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Nicholas Bugeja

Nicholas Bugeja

Nicholas Bugeja is a writer and editor. He is currently an assistant editor for Independent Australia, and edited the Monash student magazine, Lot’s Wife, in 2017. Nicholas has written on subjects such as cinema, the environment, theatre, comedy, Indonesian politics, sport and Australian law for publications including the ACMI Blog, Eureka Street, Film Matters, Overland and Senses of Cinema.

Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'Unknown: A refugee’s story' by Akuch Kuol Anyieth

September 2022, no. 446 28 August 2022
‘I want to tell you about a different kind of world, one that exists within the world we live in,’ writes Akuch Kuol Anyieth in her memoir, Unknown, thus inviting her readers to empathise with the singular plight of refugees. For much too long, refugees have been overlooked or rendered invisible; they are confined to refugee camps, detention centres, and hotel rooms, condemned to the margins o ... (read more)

Nicholas Bugeja reviews ‘Funkytown’ by Paul Kennedy

April 2022, no. 441 23 March 2022
Seasoned ABC journalist and presenter Paul Kennedy, also known as ‘PK’, has over the years cultivated an affable, equable public persona. For regular viewers of the ABC’s News Breakfast program, Kennedy is the kind of person with whom one would like to have a drink; to pore over sporting results or the tumult of living through a pandemic. It is a shock, then, to discover that Kennedy was not ... (read more)

'Dune': Denis Villeneuve’s surplus of spectacle

ABR Arts 07 December 2021
For decades, Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune (1965) was generally regarded as unfilmable, a literary work that defied transposition into another artistic medium. Never one to balk at a challenge, David Lynch embarked on his own adaptation of Dune in 1984. With neither the majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) nor the commercial appeal of the Star Wars franch ... (read more)

Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'The Force of Nonviolence: An ethico-political bind' by Judith Butler

March 2021, no. 429 22 February 2021
Judith Butler is acutely aware of the extent to which violence is an accepted part of human affairs. ‘The case for nonviolence encounters skeptical responses from across the political spectrum,’ Butler writes in the opening sentence of their latest book, The Force of Nonviolence. It is not so much that most people unconditionally advocate violence. Rather, it is considered an inexorable featur ... (read more)

Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on film theory, history and culture' by Adrian Martin

September 2020, no. 424 24 August 2020
Adrian Martin’s Mysteries of Cinema is, above all, an impassioned love letter to film, a written record of a life defined and driven by the pleasures, ambiguities, and indeed mysteries inherent in what André Bazin, co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, called the ‘seventh art’. In the author’s own words, the book ‘covers 34 years of a writing life’. It charts both his ephemeral and enduri ... (read more)

Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'Almost Human: A biography of Julius the chimpanzee' by Alfred Fidjestøl

January–February 2020, no. 418 16 December 2019
The biography has long been reserved for human subjects. It is a genre largely predicated on the idea that only humans live lives sufficiently rich and complex to be worthy of sustained examination. Countless books have centred on different kinds of animals, yet few have fallen within the biographical category. Most are found in the children’s, zoology, or fiction shelves at bookstores. Alfred ... (read more)

By the Grace of God (Sharmill Films)

ABR Arts 25 November 2019
‘By the grace of God, the statute of limitations has expired’, pronounces Cardinal Philippe Barbarin (François Marthouret), the Archbishop of Lyon, at a 2016 press conference. He is, of course, referring to the historical child abuse crimes committed by Father Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley). The press corps is understandably shaken. A journalist rises, indignant: ‘Excuse me, do you realis ... (read more)

Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'The Gap: An Australian paramedic’s summer on the edge' by Benjamin Gilmour

October 2019, no. 415 25 September 2019
Sirens wail. Families cry together. Defibrillators shock bodies into convulsion. These are the sounds and images that veteran paramedic, writer, and filmmaker Benjamin Gilmour animates in his latest book, The Gap. His prose is direct, honest, uncompromising; often unembellished. ‘Death is demystified to us; it’s the business we’re in,’ he writes. At times, we feel like we are sitting in th ... (read more)