First Look 2024

Sujo

Astrid Rondero Fernanda Valadez

<p>When a cartel gunman is killed, he leaves behind Sujo, his beloved 4-year-old son. The shadow of violence surrounds Sujo during each stage of his life in the isolated Mexican countryside. As he grows into a man, Sujo finds that fulfilling his father&rsquo;s destiny may be inescapable.</p> <p>A breathtaking film and the second collaboration of filmmakers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez (<em>Identifying Features</em>), <em>Sujo</em> recenters stories of cartel violence by exploring its aftermath, the collateral damage, and its orphans. With lyrical intensity and a penetrating humanity, it offers a moving, contemporary coming-of-age portrait of Sujo, a young man named after a strong-willed horse, and the way his identity, consciousness, and moral character are shaped through various episodes &mdash; by the women who protect him, the boys lured toward their fathers&rsquo; fates, the mentorship of a teacher &mdash; as if they are seasons in his growth. A rich tapestry of motifs reflects on how cycles are formed and broken. As a gunman&rsquo;s son, is Sujo&rsquo;s fate governed by circumstance or by something innate, akin to his spirited namesake?&mdash;JN</p>

Small Changes

Maya Bell

<p>Small Changes follows a newly single mother as she trades her successful 2 acre farm for 71 acres of empty land and a dream. After the birth of her oldest daughter, Erica Parker took out all her savings and bought a small property. With very little agriculture experience, she and her husband grew a thriving market garden. In 2019, the pair bought 71 acres with the hope of creating a sustainable living community. Now she is alone with three young daughters to raise, a school bus to live in and an ambitious project ahead of her.</p>

Gaze

Morgan Hadley

<p>This film is a reflection of exploitative power dynamics as it takes a meta-approach to the embodied experience of the male gaze. Inescapable and predatory, this phenomenon affects the way in which women internally visualize themselves and outwardly interact with the world. &ldquo;Gaze&rdquo; is deeply rooted in the collective need to heal.</p>

Home (2023)

Beatričė Bankauskaitė

<p>Brandie, a nurse with twenty years experience and a single mom, returns to her hometown during the pandemic but cannot find an affordable place to live. With a poor credit score and two boxers, she is ultimately forced to move to an extended-stay hotel. Working two jobs and raising her kids, she dreams of buying a place of her own. Home follows Brandie&rsquo;s journey of becoming a homeowner; it offers an intimate look at motherhood and redefines the meaning of home.</p>

West

Bradford Siwak

<p>The first synagogue west of the Mississippi River, United Hebrew in St. Louis eventually relocated further west to the suburbs, a journey mapped by the film in real time, accompanied by voices from the city&rsquo;s Jewish community discussing changes to the community and landscape.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

Hazel (dual)

Kevin Jerome Everson

<p>Hazel (dual) is a split screen film, shot in 16mm b/w, inspired by the legendary recording of the underrated guitarist Eddie Hazel&#39;s (1950-1993) ten-minute guitar solo on &quot;Maggot Brain&quot;, the title track to Funkadelic&#39;s 1971 album.</p>

Gwetto

Michaël Andrianaly

<p>In Tamatave, Madagascar, a group of young undocumented men work at a car wash. Jelco, Justin, Rabetsy and Mamy have come from across the country seeking employment in the city, hoping for a brighter future. Instead, they are faced with discrimination and a boss who exploits them with low wages and long hours. While waiting for their ID cards, they pass the time by playfully teasing each other, sharing meals, and reflecting on the violence that is never far from their neighborhood. Micha&euml;l Andrianaly (Nofinofy, T/F 2020) observes the rhythms of their daily lives with an intimate and lingering lens. Circumventing traditional narrative, Andrianaly immerses us in the world of these men, painting a cinematically rich portrait. A beautifully rendered hangout doc, Gwetto gives voice to the often ignored &ldquo;economically displaced&rdquo; population of Madagascar. (CT)</p>

ჯადოსნური მთა (Magic Mountain)

