Playlist
<p>An examination of the human body as an extraordinary landscape that is also otherworldly and harrowing, from five hospitals in northern Paris neighbourhoods.</p>
<p>A filmmaker records deeply intimate interactions with her grandmother who has dementia, unknowingly documenting her final days.</p>
<p>Eleven-year-old Sophie is on a budget holiday in Turkey with her young divorced dad Calum. On the cusp of adolescence, she is perceptive towards the pains of growing up as well as her dad’s subtle shifts in mood. As an adult, Sophie sifts through the home video footage she made on the trip, which continues to haunt her.</p> <p>Shot through with sun-bleached nostalgia, Aftersun reassembles Sophie’s well-worn memories with an eye for the most intimate details, searching them for emotional clarity. The film eschews predictable narrative beats of revelation, and invites us to linger in its very particular heartbreak: what it’s like to love someone without ever fully understanding them.</p>
<p>As summer approaches again, ripe peaches droop in an orchard that generations of the Solé family have been caring for. But this year is different: the air is thick with the odour of dead rabbits plaguing the crop and with the stench of a tragedy foretold. The Solés face their final harvest as eviction looms, and their peach trees will soon be replaced by solar panels.</p> <p>Shot entirely with nonprofessional actors in the Alcarràs village, this semi-autobiographical work draws on the cast’s palpable connection to the land to depict a tight-knit family reckoning with the loss of its roots—and dignity. As summer comes to a close, the film’s gentle rhythms stir up buried grief and anxiety, yet also undeniable tenderness.</p>
<p>An elderly security officer diagnosed with lung cancer talks to God. One day, he wins the lottery—but there is little relief.</p>
<p>Borrowing from Thailand’s Bad Student movement, this irreverent comedy is at once satire, a coming-of-age story, and manifesto for a frustrated generation.</p> <p>Arnold becomes the school darling after emerging champion at a math Olympiad. His success attracts a shady tuition centre owner who invites him to join an exam cheating racket. Meanwhile, trouble brews on campus when a disciplinary incident propels a group of students into action.</p> <p>Since 2020, Thailand’s students have been standing up to their schools, inspiring Sorayos to take on the institution and its banal, baffling workings. In Arnold, schools are a source of muted exasperation, other times the butt of a good joke or, as a student declares, “our first dictatorship”. With a storytelling style that marches to the beat of a country’s defiant changemakers, the comedic drama reveals a deep agitation and solidarity.</p>
<p>Facing a debilitating illness, a former dancer recounts her life of movement—onstage, traveling and now through remembrance.</p>
<p>A newspaper editor visits her former teacher, who now cares for his wife with dementia, in this gentle story about the passage of time.</p>
<p>A rebellious female student and a reticent middle-aged gynecologist strike up an unlikely bond rooted in mutual comfort as they each confront a life-altering incident.</p> <p>Gauri, a student, is dating a worker at her father’s hawker stall. One day, she discovers she is pregnant—news that worsens the fractured relationship with her father and stepmother. During a visit to the gynaecologist’s clinic, Gauri strikes a chord with her doctor, Radhika, who is struggling to come to terms with a huge loss in her life. Their unlikely bond proves to be a welcome change in both their lives.</p> <p>While critiquing social inequalities and mental health stigma, Before Life After Death highlights the democracy of dreams and the complex process of grief and healing through the circumstances of its two female leads.</p>
<p>18-year-old Eliza is pregnant, and grappling with the prospect of abortion. Through interactions with her family, she contemplates what it means to be a mother, and to be mothered.</p>
<p>Phantasms and screens—enter the burrows of a teenager’s psyche in this bracingly original hybrid film by French auteur Bertrand Bonello.</p> <p>An 18-year-old spends the pandemic lockdown trapped with her thoughts, FaceTiming friends, and consuming YouTube videos by an alluring life guru peddling bizarre devices as well as ideas on how to “live better”. Different realities and worlds, desires and projections, bleed into one another in a fever dream where meaning is but a thwarted attempt at existence.</p> <p>Bookended by a letter to the filmmaker’s own teenage daughter, Coma was produced during the lockdown which spurred even greater creativity in terms of formal experimentation with the use of animation and found footage. Resisting interpretation, Coma is a daring work that reveals the impossibility of a totalising reality—especially in a teenage girl’s head.</p>
