While this is, admittedly, Not A Movie, Hideo Kojima has perhaps come closest to bridging the video game-cinema divide, either through decades of indispensable work or the recent assistance of A24. It helps collecting onscreen talent that would make any producer blush: as revealed in trailers dating all the way back to 2022, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach returns Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Guillermo del Toro from its predecessor while adding to the fold George Miller, Fatih Akin, Elle Fanning, Luca Marinelli, and Shioli Kutsuna. With the announcement of a June 26 release comes the project’s new trailer, edited by Kojima himself.

Per his standards, Kojima hasn’t revealed too great a deal––little surprise from a man who’d craft games around characters seen across zero marketing––but there’s no mistaking its borderline-vérité visual sense, off-center comic sensibility, melodramatic pathos, or apocalyptic foreshadowing for anyone else.

Watch below:

“Why on Earth is there another film podcast?” Is the question you, the reasonable listener, will ask while nevertheless hitting play on this pilot-of-sorts for yet another entry in perhaps the seventh art’s most undignified progeny.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: here is a show that strives to stand outside its peers. This is not a show informing you that the week’s big new release is pretty good, actually or a group of guys talking about ’80s movies so bad they’re riduclawesome or me digging up the ruddiest MKV file I can find and having a friend from the Internet talk about it with me for 46 minutes––but there will be some of that, because it’s better than talking about most other things.

Rather, I’ve envisioned this as a multi-headed object: conversations among filmmakers, film programmers, and cinephiles mixed with monologues, reviews, streaming and repertory highlights––a podcast that takes you from the miked-up, pop-filtered confines of a professional-sounding show to the sturm und drang of chats among friends in a packed bar, which is where some of my most fruitful film discussions have been held and which often yields more valuable observations than, speaking hypothetically, someone stressing over saying just the right thing because they have a microphone in front of them and are emphatically aware that they’re on a film podcast.

On this debut episode I talk with Carson Lund, the co-writer, director, and editor of Eephus, now in limited release; then Hesse Deni of Movie Mindset joins me to discuss Errol Morris’ CHAOS: The Manson Murders, which is now on Netflix.

Listen below and subscribe on Spotify and Apple.

Music courtesy of Lex Walton: “Love Theme From an Unreleased Film” from the album Giving It Up.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research
My screening series Amnesiascope hosts the La Clef Revival Collective for a screening of Bye Bye Tiberias this Sunday.

Spectacle
Meanwhile, La Clef presents Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Dernier Maquis on Saturday.

Anthology Film Archives
A Volker Spengler retrospective brings three films by Fassbinder while a Matías Piñeiro-curated series offers Antonioni and Straub-Huillet.

Nitehawk Cinema
A secret Hong Kong film plays on 35mm Sunday afternoon.

Museum of the Moving Image
Snubbed Forever concludes with The Lady from Shanghai and Vertigo.

IFC Center
Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; eXistenZ, Mulholland Dr., Paprika, Dogra Magra, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas show late.

Roxy Cinema
Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart screen.

Film Forum
Play It As It Lays begins a week-long run; Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman continues in a new 4K restoration; Kung Fu Panda screens on Sunday.

Metrograph
L’Avventura, Blue Valentine, Wings of Desire, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and The Fly play on 35mm; Tonino Guerra, an Inbal Weinberg series, and John Sayles retrospective begin while Welcome to Suburbia, Take a Walk on the Wild Side, and The Body Between Us continue.

I wish there were an exact subgenre for Robina Rose’s Nightshift so I could see every single one of its kin. The British feature––recalling the austere melancholy of Chantal Akerman or films of its cinematographer, Jon Jost––has spent 40-plus years as an object of complete obscurity, knowledge beguiles while watching it: a masterclass in where to put the camera, where to cut, and where to put the camera again to follow, complicate, or upend where you put the camera before. Don’t go to film school; just watch Nightshift over and over.

The Lightbox Film Center, the British Film Institute, and Cinenova have restored Rose’s film, which Arbelos opens at Anthology Film Archives for a one-week run on March 14. Ahead of this we are thrilled to debut a trailer that perfectly encapsulates Nightshift.