Mariam Chachia Nik Voigt

<p>The walls of the old Abastumani palace are crumbling, some parts are uninhabitable, and the rooms where people still live are also in disrepair. But life goes on, albeit sometimes on the edge between life and death.</p> <p>Georgian filmmaker Mariam Chachia first heard about the Abastumani sanatorium in the southwest of the country when she herself contracted tuberculosis. The center treats patients with infectious TB who don&rsquo;t respond to antibiotics. Fortunately, Chachia recovered after treatment with medication at home, but the idea of staying in the remote sanatorium continued to haunt her. Her solution to rid herself of the nightmares was to make a film about it.</p> <p>She spends five years off and on as part of the sanatorium&rsquo;s miniature society and discovers that the nature of the residents, who often stay there for years, is less serious than their illness and the half-ruin they inhabit would suggest. In a sinister twist, this also becomes a story about how this place and its patients are connected to the history of Georgia.</p>

El eco (The Echo)

Tatiana Huezo

<p>A young mother runs across a mountain meadow with her children and they save a sheep from drowning. A girl cares for her elderly grandmother so tenderly that you want to cry while another practices being a teacher with just the right tone of voice, her dolls lined up before her as willing pupils. The fathers are mostly absent: as construction workers or tradesmen, they rarely share their daily lives with their families. In El Eco, a remote village in northern Mexico, life consists of the most elementary things. Being a child here is an intense experience from day one, involving nature, animals and people. But also love, intimacy, illness and death. And education &ndash; at least for the younger generation.</p> <p>Tatiana Huezo has made a name for herself as a sensitive and poetic documentarian (e.g.&nbsp;<em>Tempestad</em>,&nbsp;<em>Forum</em>, 2016). Accompanying three families in her new work, the notion of meandering becomes an informing principle as she brilliantly weaves a host of faces and gestures into a kaleidoscope of unpretentiousness. Almost incidentally, she portrays the care-working matriarchy in a country notorious for its innumerable kidnappings of women and girls. A tender film that celebrates the grace of animals and the children of this earth alike.</p>

Footsteps

Fiona Tan

<p>When I was living in Los Angeles I used to go regularly for hikes in Rogers State Park [...]</p> <p>I would pass a hand-painted sign from the park rangers. Its words have always stayed with me: &lsquo;Leave only footsteps and take only memories&rsquo; Footsteps (2022) is a 97-minute video installation made by Fiona Tan at the invitation of Amsterdam&rsquo;s Eye Filmmuseum. The work combines archival film footage from the museum&rsquo;s collection with a voiceover of letters written to the artist by her father while she was a student in the late 1980s.</p> <p>Tan added a soundtrack to the film material that reflects the action and events taking place, bringing the century-old footage to life. As we listen to the artist&#39;s father (voiced by actor Ian Henderson) write about the fall of the Soviet Union, civil unrest in China, and the everyday lives of the artist&rsquo;s relatives in Australia, we watch men and women toil the land and harvest the sea, we see cows in the field and old men smoking pipes, sailboats moving across the horizon, and the emergence of industry and urbanisation.</p>

Solaris Mon Amour

Kuba Mikurda

<p>A found footage documentary inspired by Stanislaw Lem&#39;s &quot;Solaris&quot;. A trance-like, personal story about loss, mourning and memory. The film consists of excerpts from films produced by the Educational Film Studio in Lodz in 1960s.</p> <p>The same year that Alain&nbsp;Resnais&rsquo;s&nbsp;masterpiece&nbsp;<em>Hiroshima&nbsp;mon&nbsp;amour</em>&nbsp;was released,&nbsp;science fiction writer and theorist&nbsp;Stanisław Lem began&nbsp;writing&nbsp;his&nbsp;influential novel&nbsp;<em>Solaris</em>,&nbsp;an artistic&nbsp;confluence that inspires this&nbsp;wholly original&nbsp;and emotionally resonant&nbsp;found footage&nbsp;film,&nbsp;which&nbsp;underscores&nbsp;the theme of post-traumatic&nbsp;memory that informs both texts.&nbsp;Mikurda,&nbsp;editor Laura Pawela,&nbsp;and composer/sound designer Marcin&nbsp;Lenarczyk&nbsp;bring together&nbsp;clips from&nbsp;70 films produced by the Educational Film Studio in Lodz in the 1960s, as well as&nbsp;the first radio adaptations of&nbsp;<em>Solaris</em>, to create an entrancing, spectral incantation of&nbsp;loss, mourning, and&nbsp;memory.&nbsp; (Museum of Moving Image)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020

