rooney elmi

Skaters are having a moment in 2018. From Jonah Hill’s upcoming directorial debut Mid90s to Bing Liu’s award-winning documentary Minding the Gap, skating has re-captured the cinematic zeitgeist. And at its center stands Crystal Moselle’s sophomore feature, Skate Kitchen.
Coming off the critical success of her 2015 Sundance hit documentary The Wolfpack, writer-director Crystal Moselle uses New York City as a backdrop for idiosyncratic teendom in her first narrative feature, loosely based on a ...

On Friday and Saturday, August 17-18, the Wex presents a rare opportunity to see Personal Problems on the big screen. The experimental drama, made in 1980, was originally intended for public television and is only now receiving a theatrical run. SVLLY(wood) publisher Rooney Elmi shares more about the work below.
Working with a minuscule budget of $40,000 in Harlem, New York, two underground titans in African American storytelling banded together to make a landmark epic that would go unseen fo...

Over the next two weekends, the Wex presents new documentaries about artists who've held the public's attention and respect for decades: Sophie Fiennes' Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami and Sara Driver's Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Below, Rooney Elmi, publisher of SVLLYWOOD, which just released its third issue, and a contributor to a number of national film sites and publications, shares her thoughts on how each filmmaker approaches her iconoclastic subject.

Q&A with Anna Swanson, a member of Angela Davis’s co-founded organization, Critical Resistance. Answering reader submitted questions on how to join the fight towards prison abolishment.

A short profile on the Ohio based filmmaking collective founded by Chinonye Chukwu that teaches and empowers incarcerated women to make their own short films, from script to screen.

Q&A with Jackie Wang, the multi-hyphenate author behind one of the years hotly anticipated books, ‘Carceral Capitalism’.

Q&A with Maya Binyam, senior editor at renown online magazine The New Inquiry, explaining the publications new subversive cyber-activist initiative, Bail Bloc.

Via WhatsApp Jade Jackman discusses the pre-production process of her BFI award winning short film, Calling Home, centered on the notorious Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England.

SVLLY(wood)’s founding editor talks to documentary filmmaker, Brett Story about the conceptualization and execution of her lyrical debut essay film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes.

Black Mother, the new documentary feature from Khalik Allah, is a portrait of a country’s dichotomies. Traveling back to his mother’s Caribbean homeland of Jamaica, the New York–based filmmaker/photographer hones the alluring, hypnotic hypersensory aesthetic brought to light with his 2015 documentary Field Niggas. As Allah grapples with the immense self-inflicted task of mapping out national experience, the polyphonic matrix of visuals and soundscapes shifts between pristine black-and-white t...

‘Shakedown’ is the debut feature length documentary from Hood By Air cofounder Leilah Weinraub

While we wait for what the Academy Awards might hold on Sunday, it’s worth revisiting the ceremony’s history of protest, beginning with Marlon Brando’s rejection of his award in 1973.

Despite a quarter century worth of sexual predatory claims against him, the R&B crooner seems to constantly evade career oblivion, unlike the growing list of predatory men in the post-Harvey Weinstein landscape.

The fourth annual Cinema Revival: A Festival of Film Restoration opens with a discussion of the work of West African filmmaker Med Hondo and a screening of his 1967 feature debut, Soleil Ô.

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