rubble, and dozens of girls were trapped beneath collapsed concrete, with residents digging with their bare hands. Parents wandered through the debris in shock, calling out their children’s names. The full report is below.

Democratic leadership slow-walked the Iran war powers resolution long enough for Trump to start the war. Top Democrats support war with Iran - they just want Trump to be the one to absorb the political fallout My report from earlier this week: capitalandempire.com/p/top-democrat…

talk of for-lack-of-a-better-word "reality" in Wiseman is usually about the camera—his surveillant style; whether it affects behavior. but Wiseman was his own sound recordist until he could no longer carry the gear, and made big choices in the mixing, as he told me in 2023:

Day 10 in a permanently dreary London. I took a bite of a scone and mumbled, to the tune of the producer tag, "I taste London in these cakes"