<p>A filmmaker abroad phones their brother and chat about the Asian koel, whose early-morning and evening calls are a feature of Singapore’s soundscape.</p>
<p>After his father disappears, a monk’s son spends a day and a night around the temple, where mysterious crystals have recently started growing on a bird’s nest. Intimate conversations, reflections, and a shared meal help him put everything into perspective and let go of the past.</p>
<p>Léa tells the story of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas as it echoes through the walls of Colmeia, the women’s prison of Brasilia: “In 2019, I got involved with my sister Chitara in this crazy scheme she was caught up in. She had bought some land in a favela—oil pipes ran right under it, so she built this huge structure, tapped the oil, and started refining it right there and was making a lot of money. She set up a deal with the motoboys, so they would buy gas from her. She also had a stand at the market where she would sell it. Chitara also got mixed up in politics. She made history.”</p>
<p>A young indigenous Bunong woman and her older brother spend one last day in their rural village in northeastern Cambodia, before an impending move to the capital city in search of a more prosperous life.</p>
<p>Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island’s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. Collecting the alarming amounts of plastic washing up also forms part of Lucas’s everyday life. Mills films on 16 mm, which lends a special beauty to the barren landscape. Science and art fuse in the two women’s activities, each enriching the other. The movements of beetles are made into music. Horse manure provides useful data for Lucas and is just as useful for Mills’s experiments in film exposure and developing, along with algae and other vegetation. When Mills loads the final film reel into her camera, it is not just the shoot that is coming to an end, but also a special encounter between two people. A twinge of melancholy is unavoidable.</p>
<p>Taha and his younger brother As'ad (Wissam Diyaa) scrape a living searching for discarded metals and plastics at the vast, stinking Baghdad rubbish dump ironically named for the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The dump section reserved for refuse from the US military regularly yields girlie magazines, which As'ad, who is only twelve, with a mix of innocence and the toughness he has needed to survive, sells off page-by-page on the sly. As'ad hits the jackpot - and causes a huge rift with his older brother - when he brings home a discarded rubber doll. He cleans up the intimacy toy tenderly, then puts it to work in a makeshift brothel. Working with a local cast, director Ahmed Yassin Al-Daradji tells an intimate, affectionate and often humorous story of kids growing up, making some hard points about the corrosive effects of poverty and consumerism along the way. This film is supported by the Red Sea Fund.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Reid Davenport, a past honoree of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 showcase, creates a diaristic portrait of his life, at times from his wheelchair. Candid and unsentimental, Davenport captures quotidian moments of human connection and frustration on the streets of Oakland. When a circus tent goes up outside of his apartment, his reflections turn to the legacy of the freak show and PT Barnum. Davenport’s viewpoint is one we rarely see on screen.</p>
<p><em>Courtesy of <strong><a href="http://www.mecfilm.de/services/pictures.html">mec film</a></strong></em></p> <p><em>In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain </em>resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.</p> <p>On the brink of the apocalypse, a narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention – de facto creating a nation.</p> <p>The film takes the form of a fictional video essay. A voice-over based on an interview between a psychiatrist and the female leader of the narrative resistance group reveals the philosophy and ideas behind the group’s actions. The leader’s thoughts on myth and fiction as constitutive for fact, history and documentary translate into poetic and science fiction-based visuals.</p> <p>As the film progresses, the narrative and visuals alternate between the theoretical and the personal. The resistance leader’s deceased twin sister makes a crucial appearance as the story takes the viewer deeper and deeper into the resistance leader’s subconscious.</p>
