Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Lee Chang-dong, Terence Davies, Shōhei Imamura, Bi Gan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villleneuve, Céline Sciamma, Guillermo del Toro, Kelly Reichardt. These are just a few of the filmmakers who have reached New York audiences at the New Director/New Films occasion for more than half a century, more than 1,100 premieres.
This year’s lineup, which returns for its 53rd edition at the Film at Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art from April 3-14, includes 35 new films, showcasing the winners of the Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo and Sundance film festivals. The start of the festival next week brought together fourteen films to watch, and you can check out the full program and program here.
All or Nothing (Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang)
In All or Nothing, director Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang uses an experimental design that splits the film in two. The same cast plays two sides of the story that intersect. Much of the film is set in the Global Harbour Mall, whose decaying shops and aisles are the backdrop to stories of unwelcome relationships. Some end; Some are stuck on escalators and parking ramps. The two protagonists are Lan Tian (An Yu), a dance teacher or filmmaker, and Wu Yoyo (Chen Xiaoyi), a worker or bully. The most productive role is that of Liang Cuishan as Perry. , a single mother in one component and a store manager in another. The film is screened in versions opposite to the two components. -Daniel E.
Mirlo Mirlo (Elene Navériani)
Georgian cinema continues to show signs of flourishing life in Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, a film about an independent and satisfied woman who is confronted for the first time with the emotions and touches of the company. Revealed at this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and Blackbird, a well-deserved winner of Best Film and Best Actress at last week’s Sarajevo Film Festival, is the latest film from Elene Naveriani, a 38-year-old director who co-wrote the screenplay with feminist activist Tamta Melashvili. This collaboration presents an unlikely story about the surprise of attraction, about what bodies look like depending on how we see them and who is looking at them, and about the pleasures of touch and solitude and whether or not they deserve to exclude each other. – Rory O. (full review)
The Day I Met You (André Novais Oliveira)
A lazy Brazilian drama with a pensive bent, The Day I Met You marks director André Novais Oliveira’s return to the New Director/New Films category after 2018’s Long Way Home. Reinforcing your eye willing to capture the rhythm of everyday life, with a specific focus Focus on often silent and rapid movements: Its most recent story follows Zeca (Renato Novaes), an indifferent school librarian who can’t seem to start his day, leading him to can. He then goes on a date with his colleague Louisa (Grace Passô), who talk about the ups and downs of life, with a specific focus on intellectual health. With an honest focus on its characters and the places they occupy, The Day I Met You is an emotionally generous portrait of stasis.
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
There are many tactics that A Different Man can just go through and a lot of things can just be. Aaron Schimberg’s awkward and uncomfortably unique trait plays the role of Frankenstein-esque inverted medical horror, a tragic satire of art that mimics life, and a spiraling spiral. Dating drama. To his ambitious, distinctive credit, he tries to combine them all into a sinister harmony, as if the surreal mixes of Charlie Kauffguy’s Escher fit into an episode of Twilight Zone inspired by David Lynch’s Elephant Man or Beauty and the Beast. It’s a dark, hilarious, and deeply unsettling portrait of a disfigured guy who is also the unflinching mirror of an appearance-centric industry. – Jake K. (full review)
Dream and Die (Nelson Yeo)
Have you ever noticed that a guy enjoys mischievous tension with a fish?You’ll get this and more at Dreaming
Explanation by (Gábor Reisz)
Politics is the enemy in Gábor Reisz’s Explanation for Everything, an ambitious and entertaining effort through the Hungarian filmmaker to confront his country’s divisive crisis. Filmed without fear of speaking to an audience outside Hungary that might not possibly master its political reference themes (a welcome selection that allows the audience to figure things out as the film progresses), Reisz gradually sets the stage for a small key moment. A national scandal. Beginning as a clumsy comedy, the film becomes a long, exasperated cry at the absurdity of how almost anything can become a political weapon. – C. J. P. (full review)
Good (India Donaldson)
For nearly two decades, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy has demonstrated how nature can be an open canvas for exploring the critical issues of male friendship and dealing with a midlife crisis. While those emotional dilemmas are persistent, the time has come to provide a complete solution. New detail for this vanity. Good One, India Donaldson’s painstakingly watched, refreshingly patient and superbly acted feature debut, adjusts perspective, about a 17-year-old woman embarking on a camp in the Catskills with her father and her most productive friend. An accumulation of small major issues and worried looks, the drama becomes a portrait of increasingly crossed barriers leading to a final breaking point. – Jordan R. (full review)
Grace (Ilya Povolotsky)
Enjoy long takes, sparse dialogue, and exquisite Kodak visuals from cinematographer Nikolai Zheludovich as Grace mesmerizes you. Ilya Povolotsky’s ambitious moment is as exuberant as it sings, interspersing exchanges of a fraught father-daughter relationship with stunning landscapes of the Russian countryside. Maria Lukyanova is charming in her first film role as a young girl, a teenager looking for more than what the van she and her father live in has to offer. As she and her father (Gela Chitava) make their way to the Barents Sea, their off-the-grid cinephile lifestyle (and their dates) become untenable.
Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych)
With Putin’s stranglehold on the media outside Russia, it can be difficult to get a transparent picture of the demoralization of his armed forces in the face of Ukraine’s formidable defense against this unjustified attack. Two years after the invasion, a new documentary makes public Russian personal recordings intercepted through the Ukrainian security services. With an officially precise technique that captures the devastating path of war in Ukraine, Oksana Karpovyc’s Intercepted delves into the psyche of the attacking forces in an unprecedented way. We hear stories of massacres of Ukrainian civilians, how they succumbed to food dogs and are so disorganized that they are damaging their own strength while their circle of relatives at home feeds false propaganda about nutransparent stockpiles and COVID origins. It is an austere and uncompromising documentary that shows how life will have to go through. in Ukraine, while confirming that even when the war ends, mutual hatred will continue to be overcome for generations. – Jordan R.
The Lost Country (Vladimir Perišić)
Vladimir Perišić’s first feature since 2009’s Ordinary People, Lost Country is set in Serbia around 1996, a country on the brink of collapse under the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Drawing on an astonishing reconstruction of chaotic classrooms, classrooms, and occasions of the During this period, Perišić shows the main points slowly, focusing on the characters’ faces rather than their movements or words. He has a wonderful lead role in Jovan Ginić, betting on a 15-year-old boy whose damaging charm to his mother Marklena (Jasna Đuričić) blinds him to the fact that she is a key player in a corrupt government.
Meezan (Shahab Mihandoust)
Meezan took off in his final third. But its first two sections, about men running on fishing boats off the coast of Iran’s Khuzestan province, are a much more common documentary. Meezan takes a big step forward when she moves into a factory where women clean shrimp. Shahab Mihandoust creates hypnotic photographs of a frenetic and mind-blowing painting without losing sight of its consequences. In addition, Ernst Karel’s sound design creates an overall coloring of noise and off-screen chatter. – Steve E.
Another Floor (Francisco Rodríguez Teare)
In Otro Sol, writer-director Francisco Rodríguez Teare’s story continues to spin, mixing characters and events until it’s almost impossible to discover what’s true. Two misfits leave Chile’s Atacama Desert to reconstruct the theft of priceless family heirlooms from relatives. a cathedral in Cadiz, Spain. But did the initial crime take place?Teare populates Hitale with desirable liars and thieves fond of poetic statements such as “hurricanes turn off the lights in my brain. “Otro Sol’s real stars are its locations, from a shanty town built on a brown-sand beach to the terraces and alleyways that surround it. the Cathedral of Cadiz. -Daniel E.
The Portrait (Laures Ferrés)
At the beginning of The Permanent Picture, a teenage girl gives birth, abandons her baby, and disappears. Then, 50 years later, a casting director finds her on the street promoting a homemade perfume. This is more or less the essence of Laures Ferrés’ metamorphic deyet album, an exploration of diaspora anxieties in which the nuances of politics and the director’s personal history gradually emerge with a wink and a smile. The two women, as anyone who sees them will soon realize, are more connected than they think, but this is a movie that revolves around big revelations. Ferrés is too curious for that, more concerned with the quirks of human faces or how anyone could begin to decipher such a connection. – Rory O. (full review)
The Edge (Alberto Gracia)
The Rim is an enigmatic piece of surrealism that evokes the novels of José Saramago and the strange Greek wave, without ever forgetting the characters’ struggles with poverty and isolation. Set in the port city of Ferrol in Spain’s Galicia region, it follows Damian (Alfonso Miguez), a boy struggling to improve his life by appearing on a game show. Instead, he is mistaken for Cosimo (played by the director), a consultant for the blind who commits suicide in the first scene. The filmmakers opt for neo-realism to describe this setting, Grace has come up with a seductive puzzle that will possibly leave you, but is imaginative enough not to threaten to bore you.
New Director/New Films will be presented April 3-14 at the Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.