Here’s the synopsis: “Over the course of a single nightshift, a West London hotel clerk (U.K. counterculture icon Jordan, and previously the star of Derek Jarman’s Jubliee) plays mute witness to a nocturnal constellation of guests ranging from punk rockers and scenester magicians to seemingly staid businessmen and old-world gentry. As the hours march deeper into night and the varied clientele depart the waking world, the hotel transforms into an otherworldly, liminal space swaying between the everyday and the enchanting. Gorgeously photographed by filmmaker Jon Jost, with a soundtrack by Simon Jeffes of the legendary Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Nightshift is both a potent snapshot of London’s early-1980s art scene (actor/poet Heathcote Williams and filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg also star) and a bold, instantly engrossing artistic statement from director Robina Rose. Newly restored by Lightbox Film Center, and back in circulation thanks to Arbelos Films, Nightshift is a beguiling masterwork of surreal, somnambulant cinema that casts a resonant and bewitching spell.”

Wherever you call home, it’s hard to be invested in cinephile culture without a mind towards its health. It was hardly some casual choice when Sean Baker took time during an Oscar-acceptance speech to plea for greater attendance––with each year every purchase at an Anthology, Spectacle, or Maysles feels more and more like an investment in the future, or perhaps a protest vote against our present. And few fight so valiantly as La Clef Revival Collective, a Parisian group who’ve earned praise from Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, John Carpenter, Justine Triet, Leos Carax, Adèle Haenel, and Céline Sciamma (the latter of whom sits on their board).

When La Clef, a Parisian theater initially open since 1973, faced severe risk of closure in 2019, the Revival Collective and aforementioned filmmakers joined forces to save the space. They are seeking $400,000 between now and April to fund renovations, and will visit New York this week to hold promotional screenings. It is––not mincing words––an honor to partner with them and show (via Amnesiascope) Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias this Sunday at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, for which tickets are now available. (If you won’t take my recommendation, listen to Brian Cox.)

Below is information on each screening, followed by video appreciations from Scorsese and Carpenter. With all respect for other five-borough happenings, La Clef’s New York jaunt is clearly your best cinematic option this week.

Wednesday March 5 at 8pm
Film Forum (209 W Houston Street)
A Woman Is a Woman by Jean-Luc Godard (1960, 88’)
Angela, an afternoon stripper in the sleazy Zodiac Club, yearns for motherhood, but live-in boyfriend Jean-Claude Brialy “isn’t ready yet,” while hanger-on Jean-Paul Belmondo is more than happy to oblige.

Thursday March 6 at 7.30pm
Anthology Film Archives (32 2^nd Avenue)
Earthlight by Guy Gilles (1970, 98’)
Pierre, a young man who lives in Paris with his father, travels to his native Tunisia in search of his early childhood and distant memories, including that of his long-since-deceased mother.

Saturday March 8 at 7.30pm
Spectacle (124 South 3^rd Street)
Dernier Maquis by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (2008, 90’)
The owner of an industrial pallet and truck repair yard, nicknamed Mao by his Arab and African employees, tries to keep everyone happy and productive, as long as it doesn’t affect his bottom line. But the accord between labor and management goes awry when Mao creates a mosque in the yard.

Sunday March 9 at 7.30pm
Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research (251 Huron Street)
Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem (2023, 82’)
Leaving her Palestinian village to follow her dream of becoming an actress, Hiam Abbass (Blade Runner 2049, Succession) also left behind her mother, grandmother and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter Lina returns with her to journey through the vanished places among the scattered memories of four generations.

Monday March 10 at 7pm
Maysles Documentary Center (242 Lenox Avenue / Malcolm X Boulevard)
Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) by Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré (2022, 122’)
Using rare archives, Crossing Voices recounts the adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by western African immigrant living in workers’ residencies in France. The story of this improbable, utopic return to the homeland follows a winding path through the ecological challenges and conflicts on the African continent from the 1970s to the present day.

Wednesday March 12 at 7pm
Alliance New York (22 East 60^th Street)
The Temple Woods Gang by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (2022, 116’)
A retired military man lives in the Temple Woods housing project. Just as he’s burying his mother, his neighbour Bébé, who belongs to a gang of robbers from the area, is preparing to rob the convoy of a wealthy Arab prince.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Anthology Film Archives
A Volker Spengler retrospective brings three films by Fassbinder; films by Ozu and Pudovkin play in Essential Cinema.

