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The Locarno Film Festival came and went quickly, although that’s normally the case with festivals. Hundreds of films packed together over 11 days, with plenty of them unknown quantities, means there will always be something to watch and something to miss. And for many of the titles premiering here, this might be the only window of time to see them before they disappear. While I keep my Distribution Watches limited to Berlin, Cannes, and Venice, after a quick glance at last year’s Concorso Internazionale I counted 11 out of 18 films that, to my knowledge, still don’t have US distribution.

Unfortunately, the already limited time to explore this year’s line-up was further limited by several disruptions in my own life that prevented me from taking a deeper dive into the programming. I say this because I don’t feel confident in making any statement on the overall quality of Locarno’s selections this year, but my curation of their curation didn’t produce many highlights compared to prior years. From what I saw out of this year’s main competition, including the Golden Leopard winner, I came away frustrated at stories of present day issues told through modes tied to conventions rooted in the past.

This was most apparent in Florin Șerban’s You Don’t Belong Here, which took home the festival’s top prize. Shot with the kind of respectable stoicism that’s expected from the Romanian New Wave, the sluggish two and a half hour runtime leads to an ending that exposes it all as a ruse for cheap sentimentality. Set in a small Romanian town, the film opens with a gang of masked, far-right racists beating a Romani man to death after he knocks one of them off their bike in self-defence. The film then cuts to Marius (Adrian Văncică), the director of the local hospital, who has to deal with the fallout from the killing when the victim’s family trashes part of the hospital to prevent an autopsy (cutting the body open would go against their beliefs). We learn Marius is a widower raising his teenage son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu), who just so happens to have recently injured his leg after falling off his bike, the details of which he refuses to speak about.

This narrative structure is immediately frustrating, as it takes over an hour for Șerban to lock his narrative pieces in place and for Marius to catch up. The film fills in that gap with characterization, as Marius’ conversations with his girlfriend and close friend reveal deep insecurities around never amounting to greatness along with a resentment toward younger generations. But Marius is a man of principle who did everything he was told to do in life in order to succeed, and so another waiting game emerges: the moment when Marius’ world shatters upon the discovery that his son is a racist murderer.

Șerban, who also wrote, produced, and edited, lets scenes play out over long takes with precise blocking, which we’ve come to expect from his contemporaries by now. But Șerban is too focused on Marius, who’s not a particularly interesting character since we have to rely on him stating his feelings outright, so everything moves at a snail’s pace. These long takes, while well-executed on a technical level, don’t have the underlying tension we’d see from Radu Muntean or Cristian Mungiu, nor the edge of directors like Cristi Puiu or Radu Jude. Other than the surface level similarities, these scenes are largely dead weight.

The only thing that keeps You Don’t Belong Here somewhat intriguing is Șerban’s distance from his characters, which makes it hard to suss out Marius’ thoughts outside of when he speaks directly. It’s obvious that he’s let down by Ioan given their chilly relationship, so when the walls start to close in it’s difficult to tell if Marius’ drive to protect his son is sincere or a need to save his own reputation. That tension vanishes altogether by the end, though, when Șerban gives up on his refined style in favour of blunt force dramatics. An inner monologue from Marius combined with an overbearing score and a baffling coda sours what little good will the film had, and in turn shows Șerban’s use of far right violence against migrants as little more than a plot device for his protagonist’s morality crisis.

Maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised that the two clear standouts of what I saw came from the Concorso Cineasti del Presente (Filmmakers of the Present Competition), a section dedicated to “emerging filmmakers” that usually allows for more experimentation with form. Beatrice Gibson’s At Night, bound to be a highlight on the festival circuit as it makes its way to Toronto and New York in the coming weeks, arrives with an assurance that makes her exclusion from the International Competition look silly. Set in Paris, Gibson follows multiple women (including herself) as they travel the city during nighttime, ruminating on a variety of subjects tied to identity and womanhood.

While the structural parameters of At Night are clear, Gibson’s film unfolds as something amorphous, ready to follow wherever its characters might take it. It’s an intent Gibson more or less declares outright from the start, as she arrives in Paris and admits she doesn’t really know what film she’s making on a phone call with her partner. Soon after, we observe women at a bar as they talk about sex, identity, family, and more. Each of them offer a perspective that sometimes clashes against another’s, but no conflict arises. There’s a mutual understanding and respect among them, that their experiences can exist together without aggregating them into some sort of universal truth. The women eventually go their separate ways and Gibson follows them into the night, with the Paris metro serving as a transition point between each character.

It’s Gibson’s refusal to pin her film down that makes At Night so refreshing, and one of the few films from this decade that tackles ideas around privilege, class, and identity with the complexity they deserve. Other films that try to address the same themes tend to fall into the trap of individualism, whether that’s via how it relates to a film’s protagonist or the filmmaker’s own, specific intent. That strategy often comes up short because, in its reduction of these concepts to a single experience or thesis statement, it creates a dissonance of reconciling the irreconcilable. What one might consider oppressive could be liberating to another; one person’s embarrassment can be someone else’s empowerment.

Gibson embraces this truth, narrative confines be damned, and embodies it through her own methods by taking on a collaborative and improvised approach with her cast of non-professionals. On the other side of the camera, Ben Rivers’ cinematography, Elvin Brandhi’s score, and Liyo Gong’s editing come together to create an entrancing atmosphere, one that draws you in further despite the knotty subject matter. Explaining my first impressions feels inadequate in the face of Gibson and her collaborators’ efforts here (I recommend reading Michael Sicinski’s explanation of the film’s poetic influences), but At Night is the only film I’ve seen this year that has me eager to revisit it, as Gibson’s openness invites ample opportunity to go down the many different paths she lays out.

My most anticipated film of the festival, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon, premiered in the same section as Gibson’s feature, although its placement here feels more appropriate given its experimentation that’s sure to spawn a divisive reaction. My first experience with Schmidt’s films was 2021’s First Time [The Time for All But Sunset – VIOLET], an audacious medium-length feature set over a train ride through Hamburg. September Afternoon is Schmidt’s first feature-length effort, and follows a similar structure as First Time. The opening plays an ‘80s ad for Langnese ice cream, an absurd pop culture artifact of increasingly crass and absurd antics on a sunny beach. Schmidt then cuts to present day, where a couple attempt to have their own beach trip in the fall with their child.

Schmidt’s sensibilities amount to durational endurance tests, with extremely long takes and sequences that stretch the mundane to the point of abstraction (From his director’s statement: “In an age of arbitrary extraordinariness, plain banality is stimulating as fuck”). I find the experience playful in how Schmidt creates waves of emotions out of so little. The idea of listening to a loop of a slowed down Billy Idol song for over 30 minutes sounds like a bit of trolling on Schmidt’s part, and for a short time it does feel that way, until it eventually creates a sort of trance state. Or the image of the couple trying and failing to set themselves up on the beach during a wind storm, which bounces back and forth between melancholic and slapstick.

Like I said when I wrote about First Time, Schmidt’s set up here allows room for viewers to take what they want out of it, so I have some hesitation offering my own interpretation in case it colours someone else’s impression. But what resonates for me is the relevance of watching this couple attempt to recreate a past moment, like the opening ad’s perfect beach day, while reality repeatedly smacks them in the face. That level of denial feels all too familiar as we see a constant push to return to some sort of normal that, despite all efforts, will never come back. The film’s surprising final act, where Schmidt reframes the story on a much larger scale, sees this futile pursuit of nostalgia come with severe consequences. Maybe our gaze has been looking back for so long that it’s too late to avoid the cliff we’ve been approaching this whole time.

One title that slipped under the radar in this year’s lineup is Peter Brunner’s Down the Arm of God, a long gestating passion project by its co-writer and star Caleb Landry Jones. On paper, it sounds like an effort with all good intentions. Jones plays Nick, a pastor who arrives at a small Texas town to lead the local congregation. The town has a large homeless population and Nick, whose own father is homeless, decides to provide shelter and services to the unhoused population at the church, much to the dismay of the townspeople. Despite its increasing prevalence in the United States, homelessness is still a subject people tend to avoid, and in talking about the film Brunner and Jones say their aims are to address the “exploitation and systemic failures within non-profits and government programs, framing homelessness as a consequence of larger global structures.”

Well, egg on my face for expecting something thoughtful from a film produced by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp. As the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Down the Arm of God is a journey straight to the bottom in its appalling and callous use of the homeless to push a hackneyed, melodramatic story. A better example of a similar story would be Jesse Moss’ 2014 documentary The Overnighters, where a North Dakotan pastor triggered intense backlash after he turned his church into a shelter for people seeking work during the state’s oil boom. Moss’ film hears out perspectives on opposing sides without dehumanizing the disenfranchised people at the centre of the conflict, which resulted in a more nuanced portrait.

Brunner is not making a documentary, even though the film’s casting of non-professionals and handheld camera shows an effort to make a gritty and naturalistic work. But nuance is nowhere to be found, as Brunner and Jones’ screenplay chooses sensationalism in order to shock whatever hypothetical anti-homeless viewer they hope to shake some empathy into. This, of course, comes at the expense of the very people they want to showcase, as they’re reduced to victims when tensions erupt in the form of a shooter who tries to kill the people staying at Nick’s church.

A film that wants to address the systemic failures that bring about homelessness should have a confrontational attitude, given how much the public’s passiveness perpetuates the crisis. Painting the unhoused as a parade of sob stories, and those against them as hypocritical religious types ready to get their guns out, translates these perspectives into shallow, digestible conventions that can easily be shit out by viewers conditioned to these storytelling tactics. Down the Arm of God is classic liberal sympathy slop, where heavy hands think they have a soft touch, and acknowledging one’s own capacity for sympathy absolves themselves of their own complicity.

To close things off, I wanted to mention The Blessing, a new short film by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. Set in a Paris bar where several patrons have holed themselves up, with cardboard covering the windows, they orbit around each other independently. A set of speakers take up a corner of the bar and an unnamed man narrates that they have to keep playing music or something bad will happen. A woman lies on the floor, a couple slow dances, another person makes drawings out of peanuts on a table, and the bartender toils away in the kitchen baking cakes.

Poggi and Vinel hop back and forth between several characters’ narration as they each throw on a song of their choice. And while it’s hard to parse out what exactly is going on at first, eventually The Blessing emerges as a defiant ode to the third space, as these characters’ paths intersect before they unite over a rave banger. The film dedicates itself at the end to a bar, and when you take The Blessing as a film from the perspective of the space rather than its inhabitants, it has a pleasant charm to it (it also might explain Poggi and Vinel’s interest in online spaces in their other works, as the internet has wiped out a lot of physical third spaces, for better and worse). It’s simple, carries a fine message, and has some fun tracks. There are worse ways to spend 24 minutes.

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I wrote a little bit about my thoughts on Locarno as a festival last year, and since my feelings haven’t really changed I don’t want to repeat myself too much. Locarno, like many other film festivals that don’t get the same amount of eyes on it as the “big three” of Berlin, Cannes, and Venice, have only become more vital over time as the space to platform and support riskier work decreases. And while Locarno has a nice balance of experimental works with broader, more mainstream fare, the programming is generally more adventurous in ways that keep me coming back (last year three of the films in my top 10 premiered here). Below are my thoughts on four films that premiered in the first several days of this year’s festival.

Maria Bäck’s Brave New Love, one of the titles up for the Golden Leopard in this year’s International Competition, continues the recent trend of Scandinavian films interested in how (mostly heterosexual) people stumble their way through the trials and tribulations of life, society, and sex. This time, Kate (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) lives a seemingly wonderful life with husband Orla (Simon Sears) and daughter Athena (Noemi Carbone Mannov) while she maintains a secret, years-long affair with Andreas (Anders Danielsen Lie). After Andreas moves away, a devastated Kate must bottle her grief, but soon enough her life falls apart as she fails to navigate this new emotional terrain.

You don’t have to look much further than Bäck’s own words to get a sense of her film’s modest and outdated aims. In a statement about Brave New Love, she describes Kate’s predicament this way: “Kate has always felt fundamentally wrong as a person. Now, ten years after becoming a mother, that feeling seems tied to the way she loves…Kate loves two men, and she refuses to choose between them!“ She then talks about how outraged she felt when told that people want sympathetic women on screen rather than a character like Kate. “Can’t we identify with a woman who is clumsy, self-absorbed, confused and full of lust for life?” she asks. “Is it because she yells terrible things at her daughter? Or because she wants to kiss another man?”

It’s a bit strange to read someone act so defiantly about trite ideas, like having a “complicated woman” on screen, or the apparently bold notion that someone could love two people at the same time. Anders Danielsen Lie’s presence here will immediately draw comparisons to Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, and off the top of my head I can point to Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz as a recent example of a woman going through a somewhat similar dilemma. Bäck’s film carries itself like it’s breaking new ground, since much of the film hangs itself on arguing for Kate’s individuality against the stigmas and standards around her unconventional approach to love. It’s a stance that looks antiquated in the same year that the film Pillion received a theatrical release.

And unlike Dag Johan Haugerud, whose Oslo Trilogy explored similar territory with better results, Bäck’s tactics as a writer and director are too blunt at the expense of her characters. There’s a subplot where Kate joins a knitting club at a church, and the female pastor who runs it reveals it’s a front; the club is for women to talk about their shame without judgement. It makes for a neat little example of how people always find ways to circumvent taboos within traditionalist systems, but it comes as no surprise when the group turns on Kate after she tells them about her affair. It’s too bad that Bäck gets so swept up in these kinds of contrivances rather than characterization, since Kate amounts to little more than a collection of eccentricities. She’s more of a representation of the case for letting a woman be messy than anything resembling a well-rounded person. It’s a film that’s too little, too late by about twenty years and, for a comedy, the funniest thing about it is the audacity to call itself brave.

Elsewhere in the Competition is Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence, which continues the somewhat mixed relationship I have with his recent output. Having been a fan of Côté’s work since Curling, and considering him to be one of the best Canadian filmmakers working today, I haven’t connected to anything of his since 2019’s Ghost Town Anthology and Wilcox. Nobody’s Violence doesn’t reverse that trend, as Côté’s ongoing interest in death and transition – largely inspired by receiving a life-saving kidney transplant – collides hard and fast against his self-imposed narrative limitations.

The film follows Mira (Larissa Corriveau), who works as an “angel of death” by helping people commit suicide. Living out of her car, Mira drives across Quebec with a tablet that gives her names and addresses of people, most of them terminally ill, who she meets and gives a drink to that will end their suffering. The nature of Mira’s work makes her isolated, until a tense encounter with one client and a brief fling with a young, eccentric man makes her re-evaluate choosing a life that exists in close proximity to death.

“I love being lost in front of my own creation,” Côté said in an interview with Variety about Nobody’s Violence, although there isn’t really much to get lost in here. Côté’s approach combines scenes more reliant on mood and atmosphere with an inferential plot that treats dangling threads like breadcrumbs for viewers to pull on as they see fit. After the opening act, where Mira visits multiple people to perform assisted suicides, she winds up at the large estate of her boss Ludo (Philippe Rebbot), a wealthy man whose violent, imposing attitude reveals itself over the course of a dinner party that quickly devolves into a bacchanal.

This second act introduces different implications with some of them confirmed (like the spies Ludo hires to keep tabs on Mira) and others, like Ludo’s connections to the government and how exactly he profits off of this business, stay ambiguous. The lengthy stretches of time where Mira observes Ludo and his guests talking about their dreams or reveling outdoors suggests a class critique, but before taking that extra step the film retreats into a broader point about how disconnected Mira feels from this environment. The fact that Côté portrays the person in charge of this assisted suicide program as a villain, and how that might complicate the politics around portraying euthanasia, is yet another implication that never resolves itself.

That doesn’t mean Nobody’s Violence has to offer any sort of political or class commentary. But Côté’s inclination to walk right up to the edge of that line suggests an aversion on his part, given the reductive and contrived plot developments he deploys in the final act. It reminds me of his 2022 film That Kind of Summer, where he took a charged topic (four women at a rehab for sex addiction) and proceeded to walk on eggshells the entire time. By the film’s climax, where Côté inelegantly ties Mira’s story up with a bloody bow, Nobody’s Violence boils down to a “Choose life” message that undermines any possibility for the film to offer something more substantive regarding its subject matter.

I wasn’t a fan of Albert Serra’s provocations back when I saw Story of My Death (I’ll never forget Manohla Dargis’s description of it as “Ed Wood by way of Alexander Sokurov”), and the combination of Serra’s arrogant press tours (“My films are unfuckable”) with his small yet fervent fanbase left a bad taste. But people change, and both Pacifiction and Afternoons of Solitude converted me into a fan, as his trolling instincts subsided while his technical skills and methods improved.

Doing a 180 on Serra has been one of the more pleasant surprises I’ve had with films this decade, as it’s the sort of counterexample to my own assumptions and feelings I always welcome (that’s what good art should do). And Serra remains as prolific as ever, with Sixteen Moments of My Life premiering while he works on his next feature. Filmed in 2025, Serra directs a concert by legendary actress Ingrid Caven based on his own concept, backed by the band Molforts who regularly collaborate with Serra on his films.

While I tend to have a ceiling with concert films (a bias that only excludes Jonathan Demme), Sixteen Moments of My Life is a respectable effort, and it’s hard not to appreciate Serra’s choices. Caven performs her album of the same name where each track has her describe a specific memory. Singing in French, German, and Latin, Caven doesn’t exactly dwell on happy times; just look at track titles like “Christmas Eve Under Bombs,” “Chaos,” or “The Piano in the Ruins.” It matches her delivery, where she wails, moans, and groans out each line, elongating syllables as far as she can stretch them. Caven’s performance expresses her memories as if they’re anguished ghosts wandering inside her mind.

Serra and cinematographer Artur Tort keeps the action on stage, cutting between multiple cameras set up on stage and in the audience pointed at Caven and the band (we only get one brief glimpse at the crowd). There’s a nice balance between the process behind the performance and the concert itself, whether it’s observing Caven ready herself backstage or shots of the band’s equipment and notes while they play. A sparse stage relies more on lighting cues, which stands out early on with the image of Caven singing while the wall behind her slowly turns into a vivid red. It’s in these moments where Caven’s performance comes close to transcending the nuts and bolts behind the spectacle.

Bound to be one of the more high profile competition titles from this year’s festival due to being selected for New York Film Festival’s Main Slate, Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming hits that special mix of timely and urgent that tends to attract festival programmers. Written by Stever’s wife Anna Melikova, the film tells the story of Ukrainian queer couple Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright), dropping us in on them days before Russia began its invasion of their country. With Russian bombs landing in Kyiv, they pack up and move to Olya’s parents in the suburbs while they prepare to flee to Germany.

These early sections of the film are the most powerful, as Stever’s direction and Volodymyr Usyk’s cinematography heighten the limbo state Olya and Oleh find themselves in as their identities face further pressure in the face of the invasion. A scene at a party with friends has a broadcast of a speech by Volodymyr Zelenskyy playing on a screen at one point, and that image interrupting what looks like a typical, youthful activity hammers home how there’s no escape from their political reality. Long takes, scenes with long periods of silence, and framing that boxes Olya and Oleh in their home (the rare views we get of the outside speak to both the fear of living in wartime and the realities of filming in a war zone) have a striking quality to them, which builds up to the film’s high point: an elaborate sequence where Olya and Oleh try to cross the border, the kind of set piece that has every opportunity to become sensationalistic but never takes the bait.

The problem Olya and Oleh encounter at the border has to do with Oleh being a transgender man, which the male border guards immediately hand off to the female soldiers to figure out. Since no men between 18 and 60 can leave the country, Oleh must use his identity to try and leave, only to get blocked by the army in humiliating fashion. Heading back to Olya’s parents, who believe Oleh is a cisgender male, the two must try to figure out a way to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles to leave the country.

The confluence of living under constant threat of bombings, hiding one’s identity to some, compromising it to others, and the pressure to fight against Russia makes for a captivating watch. Stever and Melikova let Oleh’s hellish predicament speak for itself, at least for a while. The problems come in during the latter half, when the film loses steam in its portrayal of the strain the war puts on Olya and Oleh’s relationship. There’s a sense that Stever and Melikova know it, too, since the final act rushes the plot to achieve an endpoint that feels unnecessary, especially given the Ukraine/Russia conflict is far from over. The heavy hand in the final minutes is frustrating and disappointing, since Stever’s strengths as a director shine more in the moments that lie outside of the confines of plot, where we’re placed alongside these characters and experience the tension of not knowing what might come from one second to the next.

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Last updated: August 9, 2026

Titles in bold will have a North American distributor, which I’ll include with a source linked to the distributor’s name. I will probably announce updates on my Twitter account if you’re not following me there already. Short films, retrospective titles, and TV series are not included as it’s too difficult to track.

And if I’m missing anything or need to make any corrections/changes, please comment or reach out to let me know so the list can stay up to date.

