Written and directed by film scholar turned filmmaker Lúcia Nagib, her passion project documentary Films to Die For contextualises the period in which ‘The Death of Cinema’ was a prominent source of fear and anxieties in the greater landscape of Hollywood and the indie film scene. This documentary was screened as part of the festival’s Cinephilia Encounters strand, which sets out to champion the ‘transnational culture of cinephilia,’  alongside two classics: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s collaborative efforts Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Tango Berlin (1997).

Featuring testimonies from industry legends like Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, Perfect Days), Paulo Branco (Cosmopolis, The Captive), Walter Salles (I’m Still Here), and the pioneering film critic and theorist Laura Mulvey –  who is best known for coining the term ‘male gaze’ in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Nagib’s film provides searing insight into the social and political state of cinema in this period, offering up Wenders’s ‘ambivalent’ relationship with Hollywood and his relationship with Francis Ford Coppola, who acted as something of a mentor to him in his early career.
Despite the film investigating the case of cinema and its subsequent death, it is clear that today, cinema is still miraculously alive and well. With indie cinema having a renaissance in recent years, with production companies like A24 championing indie films whilst offering almost total creative freedom to the filmmakers, cinema has survived this period of rampant anxieties and panic, and is evidently thriving. The documentary provides a historical and theoretical lens on spectatorship, authorship, and the art of cinema as a whole. 

The film implements valuable insight into the discourse of this era, offering visual and auditory homage to international cinema and B-movies. As the film beautifully puts it, the death of cinema means ‘a death of country, a death of culture, a death of people.’ Without the art of cinema, there is no outlet for our artistic expression, for our love of culture, and for many of us, cinema is our only chance to explore new worlds, new countries, or new, unadulterated meaning. Put simply, a world without cinema is a world I have no interest in being a part of.

This film review has also been published on Asian Movie Pulse: https://asianmoviepulse.com/2026/04/films-to-die-for/