New Directors/New Films 2024 (April 3-14)

<p>Aspiring actor Edward undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.</p> <p>Writer-director Aaron Schimberg&rsquo;s latest film is a surreal, singular tale of one man&rsquo;s desire to self-actualize. Sebastian Stan is Edward, a man overcome by the reality of his appearance, intent on curing his alienation and transcending his self- and socially-enforced artistic potential. Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve carefully embody foils to Edward&rsquo;s ambition; an artistic and philosophical juxtaposition of his, and our, conceits.</p> <p>Through a haunting score, Lynchian approach to story, and folkloric magical realism, a unique psychological thriller emerges. A stylish vision of the theatrical currents of New York stages a universe where reality and fiction blend in beautiful ways; where lies, expectations, and internal turmoil weave a man&rsquo;s consequentially incipient senses of truth and becoming. <em>A Different Man </em>is a reflexive allegory for the modern tortured artist; a subversive, gothic fairytale that deftly begets obsession.&mdash;CA</p>

<p>Terry Goon is keeping strict quarantine in his ex-husband&rsquo;s Brooklyn brownstone while caring for his nephew &mdash; a 19-year-old model from Morocco named Bahlul &mdash; bedridden in a full leg cast after an electric scooter accident. Unfortunately for Terry, everyone in his life wants to meet the model.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Stress Positions</em> is as much a finely tuned time capsule of the frantic fear and formative power of the pandemic as it is a road map out of dark places guided by a profound humanity. A careful balance between a consistent, razor-sharp humor and the development of a distinctive cinematic tone creates a particular mood and energy that is not easily forgotten.</p>

<p>The innovatively conceived and constructed feature debut from Chinese filmmaker Jiajun &ldquo;Oscar&rdquo; Zhang takes place entirely within the overwhelming, majestically artificial confines of the vertical &ldquo;Global Harbor&rdquo; shopping mall in Shanghai, where pairs of strangers nurse or run from romantic crushes on each other.</p>

<p>Blackberries are often the last berry to bloom in the summer season.<br /> <br /> Based on feminist writer Tamta Melashvili&rsquo;s celebrated novel, this subtle gem follows tenacious Etero, a 48-year-old woman who lives humbly in a provincial village in Georgia. Spending her days selling household goods to the local women, dreaming of a peaceful retirement and crafting jam from blackberries foraged by the river, Etero appears content and protective of her independent way of life &ndash; despite the gossip and judgement from fellow villagers. Until, unpredictably, Etero finds romance with a local deliveryman, leading to a passionate sexual awakening and signalling the long-forgotten possibility of a different life.<br /> <br /> Georgian filmmaker Elene Naveriani returns to IFFR with their third feature,&nbsp;<strong>Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry</strong>, supported by the festival&rsquo;s Hubert Bals Fund for ground-breaking projects. Radical in its restraint and humane in its complexity, this portrait of an older woman&rsquo;s place in her circle of society excels in probing the delicate nuances of tradition and modernity in present-day Georgia. Featuring an engrossing lead performance from Eka Chavleishvili and a patient sensitivity to its subject matter, Naveriani&rsquo;s film sheds essential light on a strong and beautiful life that is often left invisible.</p> <p><em>&ndash; Sophie Tupholme</em></p>

<p>Widowed 70-year-old school teacher Blaga (a brilliant Eli Skorcheva) falls prey to a frightening telephone scam, setting off a chain of events in a tautly conceived thriller that skillfully captures the feeling of a bleak post-Communist society beset by corruption.</p>

<p>After inheriting a pygmy slow loris from her long-estranged husband, a woman clings to dwindling ties to her past while her niece prepares for her wedding and worries about the future.</p>

<p>This micro portrait of two individuals finding comfort in each other&rsquo;s company follows Zeca (Renato Novaes), whose job, body, and mind have all gone out of whack, and Louisa (Grace Pass&ocirc;), his colleague at a local school, as the pair spend a few impromptu hours together outside of work.</p>

<p>Three middle aged friends reunite for the first time in years.&nbsp;Each of them sets out to confess unexpressed feelings but their vacation takes a surprising turn when the undercurrent of their past lives threaten to resurface.</p>

<p>Utilizing his paintings to find freedom from his past, a Black artist on the path to success is derailed by an unexpected visit from his estranged father, a recovering addict desperate to reconcile. Together, they learn that forgetting might be a greater challenge than forgiving.</p> <p>This soulful, sophisticated, and beautifully crafted debut feature blossoms a hard to tell story about destructive parenting, the seasons of angst weathered by an abused child becoming a successful human being, and the deep meaning and salve of creative practice.</p> <p>Oscar-nominated filmmaker and celebrated painter, Titus Kaphar, turns his attention again to cinema to innovate a fresh cinematic language that incorporates the language of paint and canvas to tells the story of Tarrell (Andr&eacute; Holland), an art star reckoning with his own traumatic childhood by creating powerful and transcendent paintings.</p> <p>At the radiant heart of <em>Exhibiting Forgiveness</em> is Tarell&rsquo;s artistic process which illuminates how a creative practice can redeem illnesses of the soul, forge pathways toward regaining power over one&#39;s own destiny, and forgive and transform despite the spiritual damage. &mdash;SF</p>