Zhang Mengqi

<p>The eleventh installment in Zhang Mengqi&#39;s self-portrait series patiently details the minutiae of daily life in the filmmaker&#39;s ancestral village during 2020.</p> <p>Over the past thirteen years, Zhang has documented her father&rsquo;s village in Hubei, China, as a repository of ancestral memory. The title of her ongoing series, &ldquo;Self-Portrait,&rdquo; suggests the degree of Zhang&rsquo;s awareness of filmmaking as an act that always implies a vital and intersubjective relation between the artist and the world&nbsp;to which she is connected. This tenth film,&nbsp;<em>47 KM 2020</em><em>,</em>&nbsp;carries that recognition to its logical endpoint, as Zhang opted to install herself permanently in the village after the outbreak of COVID-19. Filmed between early January and late December 2020, and divided into chapters corresponding to the Chinese lunisolar calendars&rsquo; 24 solar terms, this vivid account of a year in the life of a stoic community, far removed from an urban-centered pandemic, unfolds with the simultaneous vastness and fine detail of a classical Chinese handscroll painting. Featuring some of the most authentic pastoral scenes in any film, as well as some of the most delightful dialogues with children, Zhang&rsquo;s film is an immense accomplishment. Award of Excellence, 2023 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. (Museum of Moving Image)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Tendaberry

Haley Elizabeth Anderson

<p>When her boyfriend goes back to Ukraine to be with his ailing father, 23-year-old Dakota anxiously navigates her precarious new reality, surviving on her own in New York City.</p> <p>Writer-director Haley Elizabeth Anderson&rsquo;s moving debut feature is an intimately scaled character study and an openhearted love letter to Brooklyn. <em>Tendaberry</em>&rsquo;s elliptical narrative unfurls in an intricate patchwork of lyrical handheld cinematography, found footage fragments, spectral home movies, and documentary digressions. Anderson devotes the film&rsquo;s first movement to a tender and clear-eyed portrait of young love before shifting her attention to Dakota&rsquo;s (Kota Johan) life after loss and her struggles to stay afloat and forge community with fellow migrants in a rapidly gentrifying landscape. <em>Tendaberry</em> sensitively charts Dakota&rsquo;s inner journey while also looking outward to craft an elegiac portrait of the city she calls home. In a breakout performance, Johan brings Dakota&rsquo;s delicate but defiant voice to the foreground, both through poetic narration and lovely musical performances. &mdash;MC</p>

Flying Lessons

Elizabeth Nichols

<p>Flying Lessons tells the story of punk artist Philly Abe&rsquo;s intimate journey of social, artistic and spiritual transformation in the face of New York City&rsquo;s cultural crisis. Philly mourns the city she once loved as she joins with a band of anti-gentrification tenants to fight against harassment by their notorious landlord.</p>

Was Hast Du Gestern Geträumt, Parajanov? (What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?)

Faraz Fesharaki

<p>The woodchip wallpaper is pixelated, the sound heavily out of sync. The distance between Berlin and Isfahan: just under 4000 km. Not something so easy to bridge. The webcam does its best, creating the possibility of intimacy, but sometimes also simply testifing to the gulf. Over ten years, Faraz Fesharaki documented his exchanges with his family, a digital dialogue between the one who moved away to study film in Germany and those who stayed behind in the sizable Iranian city. Father Hassan and mother Mitra discuss the traditional role of the woman and present persimmons from the garden. He mutates into Abbas Kiarostami for a moment, she recalls her time in prison. Cousin Rahi supplements this intergenerational diaspora conversation from Austria with his favourite recipe: toast, mozzarella and egg. Much remains unsaid and is only alluded to.&nbsp;<em>What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?</em>&nbsp;also narrates between the lines, with texts on a red background that Fesharaki edits into the film like notes and messages, as well as VHS image memories. For ultimately, this debut film is also about a dilemma: the desire to be understood without being easily able to describe one&rsquo;s feelings.</p>

Here & Elsewhere

Bram Ruiter

<p>Framed by Jorge Luis Borges&rsquo;s verse, this poetic collage is the work of an artist with a feel for shimmering ordinariness and seemingly conventional images and their structures. Random fragments are assembled to create an agreeable film prompting us to contemplate whether we can reproduce moments once borne away by the river of time.</p>

