STRAW 2025: A Mother’s Silence Was Louder Than a Siren
A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.

I thought it would be a symbolic, cathartic experience. Initially, it was a response to the violence of certain representations. I thought that perhaps, by confronting them with an inverted image of violence, we would obtain something akin to a repaired image. It's a film-laboratory, somewhere between staged scenes and documentary, that attempts to grasp where violence goes in the reserves of our consciousness.
A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.
Like all modern societal phenomenons, it started with a meme. This one highlighted that when there’s a mom in a Pixar film, she is almost without fail given striking curves that highlight the bottom half of her body following a minuscule waist. From Elastigirl to the skeletal Mama Imelda, the animation giant’s artists seem to have a fixation on making exaggeratedly curvy maternal characters.
'También la Iluvia' exploits Indigenous peoples' fight against the privatization of water in order to tell a story about Spanish characters.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
I was able to sit down and talk with up and coming producer and director Ryan Polomski who talked about his latest project Raymond Lewis: LA Legend. It's a documentary about basketball star Raymond Lewis and here is what I found out.
The Christmas Horror section of films is growing, and today we present a bold selection of new and old Christmas horror films to celebrate this macabre union.