<p>The world is about to end. Maya is forced to go home to the province of Zambales. There, she confronts her childhood house that terrorizes her as frogs rain outside.</p>
<p>North Sudan, Merowe Dam. Abu Salma, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard on the Nile, downstream of the dam. Just like his exiled companions, he spends his days in the mud, far from his loved ones and in exhausting labour. Each night, he secretly works on the erection of a structure, a tall shape made out of mud, wood, and plastic. As the mud builds over the solid skeleton of the structure, it begins to take on an almost organic-looking form. One day, as he returns from Jebel Barkal, the mystical mountain, his creation has mysteriously disappeared. Soon strange occurrences begin to take place, and Abu Salma starts to get the uneasy feeling that someone or something is watching him.</p>
<p>Among the fig trees, young women and men working the summer harvest develop new feelings, flirt, try to understand each other, find—and flee— deeper connections.</p>
<p>A young woman with a monstrous secret desperately longs for a different body. When the new couple in town moves in next door, she sees her chance to finally get one.</p>
<p>Religion, labour and capital intersect in this observational documentary on the lives of artisans in a factory that makes Catholic figurines.</p> <p>In a labyrinthine factory in Metro Manila, workers are crammed together, inhaling toxic fumes with minimal protective gear, to make Catholic figurines for the huge religion market in the country. For some of these queer workers, life in the factory provides respite from an even harsher reality outside of it: addiction, violence and poverty.</p> <p>Divine Factory explores the quotidian lives of the artisans through memory, craft and financial security. At the same time, the observational documentary offers a searing critique on labour conditions in a capitalist economy—steering us to look more deeply at religious objects, beyond their veneer of ‘religious aura’.</p>
<p>Erik, a worker on a floating fish farm, is unable to return home after two years as planned. As he nurses his sorrow, his loneliness manifests a sea spirit who challenges his self-pity.</p>
<p>It is Palestinian custom to harvest and forage for plants but they must do so illegally under Israeli law—a process documented in this visual feast, from field to kitchen. Under Israeli law, it is illegal to harvest wild plants that are traditionally used for cooking, such as za’atar (thyme) and akkoub (gundelia), though the practice has been an age-old tradition among Palestinians. In the occupied Golan Heights, Galilee and Jerusalem, locals show their resilience despite the prohibitive law, refusing to be further alienated from their land. From field to kitchen to courtroom, Foragers reveals the joy and knowledge embedded in this Palestinian custom. Imbued with suspense and humour, Foragers is an important commentary on the extent of the Israeli occupation of Palestine—where violence is not only physical, but also cultural.</p>
<p>A warm indigenous family drama that gently crests and falls, like the seasons of their misty, mountainous homelands.</p> <p>The Hayung family inhabit the highlands of Taiwan along with other indigenous Atayal people. Held in high esteem by the community, they make a steady living from agriculture and tourism, while the men sometimes have too much to drink. Even when their days are met by ruptures like an elder’s death or land surveys, their faiths—a syncretic mix of their Gaga belief system and Christianity—appear to prevail.</p> <p>Sensitive towards local specificities, Laha Mebow crafts a narrative that eschews dramatic conceits, opting for a collaboration to honour the ways of her people. A collective realism moves the drama through the seasons (and an election cycle), suturing this family’s fortunes and misfortunes with a palpable tenderness.</p>
<p>In times like these… speaks to the strange times we live in, where the expressions of our senses are locked in deep isolation, where the abstract pulsates vividly in our cognitive presences, where intricate movements of colour, light and sound turn up their volumes, such that we are inundated by their slowly inching wilt towards death. The VR experience is one of slow-motion aesthetic implosions, that a viewer melts into the virtual at the eye of the cascading storm. This project extends from a previous collaboration between computer graphics artist Alex Scollay and visual artist Yanyun Chen, and paired with sound designed by artist Jevon Chandra, and VR technologist Corentin Debre, bringing the visuals from a temporal exhibition space into virtual reality.</p>