Competition

• 15/18 A Place To Heal (dir. Cedric Kahn)

• A Bit of Light (dir. Ali Asgari)

• Back to Buenos Aires (dir. Marco Bechis)

• Bucking Fastard (dir. Werner Herzog)

• Bunker (dir. Florian Zeller) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• Company (dir. Casey Affleck)

• Dau (dir. Ilya Khrzhanovsky)

• Ink (dir. Danny Boyle) [Netflix for US; VVS Films for Canada]

• L’Estranea (dir. Paolo Strippoli)

• Look Back (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda) [GKIDS]

• Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People? (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto)

• Possible Love (dir. Lee Chang-Dong) [Netflix]

• Primetime (dir. Lance Oppenheim) [A24 for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada]

• Succederà Questa Notte (dir. Nanni Moretti)

• The Echo Chamber (dir. Andrea Pallaoro)

• Un bon petit soldat (dir. Stéphane Brizé)

• Un Peu Avant Minuit (dir. Nicolas Pariser)

• Wild Horse Nine (dir. Martin McDonagh) [Searchlight Pictures]

• Woman Unknown (dir. May el-Toukhy)

Horizons

• A Day In The Life Of Jo: Chapter Phaedra (dir. Jacqueline Lentzou)

• Big Little Things (dir. Michelle Zhou)

• Eklipse (dir. Manuel Wetscher)

• Falling House (dir. Mohsen Gharaei)

• House of the Wind (dir. Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu)

• I Figli Della Scimmia (dir. Tommasco Landucci)

• La Città Dei Vivi (dir. Edoardo Gabbriellini)

• La Moula (dir. Jerome Pierrat)

• La Ragazza Con La Leica (dir. Alina Marazzi)

• Lovers In The Blue Night (dir. Anuparna Roy)

• Oasis (dir. Jannis Lenz)

• The Burning Giants (dir. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng)

• The Colour Of The Sun (dir. Xavier Tera)

• The Difficult Bride (dir. Rubaiyat Hossain)

• Too Much Sugar (dir. Robert Greene)

• Un Détour Par Diane (dirs. Ann Sirot & Raphael Balboni)

• Una Storia (dir. Anna Foglietta)

• Until The Day Ends (dir. Jelena Maksimovic)

• What Belongs To Others (dir. Grzegorz Debowski)

Venice Spotlight

• Conversation with the Sea (dir. Muayad Alayan)

• Furies (dir. Rami Kodeih)

• Ground Floor (dir. Gábor Reisz)

• Guria (dir. Levan Koguashvili)

• Hombre al agua (dir. Gael García Bernal)

• I Matter (dir. Alina Şerban)

• Serpenti (dir. Roberto De Paolis Maino)

• Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing (dir. Erik Shirai)

Out of Competition - Fiction

• Arrested Memory (dir. Sabu)

• Dio Ride (dir. Giovanni Veronesi)

• Father Joe (dir. Barthelemy Grossmann)

• Jupiter (dir. Alexandre Smia)

• Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors (dir. Lav Diaz)

• Nessun Dolore (dir. Gianni Amelio)

• No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman (dir. Halkawat Mustafa)

• Place To Be (dir. Kornel Mundruczo)

• Scherzetto (dir. Mario Martone)

• The Basics Of Philosophy (dir. Paul Schrader)

• Un Bon Avocat (dir. Tristan Seguela)

Out of Competition - Non-Fiction

• Be Brave (dir. Francesco Carrozzini)

• Biografia De Jorge Luis Borges (dir. Mariano Llinás)

• Boatbuilders (dir. Luke Lorentzen)

• Burgundy (dirs. Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw)

• Citizen Osama (dir. Ahmed Hassouna)

• Dust (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang)

• Everest: The Other Side (dirs. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin) [National Geographic Films]

• From Inside Out — The Architecture Of Peter Zumthor (dir. Wim Wenders)

• Holy Wood Dust (dir. Victor Kossakovsky)

• Imperium (dir. Sergei Loznitsa)

• Letters (dir. Andrei Kutsila)

• Musk (dir. Alex Gibney) [Bleecker Street]

• My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile (dir. Julia Loktev) [MUBI]

• Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger (dirs. Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace) [Disney+]

• Queer Edward II (dir. Theo Rollason)

• Shumei — The Living Legacy Of Kabuki (dir. Takashi Miike)

• The Road To Jericho (dir. Amos Gitai)

• Union Town (dir. Barbara Kopple)

• What Love Builds (dir. Russell Crowe)

Out of Competition - Film On Films

• Intermission (dir. Yonfan)

• Joie de Vivre (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

• Juso Per Ferie (dir. Karen Di Porto)

• Nino - Un Film Su Nino Rota (dir. Walter Fasano)

• The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias (dir. Sophie Fiennes)

• Twist & Shoot Mister Suzuki (dir. Yves Montmayeur)

Biennale College Cinema

• Demetra in Esilio (dir. Maria Giovanna Cicciari)

• Gu Shi (dir. Amie Song)

• Moonfish (dir. Daniel Zvereff)

• Tijuana, Todavia (dir. Gabriel Gutierrez Morales)

Giornate degli Autori/Venice Days - Competition

• A Woman Today (dir. Robert Guediguian)

• Agata the Writer (dir. Kuba Dorabialski)

• Balcanica (dir. Nicola Sorcinelli)

• Camouflage (dir. Mykyta Gibalenko)

• Dear Ajayi (dir. Damilola Orimogunje)

• I Plant My Hand in the Garden (dirs. Boris Hadžija & Hoda Taheri)

• Les Indes (dirs. Pauline Julier & Nicolas Chapoulier)

• My Notes on Mars (dir. Lili Horvát)

• Salon de Belleza (dir. Nathalia Acevedo)

• Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion (dir. María Aparicio)

Giornate degli Autori/Venice Days - Out of Competition/Special Events/Venetian Nights

• A Man’s Skin (dir. Léa Domenach)

• Al Baraneya (dir. Ashgan El-Hamus)

• Anatomy of a Portrait (dirs. Francesco Clerici & Mattia Colombo)

• Auber 89 (dir. Giuseppe Schillaci)

• Capital Sunday - Sunday Gen (dir. Giovanna Giuliani)

• Carla Lonzi, A Feminist Story (dir. Francesca Archibugi)

• Even if Hell Came (dir. Samuele Rossi)

• Memories of Lightning (dir. Riccardo Giacconi)

• Scarpe Rotte (dir. Roberta Torre)

• Southern Peasants (dir. Alessandra Lancellotti)

• The Cat Wakes Up and Yawns; Then Love (dirs. Federico Francioni & Samuele Sestieri)

• The Craft (dir. Beppe Tufarulo)

• The Legend of the Desert (dir. Elisabetta Giannini)

• The Massacre (dir. Cosimo Messeri)

• The Phantom (dirs. Ignacio Masllorens & David Lamelas)

International Critics’ Week

• Before the War (dir. Tommaso Usberti)

• Giaffa the Great (dir. Marco Santi)

• London (dirs. Marco Picoli & Victor Di Marco)

• Meteorite (dir. Sebastian Munera)

• Our Share of Sand (dir. Shalini Adnani)

• Rider (dirs. Roan Johnson & Davide Pavanello)

• The End of Times (dirs. Bibiana Rojas Gomez & Juan David Cardenas)

• The H@llow Man (dir. Kamel Laaridhi)

• Zoom In, Zoom Out (dir. Dong Jie)

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Last updated: August 27, 2026

Titles in bold will have at least one North American distributor, which I’ll include with a source linked to the distributor’s name. As always, I’m only one person doing this, so any info on new acquisitions is always helpful in case I missed something.

Competition

• All of a Sudden (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi) [NEON for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada

• Another Day (dir. Jeanne Herry)

• The Beloved (dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen) [Kino Lorber]

• The Birthday Party (dir. Léa Mysius)

• Bitter Christmas (dir. Pedro Almodóvar) [Sony Pictures Classics for US; Mongrel Media for Canada]

• La Bola Negra (dirs. Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo) [Netflix]

• Coward (dir. Lukas Dhont) [MUBI]

• The Dreamed Adventure (dir. Valeska Grisebach) [Janus Films]

• Fatherland (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski) [MUBI]

• Fjord (dir. Cristian Mungiu) [NEON for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada]

• Gentle Monster (dir. Marie Kreutzer) [Netflix]

• Hope (dir. Na Hong-jin) [NEON for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada]

• A Man of His Time (dir. Emmanuel Marre) [1-2 Special]

• The Man I Love (dir. Ira Sachs)

• Minotaur (dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev) [MUBI]

• Moulin (dir. László Nemes)

• Nagi Notes (dir. Koji Fukada) [Greenwich Entertainment]

• Paper Tiger (dir. James Gray) [NEON]

• Parallel Tales (dir. Asghar Farhadi) [Mongrel Media for Canada; no US distribution]

• Sheep in the Box (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda) [NEON for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada]

• The Unknown (dir. Arthur Harari) [NEON for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada]

• A Woman’s Life (dir. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet)

Un Certain Regard

• A Girls’ Story (dir. Judith Godrèche) [Kino Lorber/Zeitgeist Films]

• All the Lovers in the Night (dir. Yukiko Sode)

• Ben’Imana (dir. Clémentine Dusabejambo)

• Club Kid (dir. Jordan Firstman) [A24]

• Congo Boy (dir. Rafiki Fariala)

• Elephants in the Fog (dir. Abinash Bikram Shah)

• Everytime (dir. Sandra Wollner) [Films We Like for Canada; 1-2 Special for US]

• Forever Your Maternal Animal (dir. Valentina Maurel)

• I’ll Be Gone in June (dir. Katharina Rivilis) [KimStim]

• Iron Boy (dir. Louis Clichy) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• The Meltdown (dir. Manuela Martelli) [Kino Lorber]

• Strawberries (dir. Laïla Marrakchi)

• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (dir. Jane Schoenbrun) [MUBI]

• Titanic Ocean (dir. Konstantina Kotzamani)

• Ulya (dir. Viestur Kairish)

• Ulysse (dir. Laetitia Masson)

• Victorian Psycho (dir. Zachary Wigon) [Bleecker Street for US; VVS Films for Canada]

• Words of Love (dir. Rudi Rosenberg)

• Yesterday The Eye Didn’t Sleep (dir. Rakan Mayasi)

Out of Competition

• De Gaulle: Tilting Iron (dir. Antonin Baudry) [Immina Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• Diamond (dir. Andy Garcia) [Mongrel Media for Canada; Sony Pictures Classics for US]

• Her Private Hell (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn) [NEON for US; Elevation Pictures for Canada]

• Karma (dir. Guillaume Canet)

• L’Abandon (dir. Vincent Garenq)

• L’Objet du délit (dir. Agnes Jaoui)

• The Electric Kiss (dir. Pierre Salvadori)

Midnight Screenings

• Colony (dir. Yeon Sang-ho) [Well Go USA]

• Full Phil (dir. Quentin Dupieux)

• Jim Queen and the Quest for Chloroqueer (dirs. Nicolas Athane and Marco Nguyen) [Photon Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• Roma Elastica (dir. Bertrand Mandico)

• Sanguine (dir. Marion Le Coroller)

Cannes Premiere

• Aquí (dir. Tiago Guedes)

• Kokurojo: The Samurai and the Prisoner (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) [Janus Films]

• Marie Madeleine (Gessica Généus) [Maison 4:3 for Canada; no US distribution]

• Orange-Flavoured Wedding (dir. Christophe Honoré)

• Propeller One-Way Night Coach (dir. John Travolta) [Apple TV]

• The End of It (dir. Maria Martinez Bayona)

• The Match (dirs. Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco)

• Think Good (dir. Géraldine Nakache) [Cohen Media Group]

• When the Night Falls (dir. Daniel Auteuil)

• Visitation (dir. Volker Schlöndorff)

Special Screenings

• Ashes (dir. Diego Luna) [Watermelon Pictures]

• Avedon (dir. Ron Howard)

• Cantona (dirs. David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas)

• Groundswell (dirs. Josh Tickell & Rebecca Tickell)

• John Lennon: The Last Interview (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

• L’Affaire Marie-Claire (dirs. Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller)

• Le Triangle d’Or (dir. Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz)

• Les Matins Merveilleux (dir. Avril Besson)

• Les Survivants du Che (dir. Christophe Réveille)

• Rehearsals for a Revolution (dir. Pegah Ahangarani) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson) [Independent Film Company]

• Vesna (dir. Rostislav Kirpicenko)

Cannes Classics

• A Life, A Manifesto (dir. Jean-Gabriel Périot)

• Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern (dir. Mike Mendez)

• Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean (dir. Barnaby Thompson)

• My Coluche (dirs. Michel Denisot, Camille Bruere & Julie Lazare)

• Nostalgia for the Future (dir. Brecht Debackere)

• The Golden Age (dir. Bérenger Thouin)

• The Story of Documentary Film (The 1970s) [Kino Lorber]

• Vittorio de Sica - La Vie in scene (dir. Francesco Zippel)

Directors’ Fortnight

• 9 Temples To Heaven (dir. Sompot Chidgasornpongse)

• Atonement (dir. Reed Van Dyk) [Kino Lorber]

• Butterfly Jam (dir. Kantemir Balagov)

• Clarissa (dirs. Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri) [NEON]

• Death Has No Master (dir. Jorge Thielen Armand)

• The Diary of a Chambermaid (dir. Radu Jude) [Film Movement for US; Ritual Films for Canada]

• Dora (dir. July Jung)

• Double Freedom (dir. Lisandro Alonso) [Films We Like for Canada; no US distribution]

• Gabin (dir. Maxence Voiseux)

• I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (dir. Clio Barnard)

• Low Expectations (dir. Eivind Landsvik)

• Once Upon a Time in Harlem (dirs. William Greaves and David Greaves) [NEON]

• La Perra (dir. Dominga Sotomayor)

• Red Rocks (dir. Bruno Dumont)

• Shana (dir. Lila Pinell)

• Thanks for Coming (dir. Alain Cavalier)

• Too Many Beasts (dir. Sarah Arnold)

• Vertiginous (dir. Quentin Dupieux)

• Viva Carmen (dir. Sebastian Laundenbach)

• We Are Aliens (dir. Kohei Kadowaki)

International Critics’ Week

• A Girl Unknown (dir. Zou Jing) [Greenwich Entertainment for US; Ritual Films for Canada]

• Adieu monde cruel (dir. Félix de Givry)

• Alive (dir. Aina Clotet)

• Dua (dir. Blerta Basholli)

• In Waves (dir. Phuong Mai Nguyen) [Netflix]

• La Gradiva (dir. Marine Atlan) [Films We Like for Canada; 1-2 Special for US]

• Made of Flesh and Fuel (dir. Pierre Le Gall) [Strand Releasing]

• Six Months in the Pink Building (dir. Bruno Santamaría Razo) [Strand Releasing]

• Stonewall (dir. Julien Gaspar-Oliveri)

• The Station (dir. Sara Ishaq)

• Tin Castle (dir. Alexander Murphy)

ACID

• A Secret Heart (dir. Tom Fontenille)

• Blaise (dirs. Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue)

• Under A Bad Star (dirs. Lola Cambourieu and Yann Berlier)

• Into the Jaws of the Ogre (dir. Mahsa Karampour)

• Detention (dir. Guillaume Massart)

• Living Twice, Dying Thrice (dir. Karim Lakzadeh)

• Promised Space (dir. Ivan Marković)

• Rewind Barcelona (dir. Paul Nouhet)

• Summer Drift (dirs. Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter)

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Looking back at the other two film festivals I covered this year, I started to think of them in terms of how they function within the overall festival circuit. At only two years old, the Montreal Critics’ Week acts as a counter to the dominant, consumption-heavy mode most festivals operate in, its format of post-screening discussions encouraging a more active exchange of ideas between audiences, filmmakers, and programmers. Slamdance, now over three decades old, trucks along with the times as an alt Sundance, with a focus on unveiling new works from independent filmmakers.

The New Directors/New Films Festival, founded in 1972, relies on the strength of its curation. A joint effort between Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, ND/NF compiles films from emerging directors around the world that make up a snapshot of the next generation of (possibly) major filmmakers. Take a look at the festival’s history on their website and you’re immediately greeted with a stacked list of alumni that proves why ND/NF is still going strong after five decades. If you watch something here, there’s a good chance you’ll be hearing more about its director(s) in the years to come.

The quality of the selection, along with the lack of adhering to limiting factors other festivals self-impose (even the definition around a “new” director is loose, as Erupcja director Pete Ohs has helmed at least six films in the last 15 years), is why I consider ND/NF to be one of my favourite film festivals, and one I always pay attention to. I’ve lost count of the amount of directors I’ve discovered over the years, names that often slipped through the cracks of sidebars and festival lineups from the other side of the world. With the festival starting today, here are my thoughts on four films from this year’s selection.

Erupcja

An example of the KISS principle in action, Pete Ohs’ Erupcja admirably keeps things simple to tell its story of two women swept up in one big metaphor. British couple Bethany (Charli XCX) and Rob (Pete Ohs) arrive in Warsaw, Poland for a vacation. Rob intends to propose to Bethany before they head back, a surprise she already picked up on and wants to avoid at all costs. That’s partly why Bethany wanted to visit Warsaw, because she knows the perfect person to keep her busy: Nel (Lena Góra), a friend she met years ago when she found herself stranded in the city due to the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull back in 2010. Not long after Bethany and Rob arrive, news of a volcano eruption far away coincides with Bethany and Nel’s reunion, kicking off a days long bender that threatens to upend their lives.

And that’s basically Erupcja in a nutshell. The significance of volcanic eruptions, both as a coincidence that occurs every time Bethany crosses paths with Nel and as a representation of the destructive force their bond creates with each meetup, is the film’s foundation and its target. This isn’t the kind of symbol a viewer is supposed to infer from the story since the characters are well aware of it, and Bethany happily uses the eruptions as a justification for her selfish impulses. But as quickly as they dive back into old habits of bar hopping and partying, the film gives Bethany and Nel’s glamorized bout with destiny a reality check. Eruptions aren’t exactly a rare event and, as their new friend Claude (Jeremy O. Harris) points out, volcanoes kill people.

It’s a direct dismantling of the allure of romanticization, where one can find themselves deriving meaning from their own projections, which makes for an ideal pairing with the backdrop of a European vacation (maybe Erupcja could act as a bucket of cold water on Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy). Ohs takes on a collaborative approach with his solid ensemble, as the four aforementioned cast members developed the story during filming and all share co-writing credits. It gives the film a looseness from scene to scene that goes well with Ohs’ handheld, run-and-gun camerawork. And since the film is so low stakes with its drama, and so self-contained by design, it’s hard to take much issue with something so fleeting.

Maybe if I saw Erupcja on a different day I might have found it too slight for my liking, or found its cheeky nods to its European arthouse inspirations tacky. But I can’t really find much fault in what it’s doing, and it’s so light on its feet it would probably require more effort than it’s worth to try and take it down. I may not feel especially strong about it, but I gotta hand it to them: on its own, modest terms, Erupcja succeeds.

Erupcja comes out in cinemas on April 17th in the US via 1-2 Special and April 24 in Canada via Vortex Media.

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Agon

I would consider Agon to be, on a surface level, an ideal example of what ND/NF likes to showcase: a film that’s formally audacious, a feature that makes the “New” in the name associate with being at the forefront of cinema rather than taking on the literal meaning of merely a “New” work. For his directorial debut, Giulio Bertelli comes out swinging hard. Title cards introducing us to the film’s three protagonists, all of them women athletes competing at a fictitious Olympic Games, abruptly cut to the sound of gunshots before a smooth tracking shot at a firing range shows rifle shooter Alex (Sofija Zobina) working on her form. A hard cut takes us to fencer Giovanna (Yile Vianello) training in a gym, with the camera sliding around on the floor as it observes different fencers practicing. Then, a cut to judo fighter Alice (Alice Bellandi, a real-life gold medalist playing a fictitious version of herself) as she trains, until her complaints about knee pain bring us to extreme close-ups of Alice’s knee surgery during the opening credits.

It’s a disorienting introduction from Bertelli, who switches between rigorously composed shots and crude, “imperfect” bits of handheld so rapidly it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, Agon wants to pull off. As Bertelli’s stylistic tics eventually develop their own rhythm, the conceptual glue tying the three storylines together sets in. Each woman specializes in a combative and/or violent sport, with all their work and dedication boiled down to a brief competition in the grand scheme of things. Bertelli’s interests lie in the intensity of that process, the toll it takes on them, and how technology plays a role in amplifying the extreme highs and lows they go through.

Like I said, big swings, although most of them don’t land. Bertelli’s attempts to weave these stories together thematically end up thwarted by his formal restlessness, bouncing around so much that Agon takes on a modular shape that never quite fits together. The back and forth between observational, documentary-like scenes and deliberately staged ones become more jarring as the film arrives at its fake Olympic event, with Bertelli throwing wrenches into each plotline that could potentially ruin Alex, Giovanna, and Alice’s careers. These contrived moments point to Bertelli as a filmmaker eager to show off his ideas but lacking the skills to transfer that energy into something that satisfyingly coheres (if you want to see something similar that does a better job, I recommend Yuri Ancarani’s films The Challenge and Atlantide, with the former being an ND/NF selection back in 2017).

Agon will stream exclusively on MUBI in North America on April 24th.

Chronovisor

I may not share the same level of fervor as others who hyped up Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor after its premiere at Rotterdam earlier this year, but the response is understandable. A kind of first person conspiracy thriller, the film is partly the result of a rabbit hole the filmmakers fell into from what they describe as a “passing reference” in a book. Chronovisor tells the story of someone falling down the same rabbit hole by tagging alongside them in the research process, which in turn lures us into the same obsession. It’s a fun experience, a bit of analog horror more invested in the analog part of the term that’ll surely be one of the most assured directorial debuts from this year.