Museum of the Moving Image
Snubbed Forever continues with films by Bogdanovich and a 35mm print of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street.

IFC Center
Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; Herzog’s Nosferatu, Mulholland Dr., Funeral Parade of Roses, Dogra Magra, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas show late.

Roxy Cinema
Saturday brings Susan Seidelman’s She-Devil on 35mm and Wild at Heart.

Film at Lincoln Center
The career-spanning Frederick Wiseman retrospective has its final weekend.

Film Forum
Tales from the New Yorker includes films by Hitchcock, Spike Jonze, the Marx Brothers, and John Huston; Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman continues in a new 4K restoration; Addams Family Values screens on Sunday.

Metrograph
American Beauty, The Fly, and Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast play on 35mm; Welcome to Suburbia, Take a Walk on the Wild Side, and The Body Between Us begin while The Divorced Women’s Film Festival and 15 Minutes continue.

Canadian International Pictures, sister company to the great Arbelos Films, takes upon itself the noble mission of restoring and releasing lesser-seen films from up north. Their next project is a film I’d frankly never heard of, but upon watching a trailer for its restoration I can’t see it soon enough: Allan Moyle’s The Rubber Gun stars Stephen Lack (Scanners) as a Montreal drug-pusher whose makeshift family is put under threat. Ahead of bicoastal premieres––Los Angeles’ American Cinematheque on March 6 (with a Moyle Q&A) and New York’s Roxy Cinema on March 11 (where Lack will do a Q&A on March 15)––we’re pleased to exclusively debut said trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Charismatic painter Steve (Scanners star Stephen Lack) has carved out a reputation as Montreal’s premiere drug connection, trafficking narcotics with a crew of friends (and lovers) living as a makeshift ‘family’ on the fringes of society. But tensions rise when the police catch wind of their latest shipment, and Steve strikes up a friendship with a university student eager to observe the group’s illicit lifestyle for his graduate thesis. As the walls start to close in, old jealousies and new paranoias surface, and the family scrambles to adapt or perish. Featuring seven songs by acclaimed Leonard Cohen collaborator Lewis Furey, the directorial debut of Allan Moyle (Times Square, Pump up the Volume, Empire Records) is an inventive drug drama that set the stage for Drugstore Cowboy, Trainspotting, and a number of other unflinching films that made waves in subsequent decades. In spite of a shoestring budget, the urgency and vivid reality of the film’s docu-fiction approach earned widespread praise, with the Toronto International Film Festival citing it as ‘of the best films of the seventies.’ Out of official circulation for decades, The Rubber Gun is long overdue for rediscovery.”

Watch the preview below:

That it has been nine months since Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia premiered at Cannes should do nothing to diminish the excitement of its U.S. release finally commencing next month. I saw the film right in the heart of a busy NYFF schedule and have found it retaining more than most, still disturbing me well after a first encounter. As Guiraudie fans should find themselves pleased, newcomers might come away hoping to see as much as they can; few working directors are so brilliant with tone and temperament, so fearless towards concepts of moral judgement.

Ahead of Misericordia‘s March 21 opening from Janus and Sideshow, we’re pleased to exclusively debut a poster that melds its three great strengths: Félix Kysyl’s unknowable expression, autumnal atmosphere, and a splash of blood where needed (or desired). Extra credit for a tagline that got a genuine smirk out of me.

As Leonardo Goi said in his review from Cannes, “Misericordia is neither a dirge nor a lofty symposium. Strange as it may be to say for a story that begins with a burial and then shatters after a heinous death, this is a supremely and surprisingly funny film, where humor gradually accrues a subversiveness not unlike desire’s own.”

Find the poster and preview below, and check back next month for my interview with Guiraudie:

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

IFC Center
Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; Herzog’s Nosferatu, Mulholland Dr., Funeral Parade of Roses, The Thing, and Irreversible show late.

Roxy Cinema
Saturday brings Bruce LaBruce introducing Ciao! Manhattan and Melody of Love on 16mm; Claude Chabrol’s Ten Days Wonder shows on 16mm this Sunday alongside the rare Iranian feature Dead End.