<p>A teenager flunks an oral school exam, following a seemingly benign question asked by his teacher. Questions over why the boy was failed ignite a nationalistic debate, in Hungarian director G&aacute;bor Reisz&#39;s powerful, multi-perspective, state-of-the nation drama.</p>

<p>Spanish artist and curator V&iacute;ctor Iriarte&rsquo;s debut feature unfolds across four epistolary chapters, following middle-aged Vera (Lola Due&ntilde;as) as she emerges from a years-long search for the biological son whom she gave up for adoption at birth.</p>

<p>On a weekend backpacking trip in the Catskills, 17-year-old Sam contends with the competing egos of her father and his oldest friend.</p>

<p>Two young women, G&uuml;te (Clara Schwinning) and Margarita (C&eacute;line De Gennaro), eke out a living in a remote, sparsely inhabited farming village as radio broadcasts describe an unfolding global crisis&mdash;and count down to the launch of a spacecraft that might save humanity&mdash;in Katharina Huber&rsquo;s feature filmmaking debut.</p>

<p>A father and daughter duo traverse the backroads of rural Russia in a rusted, rambling van in Ilya Povolotsky&rsquo;s debut fiction feature. Clandestine DVD sales, fleeting sexual encounters, and checkpoint-avoiding detours signal the outlaw lifestyle these two share as they slowly, inevitably drift apart.</p>

<p>The unwelcome intrusion of law and society in affairs of the heart is a story grippingly told in writer-director Selman Nacar&rsquo;s sophomore feature, following 24 stressful hours in the life of a Turkish criminal lawyer torn between her allegiances to her murder-suspect client, her convalescent mother, and the judge, a man of questionable principles.</p>

<p>The destruction caused by the war against Ukraine is shown in lengthy tableaux. Intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families set up a shocking parallel world. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned.</p>

<p>In a home perched high in the wooded hills outside Taipei, aging married couple Khim-Hok (Jason King) and Siu-Tuan (Yang Kuei-Mei) bicker, gripe, and commiserate, inhabiting the familiar rhythms of a well-trod daily routine&mdash;until a sudden death throws their world into a state of muted disarray.</p>

<p>In Serbian filmmaker Vladimir Peri&scaron;ić&rsquo;s compelling coming-of-age story, 15-year-old Stefan (Jovan Ginić), a teenager in mid-&rsquo;90s Serbia, has begun to notice a harrowing chasm opening between the way he idealizes his mother (Jasna Đuričić) and how many of his fellow classmates and citizens have begun to see her in her role as the public spokesperson for president Slobodan Milo&scaron;ević.</p>

<p>Malu &mdash; a mercurial, unemployed actress living with her conservative mother in a precarious house in a Rio de Janeiro slum &mdash; tries to deal with her strained relationship with her own adult daughter while surviving on memories of her glorious artistic past. Director Pedro Freire artfully depicts the tumultuous, at times toxic, relationship between three generations of outspoken women in his energetic feature debut, <em>Malu</em>. Freire&rsquo;s script carefully delineates how the ripples of generational trauma have permanently poisoned the family&rsquo;s ties, but a tattered, instinctual affection lingers beneath the resentments, as the women alternatively hurt and protect, offend, and care for one another.<br /> <br /> At the center is the larger-than-life Malu &mdash; a woman compelled to reassert her connection to her faded stardom at any cost &mdash; embodied by Yara de Novaes in a performance that masterfully balances volatility, magnetism, and vulnerability. Actors Carol Duarte and Juliana Carneiro da Cunha ably offer support and depth as Malu&rsquo;s frustrated daughter and feisty, embittered mother, respectively, as the fluctuating chemistry of their fraught familial dynamic further illuminates this fascinating, imperfect woman.&mdash;HZ</p>

<p>Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran, is a landscape etched with scars. Amassed over its history of colonization, industrialization, revolution, and war, they define a place steeped in its past. Through the lens of workers, Meezan examines the memory of an Iranian province where conflict and war, especially in connection with oil, have left their mark. In three parts, manual labourers with maritime-related tasks and professions come together to build a polyphony of movements, sounds, and colours to create a sensory conversation that questions the bodily experience of a population who lives in a place charged with a history that defines it despite itself.</p>