To get the basics of the plot out of the way: philosophy professor Béatrice Courte (Anne-Laure Sellier) spends most of her days in solitude, holed up in libraries poring through literary materials for her research. One night, she comes upon an article about a device called the chronovisor. Built in the 1950s by a Benedictine priest, he claims it can broadcast transmissions of the past and that, using the device, he was able to witness Christ’s crucifixion. That’s all it takes to get Béatrice’s attention, and in no time she starts going through every book, magazine, and article she can find to learn more.

Auen and Walker, working with a low budget, let the majority of their film play out as nothing but Béatrice’s process. Take the familiar montage of a character going through bookshelves and microfiche you’d see in plenty of other films, focus almost entirely on the text of those research materials, stretch it out to about an hour and you’ll get some sense of what Chronovisor is like. And while I’m well aware that my description doesn’t sound like the most appealing way to spend one’s time, Auen, Walker, and cinematographer Leo Zhang ensure the presentation never gets too dry. Shooting on grainy 16mm stock and highlighting relevant passages from texts Béatrice reads (with English translations when needed), the scenes where we read along have a dynamism to them as we watch the wild, conspiratorial backstory of the chronovisor assemble in real time, line by line.

It’s exciting to see Auen and Walker’s confidence in their process, how they trust viewers will be taken by their meticulously researched collection of all things chronovisor (a fact that will echo across all coverage of this film is that the story of the chronovisor and the archival materials are all real). And while the film stays rooted in analog technologies, Chronovisor isn’t too far removed from creepypastas, liminal horror, cosmic horror, and other subgenres that online communities have formed around. Béatrice’s “old school” methods of digging around libraries has its similarities to playing ARGs or reading blocks of text in video games to fill in narrative blanks. While the film has multiple references to experimental filmmakers and literary influences, seeing them remixed and repurposed into this moody, microbudget genre piece is the type of ingenuity we should see more of from new artists (or, if you want a glib summary of the film: intellectual Skinamarink).

Chronovisor was recently acquired for North American distribution by Grasshopper Film with plans for a theatrical release this fall.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers

I reviewed Sho Miyake’s latest feature back at the Locarno Film Festival last summer, where it took home the Golden Leopard. You can read my thoughts here.

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I’ve been beating the same drum about Slamdance over the years, so forgive me for repeating myself. In the now ten (!) years I’ve been covering this film festival, Slamdance has undergone some major changes, although the narrative around it has stayed relatively consistent. Originally a parallel festival with Sundance in Park City, Utah, last year Slamdance moved to its new home in Los Angeles where it now takes place every February. The move was necessary, given Sundance’s decision to move from Utah to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. And while it’s only the second year since the move, Slamdance appears to be happy with their decision. Festival co-founder Peter Baxter boasted about “terrific growth” and surpassing $100,000 in box office for 2026. It’s a figure that doesn’t mean much without anything to compare it to, but it shows a demand for the kind of community and counterprogramming the event has fostered for over three decades.

The other big change Slamdance made in recent years was the decision to become a fully hybrid festival in 2021 as a result of the ongoing pandemic. Like the recent move, this decision was born out of necessity given the public health regulations at the time. But as other festivals switched back to being strictly theatrical, Slamdance remains committed to accessibility through its virtual component, dedicated programming of films by disabled artists and/or subjects, as well as affordability. While Sundance has also remained a hybrid festival (albeit one at the mercy of rights holders, so a chunk of films stay offline), it charges $35 per ticket to one of its virtual screenings. Slamdance offers a pass to the virtual festival for $74.99, which also includes access to their year-round channel of films and series from past editions. And if you wanted to attend Slamdance in person, a pass to every screening would only set you back $50.

As much as I like to check in on Slamdance each year, and more often than not come away seeing at least one worthwhile film, it’s a festival that demands more of a commitment to trial and error. The focus on new filmmakers and true, independent productions make it a collection of unknown quantities, meaning almost every film is a gamble of some sort. Of course, none of this is unique to the festival circuit. Every film is a gamble, and plenty of breakout successes emerge every year from higher profile festivals. But those festivals have more attendees and eyeballs on them, so there’s a bit of help in sifting through the bullshit. Slamdance, like other “lower tier” fests in this silly hierarchy, requires some extra legwork in separating the hits from the misses.

This whole preamble really amounts to a bit of guilt on my part, since I didn’t feel like I could make the adequate time commitment I usually put aside for Slamdance each year. As I tried to catch up with more films from this year’s edition, and tried to watch some of the award winners, I had to cut my losses before seeing what I consider to be an adequate amount of films. Here are my thoughts on four features (and one series) from Slamdance 2026.

The LeMieurs

In all honesty, my feelings on documentaries have changed so much over the years I rarely feel inclined to write about them. It’s partly due to being worn down by the amount of bad documentaries I’ve seen, but I find myself more annoyed by the films that are merely serviceable. These are documentaries I can’t really fault on any technical level; they’re put together nicely, perfectly watchable, and get their points across exactly as intended. These films are also a dime a dozen now, the result of years of successful, mainstream docs that developed a template style and general etiquette other non-fiction filmmakers must follow in order to get eyeballs on screens.

These documentaries are artistically bankrupt. As easy as it might be to sit back and watch them, the built-in, passive response they inspire is like nails on a chalkboard for me. I see it as a backwards approach where, instead of the subject matter influencing the filmmaking, the “material” gets awkwardly contorted and shoved into whatever pre-made form the filmmakers prefer. These strained efforts are always in service to audience comfort above all, an ugly truth many documentaries don’t address. That’s why I find myself frustrated when, for example, a “call to action” documentary around an existential threat to the environment carries itself with a similar style and energy as a fluffy portrait of a musician looking back at the peak of their career. Think of that tired Four Chord Song bit from years ago, where it’s pointed out that most pop songs follow the same chord progression. Part of that routine’s fun was thinking about how something foundationally similar could inspire so many different variations. Many documentaries feel like shitty covers of the same shitty chords heard elsewhere, a lack of effort made all the more offensive by its involvement with topics and individuals that deserve more respect and consideration.

I feel it’s necessary to share my baggage around the format before I delve into my thoughts on the three documentaries I watched from this year’s festival. The LeMieurs was the strongest of the non-fiction Slamdance titles I saw because of how effectively director Sammy LeMieur uses the limitations of his form and subjects to create a more detailed portrait. As the title suggests, this is a personal film for LeMieur since he profiles his extended family in a small, Minnesotan town. The first people we see are Seth, Kyle, and Eli, grandsons in the family tree who work together at a funeral home. In the opening minutes, we watch them prepare for the funeral of their 37-year-old cousin Tony. The three of them don’t appear bothered by burying family, going about their work like it’s any other day, and soon we’re introduced to Tony’s father Steve, who casually laments that he’ll never know his son’s cause of death due to no autopsy being performed. Soon after, Kyle tells the camera about how he separates his work from grief, so he doesn’t mourn until after the ceremony and burial when his work is done.

Right from the jump, The Lemieurs makes it clear that it’s about this family’s compartmentalization given both their line of work and the history of death and tragedy within the family. After the funeral, LeMieur switches his focus to his grandmother and family matriarch Beverly, now in her twilight years, along with her five sons that take care of her. LeMieur sits in on a meeting of his five uncles as they gather around a kitchen table to discuss how they’ll split up the responsibility of caring for their mother between them. It’s a sensitive topic they approach with the banality of doing administrative work, and the matter of fact nature of their conversation makes it difficult to parse out if this is a coping mechanism or an indifference to the inevitability of their mother’s death.

LeMieur thankfully doesn’t fuss over this, nor does he try to dig deeper into his family’s history to offer any attempt at psychologizing or explaining their behaviour. The intimacy of what LeMieur documents makes for a fascinating clash against his direction, which tends to be as unsentimental as his relatives’ attitudes over Tony’s passing and Beverly’s declining health. When Beverly’s sons come over for dinner, a reunion she delights in, the film cuts back to the earlier meeting where we watch her children figure out what they’ll do with her house once they put her into a nursing home. In someone else’s hands, the juxtaposition could easily read as judgmental, and her sons could come across as callous in how they handle her affairs. It’s in moments like this where LeMieur’s direction and closeness to his subjects pays off, as we’ve become so familiarized to his family’s personalities and dynamics that the sequence serves as a blunt reminder of the difficulty in planning for a loved one’s permanent exit.

The LeMieurs sits in that discomfort for a good while, and LeMieur understands how compelling his family’s specificity is in the face of a topic people often avoid. I could easily see a different, less interesting version of this film existing, where someone would try to investigate the backstories and references to family history often brought up by Beverly or other relatives (the biggest one being Beverly theorizing that someone might have poisoned Tony). But there’s plenty to mull over in what’s left unsaid, like the brief moments where we catch the family’s deep, underlying sorrow bubbling to the surface. Moments like these make The LeMieurs more powerful due to the film’s pursuit of authenticity over presentability.

The Bulldogs

First off, I recommend reading my interview with The Bulldogs directors Noah Dixon and Ori Segev, which I posted back when the film had its first screening at Slamdance. The Bulldogs was one of the few titles I zeroed in on at this year’s festival since it deals with the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023. It was a horrific environmental disaster whose damage we probably won’t fully grasp for decades, since it culminated in the burning of toxic chemicals that authorities insist is perfectly fine.

After watching The Bulldogs, I wanted to speak to Dixon and Segev to get a better understanding of the choices they made in approaching East Palestine and its population. This is because I found myself conflicted over their well-intentioned but deliberately hemmed in direction. The two filmmakers drove out to East Palestine about six months after the derailment, long after the media moved on to other things, and followed multiple townspeople over one year as they tried to settle back into their lives.

The Bulldogs is Dixon and Segev’s first documentary, having worked primarily in narrative before, and those instincts show themselves in their visuals and focus on several eccentric residents. Segev, doing double duty as director of photography, keeps the camera locked down, observing and/or interviewing people in precise, eye-catching frames with bold colours that make the film look like a more elaborate production (it speaks to Dixon and Segev’s production background that the film looks this good for such a small crew). And when it comes to their subjects, Dixon and Segev avoid whittling them down to a collection of idiosyncrasies for the most part. There’s a tendency for them to find levity where they can get it, and thankfully these lighter moments aren’t at the expense of the people they film.

So it works fine as a character-driven piece, but the only reason why we’re here in the first place is because of the train derailment. Up until that point, East Palestine was a rural town people (and trains) would pass though. And when it comes to tackling the impact of the derailment on East Palestine, whether it’s the pitiful excuse for compensation offered by Norfolk Southern or the backdrop of the 2024 presidential election, The Bulldogs feels lacking. Dixon and Segev make an effort to tackle it head on with subjects like Rick Tsai, a chiropractor who runs for Congress after he witnesses the environmental destruction firsthand. But Tsai’s scenes are both more political than the other subjects’ while lacking context about the election or even his affiliation (we only learn later that he’s running in a Republican primary and had no chance of winning). And a sequence where protests break out over Joe Biden’s visit to East Palestine suggests a town swept up in the divisive rhetoric of contemporary US politics, but the film doesn’t really explore that further.

Even if the politics here get away from Dixon and Segev, they come from a humanist place that’s obviously driven by a desire to highlight and embrace the oft-ignored people that make up towns like East Palestine. But without a strong handle on the incident that’s come to define these people’s lives, as well as how those lives change after becoming victims of political and capital forces, The Bulldogs can only do so much within its narrow scope.

Clovers

Shot in 2016 and 2017, the one question on my mind during Clovers was why it took almost a decade for the film to premiere. Nothing in the film addresses the long post-production period, but it only takes a few minutes for directors Jacob Hatley and Tom Vickers to have their film’s plans upended. Starting in 2016, Jennifer “Jenny” Paschal works at a prison in Asheboro, North Carolina, a town once labelled the fastest dying city in America. She loves her job, but after a few scenes of her doing the rounds, we abruptly jump three months ahead to find out Jenny was fired. Now, she’s about to embark on a whole other venture: opening a video casino called Clover’s in a strip mall. While not technically (or legally) a casino, Jenny’s business exists in a grey area since it’s made up of arcade games that have been converted to gambling machines.

It’s a bit of a ramshackle reset button for her, which falls in line with how Hatley and Vickers’ film comes across. While Clovers classifies itself as a documentary, much of its first act unfolds in scenes that have to be staged given the camera set-ups, expositional dialogue (Hatley and Vickers also have screenwriting credits), and forced interactions between Jenny and her customers. It suggests a hybrid format, but the film’s starts and stops throughout imply that direction might have been abandoned at some point.

The amateur qualities of these early scenes make it difficult to get a grip on what Clovers is up to. The seams in what Hatley and Vickers try to stitch together tend to be more distracting than what they’re trying to make. But the film transforms itself in unexpected ways, ones that make Clovers an intriguing if imperfect object in how it observes, mocks, and sympathizes with its three central figures.

After Jenny opens her business and appears to be doing well, the film soon abandons her to focus on Sharon and J.D., two middle-aged regulars at Clover’s who stay connected to each other due to having a child together in their twenties. Sharon dismisses J.D. as little more than a fling that got complicated with the pregnancy, while their son Taylor is a lost cause due to his opioid addiction.

This introduction leads to the film’s lengthy middle act, set entirely in Sharon’s house over the night of the 2016 US election. J.D. shows up to watch the results come in, even though he’s the odd one out in the house as the only person who doesn’t support Donald Trump. It’s both an unwieldy sequence and a strange time capsule, with tonal shifts that mimic the roller coaster of emotions one might have felt over one of the wildest nights in recent history. Sharon gets drunker as the night goes on, celebrating as Fox News calls one state after another for Trump until a scene that could have come straight out of a Christopher Guest film. Sharon, after seeing some favourable votes for Hillary Clinton come in, sneers at the “rigged” results from the “students” in the “electorial college” who get to decide the winner. A flabbergasted J.D. tries to explain what the electoral college means, that it’s not college students who vote, but Sharon ignores it so she can continue to vent about the spoiled kids whose parents pay for their dorm rooms.

It’s hilarious in how it sums up the ignorent contempt that fuels Trump’s support but, as the night goes on, Sharon takes a more pensive tone. She opens up about her husband’s stroke, how she went to see him at the hospital every day until his death, and her disappointment in her son’s drug addiction. She talks about Trump’s win as a “silver lining” in her life, and that she might finally be able to have a better life for herself in the years to come. It’s a sobering moment that does much of what the media failed to do in their dismissal of Trump: it shows the pain that his supporters feel, the dissatisfaction with their lives that Trump successfully tapped into and harnessed for his personal gain. But that humanizing only goes so far since Hatley and Vickers can’t help themselves; when Trump wins North Carolina, they cut away from Sharon’s celebration to a shot of her dog humping a curtain. It’s a crass jab that doesn’t sit well so close to Sharon’s more vulnerable moments on camera.

Cutaway aside, Clovers finally shapes itself into something more thoughtful in its final act. The film becomes more confessional as J.D. explains his tragic backstory, followed by Hatley and Vickers revisiting Jenny after she gets robbed at gunpoint. J.D. and Jenny turn inward, speaking about their desires and regrets, with Jenny breaking down on camera at one point when she talks about a missed opportunity as a kid to become a cheerleader. These scenes tie the film together around finally giving its subjects interiority, which culminates in the finale where J.D. performs a ceremony rooted in extreme pain as a way to, in his words, set his mind right (“Not in a sexual way, but pain gets me off,” J.D. tells Jenny in an early scene that foreshadows the squeamish ending). Even if a fair amount of viewers are likely to look away from what J.D. puts himself through, it’s a surprisingly poignant moment that closes the film. And even though Clovers stumbles across most of its runtime, it ends up in a more fascinating place than I would have expected.

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The Plan

One of the few Slamdance titles I looked forward to this year turned out to be the biggest disappointment, and while it bums me out to say it, Jessica Barr’s The Plan exists in total opposition to what I’d like to see from a political film. The few bits of writing I’ve seen about The Plan focus on its technical accomplishments, with the whole film shot in a single, 70+ minute take. Barr drops us in a Los Angeles apartment where a group of seven people meet up as they’re about to enact a plan of some sort, with the details being withheld for the first act. There’s no way I can talk about The Plan without going into plot details, so if you’d prefer to watch and find out for yourself, stop reading here.

The group eventually goes over specifics, where we learn they intend to commit an act of political terrorism that will surely kill them along with many innocent people. While that could make for a tense hook, Barr immediately shows her priorities have little to do with the actual politics of her characters. Instead, we’re subjected to tired, undercooked personal dramas and character relations. There’s Evan (Ryan Simpkins), only there for her boyfriend Liam (Percy Hynes White) who’s also sleeping with fellow group member Sasha (Arkira Chantaratananond); Toby (Logan Miller), who has drinking problems and is dealing with his boyfriend leaving him; Taylor (Jordan Hull), whose decision to go on a date several days earlier creates trust issues with everyone; and group leader Mads (An-Li Bogan) along with her girlfriend Emily (Eve Lindley), although much of their screen time is about Mads’ strained relationship with her mother.

Barr’s choice to put all the focus on petty, personal matters, and reduce the political motivations for their impending act of mass murder/suicide to broad declarations is a baffling one, to say the least. The most obvious comparison that came to mind while watching The Plan was Daniel Goldhaber’s 2022 film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which also looked at a group of young people committing an act of terrorism. Adapted from a manifesto by Andreas Malm, Goldhaber (rightfully) puts politics and radicalism front and centre. As the group prepares to destroy an oil pipeline in Texas to trigger a global energy crisis, flashbacks explain each person’s motivation, with several characters directly victimized by corporate greed and environmental pollution. The film’s point is direct: these people were radicalized because the privilege that separates the personal from the political was violently taken away from them.

Seeing the characters in Barr’s film get so hung up over their feelings, while we only get a vague sense of their ideology, makes The Plan devolve into an enraging exercise in wheel spinning. We get treated to almost every character wrestling between their desire to live and dying for a greater cause, and the film more or less stays on this individualistic framing to the very end. By the point Taylor tearfully pleads to one of her co-conspirators that she wants to “keep falling in love” rather than follow through with their plan, everything comes across as so farcical it’s difficult to tell if Barr wants us to view these characters with sympathy or contempt. If it’s the former, then The Plan amounts to a misguided and backward effort that privileges the personal over the political; if it’s the latter, then Barr’s film is deeply cynical, offering an extreme and defeatist view on political activism that’s woefully out of touch with the current moment.

The Human, Will

Part of the festival’s “Episodes” strand dedicated to series meant for TV and/or online, The Human, Will unfolds over seven parts that add up to just under one hour. The show follows Will (Will Sterbenz), a single man living a humdrum life as an insurance adjuster. Lonely and depressed, his life takes a turn after his neighbour’s gun goes off and accidentally kills Will’s goldfish. The experience makes Will become aware of how fragile his life is, which then kicks off a series of adventures he takes to exercise his newly discovered free will.

Think of it as Eat Pray Love for a homebody, as Will’s journey of self-discovery is about as small-scale and hapless as him. He kicks things off by demanding a demotion at work, as the reduction in responsibility gives him more freedom to pursue things like building a birdhouse (it goes wrong), fixing his air conditioner (it also goes wrong), or going for a hike (take a guess). Sterbenz doesn’t talk for most of the show, with the bulk of dialogue coming from Will’s guardian angel (Joe Pera) who narrates throughout.

Pera’s involvement made me hesitant about The Human, Will at first, since I’m admittedly not a fan of his schtick. His dry, deadpan delivery thrives on detailing various mundanities and topics most people wouldn’t give a second thought, a persona that never felt lived-in or true (it always reeked of a New York comedian’s caricature of a loser from flyover country to me). Pera comes from the same group of comedians like Conner O’Malley and Tim Robinson, who have both made a name for themselves through similarly absurd characters. Robinson and O’Malley prefer to work in the discomfort of their hideous and off-putting creations, with O’Malley’s satire making his characters represent empty husks that parrot distortions of very online, very toxic, and very American subcultures. Pera’s humble, doddering version of himself always read as pitiable to me, and no matter how endearing he’d try to make himself, the intent to laugh at someone so innocuous always came across as a little too mean-spirited for my tastes.

I digress, but only because The Human, Will is too wispy and mild-mannered to generate a strong reaction. Director/co-writer Edward Bursch comes from a background working on Wes Anderson’s films, and that influence shows through the series’ light touch on existential ideas. And I have to give Bursch credit for making good use of Pera, whose benevolence as Will’s guardian angel fits nicely with the show’s sympathetic tone. But The Human, Will is a passable riff on the well-worn story of arrested development/finding yourself later in life, one that’s too benign to have much staying power.

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The 2026 Slamdance Film Festival takes place in Los Angeles, California from February 19-25. Those who can’t attend in person can watch titles from the festival online between February 24 and March 6, 2026 on the Slamdance Channel.

For Noah Dixon and Ori Segev, their latest project happened unexpectedly. The duo are co-founders of Loose Films, a production company from Columbus, Ohio, and in 2021 premiered their debut feature Poser at the Tribeca Film Festival. A thriller set in Columbus’ indie music scene about a young woman’s obsession with a local musician, Poser was well-received by critics and established both directors as up and coming talents in American indie filmmaking.

Almost two years later, in February 2023, news broke of a train derailment in the small, rural Ohio town of East Palestine, with a population under 5,000. The train contained toxic chemicals from the company Norfolk Southern and, after the surrounding areas of the accident were evacuated, authorities burnt over a million pounds of vinyl chloride from the wreck (a move the head of the National Transit and Safety Board called unnecessary). Days later, the government allowed residents to return with assertions that the air and water were safe, a claim many people still don’t believe.