<p>Interweaving family lore, mythology, science fiction, and digital abstraction, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s film follows the collaboration between the artist and her mother, Thuyen Hoa, who fled Vietnam after the end of the American War via a near-calamitous sea journey.</p>
<p>Quarries follows the mysteries surrounding prehistoric stone tools from Kenya alongside the neglected labor of stonemasons who paved the streets of Lisbon. The humble gesture of these artisans, stooped over the pavement, morphs into a confrontation with the hubristic act of monument building. For the artist’s brother, the struggle to regain the use of his hands after a serious injury transforms into a narrative about agency in the face of being forgotten, marginalized and deemed of no importance. An out-of-print photography book on Portuguese stone pavements leads to a series of improbable connections. A tour of a neurobiology lab leads to an examination of a Cold War re-education camp where prisoners were forced to dig up stones to create replicas of antiquity while covertly drawing on stone shards to mark and then bury a trace of their stories. In Quarries, Ga extracts stories of resistance from unlikely places and on overlooked surfaces.</p>
<p>A queer musical fantasy set in an alternative Portugal with a raunchy and rambunctious take on loving our forests.</p> <p>It is 2069. King Alfredo, on his deathbed, recalls the idealism of his youth half a century ago. Sparked by an uptick in wildfires, young, twinky Alfredo gives up princehood to volunteer as a fireman where he learns hands-on from the hot and hunky Afonso. The heat turns up, and there is a duty to be done.</p> <p>With unbridled eroticism and a quirky ecological bent, Will-o’-the-Wisp shows us that desire matters even when the world is burning. Come for the delightful romp through song, dance, even a risqué locker room art tour, and stay for the playful picks at empire, race, sexuality. A gentle warning: this is cinema that will make you sweat.</p>
<p>Young Vania faces her fears and finds courage in tumultuous times when she takes in an injured thief seeking refuge in her family’s traditional Chinese medicinal hall.</p>
<p>A hilarious, moving and whimsical speculative fiction about our yearning for belonging and connection in a world that looks increasingly less like home.</p> <p>1993: South Korea begins to democratise. UFOs suddenly appear, hovering over cities across the world. 29 years later, a filmmaker interviews subjects from all over who (re)connect with people from the past and future in their dreams. Others, no longer feeling they belong on Earth, find solace in UFO cults. Meanwhile, the nation sees a wave of ridiculously petty assaults by ‘aliens’ on humans (or is it the other way round?).</p> <p>Alternating between sci-fi mockumentary and absurdist comedy, the film offers a hilarious, quirky and surprisingly moving portrait of the Korean millennial psyche. If you have ever experienced apocalyptic anxiety, cosmic homelessness, or yearned for a borderless utopia, this is for you!</p>
<p><span style="font-size:20px"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif">Interviews with young Thai citizens on the meaning of home as well as their sense of belonging, hopes and dreams through the digital streetscape of the current broken reality.</span></span></p>
<p>A quirky, melancholy body horror that mixes genre kicks with playful formalism as it follows the life of a mattress-dwelling fungus.</p> <p>Through love, sickness and death, the bed is a constant witness to sadness, anger and despair. But what if such feelings foster the growth of something in our beds? This melancholy creature feature traces the life cycle of a mattress-dwelling fungus that not only thrives on its guests’ negative energies, but snatches their spinal parts to shape its own body. As it moves from a couple’s apartment to the edge of North Korea, we come to pity this being that seems doomed to mirror our modern malaise, even as it outlives our inhospitable times. With electric visuals, twitchy creature effects and quirky synth music that mixes the otherworldly with schmaltz, this genuine oddity will surprise even the most sophisticated genre fan.</p>
