Another Gaze was founded in 2016 by two recent graduates who were motivated by an enthusiasm for women’s films and feminist theory. Unexpectedly to us, the journal took off – but, in retrospect, this reflected the times. With the newly politicised publics that multiplied in the 2010s (Me Too, of course, was one movement among them), there was an appetite for more than shallow appropriations of feminism, an appetite for more nuanced engagement with the cultural sphere. In the years that followed, we published predominantly new writers – online and in five extensive, but affordable, print issues. Our readership went on growing, but our resources never did.

Around 2020, we started asking ourselves questions about the sustainability of Another Gaze; doubts about the purpose of feminist criticism crept in. Were we too often concerned with representation at the expense of form, too often making moral judgements at the expense of watching films as films, and then policing or cheerleading on those terms? Reading films according to principled, passionate worldviews could (can!) produce exciting, essential criticism – but it was (remains) a fine line. As feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (1938–2026) put it, ‘how to effect another vision: [how] to construct other objects and subjects of vision’? In 2026, we are still asking ourselves this question.

Historically, Another Gaze has also published long-form writing on films that were not always easy to see, and we wanted to get these moving image works out to audiences. In 2021, we started Another Screen: streaming films and contextualising programmes with archival material, translated material, and commissioned writing. Through Another Gaze Editions, our publishing imprint which launched in 2022, that project of engaging with women’s histories continued. With temporal distance from the films we were sharing came critical distance, and engaging with cinema in this way frequently felt more satisfying than responding to the frenzy of popular culture and online discourse. Around this time, while we explored cinemas of the past in our other projects, we started an annual critics workshop in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival in London, continuing a commitment to fostering new talents, and looking to the future of criticism in so doing.

Our unofficial hiatus began in late 2023, with the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. Since then, prominent institutions (publications, festivals, film funds, distributors) have been called into question for censorship or complicity with Israel’s war crimes. As these institutions try to avoid political responsibility by invoking the power of cinema, criticism must reckon with what form that power might take – and with its own power too.

Among those institutions, film festivals insist on their value as sites for discussion – but when constrained by demands of global capital and nation states, that discussion is inevitably compromised along the way. What, today, is the reach of cinema and its fourth estate? Only by appreciating that scope – perhaps first recognising what politics are endemic to the institutions of cinema, before trying to map other political concerns onto film – can we understand how best to practice criticism.

But as other cherished publications shutter for lack of funding, thinking through those questions looks increasingly difficult; the long-form critical landscape seems split, mostly, between personal newsletters and a few legacy outlets. While cinephilia seems to be back with new, catching enthusiasm, in line with a certain ‘vibe shift’, it often resembles an old version, one that we set out to remedy ten years ago – masculine French cinephilia, encore. When we look at contemporary cinema, we see that it is still invested – superficially or not – in feminist issues. Meanwhile, when we look towards the world stage, we see feminism mobilised to justify horrors. As a feminist film journal, we want to continue to interrogate all of this. For these reasons and others, we are now relaunching Another Gaze with this online issue, and another planned for later this year. With our current funds, we will aim to publish biannually, and to open calls for submissions this spring.

Last autumn, we put out three standalone articles that together indicate the range of writing Another Gaze seeks to publish in this next iteration. On the anniversary of the Chilean coup d’etat in September, Kaleem Hawa examined how the documentaries of Patricio Guzmán represent and remember Salvador Allende’s besieged socialist project. In an essay on the many networked personas of Lynn Hershman Leeson, meanwhile, Tess Little linked the artist-filmmaker’s exploration of technology to her deconstruction of subjecthood. More recently, Helen Charman picked apart the psychoanalytic allusions of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025), finding fault in its hot-take treatment of sexual violence on campus. That review ends with an invitation to ‘forms of speech [that] generate discomfort for those in power’, as Charman wagers that ‘the point of an education is to think about things that might not feel comfortable’, and that ‘the point of a classroom is to create an environment in which we can all do that thinking’. This is, in 2026, the point of Another Gaze too.