Dixon and Segev, who live several hours from East Palestine, decided to make their next project a documentary about the town in the months after the crash. Set over a one year period, their new feature The Bulldogs follows several people from East Palestine starting in autumn 2023, long after the media stopped regularly covering the town. Subjects include local hairdresser Kay Biegenwald, pizza shop owner John Cozza, high school band members Keller and Tristan, football coach Michael Demster, and Rick Tsai, a chiropractor who runs for Congress after speaking out on the environmental destruction caused by the derailment.

The Bulldogs is Dixon and Segev’s first documentary, and while it’s completely different from Poser, the two films share an interest in regional subcultures and the eccentric personalities within them. Instead of chronicling the story around the accident and the bungled response by the government and Norfolk Southern, the film stays firmly within the city and keeps its focus on the residents. It’s a small-scale approach that matches the scale of the production, with Dixon also handling editing duties while Segev is credited as director of photography.

But Dixon and Segev’s ambitions with The Bulldogs are far from small. Shooting in Scope with deliberately framed compositions instead of relying on handheld cameras, the film elevates its subjects to something more cinematic as they try to return to a sense of normalcy despite being at the mercy of political and economic forces beyond their control. And while some of the residents don’t bother with politics, a visit in 2024 by Joe Biden exposes how the divisive and volatile nature of US politics has taken over the town through a tense confrontation between pro-Trump and pro-Palestine demonstrators.

Before The Bulldogs had its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, I spoke to Dixon and Segev about their new film. The Bulldogs is currently seeking North American distribution.

Since you’re both in Ohio and you’re not far from East Palestine, before the derailment, did you have a connection to the town? What was your perception of East Palestine prior to the derailment?

Noah Dixon: I don’t think we heard of East Palestine specifically. I grew up in Ohio, and then Ori moved to Ohio, and we have lived and worked in Ohio. So we have always been aware of the kind of different perceptions of where we live, whether it’s rural Ohio or Columbus. This is our first documentary, and I think before the derailment we didn’t know much about East Palestine until it was in the news. So much happened.

Ori Segev: Just exploring Ohio, I have driven through a ton of small towns. And my girlfriend is about 30 minutes away from East Palestine, so even before [the derailment] I’d spent some time in that area.

As you’re watching all of this unfold in the news, at what point did the two of you decide to go in, document East Palestine, and ultimately commit several years of your lives to this project?

Ori Segev: I don’t know if, when you start a project, especially a documentary versus a narrative, you know you’re going to be spending that much time. I think we thought, you know, it’s right in our backyard, we’re close, we have this connection to Ohio. Why don’t we go there? [Let’s see] what we can make and who we meet. I think it was very early on, after the first couple of shoots, that this was something we were really passionate about and wanted to continue doing. But sometimes, like on that initial jump, you’re just going for it.

Noah Dixon: Being in a place like Ohio, it’s not like there are many huge, national news stories that happen. I think the conversations we had as it was happening was about how this kind of stuff unfortunately happens often. What usually happens is the news and media will come in for a short period of time and then leave. I think because we knew that, and we lived not too far away, the conversations that we had with our producers were wondering what kind of story we could tell over time. [Let’s] check in with these residents, approach it differently than investigative journalism, and approach it with more of an observational style of really sitting with the residents.

You did receive support from the state of Ohio for this film. Given how charged the situation was, did you have to change your approach to asking them for support? Were you concerned there might be pushback? Obviously, the government might be a little sensitive to supporting something like this.

Noah Dixon: Surprisingly, no. I think they didn’t really even know our approach from the beginning. We put a lot of work into the grant application and what it was so early on in the process. Like Ori said, I think even in those early stages we didn’t exactly know what the direction of the film would be, or what the end product would be. But with the Ohio Humanities Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, we’re really appreciative of their support early on.

That question extends to the residents of East Palestine as well. In your interviews with the townspeople, there’s animosity towards the extra attention and media presence. How did you two introduce yourself to that community and get people to participate in your film?

Ori Segev: I think it was important for us to be seen around the town so that people kind of knew us. We started by filming with the football team, which is such a community event. You can meet a lot of people in town just by being around at a football game. People get to know you. And we would eat at the local diner. It’s such a small town that, if you’re outside with a camera and not at these mile marker points in time where the rest of the media is, people recognize you. It’s a lot easier to approach people and talk to them if they’ve seen you around.

Noah Dixon: I think also, because we weren’t rushing for some news story, we were able to spend time with and without the camera. We would go to the Moose Lodge without the camera and hang out with people. We would go up almost every month and spend a considerable amount of time there. I think that, because we knew that we wanted to continue the story over a long period of time, we approached it in a way that didn’t always feel rushed, and really wanted to get to know the residents on and off camera.

With regards to the teenagers you interviewed, did you realize at some point you ended up only focusing on band members in the high school?

Ori Segev: Well, I was never in band but Noah was. We were definitely comfortable there.

Noah Dixon: It’s so funny because our producer Drew Johnson played football in high school and college, so he was the one who first connected us with the football team. And he was in his element. You could see this old football side coming out of him, whereas Ori and I felt so out of place. And early on, Keller, the red headed snare drum and cymbal player, was so great to talk to. We knew we had to film more with him and Tristan, the percussionist. They were giving us such great material that we wanted to continue [working with them].

Ori Segev: Tristan joined us in Columbus for a little bit. He wants to be a filmmaker and he got to work on the project.

Noah Dixon: He did some assistant editing work, which was great.

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With a subject like this, there are different ways you can approach it because it’s like a microcosm of so many things going on in America right now. You chose an approach that’s grounded. You stay within East Palestine and only focus on the community and residents. I wanted to know why you chose this direction, or why you wanted to approach it from this perspective.

Noah Dixon: I think there are a number of answers. I’m curious what you say, Ori. There’s a part of me that knew there were other approaches being approached in that way. There are politicians and journalists and, whether we agreed or disagreed with them, there was a spectrum of attention that we knew was happening. And we come from a narrative film background. Like I said, this is our first documentary film, but it’s something that we always wanted to do. I think we’ve always leaned towards stories that have a really strong visual style. I personally had been wanting to make a documentary that’s a portrait of the place that I grew up in, not East Palestine but Ohio and the Midwest. So I think that it felt right for our voices in some ways, even though it was a new challenge working on a documentary from a background in narrative filmmaking. We knew we wanted to focus on capturing the beauty of a place and really understand the locations. We wanted to set up frames that allowed our residents to come through, both in a visual way as well as their personalities. It’s a tough question because there are so many different conversations that went into it, but from my perspective that’s one reason why we chose to approach it that way.

Ori Segev: I feel like, at least in the rhythm of the movie, it feels a little bit more like you’re in the town as all of this is unfolding by how we place the camera and let residents talk to each other. It didn’t feel like we were trying to insert our agenda too much. We let everybody speak for themselves, and I think that’s why residents liked talking to us because it didn’t feel like we were pushing anything.

Obviously, the politics of the situation are in your film, but with Biden’s visit to East Palestine politics take a central focus with the pro-Trump and pro-Palestine protests happening in town. How did you approach weaving the political elements into your film? Since you didn’t want to insert an agenda, what do you want viewers to take away from how you’re portraying politics in your film?

Noah Dixon: You said it earlier. I think we felt that it was a strange kind of cross section or microcosm of what was happening in this very small, rural town. And what’s weird is how it’s changed, because we were filming mostly in 2023 and so much has politically evolved since then. Our goal was to show the humanity that is behind this corporate failure that led to this environmental disaster. Not to make it too much about the disaster itself, but more so about the impact on the working class people that it [impacts]. From the very beginning, that was what we wanted to focus on. I think that everybody can identify with what’s out of your control. There are things that happen in politics and the economy, all of these things that Americans are dealing with that are out of their control. So how do we show the humanity? [It can be] through humorous moments, or sad moments, or capturing the beauty of humanity in spite of these things that are out of our control.

You’ve mentioned that this was your first documentary. Was there a stumbling block or hurdle that you didn’t expect in dealing with the documentary format compared to a narrative film?

Ori Segev: Honestly, our approach was hard. I think Noah deserves a lot of credit for really pushing us to not move the camera. Sometimes we’d enter a person’s space, we’d have five minutes to set up, and then we’re committing to that frame for 30 minutes. And my mind would start wandering, like, “Oh my God, there’s something way better over there.” Every time we would look back through the footage, if we did move the camera it wouldn’t edit the right way, so that was a challenge.

Noah Dixon: I think we are used to more control coming from a narrative background, and that was something we had to give up a lot of. We never knew what we were going to get. We would set up the camera, find the frame, have the conversations, and we never knew what we’d come away with. Some days were definitely harder than others, but I think that we grew a lot from the whole process, and I’m really glad that we did it. But it took a lot of time.

Ori Segev: The Biden day that you mentioned, we didn’t know any of that was happening. We were expecting to maybe get a shot of Biden coming through town, or whatever it might have been, and had no idea of the protests. As soon as we entered the town we were like, “We have to figure out how to shoot this.”

Was there a point where you considered widening the scope? I realized partway through the film that you’re not interviewing any authority figures. You don’t interview anyone in the government, you’re not interviewing scientists, nor anyone from Norfolk Southern. Was that ever a consideration, or were you only focused on just keeping it in East Palestine with the residents?

Ori Segev: We talked about it. Early on, it felt like there were other people that might be making stories that are science focused. And it felt more like, as we met the residents and as we were in the town, this was more focused on the community itself. I think we tried [to widen the scope] with the news footage. The way we showed that stuff, it was more like the rhythm of this is the year, this is the news cycle as you would watch it in clips. It didn’t feel like we needed to add so much of that.

You’re not showing a direct feed of the news footage. You’re filming the clips on a TV screen, so there’s a distance from it.

Ori Segev: It was one of those things where we had a bunch of different versions of how that looked. It took us a while to figure out what felt natural. I think our initial plan was that, if we were in a restaurant and the news would be on TV, we could capture that. But it wasn’t realistic for that to happen as we were filming. We took all of the clips we had, ran them through an old TV, and reshot them on that.

There’s a tension throughout the film between the townspeople and the authorities. The authorities insist that everything is fine and safe, but the townspeople don’t believe it. When you were in East Palestine, how did you both personally feel about the town’s safety or water and air quality?

Noah Dixon: We definitely took precautions. We drank bottled water. Again, we weren’t like the journalists that were going right as it happened. We waited for some time. Something we had talked about every time we went up there was about the safest way to do it, or being overly cautious. It’s one of those things that’s reflective of what happened in the town in that time goes on and you get more and more comfortable. We were always cautious of it but that’s what we were seeing in the town. Fortunately for us, we live in Columbus which is a few hours away, but it was something that we were always discussing as we were making the drive up there each month.

Ori Segev: I think it’s hard to know. When you’re there, there’s different information every single day that people are getting. I think people did want some sort of level of transparency, like, “Hey, this is what’s happening, here’s the best way to deal with it.” That was something that didn’t totally happen.

I wanted to ask about the style of your film. Ori, you’re the director of photography, and there’s difficulty in having a locked down camera for documentaries. How did you both develop the style and visual language when you started filming?

Ori Segev: I think my natural [instinct] in situations where you can’t control them is to have as many options as possible. I think it was a lesson in patience. As we were coming back from every trip, and Noah was editing, we’d be able to see how shooting this way was working. I think that helped so much because, at a certain point, you’ve been shooting for 20 minutes. You know you have a section that you’re going to use, so maybe we push in a little bit so we have a cutting point, or you start editing a little bit while you’re there and get some pickups. As we realized how well it was working, it was nice to continue filming because we [came back] and had an idea of what this section in the film should feel like. Sometimes we’d come back from a shoot and [realize] we didn’t really get anything, and then we’d have an amazing next day.

Noah Dixon: Early on, we went into Kay’s hair salon and she had this great wallpaper and natural light coming in. We literally put the camera up on a tripod and it looked like this beautiful, Wes Anderson kind of thing. Every situation wasn’t like that, but we were fortunate to have this visual moment early on that felt like a North Star we were able to point to. That felt like an important moment where we really liked this visually, so let’s try to stay on that visual path.

I also wanted to ask about the score. You bookend the film with montages that have a sweeping, cinematic quality to them with the soundtrack. How did you work with your composers on scoring the film, and why did you want to bookend the film with these montages?

Noah Dixon: We’re really fortunate. We were able to work with our composers that we’ve worked with on our narrative projects, Adam Robl and Shawn Sutta. As creative collaborators from working on the narrative projects, we sync together in ways that really help. Their music helped influence the edit a lot of the time. I think a lot of times filmmakers will have a picture lock cut and then work with their composers, whereas with them we’re working from the beginning and finding the edit through working with them. That’s how we’ve worked, both in narratives and on this film.

Ori Segev: It’s very fluid. There’s a lot of back and forth happening.

Noah Dixon: Even with those sweeping news sequences, it’s not like we found that and then sent it to them to edit. They were writing music that really helped with that, and we were continuously building that out. I think that process really helped with this specifically.

Ori Segev: With the fireworks in the ending montage, we sort of knew the film would end there. Just from people in the town talking about the Fourth of July, it felt like the right place [to end]. It’s the whole community together, and it felt like a nice place to leave the town.

The film doesn’t end on a positive note with regards to the derailment. There’s no accountability for those responsible or justice for the victims. At the same time, that closing montage with the fireworks does add something hopeful. I’m a pretty cynical person myself and it might sound silly to ask such a broad question, but where do you see hope in a situation like this?

Noah Dixon: With the last song [in the film], it balances this beautiful hopefulness with an undertone of melancholy. I don’t know how intentional it was, or how much we found it in the edit, but I love that the ending feels that way. There is this beautiful togetherness of community and this symbolism of what America maybe should be or wants to be. I think that all of those things together felt like trying to toe that line between beauty and hope, but I think they’re similar to what you’re saying. I think that there is a lot of cynicism, or a melancholy feeling as well, that I think a lot of people feel many times in their lives. I think the goal with the ending was to try to hit both of those feelings.

Have you shown the film to anyone in East Palestine? Have you gotten any responses yet from the subjects of your film?

Noah Dixon: We actually just went up there right before coming [to Slamdance]. We did a really small screening at the library for just a few of the [subjects]. It was nerve wracking but we got a great response. They really enjoyed watching it. Some of them, like Keller, now live as an exchange student in Brazil, so he wasn’t able to come for [the screening]. And Tristan’s at college right now, so we’re planning to do a larger screening in East Palestine soon.

Ori Segev: Honestly, watching it with them was pretty intense. We were watching it at the library in East Palestine on a projector, it was a really intimate thing. But one of the things that John Cozza said that will stick with me was when he said something along the lines of, “I didn’t want to stop watching. I wanted the movie to keep going.” That was nice. I think they really appreciated how we told the story and felt good about how we portrayed the town.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Last updated: August 9, 2026.

Like last year, I’ll start with links to Film Workers for Palestine and Strike Germany who continue to advocate for putting pressure on the Berlinale regarding the festival and German government’s anti-Palestinian actions.

I’ll try my best to track what titles in the 2026 Berlinale have North American distribution, although I’m only one person and can’t guarantee I’ll have this up to date all the time. Not every title gets a press release and coverage when they get acquired, and multiple films will likely have the fate of quietly dropping on some streaming service further down the line (unfortunately quite a few films, especially in the Forum, will probably never get seen outside of the festival circuit).

Titles listed below in bold will have a confirmed distributor in Canada and/or the United States. The name(s) of the distributor will be listed in brackets and hyperlinked to a source. Sometimes a film might have distribution in one country and not the other, so I’ll make that distinction where necessary.

Like in prior years, short films and TV series will not be included here as I’m only focused on feature film distribution. Rep titles will be in italics, and I plan to update the distributor info on those titles soon.

If I’m missing something you can leave a comment or contact me directly and I’ll add anything that’s missing.

Competition

• A New Dawn (dir. Yoshitoshi Shinomiya)

• At the Sea (dir. Kornél Mundruczó)

• Dao (dir. Alain Gomis) [Janus Films]

• Dust (dir. Anke Blondé)

• Everybody Digs Bill Evans (dir. Grant Gee) [Cohen Media Group]

• Flies (dir. Fernando Eimbcke)

• Home Stories (dir. Eva Trobisch)

• In a Whisper (dir. Leyla Bouzid) [Strand Releasing]

• Josephine (dir. Beth de Araújo) [Sumerian Pictures]

• My Wife Cries (dir. Angela Schanelec)

• Nightborn (dir. Hanna Bergholm)

• Nina Roza (dir. Geneviève Dulude-De Celles) [Entract Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• Queen at Sea (dir. Lance Hammer) [Greenwich Entertainment]

• Rose (dir. Markus Schleinzer) [MUBI]

• Rosebush Pruning (dir. Karim Aïnouz) [MUBI]

• Salvation (dir. Emin Alper)

• Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars (dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) [Films We Like for Canada; no US distribution]

• The Loneliest Man in Town (dirs. Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)

• We Are All Strangers (dir. Anthony Chen) [Film Movement]

• Wolfram (dir. Warwick Thornton)

• Yellow Letters (dir. İlker Çatak) [Films We Like for Canada; no US distribution]

• Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird) (dirs. Anna Fitch & Banker White)

Perspectives

• 17 (dir. Kosara Mitić)

• A Prayer for the Dying (dir. Dara Van Dusen)

• Animol (dir. Ashley Walters)

• Chronicles From the Siege (dir. Abdallah Alkhatib)

• Filipiñana (dir. Rafael Manuel) [Kino Lorber]

• Forest High (dir. Manon Coubia)

• Light Pillar (dir. Zao Xu)

• Our Secret (dir. Grace Passô)

• The Red Hangar (dir. Juan Pablo Sallato)

• The River Train (dir. Lorenzo Ferro & Lucas A. Vignale)

• Take Me Home (dir. Liz Sargent)

• Trial of Hein (dir. Kai Stänicke) [Strand Releasing]

• Truly Naked (dir. Muriel d’Ansembourg)

• Where To? (dir. Assaf Machnes)

Berlinale Special

• A Child of My Own (dir. Maite Alberdi) [Netflix]

• Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) (dirs. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) [A24]

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (dir. Gore Verbinski) [Briarcliff Entertainment]

• Heysel 85 (dir. Teodora Ana Mihai)

• No Good Men (dir. Shahrbanoo Sadat)

• Saccharine (dir. Natalie Erika James) [IFC/Shudder]

• Sleep No More (dir. Edwin)

• The Ballad of Judas Priest (dirs. Sam Dunn & Tom Morello) [Sony]

• The Blood Countess (dir. Ulrike Ottinger)

• The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (dir. Noah Segan) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• The Testament of Ann Lee (dir. Mona Fastvold) [Searchlight Pictures]

• The Weight (dir. Padraic McKinley)

• TUTU (dir. Sam Pollard)

• Wax & Gold (dir. Ruth Beckermann)

• Who Killed Alex Odeh? (dirs. Jason Osder & William Lafi Youmans) [Watermelon Pictures]

Panorama

• A Russian Winter (dir. Patric Chiha)

• Allegro Pastell (dir. Anna Roller)

• Around Paradise (dir. Yulia Lokshina)

• Árru (dir. Elle Sofe Sara)

• Bucks Harbor (dir. Pete Muller)

• Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon (dir. Finlay Pretsell)

• Enjoy Your Stay (dirs. Dominik Locher & Honeylyn Joy Alipio)

• Enough is Enough (dir. Elisé Sawasawa)

• Four Minus Three (dir. Adrian Goiginger) [A-Z Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• I Understand Your Displeasure (dir. Kilian Armando Friedrich)

• If I Were Alive (dir. André Novais Oliveira)

• Isabel (dir. Gabe Klinger)

• Iván & Hadoum (dir. Ian de la Rosa)

• Jaripeo (dirs. Efraín Mojica & Rebecca Zweig)

• Lady (dir. Olive Nwosu)

• Lali (dir. Sarmad Khoosat)

• London (dir. Sebastian Brameshuber)

• Mouse (dirs. Alex Thompson & Kelly O’Sullivan)

• Narciso (dir. Marcelo Martinessi)

• Numb (dir. Takuya Uchiyama)

• Only Rebels Win (dir. Danielle Arbid)

• Paradise (dir. Jérémy Comte) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; no US distribution]

• Prosecution (dir. Faraz Shariat)

• Raging (dir. Ryan Machado)

• Roya (dir. Mahnaz Mohammadi)

• Safe Exit (dir. Mohammed Hammad)

• Shanghai Daughter (dir. Agnis Shen Zhongmin)

• Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around the Self (dir. Sabine Lidl)

• The Day She Returns (dir. Hong Sang-soo) [Cinema Guild]

• The Education of Jane Cumming (dir. Sophie Heldman)

• The Garden We Dreamed (dir. Joaquín del Paso)

• The Hidden Face of the Earth (dir. Arnaud Alain)

• The Moment (dir. Aidan Zamiri) [A24]

• The Other Side of the Sun (dir. Tawfik Sabouni)

• Traces (dirs. Alisa Kovalenko & Marysia Nikitiuk)

• Tristan Forever (dirs. Tobias Nölle & Loran Bonnardot)

• Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest (dir. Viv Li)

Forum

• A Hungarian Village (1974) (dir. Judit Elek)

• A Lot Talk (dir. Pascale Bodet)