It follows it passes on

Erica Sheu

<p>Memories of family members and the stories and tales that nourished us in childhood often become part of our own memory. Erica Sheu dives to their inner depths to touch on the experiences of those who lived on Taiwan&#39;s Kinmen archipelago during and just after the war. She is guided by the flickering light of incense, which those seeking shelter used to light their way during the war, and the few scraps and grains that she has given the role of witnesses.</p> <p>&ldquo;A wound gives off its own light&nbsp;<br /> surgeons say.&nbsp;<br /> If all the lamps in the house were turned out&nbsp;<br /> you could dress this wound&nbsp;<br /> by what shines from it.&rdquo;<br /> &mdash; Anne Carson (<a href="https://sheulu.co/it-follows-it-passes-on" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Beauty of the Husband, I.1-5</a>)</p>

West Lounge

Kevin Jerome Everson

<p>West Lounge is about an unfortunate event in Columbus, Mississippi as told by an unreliable narrator.</p>

Banging on Their Bars in Rhythm

Kevin Jerome Everson

<p>Filmed at the former Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. High contrast black-and-white footage creates its own sound on the audio track. The title of the film is taken from the film script for the 1997 film Air Force One, which was filmed on location at the Reformatory.</p>

Stone, Hat, Ribbon & Rose

Eva Giolo

<p>A map &ndash; a world &ndash; unfolds on a table. We take an audiovisual tour through Brussels, which at the same time forms a cinematic message to Chantal Akerman. Gray morning light reveals parked cars in quiet streets, a swimming pool without visitors, an empty metro platform. We&rsquo;re taken to places where people spend a gray day: a gymnasium, a museum, a lost and found, a library, a cinema. Like Akerman often appeared on camera in her own films, we see Giolo, resting in a hotel room &ndash; the open window subtly lets in the sleeping city. Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose celebrate the passing of time in stillness and movement. Between the sounds and images of the city, silent, surreal scenes with objects are shown in a sky-blue studio: an inflated swimming ring, a red toy car, a still life, a vase, a rolled-up movie screen. An image of a subway corridor is suddenly reminiscent of an empty cinema screen, an open window, and the frame of a painting. The alternating, associative images function as absurd, critical, and poetic comments on everyday life.</p>

How to Run a Trout Line

Carl Elsaesser

<p>&quot;Despite the didactic promise of its title, Carl Elsaesser&rsquo;s new film will not teach you how to complete this obscure action. The phrase itself, at once ridiculous and noble, is pleasure enough, and its tone fits perfectly on a work that walks a thin, dandyish path down the border of farce and elegy. Another pleasure: it isn&rsquo;t about anything, though it&rsquo;s of quite a lot. Of fathers (who might teach one how to run a trotline, or sit on a porch, or disappear); of other films (particularly a pair by adopted fathers Michael Snow and William E. Jones); of at least two kinds of cruising; of the winter in Maine and the streets in New York and the many kinds of light to be found in and around both (ranging from snowy diffusion to snare-hit clarity). But one needn&rsquo;t know these films or Maine or New York, not any more than one need know what a trotline is, to be hooked by the ongoing oddness of Elsaesser&rsquo;s rhythms, which move gently, languidly toward new raptures of illumination.&quot; -Phil Coldiron</p>

Caracole (for Mac)

Nathaniel Dorsky

<p>Mac McGinnes, a dear friend and neighbor, often sat in with me during my editing sessions. This brief but light-filled farewell was made for Mac upon his passing. &nbsp;N.D.</p>

Seasonal Concerns

Maximilien Luc Proctor

<p>Triple exposure on EXR 50D 16mm film: two layers in summer, and the third on the cusp of winter. Statues fading in and out. Weissensee.</p>

Five Days Till Tomorrow

Lewis Klahr

<p>Begun in 2015 and completed in 2022, Five Days Till Tomorrow evokes a timeless oneiric twilight, depicting a menagerie of fantasy comic book characters as they sleep, loll, and patiently inhabit a landscape of 1970s futuristic architecture waiting for the extended night&mdash;described in the title&mdash;to come to its end.</p>

Holographic Will

Mike Stoltz

<p>The home destabilised by outside forces of capital is accompanied by a relentless percussive rhythm.</p>

Hey Sweet Pea

Alee Peoples

<p>Parental ageing and an existential wave collide in fun and surprising ways in the suburbs of LA. Dislocated B-roll, meandering voicemails, and readings from the 1984 children&rsquo;s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story combine to situate our collective grief in the hazy mundanities of everyday life.</p>