<p>Merit navigates a rapidly deteriorating relationship with her girlfriend Eva while rehearsing a play with her ex-husband in Katharina L&uuml;din&rsquo;s penetrating feature debut, which interrogates love and art with a singular expressiveness, embodying the mercurial nature of romantic relationships in all their contradictory facets&mdash;hope and despair, joy and cruelty.</p>

<p>When Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his white Belgian fianc&eacute;e Alice (Lucie Debay) embark on a family reconciliation trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the kinetic chaos of their return voyage sets the stage for a visceral reimmersion tale.</p>

<p>Otro Sol is a group of real and invented characters trapped in a film. It is also a purgatory of retired thieves set on the coast of the Atacama Desert. The film is circular and seeks to invent as well as verify the myth of Alberto C&aacute;ndia, a Chilean international thief who stole the Cathedral of Cadiz in Andalusia in the late 1980s.</p>

<p>Catalan writer-director Laura Ferr&eacute;s&rsquo;s alternately tender, clever, and mysterious debut feature mixes realism with melodrama in the story of a fiftysomething casting director who unwittingly befriends the woman who gave birth to and abandoned her as a teenager.</p>

<p>Told in elliptical fashion and moving to a surreal rhythm all its own, director Alberto Gracia&rsquo;s grimy and dazzlingly dissonant vision takes place in the port city of Ferrol, where Damian, unkempt and barely scraping by, becomes the inexplicable victim of mistaken identity.</p>

<p>`Inspired by early photographic techniques, Via Dolorosa is an immersive animation documentary that takes us through Jerusalem&rsquo;s local punk scene, where director Rachel Gutgarts spent her youth. Hoping to find atonement, Gutgarts depicts instead a permanent state of war hovering over tales of violence, addiction, sexuality, religion, and racism as told by teenagers approaching adulthood.</p>

<p>He pays him a visit during his work trip to Europe. They have not seen each other since 2015, back in Beijing. This might be the last time they meet.</p>

<p>As she walks by her high school, Mariana is surprised by Pedro&rsquo;s invitation to spend the weekend at his parents&rsquo; house away from the city. In&ecirc;s Teixeira offers a tender, delicate portrait of young love, shyness, and the shape-shifting experience of sexual awakening by giving oneself to another body yearning for affection.</p>

<p>In the postcard-perfect setting of Martinique, a group of friends get together to talk about their relationship with the island and with mainland France. Their conversations sketch the portrait of a youth from overseas.</p>

<p>A Tunisian interpreter working for asylum services struggles to refuse emotional connections when translating stories of survival and abuse from people seeking another life in France. With rules favoring suspicion against personal tragedies, Fatima Kaci films an institutionalized mistrust of others and a character&rsquo;s quest for empathy in the choice of words that carry the weight of a nation&rsquo;s colonial past.</p>

<p>After&nbsp;<a href="https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2020/films/a-bright-summer-diary" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>A Bright Summer Diary</strong></a>&nbsp;(IFFR 2020) and&nbsp;<a href="https://iffr.com/en/expanded/2022/films/ningdu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Ningdu</strong></a>&nbsp;(IFFR 2022) we once again welcome Lei Lei to Rotterdam with this compelling tribute to bygone images and memories. As always, the mundane comes alive through a conscientious montage of gorgeous compositions. A two-part quest for what has been lost through time,&nbsp;<strong>Break no.1 &amp; Break no.2</strong>&nbsp;fires the imagination.</p> <p><em>&ndash; Loes van Keulen</em></p>

<p>In a fantastic tale spun from archival material, Juliana Zuluaga Montoya explores the origins of pornographic cinema in Colombia, sparked by Luz Emilia Garc&iacute;a. In early-20th-century Colombia, in a small village surrounded by enigmatic wilderness, Garc&iacute;a becomes the master of ceremonies presiding over the debaucherous Night of the Minotaur.</p>

<p>Mila and Mar&iacute;a are two teenagers who get to know each other through video correspondences they send to each other. One day, they arrange to meet in person.</p>

<p>Lou Fauroux&rsquo;s The Internet Collapse project asks: is there life after the Internet? The first installment in this series, The Porn Selector, follows former porn star turned porn producer Kasey Warner, who aims to corner the post-Internet market on pornography by selecting, downloading, and preserving different types of porn before they disappear. Innovatively using a variety of digital production techniques, Fauroux guides us through the ethical quandaries and quagmires of the Internet as we know it&ndash;&ndash;in all its unrelenting, omnipresent glory.</p>

<p>A deluge of digital detritus, a frame-by-frame visual assault on the pleasure dome in our skulls. All set to appropriate music made by means of appropriation: chopped, screwed and then thrown in the blender. Digital Devil Saga is an opus of post-Covid life where heavy screen mediation has been completely normalised. But the film is also an act of preservation, embalming each ephemeral image, each frame, in preservation-grade 35mm ESTAR-base filmstock.</p>