• AnyMart (dir. Yusuke Iwasaki)

• Barbara Forever (dir. Brydie O’Connor)

• Black Lions - Roman Wolves (dir. Haile Gerima)

• Cesarean Weekend (dir. Mohammad Shirvani)

• Chronos - Flow of Time (dir. Volker Koepp)

• Collapse (dir. Anat Even)

• Crocodile (dirs. The Critics & Pietra Brettkelly)

• Doggerland (dir. Kim Ekberg)

• Eight Bridges (dir. James Benning)

• Einar Schleef - No Germany Did I Find (dir. Sandra Prechtel)

• Everything Else Is Noise (dir. Nicolás Pereda) [Pragda]

• Flying Tigers (dir. Madhusree Dutta)

• Foreign Travel (dir. Ted Fendt)

• Forest up in the Mountain (dir. Sofia Bordenave)

• Frauen in Berlin (1981) (dir. Chetna Vora)

• Gemstones (dir. Simón Vélez)

• Ghost in the Cell (dir. Joko Anwar) [Well Go USA]

• Given Names (dir. Nurith Aviv)

• Hear the Yellow (dir. Banu Sıvacı)

• I Built a Rocket Imagining Your Arrival (dir. Janaína Marques)

• If Pigeons Turned to Gold (dir. Pepa Lubojacki)

• Joy Boy: A Tribute to Julius Eastman (dirs. Mawena Yehouessi, Fallon Mayanja, Rob Jacobs, Victoire Karera Kampire, Paul Shemisi & Anne Reijniers)

• Lust (dir. Ralitza Petrova)

• Masayume (dir. Nao Yoshigai)

• Members of the Problematic Family (dir. R Gowtham)

• My Brother’s Wedding (1983) (dir. Charles Burnett)

• My Name (dir. Chung Ji-young)

• On Our Own (dir. Tudor Cristian Jurgiu)

• Panda (dir. Xinyang Zhang)

• River Dreams (dir. Kristina Mikhailova)

• Scenario (dir. Marie Wilke)

• Sometimes, I Imagine Them All at a Party (dir. Daniela Magnani Hüller)

• The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli (dir. Rania Rafei)

• The Moths & the Flame (dir. Kevin Contento)

• We Are the Fruits of the Forest (dir. Rithy Panh)

• When You Listen to This Song (dir. Mona Achache)

• Women as Lovers (dir. Koxi)

Forum Expanded

• Born of the Yam (dirs. Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen)

• Uchronia (dir. Fil Ieropoulos)

Generation

• A Family (dir. Mees Peijnenburg)

• Black Burns Fast (dir. Sanduela Asanda)

• Chimney Town: Frozen in Time (dir. Yusuke Hirota)

• Don’t Come Out (dir. Victoria Linares Villegas)

• En Route To (dir. Yoo Jaein)

• Everyone’s Sorry Nowadays (dir. Frederike Migom)

• Four Girls (dir. Karen Suzane)

• Ghost School (dir. Seemab Gul)

• Gugu’s World (dir. Allan Deberton)

• Hotel Oblique (dir. Merlin Flügel)

• Matapanki (dir. Diego Mapache Fuentes)

• Not a Hero (dir. Rima Das)

• Papaya (dir. Priscilla Kellen)

• Sad Girlz (dir. Fernanda Tovar)

• Sunny Dancer (dir. George Jaques)

• The Atlas of the Universe (dir. Paul Negoescu)

• The Fabulous Time Machine (dir. Eliza Capai)

• The Lights, They Fall (dir. Saša Vajda)

• What Will I Become? (dirs. Lexie Bean & Logan Rozos)

Berlinale Classics

• Carnival in Flanders (1935) (dir. Jacques Feyder)

• Crystal Palace (1934) (dir. Hryhori Hrycher)

• Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979) (dir. Grigori Kromanov)

• In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) (dir. Pradip Krishen)

• Leaving Las Vegas (1995) (dir. Mike Figgis)

• Ninja Scroll (1993) (dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri)

• Prefab Story (1979) (dir. Věra Chytilová)

• Secrets of a Soul (1926) (dir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst)

• The Mirage (1979) (dir. Ahmed Bouanani)

• The Pornographers (1966) (dir. Shōhei Imamura)

Retrospective

• Bamboozled (2000) (dir. Spike Lee)

• Bells from the Deep (1993) (dir. Werner Herzog)

• Berlin, Bahnhof Friedrichstraße 1990 (1991) (dirs. Konstanze Binder, Lilly Grote, Ulrike Herdin & Julia Kunert)

• The Border Guard (1995) (dir. Stefan Trampe)

• Boyz n the Hood (1991) (dir. John Singleton)

• Decay (dir. Mykhailo Belikov)

• The Double Life of Veronique (1991) (dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski)

• From the East (1993) (dir. Chantal Akerman)

• Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

• Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993) (dir. Dušan Makavejev)

• In the Splendour of Happiness (1990) (dirs. Johann Feindt, Jeanine Meerapfel, Helga Reidemeister, Dieter Schumann & Tamara Trampe)

• Party Girl (dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer)

• Prince in Hell (dir. Michael Stock)

• Slacker (dir. Richard Linklater)

• Sunny Point (dir. Wolf Vogel)

• Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989) (dir. Ulrike Ottinger)

• Juice (1992) (dir. Ernest Dickerson)

• Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) (dir. Kutluğ Ataman)

• Orange Vests (1993) (dir. Yury Khashevatsky)

• Run Lola Run (1998) (dir. Tom Tykwer)

• Videograms of a Revolution (dirs. Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica)

• Wildwood, NJ (dirs. Ruth Leithman & Carol Weaks Cassidy)

TEDDY 40

• A Fantastic Woman (2017) (dir. Sebastián Lelio)

• A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2003) (dir. Julián Hernández)

• The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005) (dir. Auraeus Solito)

• Kokomo City (2023) (dir. D. Smith)

• Queens Don’t Cry (2002) (dir. Rosa von Praunheim)

• Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985) (dirs. Elfi Mikesch & Monika Treut)

• Tomboy (2011) (dir. Céline Sciamma)

• The Watermelon Woman (1996) (dir. Cheryl Dunye)

Berlin Critics’ Week

• Beautiful and Neat Room (dir. Maria Petschnig)

• Desire Lines (dir. Dane Komljen)

• Worry Time (dir. Tom Brennan)

• One Minute is an Eternity for Those Who Are Suffering (dirs. Fabio Rogerio & Wesley Pereira de Castro)

• Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (dir. Goran Hugo Olsson) [Icarus Films]

• Justa (dir. Teresa Villaverde)

• Turgaud (dir. Adilkhan Yerzhanov)

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Last year, when the Montreal Critics’ Week kicked off its first edition (also the first Critics’ Week in Canada, as this type of event is more commonly attached to film festivals in Europe), I interviewed festival programmers Mathieu Li-Goyette and Ariel Esteban Cayer to learn more about their philosophy behind their curation and the festival’s format, which took inspiration from the Berlin Critics’ Week in grouping films together with lengthy post-screening discussions by filmmakers, critics, and guests from Montreal’s arts community.

The Montreal Critics’ Week’s approach, which Li-Goyette described as putting the “curatorial gesture of programming” at the forefront, represents a glimpse at what smaller, regional festivals can offer as an alternative to the passive, consumption focused nature of bigger film festivals. The discrete nature of hopping from one festival screening to the next, looking at each feature independently of the others, is nowhere to be found here. Each night demands active participation and interaction, encouraging viewers to think critically rather than watch, react, and move on.

Looking at some of the features making up this year’s selection, the Montreal Critics’ Week provides a more interesting glimpse at cinema in the past year than cobbling together critical consensus picks or major award winners from the festival circuit. Even the highest profile film in the lineup, the Cannes selected Magellan by Lav Diaz, provides a strong counternarrative of its subject that highlights the arrogance driving his doomed quest to explore and conquer. And while Magellan is Diaz’s most “accessible” film to date, with a sub-three hour runtime, gorgeous colour cinematography by Artur Tort, and the star power of Gael Garcia Bernal in the title role, it still couldn’t get Diaz the Competition slot at Cannes he likely hoped to get (Diaz has competed in Berlin and Venice, and took home the top prize at the latter fest in 2016, but has yet to compete at Cannes). The film ultimately landed in Cannes Premiere, a section out of competition the festival uses to dump films they don’t want other festivals taking from them.

Other films in this year’s programme suggest a conscious effort to highlight filmmakers carving out small, singular spaces in cinema. The Argentinian filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine has steadily built a devoted following of cinephiles over the years, and they continue to exist as an anomaly in world cinema with Alejo Moguillansky’s Pin de Fartie. Pulling from Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, Moguillansky and other El Pampero Cine members approach the source material with an inviting playfulness, creating self-aware variations on the text that includes documenting their own process making the film.

Opening night feature Cauchemar Conseil by Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk confirms the duo as two of the more exciting names to emerge from Canadian cinema this decade after 2022’s underseen and underrated The Dream and the Radio. Its story of a PhD student figuring herself out over a summer in Montreal includes a forest-dwelling shaman, an eccentric musician, an unfaithful thesis advisor, and a sleepwalking protagonist that allows the film to hop from reality to fantasy and surrealism at any time. Within the context of contemporary Canadian cinema, the openness and experimentation by Després-Larose and Rousiouk is a breath of fresh air, letting their story evolve in unexpected and delightful ways that makes other recent Canadian features look stuffy and rigid in comparison.

The two US features in this year’s Critics’ Week, Amanda Kramer’s By Design and Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love, showcase artists who appear to have a harder time getting recognized in their home country. By Design, Kramer’s sixth feature, was her first to premiere at Sundance, which felt like an overdue acknowledgment of an American independent filmmaker who’s managed to make a name for herself outside of a festival designed to platform people like her (Kramer had a retrospective in 2022 at Rotterdam where she premiered two new features, three years before By Design premiered). But Kramer’s style – all campy artifice and theatricality owed to older, avant-garde influences other US filmmakers don’t have the same interest in – doesn’t make for a nice fit with the usual fare Sundance likes to show. The film, where Juliette Lewis plays a woman so distraught over being unable to buy a designer chair she transfers her soul into the chair, uses the literal objectification of its high concept body swap to explore ideas around desire and envy, with a few shots against the low hanging fruit of pretentious art world types peppered throughout.

Revelations of Divine Love shows an example of a new, American indie that’s so out of step with the current landscape it’s understandable that, as I’m writing this, it hasn’t even screened in the US yet (it premiered at FIDMarseille in France last summer). Golum bases her film around Julian of Norwich, who lived in 14th century England and wrote what is now the oldest surviving text written by a woman. Her writings came from a series of religious visions she had while recovering from an illness that made her become an anchoress, locking herself in a small room for the rest of her life where she dedicated herself to writing about her experiences.

Much of Golum’s film comes across as a deliberate effort to sidestep cliches and common elements from American indies, whether it’s the hand-crafted and painted sets and miniatures or the anachronisms seen all over from casting to the electronic score. What stands out the most is Golum’s total sincerity regarding Julian and her beliefs. And by forcing viewers to focus on Julian and the strength of what she believes in, as well as focusing on people who support or seek help from her, Golum’s direct engagement with faith and spirituality is a welcome outlier.

Julian’s own act of devout creation through her writing has its similarities with filmmaking (or, more broadly, the artistic process no matter which medium), a connection that Golum makes evident. I found myself more interested in the contrast of Julian’s devotion and selflessness compared to the individualist lens we see from storytelling today. Golum looks at the past in the present tense, but not in the sense of immersion or escapism where we feel like we’re witnessing the 1400s as they were. In fact, the lo-fi charms of the production design gradually become reminders that the historical details usually fussed over in period pieces are long decayed or destroyed. But Julian’s writing, an act of faith that she would never see a material benefit from in her lifetime, still exists today. A closing title card points out that little is known about Julian’s life and, had she not written, there would have probably been no evidence of her existence. Revelations of Divine Love offers a refreshing perspective in finding parallels with our current moment through the stark differences between our own quest for comfort and satisfaction and Julian’s sacrifice for a cause bigger than herself.

Pay attention to the festival circuit long enough and you eventually become aware of the invisible barriers of taste that’s come to define the kind of fare certain festivals prefer to invite (and, in a sad example of the chicken vs egg debate, probably influence the kinds of films that get made in the hopes of appealing to these festivals). Maybe it’s a case of familiarity breeding contempt, but smaller festivals like this one don’t have to be iterative also-rans of whatever might be “buzzy” in a given year. There’s ample opportunity to try something different, to dig deeper to try and engage with films beyond the screen in ways that higher profile events don’t.

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There’s a trickiness to navigating the portrayal of someone who exists on the fringes of society. In Urchin, the feature directorial debut of actor Harris Dickinson, we first see homeless drug addict Mike (Frank Dillane) wandering around London asking people for money with little to no success. When someone does finally offer Mike some help, taking him to a nearby restaurant to buy him a meal, Mike sucker punches them, stealing their watch so he can pawn it for some quick cash. It’s a setup that establishes Dickinson as a filmmaker up for a challenge, choosing to open on his protagonist at rock bottom before building sympathy for him as he attempts to climb out of a spiral he’s fallen into many times before.

Dickinson’s efforts to navigate that journey are uneven at best, a combination of good and bad instincts that make for a flawed but promising first feature. The police arrest Mike shortly after the assault, having caught the entire incident on security cameras, and throw him in jail for eight months. The film then skips ahead to Mike finishing his sentence, giving him the chance to reset himself after serving time, with a social worker providing him temporary housing at a hostel and a job as a hotel cook.

These moments between Mike and the systems meant to reintegrate him into society show Dickinson approach his subject matter from the right place, juxtaposing the dehumanizing process of a one size fits all approach to rehabilitation against the basic human decency Mike deserves. When he asks about what happens once his housing arrangement ends he’s told not to worry about it just yet, a dismissal that exposes how this system views Mike and others like him as cases to be shuffled along a workflow.

Urchin works best when it stays in the realm of drawing direct lines between Mike and the social and political powers he’s at the mercy of. The tendency of narratives about the lower class to look through an individualist lens, where the focus stays on how characters try to overcome barriers rather than interrogating what those barriers are and how they got there, only reinforces the failings of institutions many storytellers gladly mine. Context is key, and some of the filmmakers influencing Dickinson’s film - Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, and the Dardennes - understand how to apply that context so it informs every element of their stories.

As Urchin continues, Dickinson shows a disappointing preference for character over context. With cinematographer Josée Deshaies, he hops back and forth between observational and stylized sequences, including several that provide surreal and enigmatic glimpses into Mike’s perspective. The more stylized sequences, which include needle drops of songs by the likes of Atomic Kitten and Desireless, call more attention to themselves as showy bits of directorial flair instead of adding anything substantive to the film or Mike’s character.

The observational parts work better, giving Dillane the opportunity to show Mike’s emotional highs and lows as he struggles to support himself, although the showy instincts from the stylized scenes creep in and clash. An early scene observes Mike getting into a public fight with a friend (played by Dickinson) from afar, shot with multiple cameras from a distance that appears to include non-actors who weren’t aware of being filmed. It makes for a disarming blend of fiction and non-fiction, but it’s difficult to parse out the intention outside of some hidden camera stunt filmmaking.

While there are sincere motives behind Dickinson’s direction that makes Urchin worth consideration, the bumpy blend of styles makes his execution unfocused. As the social worker and government support drop out of the film, leaving Mike to his own despair and setting him up to fail, Dickinson goes further inward, with more fantasy sequences that imply Mike’s loosening grip on reality. Heavy on recurring images and symbols, these scenes are designed to be interpreted however one sees fit to parse out his interiority. And if the intent of establishing more to Mike outside of the confines of this narrative sounds fine in theory, in practice it’s more like dropping breadcrumbs to solve the mystery of his mind. In a medium that rarely portrays the underprivileged with rich, interior lives, it’s hard to see the point of this enigmatic dress up.

Urchin is now in theatres in Canada via Films We Like and the US via 1-2 Special. You can find Canadian showtimes for Urchin here and US showtimes here.

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There’s an art to pissing people off, a fact that’s often ignored by those eager to get a rise out of their targets. Terms like “cheap” or “empty” provocation imply a value to the act of provoking others, and more often than not those wanting to provoke prefer the path of least resistance for themselves, an overreliance on shock value that tends to come at the expense of punching down on others. It doesn’t take long to spot these kinds of bankrupt efforts, and despite the intentions of lazy provocateurs their methods make it easy to dismiss them.

Two new releases in October, Todd Rohal’s Fuck My Son! and Radu Jude’s Dracula, “troll” audiences in their own respective ways. Rohal’s film falls into the cheap category, a disappointment after Uncle Kent 2, his previous feature from 2015. A sequel to Joe Swanberg’s 2011 drama, Uncle Kent 2 opens with Swanberg giving Uncle Kent star Kent Osborne permission to make a sequel after he pitches the idea of one. It was a simple joke (make the most unnecessary sequel ever) that Osborne and Rohal took to the furthest extremes, using the pointlessness of the film’s existence to run wild with absurd ideas and crass jokes while poking fun at the film industry’s obsession with turning every idea into intellectual property.

Fuck My Son! doesn’t have anything to play against, other than simplistic notions of decency. Robert Longstreet plays Vermina, an elderly woman who kidnaps a single mom (Tipper Newton) and her young daughter (Kynzie Colmery), locking them up in the basement of her secluded farmhouse. Vermina has no use for the little girl outside of torturing her to force her mom to do one thing: have sex with Vermina’s son (Steve Little), a mutated mass of oozing, babbling flesh that looks like a genetic experiment gone wrong.

With the introduction of the son, Rohal’s film turns into a series of gross out moments around the logistics of arousing and fucking someone (or, depending on how you see it, something) with a nightmare-inducing reproductive system. There’s some fun in seeing all the ways Rohal and his committed cast try to be as disgusting as possible, until the realization sets in that Fuck My Son! offers nothing else. Rohal indulges in one juvenile sight gag after another, a supposed exercise in depravity whose premise is too untethered from reality to make any of what it throws in viewers’ faces stick.

The only person guaranteed to get enjoyment out of Fuck My Son! is Rohal, who gleefully stretches the limits of his film in his chaotic finale’s multiple endings, as if he’s giggling at the thought of subjecting people to his work. But Rohal doesn’t let anyone else in on the joke. Towards the end of the film, as I looked around the room at my screening to witness dozens of bored, stone cold faces, feeling the spirit of the sunk cost fallacy among us, the cheapness of Rohal’s film and its antics were plain to see. Fuck My Son! is a misguided middle finger, so unclear in terms of who it’s pointed at that you can only assume it’s meant for anyone who bothered to sit through it.

You don’t have to look far to see confirmation of how Rohal bungled his film, as he’s spoken to the press about the backlash Fuck My Son! received over his film’s use of AI in several scenes. He defends it by saying the use was intentional, that it was meant to parody right wing corporations who would use AI themselves, a context Rohal doesn’t provide in his film. The backlash and criticisms Rohal received haven’t been a problem for Radu Jude’s new film Dracula, whose use of artificial intelligence is more blatant than Rohal’s. Jude opens his film with garish, AI generated images of Dracula repeating the phrase “I am Vlad the Impaler Dracula, you can all suck my cock.” That’s followed by the introduction of a young man (Adonis Tanta) who explains he’s supposed to direct a Dracula movie but, with no ideas on how to make it, he’s relying on AI to help him. Over a dozen different variations on Dracula follow, including a musical, a silent film, an adaptation of a Romanian vampire novel, and more.

Once Jude establishes that we’re watching the results of a hack filmmaker workshopping terrible ideas into a messy compilation, he creates a space where he can be as bad as he wants. Shot on iPhones and around the same time as his other 2025 feature Kontinental ‘25, Dracula provokes viewers with its crudeness and sheer volume, expecting people to put up with 170 minutes of proudly “lazy” filmmaking. But Jude isn’t being vulgar for the sake of it. He understands that coarseness works better as a response, and in this case he’s rejecting cinematic norms around structure, plot, and competence, to name a few. If someone sees that as confrontational, that’s on them more than it is on Jude.

Despite its real and artificial appearances, Dracula is inviting and funny, as long as you’re willing to accept Jude’s terms. He plays within the accessible format of genre, usually horror and comedy, while throwing in some indulgences in bad taste. A direct line could be drawn between Jude’s film and works by David Wain and Michael Showalter, like Wet Hot American Summer and Stella Shorts, their collection of short films with Michael Ian Black from the comedy trio Stella. Wain and Showalter’s writing has an awareness of cliches and tropes so common in narrative film they’ve become rote, the kind of busywork like exposition and plausibility that are so often repeated it’s easy to forget they’re arbitrary.

Stella Shorts, which were produced as part of Stella’s comedy shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were shot on cheap digital video cameras with no budget, and were usually full of cameos from the trio’s celebrity friends like Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper. Most shorts had a basic setup, with some directly based on films like The Big Chill or Die Hard, and used that foundation to do whatever absurd, anarchic things they desired, whether it was impromptu orgies (Wain, Showalter, and Black said they would often end their shorts with everyone having sex if they couldn’t come up with a better conclusion) or using a dildo as a prop. By the time Dracula introduces a chapter about a “cock farmer” who picks dildos off stalks in a field, it was difficult to avoid seeing a connection between the two projects.