Labores en curso

Bruno Delgado Ramo

<p>A record of places as they are being made: construction sites, artist studios, kitchens, a garden&mdash;spaces in which a process, a state of incompletion and transformation, occurs. &ldquo;It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.&rdquo;</p>

Single File

Simon Liu

<p>In this stroboscopic film, a virtuosic application of analogue darkroom practices and video processing techniques conceals and reappraises the nature of personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide&mdash;a new linearity is required; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors.</p>

Achilles

Farhad Delaram

<p>In Farhad Delaram&rsquo;s feature debut, two fugitives in contemporary Iran encounter citizens across the country, all wounded by the same corrupt government and all united in their willingness to help the pair survive.</p> <p>Nicknamed Achilles, Farid (Mirsaeed Molavian), a former filmmaker, now works nights as an orthotist in Iran&rsquo;s capital. Broken by the only political system his generation has ever known, he is consumed by anger and sorrow. One night, after a colleague&rsquo;s devastating revelation of losing her son and additionally suffering 26 days before authorities permitted his body to be claimed, Achilles&rsquo;s apathy begins to crumble. Meanwhile, the administration is cracking down on his lack of rule-following, which leads him to a hospital&rsquo;s restricted psychiatric ward. There, he meets a sedated patient, handcuffed to her bed: Hedieh (Behdokht Valian), a political prisoner who has been institutionalized for years. Now, with the help of Achilles, she will again experience freedom &mdash; which, as those who have lived without it know, is regained at a cost. The duo&rsquo;s only option is to flee.</p> <p>Shot on location,&nbsp;<em>Achilles</em>&nbsp;takes us from Tehran to the dried-up Lake Urmia in Iran&rsquo;s northwestern province of Shabestar, to the Caspian Sea, and, with authorities in hot pursuit, to Maku, near Turkey&rsquo;s border. Unbeknownst to Hedieh, who is estranged from her daughter, the journey is not entirely haphazard. Unbeknownst to Farid, his actions will ripple well beyond his own life.</p> <p>Writer-director Farhad Delaram developed this film as the bloody crackdown on protesters began in his home country, and he drew on his lived experience, having spent weeks in a small cell surrounded only by concrete. His feature debut is a testament to the magnitude of collective cracks that &mdash; when amassed &mdash; can tear down walls.</p> <p><strong>DOROTA LECH</strong></p>

1489

Shoghakat Vardanyan

<p>When soldiers are killed, they often end up as anonymous numbers in news reports. But behind every number, there is a person who leaves behind heartbroken family members. The title 1489 refers to the anonymous number of a &ldquo;body of an individual missing in action.&rdquo; It was the number assigned to Soghomon Vardanyan, a 21-year-old student and musician who was close to completing his mandatory military service when the conflict between Azerbaijan and his home country Armenia over Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) flared up again in September 2020.</p> <p>On the seventh day of the war, Soghomon goes missing. Using her phone camera, his sister Shoghakat decides to film her and her parents&rsquo; search and their emotional process. After six months, bones are found, but DNA research is needed to show whether the remains are actually those of Soghomon, and the family will have to wait a year and a half for the results.</p> <p>All the while, Shoghakat continues to film, even in the most intimate and vulnerable moments, which sometimes makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience. But at the same time, it makes the intense sadness and loss of a human being of flesh and blood all the more tangible.</p>

A Portas Fechadas (Behind Closed Doors)

João Pedro Bim

<p>In 1968, Brazil&rsquo;s military government convened the National Security Council to enact Institutional Act No. 5, ushering in the most violent period of the dictatorship. The meeting was recorded, but remained secret for decades. The filmmakers delved into the archives and now reveal the recordings.</p> <p>We hear the voices of ministers who, one by one, express their support for the infamous law. They wax lyrical about a new revolution and economic prosperity. The ease with which they suspend the constitution is shocking. To reinforce the dictatorship, Brazilians were bombarded with cheerful propaganda newsreels glorifying the policy, accompanied by upbeat music. The filmmakers have cleverly combined these films with the audio recordings of the military government.</p> <p>The propaganda features a lot of flag hoisting and lavish praise for the Trans Amazonian highway. Toxic lies: in reality, people were deprived of their vote and forbidden to demonstrate. Opponents of the regime were tortured and executed. And until today, not a single member of the military has been convicted of crimes committed during the dictatorship.</p>