Japan Society
Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower shows on 35mm this Friday.

Film at Lincoln Center
The newly restored Compensation begins screening while a career-spanning Frederick Wiseman retrospective continues.

Film Forum
Tales from the New Yorker includes films by Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, and John Huston. Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman continues in a new 4K restoration; Meet Me In St. Louis screens on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
Willem Dafoe: Wild at Heart continues.

Museum of the Moving Image
Snubbed Forever continues with Blue Collar and Carmen Jones.

Metrograph
Alien, Love Torn in a Dream, and Rambling Rose play on 35mm; The Divorced Women’s Film Festival and an António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro program starts while Laura Dern, Raise Ravens, Amongst Humans, and 15 Minutes continue.

Marking one of their biggest upgrade months yet, the Criterion Collection is consecrating May 2025 with new 4K editions for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, In the Heat of the Night, and (reaching well back into the library) Withnail and I, running a gamut from opulent, fantastical color to solid 60s-studio sheen to the outright gnarly.

Meanwhile, Charles Burnett‘s legendary Killer of Sheep is given a major upgrade as Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers / Four Musketeers duet also earns full honors. Which should not distract from Abbas Kiarostami’s epochal The Wind Will Carry Us coming to Blu-ray, nor the same for another Bruce Robinson-Richard E. Grant collaboration, How to Get Ahead in Advertising.

See artwork below and more at Criterion:

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema
Vincent Gallo writes, directs, and / or stars in Buffalo ’66, Trouble Every Day, and The Brown Bunny, all playing on 35mm; a print of Twilight screens Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art
Dutchman and We Are Universal play in a two-for-one screening.

Japan Society
A six-film Nobuhiko Obayashi retrospective has two final showings on Friday.

Anthology Film Archives
Willem Dafoe: Wild at Heart features films by Schrader, Lynch, Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow.

Film at Lincoln Center
A career-spanning Frederick Wiseman retrospective continues.

Museum of the Moving Image
Snubbed Forever continues.

IFC Center
A new 4K restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock continues; Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. screen; Fargo, The Thing, Irreversible, and House show late.

Film Forum
Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman begins playing in a new 4K restoration; The Little Mermaid screens on Sunday.

Metrograph
Alien, Cría Cuervos, The Fabulous Stains, and Blow-Up play on 35mm; a Ryan J. Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni curation, Knock Knock, Brigitte Lin, Amongst Humans, and 15 Minutes continue.

A yearly highlight of New York programming (and North American options at large), the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look returns on March 12 with an opening-night, US-premiere screening of Durga Chew Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, closes March 16 with the stateside debut of Giovanni Tortorici’s Diciannove, and in intervening days combines programming of recent cutting-edge highlights with in-person talks and seminars.

First Look’s fixture “Working on It” will run between March 12 and 14, offering “a laboratory for works in progress and dialogues about process, bringing together festival guests, filmmakers, students, writers, and the general public.” Meanwhile, writers and editors from Reverse Shot “will welcome a new cohort for its Emerging Critics Workshop, with writers attending throughout the festival”; submissions may be made here through February 14.

So says Eric Hynes, MoMI’s Senior Curator of Film and First Look’s Artistic Director:

“In so many ways, First Look serves as the centerpiece of MoMI’s film programming calendar. Over the course of five days in March we bring in select filmmakers from around the world to premiere their latest films in New York, share with our audience and one another their working methods and future plans, and either establish or build upon relationships with our programming team and wider community. We’ll welcome debut filmmakers, veterans making their first trip to MoMI, and First Look veterans with exciting new work. I’m excited about this year’s lineup, proud of its wide spectrum of forms and practices, and eager to bring more attention to these amazing artists.”

First Look 2025 was programmed by Eric Hynes, MoMI Curator of Film & First Look Artistic Director; Edo Choi, First Look Senior Programmer; and Sonia Epstein, Curator of Science and Technology; Sarah Luciano, Associate Director of Special Programs; and Eynar Pineda, First Look Producer. First Look’s avant-garde films were programmed by Edo Choi and David Schwartz. 