Like Wain and Showalter, Jude’s playing within the boundaries of cliches and conventions acts on the assumption that these things are malleable but not worth breaking. For as much as films like Wet Hot American Summer or Wain/Showalter’s romcom spoof They Came Together poke fun at their respective genres, they still follow the overall structure and resolutions expected of these kinds of films. Dracula isn’t as laser focused in terms of its targets. Jude’s recent films take an open arms approach that reflects how the internet and social media flattens our access to information, so watching Dracula requires a constant state of awareness given the high and low brow references constantly thrown around. But Jude’s skewering of various subjects, like AI, capitalist greed, and far right politics, work toward reinforcing the need for subversiveness and artistry in cinema those aforementioned forces want to suppress. Dracula may have a sloppy appearance but don’t be fooled; there’s more thought and purpose in its provocations than it lets on at first glance, which makes its shenanigans harder to disregard.

Todd Rohal’s Fuck My Son! is currently touring cinemas across North America via self-distribution. You can find out where it’s playing here. Radu Jude’s Dracula is out now in Canada via Films We Like and the US via 1-2 Special. You can find out where it’s playing in Canada here and the US here.

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Last updated: May 5, 2026

Titles in bold will have a North American distributor, which I’ll include with a source linked to the distributor’s name. I will probably announce updates on my Twitter account if you’re not following me there already. Programmes dedicated to short films and TV series are not included as it’s too difficult to track (some shorts may be included if they are within programmes dedicated mainly to features).

And if I’m missing anything or need to make any corrections/changes, please comment or reach out to let me know so the list can stay up to date.

Competition

• A House of Dynamite (dir. Kathryn Bigelow) [Netflix]

• At Work (dir. Valérie Donzelli)

• Below the Clouds (dir. Gianfranco Rosi) [MUBI]

• Bravo Bene! (dir. Franco Maresco)

• Bugonia (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) [Focus Features]

• Duse (dir. Pietro Marcello)

• Elisa (dir. Leonardo Di Costanzo)

• Father Mother Sister Brother (dir. Jim Jarmusch) [MUBI]

• Frankenstein (dir. Guillermo del Toro) [Netflix]

• Girl (dir. Shu Qi)

• Jay Kelly (dir. Noah Baumbach) [Netflix]

• La Grazia (dir. Paolo Sorrentino) [MUBI]

• No Other Choice (dir. Park Chan-wook) [NEON]

• Orphan (dir. László Nemes)

• Silent Friend (dir. Ildikó Enyedi) [1-2 Special]

• The Smashing Machine (dir. Benny Safdie) [A24]

• The Stranger (dir. François Ozon) [Immina Films for Canada; Music Box Films for US]

• The Sun Rises on Us All (dir. Cai Shangjun)

• The Testament of Ann Lee (dir. Mona Fastvold) [Searchlight Pictures]

• The Voice of Hind Rajab (dir. Kaouther Ben Hania) [Willa]

• The Wizard of the Kremlin (dir. Olivier Assayas) [Vertical]

Horizons

• A Year of School (dir. Laura Samani)

• Barrio Triste (dir. Stillz) [Film Movement]

• Divine Comedy (dir. Ali Asgari)

• Father (dir. Tereza Nvotová)

• Funeral Casino Blues (dir. Roderick Warich)

• Grand Ciel (dir. Akihiro Hata)

• Hiedra (dir. Ana Cristina Barragán)

• Human Resource (dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit)

• Late Fame (dir. Kent Jones) [Magnolia Pictures]

• Lost Land (dir. Akio Fujimoto)

• Milk Teeth (dir. Mihai Mincan)

• Mother (dir. Teona Strugar Mitevska)

• On the Road (dir. David Pablos) [Strand Releasing]

• Pin de Fartie (dir. Alejo Moguillansky)

• Rose of Nevada (dir. Mark Jenkin) [1-2 Special]

• Songs of Forgotten Trees (dir. Anuparna Roy)

• Strange River (dir. Jaume Claret Muxart)

• The Kidnapping of Arabella (dir. Carolina Cavalli) [Oscilloscope Laboratories]

• The Souffleur (dir. Gastón Solnicki) [Kino Lorber]

Venice Spotlight

• A Loose End (dir. Daniel Hendler)

• Calle Malaga (dir. Maryam Touzani) [Strand Releasing]

• Hijra (dir. Shahad Ameen)

• It Would Be Night in Caracas (dir. Mariana Rondón & Marité Ugas)

• Made in EU (dir. Stephan Komandarev)

• Motor City (dir. Potsy Ponciroli) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; no US distribution]

• Silent Rebellion (dir. Marie-Elsa Sgualdo)

• Tired of Killing. Autobiography of an Assassin (dir. Daniele Vicari)

Out of Competition - Fiction

• After the Hunt (dir. Luca Guadagnino) [Amazon/MGM]

• Andrea’s Island (dir. Antonio Capuano)

• Chien 51 (dir. Cédric Jimenez)

• Dead Man’s Wire (dir. Gus Van Sant) [Row K Entertainment]

• In the Hand of Dante (dir. Julian Schnabel) [Netflix]

• My Tennis Maestro (dir. Andrea Di Stefano)

• Orfeo (dir. Virgilio Villoresi)

• Scarlet (dir. Mamoru Hosoda) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• Sermon to the Void (dir. Hilal Baydarov)

• The Holy Boy (dir. Paolo Strippoli) [Shudder]

• The Last Viking (dir. Anders Thomas Jensen) [Samuel Goldwyn Films]

Out of Competition - Non-Fiction

• Kabul, Between Prayers (dir. Aboozar Amini)

• Back Home (dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

• Broken English (dir. Jane Pollard & Iain Forsyth)

• Cover-Up (dir. Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus) [Netflix]

• Director’s Diary (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov)

• Ferdinando Scianna — Il Fotografo Dell’ombra (dir. Roberto Andò)

• Ghost Elephants (dir. Werner Herzog) [National Geographic]

• I Diari di Angela — Noi Due Cineasti. Capitolo Terzo (dir. Yervant GIanikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi)

• Kim Novak’s Vertigo (dir. Alexandre Philippe)

• Marc by Sofia (dir. Sofia Coppola) [A24]

• My Father and Qaddafi (dir. Jihan K)

• Notes of a True Criminal (dir. Alexander Rodnyansky & Andriy Alferov)

• Our Land (dir. Lucrecia Martel) [Strand Releasing]

• Remake (dir. Ross McElwee) [Music Box Films]

• The Tale of Silyan (dir. Tamara Kotevska) [National Geographic]

Out of Competition - Film & Music

• Nino. 18 Giorni (dir. Toni D’Angelo)

• Piero Pelù. Rumore Dentro (dir. Francesco Fei)

• Newport and the Great Folk Dream (dir. Robert Gordon)

• Francesco de Gregori (dir. Stefano Pistolini)

Venice Classics - Non-Fiction

• The Ozu Diaries (dir. Daniel Raim)

• Sangre del Toro (dir. Yves Montmayeur)

• Memory of the Forgotten (dir. Javier Espada)

• Megadoc (dir. Mike Figgis) [Utopia]

• Mata Hari (dir. Joe Beshenkovsky & James Smith)

• Louis Malle, Le Révolté (dir. Claire Duguet)

• Holofiction (dir. Michal Kosakowski)

• Elvira Notari: Oltre Il Silenzio (dir. Valerio Ciriaci)

• Boorman and the Devil (dir. David Kittredge)

Biennale College Cinema

• Lamb of God (dir. Massimiliano Camaiti)

• Becoming Human (dir. Polen Ly)

• One Woman One Bra (dir. Vincho Nchogu)

• Secret of a Mountain Serpent (dir. Nidhi Saxena)

Giornate degli Autori/Venice Days - Competition

• A Sad and Beautiful World (dir. Cyril Aris)

• Bearcave (dirs. Stergios Dinopoulos & Krysianna B. Papadakis)

• Gioia (dir. Nicoangelo Gelormini)

• Inside Amir (dir. Amir Azizi)

• Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes (dir. Gabriel Azorín)

• Memory (dir. Vladlena Sandu)

• Memory of Princess Mumbi (dir. Damien Hauser)

• Past Future Continuous (dirs. Morteza Ahmadvand & Firouzeh Khosrovani)

• Short Summer (dir. Nastia Korkia)

• Vanilla (dir. Mayra Hermosillo) [Outsider Pictures]

Giornate degli Autori/Venice Days - Out of Competition/Special Events/Venetian Nights

• 6:06 (dir. Tekla Taidelli)

• A Near Thing (dir. Loris G. Nese)

• A State Film (dir. Roland Sejko)

• Be Loved (dir. Elisa Amoruso)

• Confession - How I Found Out I Wouldn’t Make the Revolution (dir. Bonifacio Angius)

• Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t (dir. Dianni Di Gregorio)

• Do You Love Me (dir. Lana Daher)

• Dom (dir. Massimiliano Battistella)

• Full Speed Backward! (dir. Antonio Morabito)

• I Want Her Dead (dir. Gianluca Matarrese)

• Laguna (dir. Sharunas Bartas)

• Life Beyond the Pine Curtain - America the Invisible (dir. Giovanni Troilo)

• Toni, My Father (dir. Anna Negri)

• Who is Still Alive (dir. Nicolas Wadimoff)

• Writing Life - Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students (dir. Claire Simon)

International Critics’ Week

• 100 Nights of Hero (dir. Julia Jackman) [IFC]

• AGON (dir. Giulio Berelli) [MUBI]

• Cotton Queen (dir. Suzanna Mirghani)

• Gorgonà (dir. Evi Kalogiropoulou)

• Ish (dir. Imran Perretta)

• Roqia (dir. Yanis Koussim)

• Straight Circle (dir. Oscar Hudson) [Joint Venture]

• Stereo Girls (dir. Caroline Deruas Peano)

• Waking Hours (dirs. Federico Cammarata & Filippo Foscarini)

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Last year’s Berlinale was the last edition for artistic director Carlo Chatrian, who previously directed the Locarno festival between 2012 and 2018. Chatrian’s exit was not his choice, and the decision to force him out was met with pushback from hundreds of filmmakers. The common assumption was that Chatrian and his team’s selections were too esoteric for an event that demanded the kind of star wattage and prestige seen at Cannes or Venice. In other words: art was bad for business.

The drama around Chatrian’s time at Berlin coming to an end is an easy example to point to of high profile film festivals catering to market interests rather than artistic ones. Locarno’s continued commitment to prioritize the latter makes its programming feel like a relief within today’s festival circuit. This year’s International Competition, which includes Ben Rivers, Fabrice Aragno, Dane Komljen, and Radu Jude to name a few, contains a mix of titles whose willingness to make bold, risky choices means they’d likely get rejected or chucked into a sidebar anywhere else. It’s nice to see there’s still a place for these films that can provide a deserving platform for them, even if these kinds of spaces continue to shrink with each passing year.

The most obvious example of bold and risky filmmaking from this year’s competition would be Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, which he filmed on the same 2000s cell phone he used on his 2017 debut Let the Summer Never Come Again. That means a low resolution with images that call more attention to the pixels making up each frame than what’s actually in them. The film sets up a narrative hook in its opening minutes when Irakli (David Koberidze) receives a letter from his recently missing daughter Lisa demanding he not look for her. Irakli ignores Lisa’s request and reaches out to her friend Levani (Otar Nijaradze), and the two drive around the countryside looking for her after they find out she’s supposed to work on a project photographing soccer fields in Georgian villages.

The film’s narrator establishes that Levani, like other people “in the film’s reality,” is invisible, and much of Dry Leaf shows Irakli interacting with no one else on screen. That choice might come across as a touch of whimsy, but it ties right into the degraded, near-abstract quality of Koberidze’s images. By design, Dry Leaf invites viewers to imagine parts of scenes for themselves, while the camera demands a constant state of adjusting one’s perception to figure out exactly what’s on screen from one shot to the next. In his own friendly way, Koberidze uses brute force to make viewers actively engage with what they’re watching.

That demand can get taxing, especially with most of the three hour runtime dedicated to montages of various stops along Irakli and Levani’s journey. That pattern can get repetitive once the initial appeal of Koberidze’s form wears off. But for every lull in Dry Leaf, there’s a stunning shot or moment right around the corner to keep the film engaging. There’s a constant unpredictability to the perceived flaws and outdated qualities of Koberidze’s camera, and the episodic structure allows the film to maintain an openness that can push the film in any direction at a moment’s notice. That alone makes Dry Leaf one of the year’s most vital films.

One of the other highlights in this year’s programme is Jérôme Reybaud’s A Balcony in Limoges, which played in the festival’s Cineasti del presente competition for first and second features. In a brief 70 minutes, Reybaud pointedly calls out the societal impasse we’ve reached in recent years, making it one of the best examples of a new film tackling our contemporary malaise.

The film follows two women, former high school classmates who cross paths in their fifties: Eugénie (Anne-Lise Heimburger), a single mother off work due to an injury, and Gladys (Fabienne Babe), who lives out of her car and works odd jobs during the day to fund her clubbing at night. Eugénie acts as a good, loyal citizen, following orders and doing charity work on the side; Gladys has abandoned societal norms and requirements, having no bank account, throwing away her ID, and showing pure disdain for politics.

Eugénie befriends Gladys in the hopes of helping her reform her ways, a set-up that would feel right at home among the feel-good dramedy dreck that France loves to churn out year after year. But Reybaud’s direction calls attention to the flaws in both women’s outlooks, from Gladys’ destructive nature hurting those around her to Eugénie’s compassion masking her need for others to conform. There’s little interest in psychologizing either of them as they represent two end results of economic, social, and political systems that have reached a point of exhaustion; one person desperately clings on to the old ways while the other tries to rebelliously flee them.

The film stays close to Eugénie and Gladys but maintains a distance, which ties into the false sense of privacy provided by the balcony in the title (the film’s narrator is Eugénie’s neighbour who lives directly across from her, an incomplete perspective that Reybaud’s direction mimics). A Balcony in Limoges simply observes the clash between these two women, both of them unable to see any alternative way forward under the status quo, and in its own, deadpan way, lets the inevitable play out. It’s a bleak and funny film, and its provocative final act is sure to give people enough cover to dismiss its incisiveness rather than engage with it.

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The festival jury headed by Rithy Panh awarded the Golden Leopard to Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, a perfectly fine film whose win felt a little disappointing given the more adventurous and formally daring titles in this year’s competition. Split into two parts, the film takes place through the perspective of Li (Shim Eun-kyung), a screenwriter who finds herself in a rut. The first section shows her most recent film, a drama set in a seaside town where a teenage boy and girl meet and quickly connect over their isolation and melancholy. The second part switches back to Li in wintertime, who impulsively travels to a rural village with the hope that her sojourn will solve her creative block. When she arrives and discovers that all of the hotels in town are full, she winds up at an old guesthouse run by a man named Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi).

Miyake’s formal chops fare better than his writing, which is why the first half’s contemplative and evocative film within the film hits a better tonal balance than Li’s winter trip. Using long shots that has the island and surrounding ocean dwarf the two alienated teens, Miyake lets the juxtaposition of the gorgeous visuals and pensive characters do most of the work, which includes two of the film’s best sequences: a conversation in one take as the sun goes down, and an ocean swim during a rainstorm that looks like the waves might overtake the camera at any second.

The winter section with Li takes a meta turn, and with it a more literal and obvious film emerges from her strained interactions with Benzo. The intended parallels with the first half are immediate, and once Benzo tells Li he prefers “to see dramas with humour” and that a good film is based on how it depicts “human sadness,” it doesn’t take long to guess where the film will go next. An impromptu, late-night trip to add spontaneity leads to revelations about Benzo’s past, all of it portrayed in a neat fashion meant to achieve a tonal balance between funny and somber. This isn’t exactly a revelatory aim, and the finality of Li’s arc with regards to solving her inability to create a new story is less satisfying than the more open-ended and affecting moments earlier in the film.

Another solid film from this year’s competition is Julian Radlmaier’s Phantoms of July, which slowly but surely won me over thanks to its pleasantly surprising final act. Set in the east German town of Sangerhausen, the story unfolds across four chapters, with the first taking place centuries earlier. Lotte (Paula Schindler) works as a lowly servant to a rich family, but when she falls in love with a poor man who wants them to run off to France, their defiant act of love comes with terrible consequences. The rest of the film takes place in the present, first with Ursula (Clara Schwinning), who works multiple jobs to make ends meet. When a trio of musicians from Berlin visit town to perform at a concert, Ursula falls head over heels for one of them with deliberate echoes of Lotte’s doomed romance.

Radlmaier doesn’t leave much to work with in terms of story, laying out the core theme of yearning early on in the film along with how the upper class imposes the circumstances for yearning on the lower classes. Beyond the strong cinematography by Faraz Fesharaki, Phantoms of July turns into a game of spotting the various symbols and references, like the use of cherries for desire or how Ursula’s plot modernizes Lotte’s chapter. Things take a more interesting turn with the introduction of Neda (Maral Keshavarz), an Iranian immigrant who hopes to become an influencer as the town’s racist, anti-immigrant attitude makes it impossible for her to find steady work. She gets her own bit of longing in the form of a local street sweeper she swears is someone she knew from Tehran. Or maybe it’s nothing more than a ghost haunting Neda’s dreams.

The shift into a more fantastical realm in the fourth chapter, where Lotte, Ursula, and Neda’s stories intertwine, also has the film take on a lighter and more confident tone. That could be due to Radlmaier taking a more active role with his messaging, swapping out the echoes and parallels between past and present with direct, intersecting lines. The film’s final exchange takes a deliberate step back to add some necessary perspective to Ursula and Neda’s plights, and how their situations represent part of a cycle that’s been in motion for much longer than they’ve been around. Radlmaier’s use of the medium’s ability to collapse time and space is hopeful; if division and bigotry make it hard to have solidarity with each other today, maybe we need to find it in the past.

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In trying to find a way to express anything adequate about Kamal Aljafari’s new film With Hasan in Gaza, it didn’t help to look at what others have to say. “It’s a documentary with no structure,” according to one person on Letterboxd, while another says it’s “more a mess than a real film” and a third person declares it’s “not making much cinematic sense.” Maybe the most revealing comment was from one person who said that the film’s raw footage could make for an amazing documentary, but Aljafari’s film “ain’t it.”

This is not to make examples of those people, or to scrutinize these specific comments on a platform that isn’t really designed for scrutiny. What stuck out to me was the common factor of demanding something more narrative, more cinematic. With Hasan in Gaza is a found film made up of three MiniDV tapes from 2001 that Aljafari discovered over one year ago, containing footage of a trip he took through Gaza. He presents the three tapes in order, with no additional edits to the footage. But the demand from the aforementioned criticisms is that the film is not familiar enough in its presentation, and the implication from that demand is, were Aljafari to repackage it in a way that makes the oppression more palatable, it might fare better for a certain type of audience. Sometimes, looking at things through an exclusively aesthetic lens can be about as useful as digging one’s head in the sand.

With Hasan in Gaza gradually reveals the purpose of Aljafari’s trip, which is to try and find a man he met while in prison in the 1980s after being detained as a teenager. Hasan acts as Aljafari’s guide and at first the trip suggests, for those unaware of Gaza’s history or even The Second Intifada, some sense of normalcy. They check out a food market, film one of Gaza’s universities, and observe Gazans on the streets and in bars. The reality of life in Gaza soon reveals itself, as Aljafari strikes up a conversation with a man who recently got out of jail after being detained for eight years. As Aljafari and Hasan’s journey continues, and they encounter people telling them about their deplorable and dangerous living conditions, the constant threat of violence from Israel dominates the film. Its most harrowing moments take place in Hasan’s home at night, where Aljafari films shelling and gunfire from the IDF while periodically taking shelter in the bedroom of Hasan’s young daughter.

The footage speaks for itself. The humanity of the Palestinian people that Israel and its allies refuses to acknowledge shines through in both their anguished cries and resilience in carving out lives for themselves under dehumanizing and life-threatening oppression. The film’s final section has Hasan driving around a city where he believes the man Aljafari’s looking for resides, although on screen text explains there wasn’t even a name or address to work with. The text combined with the film’s soundtrack (going back and forth between old songs and a droning sound) moves us away from the immediacy of the footage to a present context of Aljafari’s own memories as he revisits this period from his life. We watch Aljafari chase a memory within a Gaza that no longer exists.

If there’s any solace in the film, it arrives at the very end, where a scrolling text has Aljafari detail how he remembers the man he searched for from his time in prison. The film closes on the words “I remember,” a phrase used in the context of Aljafari’s recollection of the inmate’s act of defiance against Israeli guards. But the act of remembering led to this search over a decade later and, almost 25 years after that, to this film. If nothing else, the memories can endure.

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I’ll be publishing a bit of coverage of the Locarno Film Festival titles this month. The festival officially started on August 6, so until more titles screen here’s a write-up about Duwayne Dunham’s new film which premiered today.

There’s a bit of melancholy with the long-awaited arrival of Duwayne Dunham’s Legend of the Happy Worker. Adapted from S.E. Feinberg’s one act play The Happy Worker, the film’s origins begin in the 1980s when David Lynch supposedly tried to adapt it himself, going so far as to scout for locations. Lynch abandoned the project, giving the script and play to Dunham, who worked for Lynch as an editor on Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Wild at Heart, and Dunham spent three decades trying to get his own adaptation off the ground. In 2018, not long after Dunham reunited with Lynch to edit Twin Peaks: The Return, The Legend of the Happy Worker started filming. But with a seven year period between its production and premiere, the film finally emerges with Lynch’s absence, a posthumous Executive Producer credit, and one of the last times we’ll see his name attached to a new film.