Through this relaunch issue, our writers weigh in on matters that might feel comfortable to some readers, and at other times ask provocative questions of what we have come to know as contemporary film culture. Cici Peng, for example, raises an eyebrow at the neoliberal festival model while she appraises the unsentimental, punk works of Chilean filmmaking duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda; these, she says, do away with the ‘sentimentality and condescending forms of empathy’ common to socially progressive cinema. Henry Miller, for his part, reckons with a debt to the 1970s – and points the finger at Another Gaze – as he suggests that film culture of the last decade has been ‘overdrawn on the Bank of Mum and Dad’: too reliant on past theories, too enamoured of old movies.

That there might be something conservative in turning, time and again, to the past as some sort of refuge from the present has not escaped either of us. Yet while contemporary cinephilia is still so invested in the past (as the popularity of re-releases, restorations, and festivals like Il Cinema Ritrovato might suggest), we value critical writing that situates films in their historical moment, resisting the temptations of anachronism. In their respective contributions, Laura Staab, Sophia Satchell-Baeza, and Genevieve Yue do just this, thinking about films which were first released between 1968 and 1981 with the headiness of world revolution, countercultural scenes, or tenacious twentieth-century family ideals in mind.

Back to the present: in her review of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”, Georgie Carr weighs the new adaptation against previous takes on Emily Brontë's endlessly alluring novel. Tired metaphors are a problem for Carr and for Katherine Connell and Esmé Hogeveen, who elsewhere talk us redemptive depictions of transgressive motherhood in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025); it is the first instalment of their new column of conversations about new releases. Turning to American experimental film, Hannah Bonner excavates humanist poetics from nonhuman formations as she studiesDeborah Stratman’s Last Things (2023), and Chiara Haefliger interviews Mary Helena Clark, together contemplating Leeson-like slippages of object and subject, the suggestive potential of images, and influences on her oneiric work.

Speaking with Maria Chiaretti and Patrícia Mourão de Andrade, Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitán makes mention of the American avant-garde – she has been editing footage of her decade-long ‘encounter’ with the late Ken and Flo Jacobs – while she reflects widely on her forty-year film career: from her beginnings and her husband, Glauber Rocha, to Indigenous cinema and ‘anti-portraiture’. That term, ‘anti-portraiture’, might be applicable to many filmmakers under discussion in this relaunch; as Yue says of Tang Shu Shuen, few ‘neatly fit a category’ or into the ‘taxonomic boxes’ most readily available to us. That goes for Clara Law too, whose own forty-year film career has traversed the globe – Hong Kong, England, Australia – and different modes of production, as Eleanor Lu’s interview with the filmmaker renders clear. (It represents one of three indispensable contributions from previous participants of our critics workshop in this relaunch issue.)

Women’s manifold contributions to cinematic arts do not, of course, begin in the post-’68 moment – though this is where our interests have tended to gravitate, and perhaps unsurprisingly. In those years, the emergence of women’s movements converged with the institutionalisation of film, and much of the research and restoration work of recent years has been focused on this period. Micaela Brinsley and Florencia Marchetti, however, orientate us to the first half of the twentieth century in their translation of ‘Divorce as a Sanitary Measure’, a famous speech that the Spanish artist and intellectual Mercedes Pinto gave in 1923 in a bid to better protect women from abusive husbands. That Luis Buñuel was later inspired by Pinto’s work on abuse and madness, adapting her 1926 novel to make Él (1953), one of his Mexican melodramas, serves not only as a reminder to look back but to look askance, beyond the auteur, where women shaped cinema from other places.

Another Gaze wants to continue to shape cinema culture from its position as an independent publisher, but can only do so with donations. If you enjoy the work we do, consider contributing here.

On Emerald Fennell’s "Wuthering Heights" by Georgie Carr

Talking Motherhood by Katherine Connell & Esmé Hogeveen

On Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (1968) by Genevieve Yue

On Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981) by Sophia Satchell-Baeza

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Longest Dream by Laura Staab

Two Decades in Another Decade by Henry K. Miller

Liars, Fascists, Drifters: The Cinema of Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda by Cici Peng

On Deborah Stratman’s Last Things (2023) by Hannah Bonner

A Conversation with Mary Helena Clark by Chiara Haefliger

A Conversation with Paula Gaitán by Patrícia Mourão de Andrade & Maria Chiaretti

A Conversation with Clara Law by Eleanor Lu

Mercedes Pinto’s ‘Divorce as a Sanitary Measure’ by Micaela Brinsley & Florencia Marchetti