No piece in 009 better embodies the answers to these questions than Eman Mohammed’s photo diary of Gaza. Her photographs cannot be contained to a headline or phrase; they capture the devastation of the genocide and the ebullience and spirit of Palestine. When I see Mohammed’s work, I can’t help but think of the danger she’s experienced to give us this portal into the lives of Palestinians—and the danger of those featured in her photos of Gaza. I am honored to have her photography in this issue, and I trust you will feel the same way.
Our cover star, André Holland, is also taking on the questions of what it means to be an artist in these times. Holland stars in three films released this year: The Actor, Love Brooklyn, and an adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. Despite his leading man status, Holland is seeking the role of the student. He recently graduated from the master’s program at Harvard Divinity School and is a 2025-2026 Black Film Project Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute of the Hutchins Center. Holland confesses that while his career has earned him success, he was missing something important. “We learn how to be good artists, but we don’t always learn how to be good change agents,” he tells our writer Murtada Elfadl.
If you’re alive and reading this, then you know Sinners (2025) is a movie that’s generated conversation, critical dissection, and huge box office numbers. Turns out people will go to the theater to see a non-franchise movie when it’s made with intelligence and heart. Sinners is not the first time that Coogler has made connections to the ancestors. In Kambole Campbell’s profile on Coogler, he mines the director’s desire to commune with the dead—even those he’s lost personally—no matter the genre of film. From Fruitvale Station (2013) to Creed (2015) and Black Panther (2018), Coogler’s stories are rooted in who we no longer see but can never forget.
Another artist who is ever attuned to what is not seen is sound recordist and filmmaker JT Takagi. Yance Ford’s interview with Takagi is a meditative reflection on why sound recording is fundamental to filmmaking but rarely commented on. Their conversation is all the more fascinating because Takagi has been the sound recordist for Ford’s films Strong Island (2017) and Power (2024), as well as Louis Massiah’s newest film (which as I write, just premiered at the 2025 festival), TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025). Takagi shares the “accident” that led her to sound recording and what she’s learned as the executive director of Third World Newsreel.