<p>A forceful work of personal geography that makes visible the former Yugoslavia’s traumatic breakup.</p> <p>The 1999 total solar eclipse visible from Serbia was met with anxiety by the population, taking place during a period of disintegrating Soviet lifestyles. Meanwhile, the genocides committed during the ’90s remain a fresh memory, but taboo, and many are eager to forget.</p> <p>Having left during the turmoil, Nataša Urban returns to her home country to collect stories from family and friends. Uncanny images and double perspectives haunt this essayistic documentary, as tales of past selves—told languidly, with unexpected poetics and quiet ignorance— are paired with landscapes scarred by history. Memory, like the eclipses bookending the film, is elusive: it threatens to overwhelm, only to slip away before one can take it in.</p>
<p>A contemporary tale of reincarnation about two lovers meeting in the present day after several centuries of longing, yet still trapped in their destiny of a perpetual cycle of love and death.</p>
<p>A refugee and a researcher are embroiled in a devious game of deception in this spellbinding island folk horror.</p> <p>Zahara, a stateless refugee, becomes the guardian for her orphaned niece after a traumatic incident. Selling turtle eggs to survive, the pair live on a remote island where the living and the dead seemingly coexist. But their life of isolation soon changes with the arrival of Samad, a researcher who convinces Zahara to assist him in navigating the island. Along the way, Zahara and Samad’s interactions lead to a battle of wits and cunning—with deadly results.</p> <p>Stone Turtle is a revenge thriller that unfolds through unconventional storytelling including an animated segment. This wild and dynamic genre mashup featuring local folklore makes Woo Ming Jin one of the most exciting directors from the Malaysian New Wave.</p>
<p>Driving abroad, a couple discuss public transportation, sketching, seeing and being seen in this hybrid triptych.</p> <p>Set betwixt Singapore & Los Angeles, SMRT Piece is a video-experimental animation triptych about public transit, queer bodies, risk, missing home, seeing VS being seen, movie magic, drawing as an abstract intellectual exercise, Agnes V., and snuggling with your lover.</p>
<p>Absurdist filmmaker Quentin Dupieux’s francophone Power Rangers is a wacky, uproarious look at off-duty superheroes.</p> <p>Like your favourite spandex-clad, helmeted childhood superheroes, the five-piece Tobacco Force fights extraterrestrial evil to save the world. But in order to defeat the formidable Lizardin, the squad needs to address their weakening solidarity. Their slobbering rodent chief decides to send them for a lakeside team-bonding retreat.</p> <p>From talking barracudas to murders at a villa, this bizarre comedy plays with the genre conventions of children’s television, swerving unexpectedly into tales of the macabre. Dupieux’s latest film cements his position as a maverick cult director with the air of a self-assured surrealist.</p>
<p>After a mix-up sends the wrong body to cremation, a darkly humorous series of events plays out between the undertaker and three siblings at their father’s wake.</p>
<p>In a meatless, pandemic-ridden society of extreme inequalities, a meat-obsessed cardboard collector wants a taste of the new groundbreaking meat product—at all costs.</p>
<p>A sensorial, left-field take on Thai political history that moves between a subdued past etched in the landscape of Khao Kho mountain, once a stronghold of communist insurgents, and a dynamic near-present marked by Bangkok’s 2021 anti-government protests.</p>
<p>A man spends most of his life mourning the things he lost, unable to move on. He frequents a silent but helpful medium and embarks on a spiritual journey where he lingers among his past lives.</p>
<p>A rural Transylvanian town is plagued by xenophobia—and an unseen threat looming the forest. A</p> <p>fter working abroad, Matthias returns to his bucolic Transylvanian village where his son, Rudi, has been scared speechless after encountering an unknown entity in the woods. Meanwhile, Matthias clashes with his estranged wife over raising their child with toxic masculinity, driving him to reunite with his former lover, Csilla. When Csilla hires three South Asian immigrant workers, the townsfolk’s racist fervour is ignited, spreading unforgivingly.</p> <p>R.M.N. scans the communal psyche of a town steeped in xenophobic nationalism, revealing simmering cultural anxieties about an uncertain future. Mungiu expertly crafts a universally resonant story of human’s intolerance for the other, not as a warning, but as déjà vu.</p>
<p>In a covid-plague Singapore, people begin to fear reality and feel a growing sense of uncertainty. Plastic Sonata tells the story of three individuals as they face the global crisis, impending loneliness and their family.</p>
