Tara Judah is a film critic and curator, primarily interested in how art can inspire personal voice to inflect those spaces. Tara’s projects engage authenticity, performative enquiry, creative reflection, and critical intervention. As a writer, video essayist and cinema producer, she has worked in the UK and Australia for and with Watershed, BFI, 20th Century Flicks, Cube Microplex, The Astor Theatre, Girls on Film Festival, Senses of Cinema, Sight & Sound, Monocle24, Desist Film, Overland and BBC World Service.
A bimonthly column on film and reflections, somewhere between art and reality.
Reflections 7
How I am deciding what to watch is, potentially, the most troubling aspect, though, and gives testament to what cinemas are best at. As a British Australian, I am, in the first instance, watching British and Australian films, which feels like an incredibly colonial and xenophobic selection criteria.
Reflections 6: What does it mean to contribute to film criticism?
Yesterday, eight artistic directors of hefty European film festivals attended the opening night of the 77th Venice International Film Festival. Press releases tell me they reaffirmed the value of cinema. I wonder who was there to hear them.
Reflections 5
I can’t write if I don’t read. This is because I don’t invent, I respond; to art, to others, and even to myself. It’s not because that’s how I understand the role of the critic (although I do) but because it is, quite simply, who and how I am
Reflections 4
I have started watching films, exploring artwork and understanding the world in the same way that I do my grocery shopping. One tab is a virtual book splurge, where I literally and endlessly add knowledge I ought to have into an, albeit virtual, shopping basket. It’s funny that the supposed end point to this activity is to ‘check out’.
Reflections 3
I don’t watch much, anymore; binge-watching makes me ache and devouring cinema like popcorn is too loud and too crunchy for my current disposition. But what I watch, I swim in, letting it sink into my bones, so that it can flow with the water that is already so much of me.