See the lineup below:

OPENING NIGHT   
Bonjour Tristesse 
Dir. Durga Chew-Bose. 2024, 110 min. Canada/France. Durga Chew-Bose’s modern adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s classic 1954 novel features Lily McInerny as 18-year-old Cécile, spending her summer holiday on the French Riviera with her widowed father Raymond (Claes Bang). The carefree, sun-soaked days are interrupted by the arrival of steely fashion designer Anne (Chloë Sevigny). A major new film director, Chew-Bose has created a heart-wrenching, keenly observed coming-of-age tale. U.S. premiere  

CLOSING NIGHT 
Diciannove  
Dir. Giovanni Tortorici. 2024, 108 mins. Italy. Outstanding newcomer Manfredi Marini plays Leonardo, who leaves his home in Palermo to attend business school in London, starting a journey that takes him to Siena and Torino, where he becomes increasingly intolerant of the larger world and others’ points of view. Tortorici’s debut is reminiscent of early Arnaud Desplechin as it zigzags temporally and tonally along with Leonardo’s impulsive, potentially toxic behavior. U.S. premiere    

SHOWCASE SCREENING   
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 
Dir. Göran Hugo Olsson. 2024, 200 mins. Sweden/Finland. Working from thousands of hours of footage catalogued in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service SVT, archival chronicler Olsson unspools a rigorously cool and steely account of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, as witnessed and represented by Swedish journalists over the course of the Cold War era. U.S. premiere   

SHOWCASE SCREENING 
Zodiac Killer Project 
Dir. Charlie Shackleton. 2024, 91 min. U.K. When his plans for a true crime documentary hit a wall, Shackleton set about reconstituting what might have been, while deconstructing what we’ve come to expect from an oversaturated genre—using Bay Area landscapes, archival material, reenactments, film and TV clips, and his own wry and nimble voice-over. New York premiere 

SHOWCASE SCREENING
When the Phone Rang 
Dir. Iva Radivojević. 2024, 75 mins. Serbia/U.S. On a Friday morning in 1992, eleven-year-old Lana (Ilincic) receives a phone call about a death in the family, a life-changing event in sync with the fracturing of Yugoslavian history and identity. Inspired by her own childhood memories, filmmaker Radivojevic loops back to that fateful moment as a conjuring and incantation.U.S. premiere 

100,000,000,000,000 (Cent Mille Milliards) 
Dir. Virgil Vernier. 2024, 77 mins. France. Drifting through an ethereal Monaco during the eerie, emptied-out limbo of the Christmas holidays, a diffident young sex worker gradually forms a strange, tentative bond with a preadolescent whose parents, Chinese real estate developers, have left her in the charge of her Serbian babysitter. U.S. premiere 

Chronicles of the Absurd
Dir. Miguel Coyula. 2024, 77 mins. Cuba. Coyula and actor Lynn Cruz were subjected to various forms of control and intimidation while making their dystopian feature Corazón azul in Cuba in 2011. This defiant and entertaining work playfully uses headshots and avatars to visualize clandestine audio recordings documenting years of Kafkaesque impositions, threats, and vital dissident art. U.S premiere

Desert of Namibia 
Dir. Yôko Yamanaka.  2024, 137 min. Japan. Yamanaka’s second feature follows mercurial 21-year-old Kana, who vacillates among suitors, priorities, and moods. Does she want security or stimulation, adulthood or regression; is she just unpredictable or unwell? Yuumi Kawai embodies Kana with a fierce volatility that evokes the hot-blooded, without-a-net cinema of Cassavetes and Rowlands. New York premiere 

Elementary 
Dir. Claire Simon. 2024, 105 min. France. The latest immersive work from documentary master Claire Simon takes us into Makarenko, a public elementary school in the Parisian suburb Ivry-sur-Seine, over the course of a school year, staying attentive to the glorious unpredictability of human interaction and the revelations of learning. U.S. premiere 

The Fifth Shot of La Jetée
Dir. Dominique Cabrera. 2024, 104 min. France. Filmmaker Cabrera belatedly discovers in her latest feature that Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi photomontage La Jetée, made the same year that Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule, might also be an inadvertent historical document of her own family. This detective story uncovers evidence about her family, French colonialism, Marker, and film itself. U.S. premiere 