<p>Re-discovered film negatives represent families of affluence who absorbed Thailand’s wealth, like parasites. The journey from analog to digital, and finally to AI-generated images, gradually evolves these captured faces into a new species of monster.</p> <p>Negatives found at an out-of-business film lab are manipulated through analogue and digital means, producing an abstract sequence suggestive of monstrous figures of wealth and power.</p> <h2> </h2>
<p>Shuttling between Ireland and the Philippines, this psychological thriller brings together two unlikely women and their work.</p> <p>Haunted by visions of a tick-infested dog, children’s fashion designer Christine is afflicted with an inexplicable, debilitating illness. One day, Filipina domestic worker Diana turns up to help, bringing with her a promising folk remedy that soon unnerves the family and reveals a repressed truth.</p> <p>Throughout this skin-crawling thriller, Christine’s and Diana’s lives are intertwined in profound, material ways that go beyond patient and physician. A bewitching allegory for our transnational times, Nocebo asks: how far will we go to heal and expel the kinds of ills buried in the unplumbed depths of the psyche, the body and our societies?</p>
<p>Two tales about love and escape—entwined, embattled and unfurling through understated yet witty subversions of cinematic conventions.</p> <p>Jafar Panahi has just moved to a rural village to remotely oversee filming in a nearby town over the border. Parallel stories unfold across these situations as desires—those between partners, for a future, or to craft art—are suppressed by larger forces of social and political authority.</p> <p>While naturalistic in style, No Bears blurs the bounds of documentary and fiction, deftly playing with and eluding narrative anticipation—its framing shaped by the conditions of state repression that Panahi and other filmmakers face in Iran. This reality of his intertwines with the worlds other characters inhabit, throwing loyalties, hierarchies and truths into question amid contentions of criminality and liberty.</p>
<p>A playful collage of images, words, sounds and texts that deconstructs female desire in post-revolution Iranian cinema.</p> <p>In Iran, physical touch between a man and woman is prohibited in films. Nazarbazi (‘the play of glances’) examines the at times playful visual forms and gestures employed in post-revolution Iranian cinema to bypass censors. Weaving together cinematic moments of ‘sin’, Nazarbazi reflects on the film legacy of invisible desires, implied proximities and unspoken glances.</p> <p>Tafakory inserts metatextual interventions: quotes from writers and philosophers such as Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou expand the meaning of the images. Subverting the strict and uneven codifications of portrayals of female desire, Nazarbazi makes a convincing argument about the radical relationality of touch—without touching.</p>
<p>Angola. Three generations of women in a 25-year-long civil war: Lelena (the grandmother), Nayola (the daughter) and Yara (the granddaughter). Past and present interlace. Nayola goes in search of her missing husband at the height of the war. Decades later, the country is finally at peace but Nayola has not returned. Yara has become a rebellious teenager and a subversive rap singer. Lelena tries to contain her for fear of the police coming to arrest her. One night, a masked intruder breaks into their house, armed with a machete. An encounter like nothing they could have imagined.</p>
<p>An adaptation of Moby Dick as a silent film and theatre piece with a postcolonial and queer reading that highlights its marginal characters.</p> <p>Wu Tsang and her collective Moved by the Motion reinterpret the world of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel by highlighting supporting characters and foregrounding sublimated themes. Pacific Islander harpooner Queequeg, the Sub-Sub Librarian and cabin mate Pip become key players, while the novel’s critiques of totalitarian belief and hierarchical exploitation of labour are read through a queer, postcolonial lens.</p> <p>MOBY DICK; or, The Whale inventively combines the tropes of silent film, the props and choreography of theatre, and the texture of VR and archival footage. It points out the human costs and ecological crises arising from extractive capitalism and an endless drive for progress even as it celebrates the endurance of desire, solidarity and poetry.</p> <p>This programme is brought to you with the support of the U.S. Embassy in Singapore.</p>