The Featherweight

Robert Kolodny

<p>Set in 1964, a camera crew follows Willie Pep, retired featherweight boxing champion. Down and out in Hartford CT, married to a woman half his age and with a drug-addled son and mounting debts, Pep decides to make a return to the ring.</p>

Knit’s Island

Ekiem Barbier Guilhem Causse Quentin L’helgoualc'h

<p>Shot entirely in a virtual environment, Knit&rsquo;s Island is an exceptionally cinematic and contemplative documentary. The film is set in a rural game world that is both impressively realistic and uncannily not quite right. What is still &ldquo;real&rdquo; in this virtual existence, which will probably play an important role in the lives of more and more people in the future? With this question, the filmmakers set out to explore the sparsely populated 250 square kilometers of the game.</p> <p>They encounter zombies, dodge shootings, and speak to a disconcerting group who set out simply to kill as many other participants as possible. Above all, they meet players who spend hundreds or thousands of hours here, roaming, growing food, forming communities.</p> <p>&ldquo;Sometimes I confuse my digital memories with those in real life,&rdquo; a player says. &ldquo;This virtual nature reminds me of my homeland, Australia,&rdquo; says another in Berlin. The boundaries between role-play and reality gradually fade &ndash; all the more so during Covid lockdowns, when for many players, the video game became their most important &ldquo;outside world.&rdquo;</p>

Mimang

Kim Taeyang

<p>Kim Taeyang&rsquo;s feature debut, shot over four years, follows a man and a woman who meet by chance and stroll through Seoul&rsquo;s changing streets.</p> <p>The word &ldquo;mimang&rdquo; holds multiple meanings in Korean. One, being unable to make sense from ignorance. Two, being unable to forget what one wants to forget. And three, searching far and wide. In debut filmmaker Kim Taeyang&rsquo;s Seoul-based feature debut, the camera observes in three parts the changes in time, space, and characters that align with the above-mentioned definitions. Shot in Seoul over the course of four years, the film vividly captures changes to the characters and the city &mdash; specifically the historical area of Jongno &mdash; during a couple&rsquo;s strolls up and down (memory) lanes.</p> <p>Potentially marking the beginning of a new style in Korean film, the triptych&rsquo;s photography unexpectedly beautifies &mdash; even romanticizes &mdash; a city that is generally considered to be oversaturated with tasteless signage. The use of a telephoto lens puts us close to the characters, but intentional cropping prevents us from getting the full picture. Never releasing enough information to properly deliver emotions in depth, Kim flattens the film&rsquo;s perspective, as if to mimic the compressing nature of cinema that sandwiches one&rsquo;s life to a few hours. Despite our distance from the characters,&nbsp;<em>Mimang</em>&nbsp;successfully draws out feelings of reminiscence and longing for a place and people we don&rsquo;t recognize.</p> <p>A condensed Korean indie counterpart to Richard Linklater&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>Before</em>&nbsp;series,&nbsp;<em>Mimang</em>&nbsp;ends with a final title card that suggests there could be yet another meaning for &ldquo;mimang.&rdquo;</p> <p><strong>GIOVANNA FULVI</strong></p>

Sei khen (The Clinic)

Midi Z

<p>A weary-looking middle-aged couple shuffle around their cluttered loft in Yangon, Myanmar. There is stuff everywhere, and a mountain of pills in blister packs lie haphazardly on top of a glass case. The loft turns out to be a clinic and the couple are qualified doctors. They are also artistic: she paints and draws, he is making a feature film, and their patients receive creative therapy in addition to regular treatment. This might not be a sterile, efficient hospital full of white coats, and the treatment rooms might look shabby, but there is real time and attention for people here.</p> <p>Gradually the film zooms out, offering more political context, and it becomes clear why this unconventional medical couple receive so many patients with mental health issues. Director Midi Z also shows the making of the doctor&rsquo;s politically sensitive fiction film, all the way up to its premiere at an international film festival.</p> <p>The film never offers explanations or interpretations, and is portrayed in a matter-of-fact way. Combined with a soundtrack that is at times hypnotic, and a dreamlike, disorienting atmosphere, the result is a mesmerizing and extraordinary viewing experience.</p>