A Frown Gone Mad 
Dir. Omar Mismar. 2024, 71 mins. Lebanon. In a beauty salon in Beirut, one client after another sits in Bouba’s chair seeking cosmetic treatment. Omar Mismar’s uniquely mesmerizing film consists entirely of close-ups fixed on clients’ faces. A work of real-life body horror that’s also a tender portrait of communal defiance. North American premiere 

Measures for a Funeral 
Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz. 2024, 142 min. Canada. PhD candidate Audrey (Deragh Campbell) journeys from Toronto to London to Oslo to research the life of forgotten Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow while fever-dream calls from her dying mother (herself a failed violinist) go to voicemail. The latest from singular artist Bohdanowicz richly blends family history with archival research and gothic storytelling. U.S. premiere 

Park 
Dir. So Yo-Hen. 2024, 101 min. Taiwan. In this intricately improvised whatsit, Indonesian immigrants Asri and Hasan convene every day at twilight hour, in the heart of Taiwan’s oldest city, to share the day’s news and experiences, spinning second-hand tales of migrant struggle into rhapsodically spontaneous verse. New York premiere 

The Periphery of the Base 
Dir. Zhou Tao. 2024, 54 mins. China. Mixed media artist Zhou constructs mutating digital landscapes that confound classical notions of scale, composition, and visual realism. His latest sets us adrift in the desolate expanse of the Gobi Desert, where an amorphous infrastructure project of massive proportions is underway. North American premiere 

Sanctuary Station 
Dir. Brigid McCaffrey. 2024, 69 mins. U.S. Shot on high-contrast black-and-white 16mm film and Super 16, this incandescent work weaves a rough, hallucinatory patchwork of encounters with women, old and young, solitary and collective, who live or work among the wildlife of the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. Part of Science on Screen. New York premiere

The Shipwrecked Triptych
Dir. Deniz Eroglu. 2025, 90 mins. Germany. Displaying remarkable formal sophistication with a dazzling composite of film stocks, formats, and digital VFX, visual artist Eroglu’s provocative narrative triad forms a surreal, at times comic, and alway fascinating treatise on contemporary Germany, its meaning, its history, and its libidinal unconscious. North American premiere

Songs of Slow Burning Earth
Dir. Olha Zhurba. 2024, 95 mins. Ukraine/France/Sweden/Denmark. Filmed over two years in Ukraine, Zhurba’s epic depiction of her society under siege by Russia moves ineluctably from one grandly scaled, finely detailed scene of calamity to another, each designated by its degree of proximity to the front. East Coast premiere 

Tata 
Dirs. Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc. 2024, 82 min. Moldova/Romania. Moldovan journalist Lina receives a video message from her estranged father, a migrant worker in Italy, seeking help from his abusive employer. Equipping him with a hidden camera, Lina finds herself on a parallel journey of justice—uncovering a pattern of domestic violence that has plagued her family for generations. U.S. premiere

A Want in Her 
Dir. Myrid Carten.  2024, 81 min. Ireland. When her troubled mother goes missing, Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten returns home to find her—at the risk of losing herself. Drawing upon previously captured footage, new interventions, and extraordinarily evocative visual experiments within their living spaces, Carten reinvents the “home movie” as an aching, active processing. New York premiere 

Windless 
Dir. Pavel G. Vesnakov. Bulgaria/Italy. 93 mins. After years working abroad in Spain, a taciturn young man returns to his village in rural Bulgaria to clean out his late father’s flat. As he reconnects with old friends and relatives, he hears tales of his father, by all accounts, a fiercely deeply loving man whom he does not recognize from his own memories. 2024 European Film Awards Selection. New York premiere
 
FIRST LOOK 2025 SHORTS:

Aotearoa  
Dir. Maximilien Luc Proctor. 2024, 6 mins. Germany. 16mm. The snow of Weissensee, a home in Tāmaki Makaurau, the beach in Matapōuri. Edited in camera, using double-perforated film. North American premiere 

Being Blue 
Dir. Luke Fowler. 2024, 18 mins. U.K. DCP. Filmed during a residency at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, former home of artist, filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, Being Blue touches impressionistically on themes of sexuality, queer British life, art making, and nature. North American premiere  

