review
By Lawrence Garcia | March 21, 2024

Like Godard, Radu Jude is acutely aware of how every image or sequence of images can be sorted into genres, textures, colors, references, and so on, categories whose associations stretch back into the whole of cinema’s past.

feature
By Nicolas Rapold | March 27, 2024
Festival Dispatch

Threaded throughout No Other Land are scenes conveying the warm friendship between Abraham and Adra, who is initially skeptical of whether his companion’s exposés will have much effect; their chats, filmed by Szor, are oases of communion and symbolic potential in a rocky, increasingly insecure landscape.

review, feature
By Frank Falisi | March 27, 2024
First Look 2024

The village first drew Zhang Mengqi back as a subject in filmmaker Wu Wenguang’s Folk Memory Project, a collection of oral histories from people who lived through the Great Famine.

review
By Jasmine Liu | March 21, 2024
First Look 2024

Being lost is a condition of possibility, which the film’s characters practice half with intention and half by circumstance.

review
By Adam Nayman | March 19, 2024

That the output of Fessenden over four decades has been taken for granted is one thing, but it is more like his being taken for granted has itself been taken for granted, as grimly self-fulfilling as any dark prophecy about pentagrams and the need to stay off the moors.

interview, feature

Sure, I make films as an artistic pursuit as an artist, but I make films to help my characters, my friends first.

feature, review
By Clara Cuccaro | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

Shot on a combination of MiniDV, Betacam, and 16mm, Arthur&Diana is laden with nostalgic references. Locations are filmed in color with a handheld camera evoking the Dogme 95 movement.

feature, review
By Chris Shields | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

Midi Z’s film, shot between 2017 and 2023, documents the period leading up to the 2021 coup by the Tatmadaw—Myanmar’s military—that deposed the democratically elected National League for Democracy and installed a military junta.

feature, review
By Julia Gunnison | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

Delineating a war requires accounting for tremendous complexity and historical context that’s difficult to capture in 120 minutes. But as this film conveys, the best storytellers are the city streets.

feature, review

Prayers for the Stolen showed her preternatural knack for filming space and time in a realist mode, but Tatiana Huezo's approach to her latest work is even more impressive.

feature, review
By Mark Asch | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

The film is another of brothers Bill and Turner Ross’s immersions in the regional euphoric...The filmmakers are after a kind of Herzogian ecstatic truth, often to be found in the kinds of spaces where someone is likely to be rolling on literal ecstasy.

review, feature
By Michael Sicinski | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

Forgoing any touristic impulse, Patiño takes his cues from filmmakers such as Peter Hutton and especially Mark LaPore, charting not only the people and places before him but also his fundamental distance from those environments.

review, feature
By Vikram Murthi | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

The Featherweight actively engages with core ideas behind direct cinema and verité, residing in a blurry middle ground between the two genres, that is between minimizing a documentarian’s presence and actively participating in the action.

review, feature
By Emma Ward | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

Vardanyan weaves back and forth between depictions of creation and destruction, presence and absence, the emotional and the bureaucratic. That these apparent paradoxes coexist onscreen emphasizes the incomprehensibility of the family’s situation as a whole.

interview, feature
By Keva York | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

There is this diffusion to the image projected on the glass. The glass has this inherent texture, and the way color looks on it is not natural… it’s not quite like Technicolor, maybe more like two-strip Technicolor, or even some early hand-colored things.