Lynch’s recent passing will invite comparisons between Dunham’s film and Lynch’s work, or at the very least put one in a frame of mind to focus on the Lynchian parts of Legend of the Happy Worker. There are cameos from several actors in The Return, as well as a golden shovel featured prominently that could have very well been taken from the set of Lynch’s show. But Dunham operates differently than Lynch, with his work as a director largely made up of children’s movies in the 1990s and 2000s like Homeward Bound, Little Giants, and Disney Channel classics including Halloweentown. Dunham’s films have the heartfelt qualities seen in Lynch’s portrayals of Americana (even Lynch did his own Disney movie with The Straight Story) but he keeps his work broadly appealing and for younger audiences.

Dunham’s approach hasn’t really changed with Legend of the Happy Worker. He takes Feinberg’s story, a “fable for our time” that lays out the exploitation of workers under American capitalism, and films it in the same mode as a Disney film from the 1990s. It’s broad, absurd, and often resembles a live action cartoon. The exaggerated performances make the film exist on a wavelength where a musical number could break out at a moment’s notice. Everyone speaks with a wide-eyed, “aw shucks” attitude, emphasizing things with “damn” or “darn” in every other sentence. The orchestral score by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek and Phil Marshall conjures up memories of James Horner’s soundtrack for Fievel Goes West. To see this style applied to a story about the perils of capitalism’s dehumanizing nature is, to put it bluntly, weird.

The film’s central character is Joe (Josh Whitehouse), a father and husband who loves going to work every day to dig a hole in the desert under the benevolent watch of the hole’s owner Goose (Thomas Haden Church). This idyllic existence gets disrupted when an old worker named Pete (J.R. Starr) demands Joe meet with Goose to ask one question: “Why?” The question scares Joe, and once he finally builds up the nerve to ask it even throws Goose off. Goose ends up rewarding Joe for asking, giving him a promotion that includes moving to a fancier part of town called Easy Street. The film never explains the purpose of the hole, why it’s being dug, or if it produces anything of material value. It’s just work, and everyone is happy to do their part.

Goose’s tactics reflect a more antiquated (but far from extinct) way of doing business, one whose prosperity depended on keeping its workers in the dark as much as possible. Joe and his co-workers are, for the most part, perfectly happy digging and getting paid, simply because it’s all they know. And when Joe’s single question exposes the fragile nature of the relationship between Goose and his workers, he’s placated with rewards to distract him.

The arrival of Joe’s uncle Clete (Colm Meaney), a well travelled businessman who rides into town on a loud car spitting out black smoke, represents the evolution of business that came with industrialization. Clete wants the hole for himself, and intends to bring in tractors he calls “earth mongers” to ramp up digging so he can maximize profits. Clete understands the power of knowledge, calling Goose out on keeping people ignorant and scared to maintain his success, but Clete has no limits when it comes to attaining money and power. He tells Goose it’s wrong to quash a man’s curiosity when he uses their curiosity to keep them under his thumb.

Given that, tonally, this is in line with Dunham’s previous films, the hokey nature of this one makes it hard to grasp just how self-aware it might be. The glossy, digital sheen of the visuals and cheap-looking green screen, combined with some awkward edits and blatant overdubs, give off a shoddiness that might explain the lengthy post-production period. And the film’s obvious, corny execution, from its slapstick gags to its overbearing sentimentality, inspires the kind of kneejerk, cringe reaction one might get if they ever come upon a Disney Channel Original. But there’s a dissonance between style and subject matter that makes Dunham’s film difficult to dismiss as a fiasco. Seeing such an overt criticism of capitalism expressed in the same form as the kind of dreck a business titan like Disney tosses out in the hopes of making a quick buck is too intentional to ignore. It’s a repurposing that makes Legend of the Happy Worker a fascinating misfire, one whose commitment demands a begrudging respect.

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It hasn’t been the strongest year so far from what I’ve seen, and frankly having a round up that’s largely critical made me a bit weary about even doing one in the first place. Many of this year’s highlights were from last year’s festival circuit and have finally gotten a general release by their distributors. I’ve also been busy with other things to keep up with new releases or catch up on festival fare as much as I’d like to, but that’s the same story every year.

So here are my thoughts on seven new releases from 2025, along with some brief words and self-promotion on four films I’ve written about elsewhere. Depending on how this goes, I may do a second part where I can share my feelings on titles like Materialists, the new Mission: Impossible entry, Friendship, and (sure, what the hell) the new M3GAN movie among others, if there’s any interest in that (please let me know if you’d be interested in that!).

Read, enjoy, agree, disagree, etc. as you wish.

Presence & Black Bag (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

The Steven Soderbergh/David Koepp double feature of 2025 nobody asked for came and went pretty quickly, and even if not a lot of people cared about either of them the two films got an unexpected reaction out of me. Put together, both could represent a simplified version of the yin and yang that Soderbergh tends to operate in: entertaining Hollywood fare with broad appeal (the Ocean’s trilogy, Magic Mike, Erin Brockovich, Logan Lucky) and exercises where he experiments in different ways (the branching narrative of the Mosaic app, whatever he could come up with each week for The Knick, producing a terrible broadcast of the Academy Awards).

Presence falls in the latter category, with Soderbergh quietly filming the low-budget, single location thriller during the dual WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 with the necessary waivers. The experiment here is to have the camera in Presence be its own character, as it’s the first-person perspective of a ghost haunting a house that a rich, dysfunctional family just moved into. And to ensure that concept meets the expectations of a disembodied voyeur existing outside of time, Soderbergh has the camera floating around from room to room, each scene a single take separated by hard cuts to black.

It has its charms for a little while. At the beginning I got some entertainment out of Soderbergh trying his hand at something resembling Michael Haneke. But there’s a difference between experimentation and fucking around, and Presence soon runs out of steam thanks to Koepp’s boneheaded story (don’t think too much about the involvement of the opioid crisis or its circular plot twist, Koepp clearly didn’t) and Soderbergh’s assumption that his acrobatic operation of his camera rig could prop this thing up for 85 or so minutes. At one point I wondered if he conceived of this whole project as a convoluted way to do more cardio. Signing up for a HIIT class would be a lot cheaper.

To my surprise, the better Soderbergh/Koepp film this year turned out to be the bigger budgeted Hollywood effort Black Bag, a film with over 25x the budget of Presence that can be explained in a fraction of the time it took me to describe that film’s hook. There’s a sexy spy couple, a mole in their agency, suave suspects, and a whole lot of scheming until everyone lays their cards on the table. It’s weirdly traditionalist in the way it treats the unshakeable bond of its monogamous, married hetero protagonists as the kind of glue that can stop a country from triggering World War III (don’t think too much about the film’s superfluous treatment of its politics, Koepp clearly didn’t).

But I don’t mind that since Black Bag proves its point: it sticks to a solid, familiar framework of narrative storytelling and churns out a pleasant bit of light entertainment with a strong, charismatic ensemble. Compared to Presence, Black Bag flows better without carrying around the cumbersome weight of an artistic conceit.

Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler)

To put it politely: I’m not a fan of Ryan Coogler’s populist style, which crosses the boundary from good old-fashioned, broadly appealing entertainment to banal pandering. I came away from Sinners thinking that Coogler is a truly commercial filmmaker, in that his approach aligns with advertising. He’s here to sell a product, and he does it in such a way that every single person in the room will understand exactly what’s being sold in an entertaining way.

And sure, that sounds like the entire point of big studio fare, but I don’t find Coogler is especially good at it. Is there a reason why every plot element or part that points to its themes have to be bolded, italicized, and underlined every single time? Is there a point to a callback if you immediately cut away to the thing you’re calling back to, in case anyone might have missed it? Coogler directs in signposts, and I found myself bored by it. Take the central sequence where Sammie (Miles Caton) sings a number in Smoke and Stack’s juke joint so good that it transcends time to bring together different music styles and cultures. Coogler films it in a bravura single take, but he repeats the film’s opening narration which flatly states the idea, and then does the most literal interpretation of it: by placing past, present, and future in the same room. It felt more fitting as an ad for Apple or Spotify.

At least everything pre-genre switch is fine, since it gives the ensemble some room to show off. Things go south once the horror elements come in simply because Sinners turns into a bad horror/action film. The direction switches between uninteresting coverage and incomprehensible action sequences (it boggles my mind that, after spending so long in the juke joint, Coogler does so little with that space when we get to the climax). The writing crams too much in and then links it together with flimsy contrivances (shoving a white supremacist massacre after the vampire portion wraps up to give Smoke a hero’s exit is a good example of Coogler’s pandering, as well as his awkward writing by jamming several different endings together). It’s a lot of ineptitude for me that has put me firmly on the opposite side of the more positive responses from audiences and reviewers, so I chalk it up to a difference in preferences.

A moment like the aspect ratio opening up right as the climactic battle kicks off, with the top and bottom bars of the screen moving like curtains opening up for the big show, means Coogler is first and foremost a showman here. And Sinners does function as a platonic ideal of the “one for me” film that some hoped would result from Marvel and other Hollywood studios snatching up Sundance darlings to direct their franchises and tentpoles. I can understand that might have an appeal even though, in Coogler’s case, it’s more of a “three for them, one for me” arrangement. All I saw was a messy film, not in terms of its concepts or ideas that stared at me in the face whenever they came to the forefront, but as an example of bland and bad filmmaking.

Warfare (dirs. Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza)

I used to be a fan of Alex Garland. I thought Sunshine was great, and I even liked Never Let Me Go and Dredd. And while I didn’t care for his directorial debut Ex Machina, I thought Annihilation was a good adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel because it tried to adapt the source material to a new medium rather than directly translate it. But what his miniseries Devs hinted at and his film Men creeped toward has now been confirmed by 2024’s Civil War and this year’s Warfare: Alex Garland is fucking stupid.

I’m not sure why Garland decided to step his foot into politics, but the smug, self-important tone smeared all over Civil War and Warfare shows he took that step with the confidence of a man who can’t smell the pile of shit he just stomped on. Civil War sees him imagine an America in the near future split into two warring factions from the POV of photojournalists making their way to capture an upcoming battle in the nation’s capital. Aside from showing America in the same light as the war-torn, underprivileged nations whose struggles are often communicated through journalists (you can all but hear Garland whispering “It could happen to you” from behind the camera), Civil War has nothing to say. Garland invents a political conflict and then firmly plants himself at the sidelines of it, acting as impartial observer overlooking his fiction so we can “hmm” and “ahh” over it. All I can see is Garland looking down at us.

Now we get to Warfare, which he co-directed and co-wrote with Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza. Despite a switch from the fiction of Civil War to a story based on real-life events, from the beginning Garland immediately places himself into a fake “neutral” role. Opening titles explain that Warfare portrays a battle between a platoon of US Navy SEALs and a group of Al-Qaeda fighters in 2006 in Iraq, and the film is taken from the testimonies of the platoon members. This framing means Garland gets to paint himself as the messenger, merely helping bring this one-sided account to cinematic life while basking in the praise of making a gritty, nuts-and-bolts take on the visceral realities of wartime combat. He even went so far as to downplay his role while doing press for Civil War, calling himself a “supporting character” to Mendoza.

What a privileged positon where Garland can sit so pretty. He thinks he can take an issue as recent as the Iraq War, one where the ramifications of that disaster are still reverberating today, and act like he’s researching centuries old history. All of the feigned objectivity around this film is flimsy bullshit. You could take the same approach as Warfare and apply it to the other side of this battle, or any side of any battle. You can point to that as proof of Warfare being apolitical or impartial in its approach, but my point is that this focus takes away from the politics of the choices made within this format: who you portray, who you show, who you privilege over others.

I think of two moments in Warfare that sum up why I find it useless, both of which happen at the end. The first is the final shot before the credits, after the soldiers flee in tanks and the camera lingers on the street’s residents and enemy combatants emerging out of hiding spots before a sudden cut to black. The second happens during the end credits, set to Low’s “Dancing and Blood”, where we get side by side shots of the actors and the real-life counterparts they played. Most of them have blurred faces, including a shot of a blurred family photo of the people whose house was taken over by the platoon and destroyed in the battle. It then cuts directly to a photo of the cast, Mendoza, and other members of his unit all flipping off the camera. Maybe a smarter filmmaker would have put some thought into the choices behind these cuts or the sequencing, or the foolishness of telling a story in tunnel vision with your own method style of burying your head in the sand. Alex Garland is not that filmmaker because Alex Garland is fucking stupid.

Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie)

Alain Guiraudie: one of France’s best directors working today? Probably. Misericordia was my favourite film of 2024, and it received a release earlier this year through Janus/Sideshow in the US and Films We Like in Canada. I first wrote about Misericordia after I watched it at TIFF, then did a blurb for my Top Ten of 2024, and finally interviewed Alain Guiraudie about the film. You can stream Misericordia now on The Criterion Channel and probably buy/rent it on VOD, so if you haven’t watched it yet go and fix that immediately.

Parthenope (dir. Paolo Sorrentino)

I’m not interested in making a case for Parthenope, just as Paolo Sorrentino isn’t interested in making a case for any of what he talks about in his film. Parthenope premiered in competition last year at Cannes and received, at least in some circles, a largely negative reaction. I remember getting the sense of exhaustion from several responses to Parthenope, an undercurrent of “I don’t want to deal with this” when having to muster enough words about a director’s vision you couldn’t give two shits about.

I don’t blame anyone who feels that way about Sorrentino. It didn’t help that Parthenope arrived with descriptions of it being the first film by him with a female protagonist. It’s a fun bit of shade to use the word “first” to imply someone’s dead last, or as a celebration of their first step away from the old way of doing things. It probably made things worse that this first female lead gets saddled with the double duty of representing Sorrentino’s beloved Naples and the concept of beauty itself. Jep Gambardella in The Great Beauty had it easy; if Sorrentino was going to write a woman, he was going to make sure he put her to work.

All of this is to say that I understand why Sorrentino doesn’t work for everyone, and while Parthenope isn’t one of his stronger films I liked it for the most part. I prefer his films when they operate with the right balance of gorgeous and silly (it’s why I consider This Must be the Place to be one of his best films and Youth to be one of his worst). Parthenope shows its title character (again, the embodiment of beauty) going through life from the glory days of growing up isolated to navigating a world unable to understand or appreciate her, save for one mean anthropology professor (a bit of a shame that Silvio Orlando’s performance will likely get forgotten alongside the film). A scene in the first act between Parthenope and a rich man clamouring for her sets up the dynamic she’ll face throughout her adult life: he sees her as a trophy to win, she asserts herself as a full-fledged individual, and he responds by ruthlessly attacking her to try and dim the things that drew him to her in the first place.

Parthenope hops from one experience or fling to another across decades, and Sorrentino does his usual schtick of beautiful looking sequences designed to embody his maximalist appreciation for all life and humanity has to offer, both good and bad. I’m perfectly fine with this for purely subjective reasons. Sorrentino is unabashedly indulgent as always, and here I’m happy to take in most of it. There’s something enjoyable about watching an entirely different perspective than mine, especially when that person has a good sense of style and an episodic structure to make it go down easier.

Vulcanizadora (dir. Joel Potrykus)

Another one of my favourites from last year that’s finally out now thanks to Oscilloscope Laboratories, I wrote about Vulcanizadora over at The Film Stage when I interviewed Potrykus at the Fantasia Film Festival. If you’re in the US, you can watch it on VOD.

The Life of Chuck (dir. Mike Flanagan)

I reviewed The Life of Chuck after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, where it ended up winning the People’s Choice Award. You can read my review above for why I found myself so disappointed by Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation, which I would describe as feeling like someone sitting down to tell your adult self that your pet isn’t around anymore because it moved to a farm upstate.

I’ve been a fan of Mike Flanagan’s ever since I saw his feature debut Absentia and was blown away by Oculus, which is one of the best horror films to come out of the 2010s. His earlier films had a mean streak to them, with broken characters representing anxieties around death, loss, grief, and addiction that would wind up with fates that realized those anxieties in disturbing ways. I like to think of Flanagan’s adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House as the final chapter in that part of his career, where he addresses the same ideas but ends at a place of closure and hope for the future.

With that change in outlook comes a lot of sentimentality and self-importance, exemplified by his reliance on lengthy monologues he likes to give his characters. Flanagan, his wife and collaborator Kate Siegel, and the troupe of performers they’ve built over the years even have a term for it called “Flanalogues,” and I leave it to you to decide if the term should be seen as affectionate or annoying. Between The Life of Chuck, Midnight Mass, and what I saw from The Fall of the House of Usher, my interests and Flanagan’s have diverged quite a bit over the past decade. I could call it bittersweet but I don’t think it’s that serious. It’s a slight bummer to lose interest in a filmmaker whose career I followed closely and championed from the beginning, especially when they actually get the success they deserve. I approach his work with a bit more caution going forward, and Flanagan gets a first look TV deal with Amazon. We’ll all be fine.

April (dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili)

I wasn’t a fan of Beginning, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s feature debut from 2020 that looked gorgeous but indulged in a forbidding style of festival friendly fare that fizzled out in the mid-2010s. April sees Kulumbegashvili double down on that style, and had me thinking back to films like 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Tribe, Godless, and more Eastern European miserabilist fare from years ago. Does April signify a revival of this particular kind of filmmaking? Are we all ready to sit down and take in ultra-precise compositions, characters put through hell and back, swift and horrific violence, and long takes sure to be timed and mentioned in reviews by the trades?

I thought we moved on from this, but the high praise out of Venice (where it won a Special Jury Prize), Toronto, and New York shows there’s still a pulse. I grew tired of the kind of filmmaking Kulumbegashvili specializes in because, at a certain point, it looked like posturing instead of anything meaningful, just intent for the sake of intent dressed up in a style that demands respect. Lead character Nina, an OB-GYN who performs illegal abortions on the side in her traditionalist and patriarchal village, is isolated and miserable, and her feelings take shape as some sort of monstrous creature covered in sagging skin that pops in and out of the film. And in case you don’t get the meaning of this surreal image, Kulumbegashvili makes sure you will.

It’s all impressive in terms of craft, from Arseni Khachaturan’s cinematography to Matthew Herbert’s score, but the only takeaway I had from April was how nice it looked. There’s a sequence early on where Nina drives around town at sundown, looking to pick up a man she can have sex with. It’s a gorgeous sequence, with the camera panning around from inside her car to show off the striking visuals of nighttime creeping in. Then, after Nina picks someone up, we see him switch between groping her and talking to her in a long take from the passenger side of the car (we only see the man’s hands and hear his voice). A few seconds into the shot, I guessed that he was going to assault Nina at some point. About a minute later he slams her head into the steering wheel, in a sudden burst of violence reminiscent of films by Michael Haneke or Yorgos Lanthimos. I don’t care to watch a film that puts me into this mindset, no matter how good it looks in low light.

Bring Her Back (dirs. Danny & Michael Philippou)

After being pleasantly surprised by Talk to Me, Bring Her Back shows Danny and Michael Philippou as one trick ponies. There’s very little to take from this pastiche of A24’s horror catalogue beyond the message that losing a loved one sucks, a universal truth rendered into something facile by elevating the Philippou’s juvenile instincts they try to disguise by cloaking it with the grave topics of grief and trauma.

Talk to Me also dealt with the same ideas, but it was attached to the classic horror story of facing consequences via a game involving a plaster arm that could communicate with the dead. The film sets up a system with more than one failsafe and an explicit rule to follow, then has its fun doling out the aftermath once someone does everything they aren’t supposed to. Bring Her Back opts to keep its secrets from the start, when siblings Andy (Billy Piper) and his blind half-sister Piper (Sora Wong) wind up at the home of foster mom Laura (Sally Hawkins), who’s still grieving the loss of her daughter who was also blind. Slow, brooding zoom-ins on ritualistic objects around Laura’s home tip us off that something is wrong, although the shoddy pacing, tone, and structure did a fine enough job at that anyway. Every moment hinting at whatever dark reveals are about to come have all the grace of someone repeatedly saying “I know something you don’t know.”

There isn’t much else to say plot wise. Laura got a hold of some forbidden how-to videos and plans to use them to resurrect her daughter through Piper. Meanwhile, the Philippous use their tried and true shorthand of fucking children up to make their horror “gnarly” and “brutal” (when in doubt, feed a child a knife I guess). I kept thinking back to the New French Extremity of the 2000s, that little movement of ultraviolent horror films out of France like High Tension and Inside. Those films had more to admire because they didn’t try to act like they were better than what they really were. With Bring Her Back, I have to see the Philippous acting like they’re doing something meaningful here, as evidenced by their laughable sympathy edit of Laura in the film’s closing minutes. This is the same film that introduces a blind character only to have her Mr. Magoo her way through the final act to try and add tension. Grow up.

The Accident (dir. Giuseppe Garau)

After reviewing The Accident and interviewing director Giuseppe Garau at Slamdance in 2024 (where it won the Grand Jury Prize), I’m happy that the film found a home via Fandor where it’s currently streaming. It’s a solid black comedy about a woman trying to claw her way back to stability through a cruel, ruthless environment, which Garau films entirely from the car’s passenger seat. If you’re looking for one of the “hidden gems” of the year, a film that tends to fly under everyone else’ radar, this is the one you should watch.