Arthur & Diana

Sara Summa

<p>Writer-director Sara Summa stars alongside her real-life brother Robin Summa, in this playful auto-fictional road trip from Berlin to Paris.</p> <p>Siblings Arthur and Diana are en route from Berlin to Paris in their late father&rsquo;s Renault with Diana&rsquo;s adorable two-year-old son in tow. On a mission to renew an expired MOT &mdash; a certificate confirming a vehicle&rsquo;s compliance with road safety and environmental standards &mdash; on their shared car, a rusty childhood relic, they also plan on visiting their aging mother along the way.</p> <p>With no topic off the table, Arthur &mdash; who is younger, with a bohemian air, and into geocaching &mdash; is adjacent to intense and pragmatic Diana, who&rsquo;s just looking to get from point A to point B. Between bantering and bickering, and with a flat tire to boot, the pair encounter a beautiful vagabond, have a run-in with the police, party, attend a funeral, and detour through Italy. Charming every step of the way, the family will wind up with a few more friends and hopes than they departed with.</p> <p>Sara Summa constructs a playful and intimate sophomore feature following her debut&nbsp;<em>The Last to See Them</em>, which screened in the Berlinale&rsquo;s Forum programme in 2019. A European road movie on the surface,&nbsp;<em>Arthur&amp;Diana</em>&nbsp;is the autofictional brainchild of Summa, who plays the headstrong lead alongside her real-life brother, Robin Summa.</p> <p>Accompanied by Ben Roessler&rsquo;s delightful score and shot on MiniDV, Betacam, and 16mm by Faraz Fesharaki (who follows his work on Alexandre Koberidze&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?</em>),&nbsp;<em>Arthur&amp;Diana</em>&nbsp;moves constantly between the tension and stasis that bonds all families and sometimes propels us to stay on course.</p> <p><strong>DOROTA LECH</strong></p>

Samsara

Lois Patiño

<p>The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Th&ouml;dol, describes the three transitional phases between death and rebirth. In the first part of&nbsp;Samsara, which comprises two narrative sections and a sensational centerpiece, a young man in Laos reads the book to an elderly woman. He befriends several monks&mdash;young males like him&mdash;from the nearby monastery, and they meet at the magnificent waterfalls of Kuang Si to discuss their plans for the future. The woman, meanwhile, is ready to take leave of her present existence.</p> <p>The story continues on the other side of the world, the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, where we see a goat kid being born and coming under the care of an Islamic family. But this section only starts after filmmaker Lois Pati&ntilde;o has presented the viewer with an awe-inspiring transitional section that can only be fully experienced with closed eyes. It transforms Samsara into more than a film&mdash;this is a unique cinematic experience, a meditative journey exploring different perspectives on life and death.</p>

ვადაგასული საქმე (Limitation)

Elene Asatiani Soso Dumbadze

<p>When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 it became clear to anyone that the aggressor was conducting a hybrid war against Ukraine. It conquered Crimea with a combination of disinformation, propaganda, and secret military support for rebel groups, and covert military operations. The only surprise is that many people were surprised when Russia deployed this military strategy, because it has a long history of doing so.</p> <p>Limitation examines the involvement of Russia in the 1992 coup d&rsquo;&eacute;tat that overthrew Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who was elected as Georgia&rsquo;s first president in 1991. The film draws exclusively on Internet-sourced footage that was shot during the armed rebellion that brought down the head of state. The source for each news item, interview, and report is given, whether that&rsquo;s the Georgian government, the opposition, international news media, or &ldquo;unknown.&rdquo; Each side has its own truth&mdash;for the opposition, Gamsakhurdia is a &ldquo;dictator&rdquo; and a &ldquo;Judas.&rdquo;</p> <p>Russia, meanwhile, plays a murky but decisive role by arming the opposition with military equipment such as grenade launchers and tanks. Gamsakhurdia&rsquo;s fate was sealed, and he left the country in 1992.</p>

An Evening Song (for three voices)