<p>Teleporting migrants and US troopers are segregated on the CAPS, an island of metamorphosing bodies and virtual realities.</p> <p>The final chapter in a dystopian sci-fi trilogy, Life on the CAPS imagines a world where unauthorised migrants disassemble their bodies and teleport. They have been detained by US immigration troopers on the CAPS, a once-transitory island in the Atlantic Ocean that became a city with its own music, dance and high-tech culture. The migrants develop plastic faces or adaptable physical forms if they do not properly rematerialise—like Kamal, who has bought a new body to fight for liberation. Occupying separate zones, troopers and migrants have bizarre online encounters via deep-sea data cables. This film speculates on the states of possibility and revolution that can emerge from a world of bodily fluidity and virtual realities. A co-commission by Nottingham Contemporary and The Renaissance Society.</p>
<p>Fiction and reality blur when Leonor, a retired filmmaker, falls into a coma after a television lands on her head, compelling her to become the action hero of her unfinished screenplay.</p>
<p>Vibrant, often hilarious yet emotionally powerful, this Pakistani family drama that questions gender and sexual norms is set to capture the hearts of many.</p> <p>In a conservative multigenerational Pakistani household, soft-spoken Haider is pressured to find a job and to produce a male heir. After he lands a role as a backup dancer at an erotic dance theatre, his wife Mumtaz reluctantly leaves a job she enjoys at the behest of the family’s patriarch to become a housewife. While Mumtaz struggles in the domestic sphere, Haider falls for his boss, a confident, charismatic transgender dancer (played by transgender actress Alina Khan).</p> <p>Joyland is a sensitive and humanistic portrayal of repressive gender and sexual norms, told with an astute blend of vulnerability and humour. With this highly accomplished feature debut, Saim Sadiq signals a bright future for Pakistani cinema.</p>
<p>In an effort to better understand their relationship, the director Ash Goh Hua and her mother discuss their estrangement over the phone.</p>
<p>An essayistic film exploring the legacies of cinema in New Order Indonesia and what it means to be inheritors of its filmic language.</p> <p>Suharto’s self-proclaimed New Order government (1966–98) was characterised by intense political suppression and censorship. As a result, cinema became a vehicle for state ideologies. This film foregrounds the recurrence of prosaic shots of everyday life and patterns of narration in films of that era to draw new interpretations and meanings, thus providing an alternative reading of the New Order regime.</p> <p>Splicing together lo-fi film footage culled online, the film recontextualises scenes and overturns the political subtexts of the regime as resistance against authoritarianism. As the filmmakers say, “Interpreting is an act of citizen participation.”</p>
<p>The repetitive nature of a middle-aged man’s daily commute home proves to be quietly revelatory.</p> <p>In suburban Melbourne, Andrew, a charming middle-aged legal worker, leaves the office and drives home punctually at 5pm daily. During the long rush-hour commute, he dutifully calls to check in on his mother who has dementia, and after that shares a casual chat with his wife. At times, a colleague hitches a ride back, and the two develop a friendship through conversations about family, work, anxieties, love and mortality.</p> <p>Unfolding over the course of a year, this naturalistic docudrama with improvised dialogue takes place almost entirely in a car, with us tucked voyeuristically in the backseat. As we watch the light and seasons change outside, a deeply human portrait of a man gradually reveals itself.</p>
<p>A filmmaker shares his journey of self-discovery while living abroad, far from his family.</p>
<p>A scrapyard owner, whose family and community are still dealing with the legacy of the Vietnam War, comes across an unexpected chance at healing and rebirth.</p> <p>Sharp, no-nonsense Nguyet runs a scrapyard business in Quang Tri, while making sculptures from bomb metal. She also cares for her mother who is still grieving the loss of her husband, killed by unexploded ordnance. Quang Tri is one of the most heavily bombarded regions in the history of modern warfare, and the land and its people continue to be scarred by deep trauma.</p> <p>When Nguyet chances upon a peculiar connection between herself and a famous deceased American sculptor, she discovers the resurrective possibilities of art in the face of enduring cycles of violence. Amid transnational histories of war, new rituals arise from deeply rooted local beliefs. This film explores the importance of objects as counter-archives, and the haunting, subliminal power of sound and music.</p>