Bliss Point 
Dir. Gerard Ortín Castellví. 2023, 26 mins. Italy/U.K./Spain. Artificial intelligence manages a warehouse, identical rows of burgers are flipped, and robots glide through factories. Filmed with elegance and technological precision, Bliss Point portrays the automation of food production. Part of Science on Screen. North American premiere 

Common Pear
Dir. Gregor Bozic. 2025, 15 mins. Slovenia. In a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate disasters, a team of scientists develops new technology that transmits true emotions from humans on screens to those that watch them. North American premiere

Chelsea Drive 
Dirs. Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold. 2025, 4 mins. U.S. Digital projection. Chelsea Drive displays three decades of Black student style, fashion and dance at the University of Virginia. North American premiere 

Full Out 
Dir. Sarah Ballard. 2025, 14 mins. U.S. DCP. In French with English subtitles. In 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized onstage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse. World premiere

how to make magic 
Dir. Blanca Garcia. 2024, 5 mins. Spain/U.K. Super 8mm. Filmed in the New Forest, the largest remaining unenclosed common land in England, where the entanglement of non-human and human activity hides a joyous spell. New York premiere 

Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths 
Dir. Eva Giolo. 2025, 24 mins. DCP. Belgium/Italy. In the valleys surrounding the Dolomite Mountains, children reimagine ancient Ladin legends while they examine bodies of water, holes, caves, and passages looking for something lost or forgotten. North American premiere 

The Phalanx 
Dir. Ben Balcom. 2025, 13 mins. U.S. DCP. Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time. World premiere 

Songs Overheard in the Shadows 
Dir. James Edmonds.  2025, 22 mins. Germany. 16mm. Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness. World premiere 

Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of the Air 
Dir. Sam Drake. 2025, 9 mins. U.S. DCP. Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War-era human radiation experiments—a miasma of elite deviance. Desert dust settles into teeth. A search that dissolves into a cipher. North American premiere 

A Thousand Waves Away 
Dir. Helena Wittmann. 2025, 10 mins. Germany. DCP. The people are in turmoil. The ground from which their enchanted garden grows, is trembling. North American premiere 

Unstable Rocks 
Dir. Ewelina Rosinska, in collaboration with Nuno Barroso. 2024, 25 min. Germany/Portugal. Geology, animals, and the human path flow together in this subjective portrait of Portuguese landscapes. North American premiere

The Vanguard Tapes 
Dir. Bill Morrison. 2025, 29 mins. U.S. In 1995, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Bill Morrison (Incident) was a dishwasher at the Village Vanguard, the legendary jazz club in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Morrison’s poignant and deliciously candid film, with footage captured during his breaks, features conversations with and monologues by legends Cecil Taylor, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Harold Mabern, Jamil Nasser, and others. U.S. premiere

First Sight: 2025 Award-Winning Shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism:
For the eighth consecutive year, First Look presents Jury award–winning graduate and undergraduate student films from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. All were originally presented at the Stronger Than Fiction Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri. This year’s jurors were Isabel Castro, Chloe Gbai, and Eric Hynes. New York premieres 

Cowboy Strike 
Dir. Matt Pehl. 2024, 22 mins. U.S. In 1883, cowboys in the Texas Panhandle responded to the rise of the first mega-ranches in dramatic fashion: they launched a strike. In investigating the story of this long-forgotten historical anecdote, a songwriter seeks to pay tribute to the cowboys’ search for economic justice. Winner, Stacy Woelfel Award for Innovative Journalism. 

I Will Take the Blame 
Dir. Elena Fu. 2024, 15 mins. U.S. A young Chinese woman endeavors to mend her parents’ fractured marriage, only to encounter the painful realization of her own limitations. Winner, Best Film.

Satan’s Greatest Lies 
Dir. Michael Coleman. 2024, 35 mins. U.S. George Russell, a maverick environmental activist with a God complex, mourns the unexpected loss of his youngest daughter, causing him to question his lifelong crusade to preserve the piney woods of East Texas. Winner, Best Director. 

Victim 
Dir. Tess Jagger-Wells. 2024, 13 mins. U.S. In 1950, Janett Christman was murdered while babysitting in Columbia, Missouri. Almost 75 years later, a filmmaker investigates the unsolved case and its surprising connection to pop culture while she confronts her obsession with true crime. Winner, Special Jury Award for Editing.