Blowing Up—A Perspective on Grief and a Lesson in Compassion
We are constantly being pushed to move on from mishaps and negative feelings. What happens if we're not ready to do so?

RETRODREAMING examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story: May it be during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling "Kaidan "(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed "Kaidan "(Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for "Scary School Story") in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo. A voice from a tape recorder recalls the reality of a secret experiment during a pandemic that resulted in further mysterious events. The audiovisual experience draws the viewer into a strange, suspenseful atmosphere somewhere between an unlived retro-future, a sci-fi dream, and an unfinished mystery tale.
We are constantly being pushed to move on from mishaps and negative feelings. What happens if we're not ready to do so?
This Transgender Day of Remembrance, let us take a look at six films about transgender children grappling with their identity in a heteronormative world that despises their kind and tries its best to invalidate their feelings.
Love, Simon (2018) based on the book “Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda” (by Becky Albertalli) is a teen LGBTQ+ rom-com with themes of longing to find others with similar struggles, and ultimately is a story of acceptance of identity from those around you, and most importantly, from yourself.
This emotional, frightening, and dreamlike story examines the ways actresses are exploited in the name of art.
Even without the messaging, Mercy does not hold up as a movie. It's sloppily done and the mystery doesn’t tie together at the end.