Graham Swon

<p>Love triangles have long delighted cinema, literature and the tabloids. For his second film (after&nbsp;<em>The World is Full of Secrets</em>, which explored the workings of fear), Graham Swon uses this simple plot as the basis for a highly original cinematic experience. Somewhere in the Midwest at the end of the 1930s, an intimate portrait of three protagonists: Barbara, a writer forbidden from writing in her youth; her husband Richard, author of airport novels of limited success; and their dedicated maid Martha (the bewitching Deragh Campbell). With these ingredients of a provincial, bourgeois melodrama (the film never completely relinquishes them), along with a few dashes of political critique (men fare better socially), Graham Swon leads his film a long way from naturalism.</p> <p><br /> The three voices, interwoven like swansongs, explore the recesses and secrets of memory, of fantasized lives, of restorative thoughts and dreams.<br /> Obsessions, superimposed lives, thwarted or tragic destinies, the narrative is fluid and changing, playing with superimpositions and fades, overplaying hushed, sweet, ethereal, and nocturnal atmospheres to the point of dizziness, as well as revisited stylistic elements of pre-war cinema. Streams of consciousness (reminiscent of Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>The Waves</em>) come together to dissolve as much as to lead us astray. These stories of love and frustration evoke a certain past America, but also a whole field of cinema, carried to faraway shores.</p> <p>Nicolas Feodoroff</p>

Gasoline Rainbow

Bill Ross IV Turner Ross

<p>After graduating from high school, a group of teenagers from small-town Oregon go on a road trip to the coast some 500 miles away. The five good friends set off in a van in high spirits and begin a rollercoaster of adventures and extraordinary encounters with odd passersby, hobos and hippies&mdash;a modern version of Kerouac&#39;s On the Road. On foot, by freight train and by boat, they hope to reach the famous &ldquo;Party at the End of the World.&rdquo;</p> <p>The friends talk about their uncertainties and problems, musing in voice-over or with new best friends they make along the way. What will the future hold when they return home? There&rsquo;s no shortage of inspiration and new ideas in the meetings with the free-thinking, hippie-like residents of Oregon.</p> <p>The filmmakers play with reality and fiction, as they did in their previous projects that are an ode to typical American phenomena, in this case the road trip. There is room for emotion and sadness, but also loads of fun in the endless freedom of skating, sleeping under the stars and smoking a lot of weed&mdash;all under the motto: &ldquo;Fuck it.&rdquo;</p>

I Would Like to Rage

Lého Galibert-Laîné

<p>Compassion, sadness and love can be expressed quite effectively online&mdash;even when acted, they can seem quite authentic. The same cannot be said of anger. Onscreen, an expression of escalated displeasure and negative agitation almost always looks like a poorly acted play. This has to do with the frequent use of outbursts of anger online as a strategic means to build an image or intimidate others, especially by male social media users. Anger thus degenerates into a blunt platitude, captured in memes and GIFs.</p> <p>In their latest video essay, Chlo&eacute; Galibert-La&icirc;n&eacute;, a master of the genre they aptly call &ldquo;desktop documentary,&rdquo; explores how they can reclaim anger as a bona fide emotion in the online environment. They study gestures and words, who uses them and how, as well as how people respond to them. With a comic perspective, Galibert-La&icirc;n&eacute; concludes that authenticity is often an imitation of the accepted standard.</p>

Threat Assessment

Todd Chandler

<p>At a convention addressing gun violence in schools, filmmaker Todd Chandler (<em>Bulletproof</em>) trains his camera on a curious, and possibly telling, tendency among the law enforcers and administrators in attendance</p>

The Perfect Square

Gernot Wieland

<p>Director Gernot Wieland worked for twelve years with an animal trainer who taught birds to fly in circles or squares. The film examines how aesthetic norms influence Western views of the world and why these norms end in failure.</p>

Print Analysis (2 B)

Anja Dornieden Juan David González Monroy

<p>&ldquo;Here, an object, cool and delicious but somehow confused, is set upon by an outside force which grasps it long enough to make one wonder whether the mystery of its appearance might successfully be removed only to render it inedible, to produce a new, unsavory confection, strewn with dangers to the mouth which might, nevertheless, with luck, point toward something specific, even meaningful, about the pieces from which the original was shaped.&rdquo;&nbsp;&mdash;Ojoboca&nbsp;</p>

Handful of Dirt

Izabela Zubrycka

<p>Halina is one of the last funeral singers in Podlasie. Her son Andrzej is a gravedigger. Over the years, they&rsquo;ve helped thousands of people cross over to the other side, forever bridging life and death, the quotidian with the spiritual, song and silence</p>