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Last updated: May 5, 2026

Titles in bold will have at least one North American distributor, which I’ll include with a source linked to the distributor’s name. Rep titles will be listed in italics with the original year of the film’s premiere. As always, I’m only one person doing this, so any info on new acquisitions is always helpful in case I missed something.

Competition

• Alpha (dir. Julia Ducournau) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; NEON for US]

• Case 137 (dir. Dominik Moll) [Film Movement]

• Die My Love (dir. Lynne Ramsay) [MUBI]

• Eddington (dir. Ari Aster) [VVS Films for Canada; A24 for US]

• Fuori (dir. Mario Martone)

• It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi) [NEON]

• Mother and Child (dir. Saeed Roustaee)

• Nouvelle Vague (dir. Richard Linklater) [Netflix]

• Renoir (dir. Chie Hayakawa) [Film Movement]

• Resurrection (dir. Bi Gan) [Janus Films]

• Romeria (dir. Carla Simón) [Janus Films]

• Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; NEON for US]

• Sirat (dir. Oliver Laxe) [NEON]

• Sound of Falling (dir. Mascha Schilinksi) [MUBI]

• The Eagles of the Republic (dir. Tarik Saleh) [Cohen Media Group]

• The History of Sound (dir. Oliver Hermanus) [MUBI]

• The Little Sister (dir. Hafsia Herzi) [Strand Releasing]

• The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt) [MUBI]

• The Phoenician Scheme (dir. Wes Anderson) [Focus Features]

• The Secret Agent (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho) [NEON]

• Two Prosecutors (dir. Sergei Loznitsa) [Janus Films]

• Young Mothers (dirs. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) [Music Box Films]

Un Certain Regard

• A Pale View of the Hills (dir. Kei Ishikawa)

• A Poet (dir. Simón Mesa Soto) [1-2 Special for US; Films We Like for Canada]

• Aisha Can’t Fly Away (dir. Morad Mostafa)

• Eleanor the Great (dir. Scarlett Johansson) [TriStar Pictures/Sony Pictures Classics]

• Heads or Tails? (dirs. Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis) [Samuel Goldwyn Films]

• Homebound (dir. Neeraj Ghaywan) [Dharma Productions]

• I Only Rest in the Storm (dir. Pedro Pinho)

• Karavan (dir. Zuzana Kirchnerová)

• Love Me Tender (dir. Anna Cazenave Cambet) [Axia Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• Meteors (dir.  Hubert Charuel)

• My Father’s Shadow (dir. Akinola Davies Jr) [MUBI]

• Once Upon A Time In Gaza (dirs. Tarzan Nasser and Arab Nasser) [Watermelon Pictures]

• Pillion (dir. Harry Lighton) [A24]

• Promised Sky (dir. Erige Sehiri) [Film Movement]

• The Chronology of Water (dir. Kristen Stewart) [The Forge]

• The Great Arch (dir. Stéphane Demoustier) [TVA Films for Canada; Cohen Media Group for US]

• The Last One for the Road (dir. Francesco Sossai) [Ritual Films for Canada; Music Box Films for US]

• The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (dir. Diego Céspedes) [Altered Innocence]

• The Plague (dir. Charlie Polinger) [Independent Film Company]

• Urchin (dir. Harris Dickinson) [1-2 Special]

Out of Competition

• 13 Days, 13 Nights (dir. Martin Bourboulon) [Samuel Goldwyn Films]

• Colours of Time (dir. Cédric Klapisch) [Mongrel Media for Canada; no US distribution]

• Highest 2 Lowest (dir. Spike Lee) [A24/Apple TV+]

• Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (dir. Christopher McQuarrie) [Paramount Pictures]

• Partir un jour (dir. Amélie Bonnin)

• The Richest Woman in the World (dir. Thierry Klifa)

• Vie Privée (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski) [Sony Pictures Classics]

Midnight Screenings

• Dalloway (dir. Yann Gozlan)

• Exit 8 (dir. Kawamura Genki) [NEON]

• Honey Don’t (dir. Ethan Coen) [Focus Features]

• No One Will Know (dir. Vincent Maël Cardona)

• Sons of the Neon Night (dir. Juno Mak)

Cannes Premiere

• Amrum (dir. Fatih Akin) [Kino Lorber]

• Connemara (dir. Alex Lutz)

• Ma frère (dirs. Lise Akoka & Romane Gueret)

• Magellan (dir. Lav Diaz) [Janus Films]

• Orwell: 2+2 =5 (dir. Raoul Peck) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; NEON for US]

• Love on Trial (dir. Kōji Fukada)

• Splitsville (dir. Michael Angelo Covino) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; NEON for US]

• The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (dir. Kirill Serebrennikov)

• The Love That Remains (dir. Hlynur Pálmason) [Janus Films]

• The Wave (dir. Sebastián Lelio) [Wolfe Video]

Special Screenings

• A Magnificent Life (dir. Sylvain Chomet) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• Arco (dir. Ugo Bienvenu) [NEON]

• Bono: Stories of Surrender (dir. Andrew Dominik) [Apple TV+]

• L’homme Qui A Vu L’Ours Qui A Vu l’homme (dir. Pierre Richard)

• Little Amélie (dirs. Maïlys Vallade & Liane-Cho Han) [GKIDS]

• Mama (dir. Or Sinai)

• Tell Her I Love Her (dir. Romane Bohringer)

• The Six Billion Dollar Man (dir. Eugene Jarecki)

• The Wonderers (dir. Joséphine Japy)

Cannes Classics

• Amores Perros (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu) {2000} [MUBI]

• Barry Lyndon (dir. Stanley Kubrick) {1974} [Warner Bros.]

• Beyond Oblivion (dir. Hugo del Carril) {1955}

• Bo Being Bo Widerberg (dirs. Jon Asp and Mattias Nohrborg)

• Chronicle of the Years of Embers (dir. Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina) {1975}

• Comanche Territory (dir. George Sherman) {1950} [Universal Pictures]

• Days and Nights in the Forest (dir. Satyajit Ray) {1970} [Janus Films]

• Dogma (dir. Kevin Smith) {1999} [Iconic Events]

• Floating Clouds (dir. Mikio Naruse) {1955}

• Hard Boiled (dir. John Woo) {1992} [Shout! Studios]

• I Love Peru (dirs. Raphaël Quenard & Hugo David)

• La Paga (dir. Ciro Durán) {1962}

• Leading the Race (dir. Joël Santoni) {1974}

• Magirama (dirs. Abel Gance & Nelly Kaplan) {1956}

• Merlusse (dir. Marcel Pagnol) {1935}

• My Mom Jayne (dir. Mariska Hargitay) [HBO]

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Miloš Forman) {1975} [Warner Bros.]

• Red Canyon (dir. George Sherman) {1949} [Universal Pictures]

• Said Effendi (dir. Kameran Husni) {1955}

• Slauson Rec (dir. Leo Lewis O’Neil)

• Stars (dir. Konrad Wolf) {1959}

• Sunshine (dir. István Szabó) {1999}

• The Arch (dir. T’ang Shushuen) {1968}

• The Girls (dir. Sumitra Peries) {1978}

• The Gold Rush (dir. Charlie Chaplin) {1925} [Janus Films]

• The One I Loved (dir. Diane Kury)

• To Vigo I Go (dirs. Lírio Ferreira and Karen Harley)

• Watch What You Say (dir. Vincent Glenn)

• Welcome to Hollywood (dir. Stéphane Ghez)

• Yi Yi (dir. Edward Yang) {2000} [Janus Films]

Cinéma de la plage

• A Hidden Life (dir. Terrence Malick) {2019} [Searchlight Pictures]

• Ange (dir. Tony Gatlif)

• Angel’s Egg (dir. Mamoru Oshii) {1985} [GKIDS]

• Any Number Can Win (dir. Henri Verneuil) {1963}

• Bardot (dir. Alain Berliner)

• Darling (dir. John Schlesinger) {1965}

• Duel in the Sun (dir. King Vidor) {1946}

• Hard Boiled (dir. John Woo) {1992} [Shout! Studios]

• Naked Autumn (dir. François Leterrier) {1961}

• Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder) {1950} [Paramount Pictures]

• The Legend of the Palme d’Or Continues… (dir. Alexis Veller)

• Red Wood Pigeon (dir. Nanni Moretti) {1989}

Directors’ Fortnight

• Brand New Landscape (dir. Yuiga Danzuka)

• Dangerous Animals (dir. Sean Byrne) [Elevation Pictures for Canada; Shudder for US]

• Death Does Not Exist (dir. Félix Dufour-Laperrière) [Maison 4:3 in Canada; no US distribution]

• Enzo (dir. Robin Campillo)

• Girl on Edge (dir. Jinghao Zhou)

• Her Will Be Done (dir. Julia Kowalski)

• Incomptables (dir. Thomas Ngijol)

• Kokuho (dir. Lee Sang-il) [GKIDS]

• Lucky Lu (dir. Lloyd Lee Choi)

• Militantropos (dirs. Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova & Simon Mozgovyi)

• Mirrors No. 3 (dir. Christian Petzold) [1-2 Special]

• Peak Everything (dir. Anne Émond) [Immina Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• Sorry, Baby (dir. Eva Victor) [VVS Films for Canada; A24 for US]

• The Girl in the Snow (dir. Louise Hémon)

• The Girls We Want (dir. Prïncia Car)

• The Party's Over! (dir. Antony Cordier) [Axia Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• The President's Cake (dir. Hasan Hadi) [Sony Pictures Classics]

• Wild Foxes (dir. Valéry Carnoy)

• Yes (dir. Nadav Lapid) [Kino Lorber]

International Critics’ Week

• A Useful Ghost (dir. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke) [Cineverse]

• Adam’s Sake (dir. Laura Wandel)

• Baise-en-ville (dir. Martin Jauvat)

• Dandelion’s Odyssey (dir. Momoko Seto)

• Imago (dir. Déni Oumar Pitsaev)

• Kika (dir. Alexe Poukine)

• Left-Handed Girl (dir. Shih-Ching Tsou) [Netflix]

• Love Letters (dir. Alice Douard) [Immina Films for Canada; no US distribution]

• Nino (dir. Pauline Loquès)

• Reedland (dir. Sven Bresser) [Outsider Pictures]

• Sleepless City (dir. Guillermo Galoe)

ACID

• A Light That Never Goes Out (dir. Lauri-Matti Parppei)

• Drifting Laurent (dirs. Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture & Mattéo Eustachon) [Wolfe Video]

• Drunken Noodles (dir. Lucio Castro) [Strand Releasing]

• Entroncamento (dir. Pedro Cabeleira)

• L'aventura (dir. Sophie Letourneur)

• Life After Siham (dir. Namir Abdel Messeeh)

• Nuit Obscure – Ain’t I A Child? (dir. Sylvain George)

• Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk (dir. Sepideh Farsi) [Kino Lorber]

• The Black Snake (dir. Aurélien Vernhes-Lermusiaux)

The 31st edition of the Slamdance Film Festival takes place in Los Angeles, California between February 20 and 26, 2025. The festival lineup will also be available to view virtually from February 24 to March 7 at https://www.slamdancechannel.com. You can buy a virtual pass for Slamdance over at the festival’s official website.

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Banr (dir. Erica Xia-Hou)

Credit where it’s due: while not entirely successful, Erica Xia-Hou’s Banr is the kind of swing for the fences filmmaking I was hoping to see more of from this year’s Narrative Features strand. It’s also a bit of a surprise as a debut from Xia-Hou, whose prior credits include acting in, writing, and editing major productions in China starring the likes of Jackie Chan and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Banr has her in the roles of director, writer, editor, co-star, and co-producer, filming on a low budget with non-professional actors in a frenetic portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease tearing a family apart.

The film opens with Liu Ximei (Sui Li) at a nursing home watching a video of her husband Zhang Jianjun (Baoqing Li) explaining that he’s dead, leaving behind recorded videos to help her remember the past. Revealing this information at the outset before flashing back initially comes across as trite, but Xia-Hou’s structure and editing makes the information irrelevant. Frequently cutting back and forth through time and unfolding in fragmented scenes, Banr remains unsettled for most of its runtime to approximate the lack of control when dealing with Alzheimer’s.

The key word being approximate, as Xia-Hou thankfully avoids keeping her film strictly in Liu Ximei’s perspective. Banr frequently switches perspectives between the couple, at one point showing Zhang’s dreams. Rather than take the route of trying to portray Alzheimer’s, Xia-Hou lets her film unfold like it’s flipping back and forth through a rolodex of memories, and the chaotic jumbling conveys the stress and devastation of navigating a loved one’s crumbling awareness.

There are brief periods when Banr comes close to realizing its ambition, where the cumulative history of this couple’s experiences collapse into compelling, sensorial moments. But Xia-Hou frequently pulls back, and eventually runs to the safety of narrative and convention to ground her film. There’s a scene where Zhang heads back to his apartment and the film begins to crosscut between him and Liu back home, an attempt to build tension as he’s left her unattended. It’s a jarring scene because of how it suddenly introduces a contrivance that rings false compared to everything surrounding that moment.

As Banr continues, Xia-Hou settles into sentimentality as she pushes a message about love being the only constant through tragedy. It’s not so much the message that’s the issue as it is the sappy execution of it. The film goes from compelling experimentation to hammering its themes with a blunt force that clashes against its lack of cohesion.

Portal to Hell (dir. Woody Bess)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and so is Portal to Hell, an uneven comedy that wants to be a satire on Los Angeles and a sincere look at how guilt and grief go hand in hand. Debt collector Dunn (Trey Holland), hating his job and getting over the loss of his brother, is the one to discover the portal in a laundromat dryer, although no one else seems too bothered by it. Eventually a demon named Chip (Richard Kind) pops out and explains to Dunn that he’s here to collect the soul of Dunn’s dying neighbour Mr. Bobshank (Keith David). Dunn sees an opportunity to save someone’s life and agrees to give Chip three souls in exchange for his neighbour’s safety.

Writer/director Woody Bess lucked out getting the likes of David and Kind in his debut, along with a cameo by MadTV star Michael McDonald. All three give solid performances that show off their reliability as comedic performers, with Kind providing the film’s few funny moments as a demon who loves his job. Aside from that, Portal to Hell is overly corny as a comedy, which makes its last act switch to sappy sentimentality unsurprising. One of the few things going for it is its matter of fact approach to the portal itself, and how people like laundromat manager Ed (Romina D’Ugo) treat it like an annoyance that will only make their job more difficult. Bess’ running joke that nothing really fazes Angelenos works because it’s part of the film’s DNA and shown rather than told, a trait that should have been applied elsewhere in his film.

American Theater (dirs. Nicholas Clark & Dylan Frederick)

A documentary full of unrealized potential, Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick’s American Theater follows Brian Clowdus, a self-described entrepreneur who was the artistic director of an immersive theatre company in Atlanta that pulled off elaborate stagings of plays and musicals. In 2019, Clowdus was “cancelled” after multiple allegations of aggression, sexual harassment, racism, and unsafe work conditions forced him to resign. Since then, Clowdus rebranded himself into a Republican Trump supporter and returned to Atlanta to direct a new, immersive play about the Salem witch trials, with a cast of friends also exiled from their respective arts communities over their problematic views.

Clark and Frederick take a strictly observational approach to Clowdus and his troupe and their politics, to the point where there’s almost an aversion by them to tipping their hands in any direction. If anything, Clowdus gets judged more for his arrogance and entitlement in the ways he bulldozes over everyone else to get his way, safety and standards be damned. His play’s eventual undoing turns out to be something he was warned about from the very start, which Clowdus shrugged off. Once faced with the consequences of his recklessness, he simply ignores the reasons so he can feed it to his persecution complex over being cancelled by “woke” liberals.

There are plenty of chances for American Theater to coalesce into a strong statement. The documentary also follows Clowdus as he travels between Atlanta and Florida, where he’s running a campaign to become the Republican candidate for a state congressional seat. Watching the behind the scenes process of a conservative, reactionary play has a compelling quality given the commonly liberal association with these kinds of artistic spaces, along with a group of “outcasts” who used to exist in those spaces finding their own warped sense of community. There’s a bigger picture American Theater could have engaged with. Clark and Frederick prefer to keep a narrow view on their subjects, resulting in a muddled perspective and a missed opportunity.

The Hole Story (dir. Elijah Sullivan)

I’ll admit it hasn’t been the best edition of Slamdance for me, although I’m sure the reviews have been reflective of that. This is an inevitability of covering film festivals, especially one filled with largely unknown quantities. Sometimes it amounts to playing a game of chance, with the hopes of landing upon a true hidden gem. But getting to that point requires a lot of digging through titles, and while not every film is an outright success, the independent nature of these productions usually means they contain something of interest. If any of the films I covered this year didn’t have anything worth discussing, even in a critical manner, I wouldn’t have bothered finishing them.

So let me save the best for last with Elijah Sullivan’s The Hole Story, a modest documentary that turned out to be the highlight of my experience watching Slamdance titles this year. Sullivan comes from the town of Mount Shasta, California, named after the volcano it’s next to. In 2009, someone discovered a strange hole on the volcano’s slope approximately 60 feet deep and clearly man made given the equipment found at the bottom. Beyond the few items left behind, there was no other evidence of who dug the hole.

Sullivan uses this mystery to dive into the history of his town, framing it as his own investigation of who might have been responsible for the hole and what might have been found in it. The most obvious theory, and the one the authorities believe, is that people were illegally mining for minerals. Sullivan presents different theories, each one providing background on Mount Shasta’s history of attracting “spiritual tourists” and cults who believe in a theory that the volcano contains a secret, underground alien civilization. The Hole Story interviews several of these believers, although they mostly amount to red herrings when it comes to figuring out the truth about who dug the hole.

The film does eventually get answers of some sort through someone who claims he worked on the dig, but his story only brings up more questions. By the end, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Sullivan isn’t particularly invested in solving the mystery. The portrait he paints of Mount Shasta, while shot like a stylish investigative report, is one of people causing destruction in their pursuit of proving con artist cult leaders correct. By the end, the origins of the hole remain unknown because there probably isn’t anything to find. It amounts to a symbol of how deep people can go when fooled by a deceptive belief system. In this case, it’s about 63 feet.

The 31st edition of the Slamdance Film Festival takes place in Los Angeles, California between February 20 and 26, 2025. The festival lineup will also be available to view virtually from February 24 to March 7 at https://www.slamdancechannel.com. You can buy a virtual pass for Slamdance over at the festival’s official website.

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Foul Evil Deeds (dir. Richard Hunter)

It starts with establishing as much distance as possible between viewer and film. A title card reads “The events depicted in this film are all based on true stories” before a fisheye lens shot of a theatre from the stage. The lights turn on to reveal an empty audience, then a cut to a green curtain pulling back to the film’s “first” shot. The rest of the film doesn’t take place on a stage, although the theatrical context makes it clear we have to look at Richard Hunter’s film at a remove.

That choice might have borne out of Hunter and cinematographer John Fisher’s decision to shoot on a miniDV camcorder from the 1990s, a format that had a brief flash of popularity in the early 2000s with a handful of prominent filmmakers like David Lynch and Agnes Varda. Its fuzzy, standard definition visuals and consumer-grade status associates it with the roughness and intimacy of home videos, yet Foul Evil Deeds does everything it can to avoid that association through precise, locked down compositions and slow, deliberate pans and zooms. Once the opening contextualization establishes the amount of distance between the film and audience, the style maintains it.

These are logical choices, given Foul Evil Deeds’ structure. The film unfolds through six vignettes, all set in London but none of them ever crossing paths. Hunter cuts back and forth between them, separating each sequence with a hard cut to black that brings to mind Michael Haneke’s films like 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and Code Unknown. And while Hunter takes his film into some bleak and uncomfortable directions, the overall tone leans more into dry comedy like the films of Roy Andersson. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Hunter cited Haneke and Andersson as influences on his film.

What Hunter brings to his film outside of the obvious reference points coalesces into a shallow and disappointing statement given all of the effort in developing the film’s visual language. Not every storyline gets the same amount of attention, so several emerge as the primary narratives. These stories play out in a straight line, with Hunter chopping them up into smaller fragments and putting other stories between them. The secondary stories, which include an accountant who enjoys the services of a dominatrix and a group of teens whose prank on their friend literally backfires, function as little more than dull buildups to a single punchline.

All of these tales showcase Hunter’s single point, which amounts to the ways human beings engage in the eponymous acts on a daily basis. Whether it’s teens mocking a man with a prosthetic limb, shouting at someone for no reason, adultery, poisoning animals, or murder, all of these behaviours represent levels on a scale of our capacity to do harm. For some reason, Hunter sees value in this alone, and Foul Evil Deeds saps out any economic, political, or social contexts for these actions. That results in an incomplete picture, one that’s broadly drawn but missing the different shadings that can define motivation. Hunter collapses everything into his lone idea that, by the end, turns out to be nothing more than a truism.

Fanboy (dir. Bean Mckee)

Something I didn’t expect to find myself recalling was Robert D. Siegel’s 2009 film Big Fan, where Patton Oswalt played an obsessive New York Giants fan who goes down a Taxi Driver-esque spiral. Bean Mckee’s Fanboy similarly follows a football-obsessed man named Allen (Jon Washington), who moves from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio in 2014 to be close to the centre of the action for his favourite team during college football season. Allen doesn’t attend Ohio State University, but his passion runs so deep he hopes to find other like-minded individuals there while he learns to live on his own and establish his independence.

Allen’s decision to move with no real plans other than hanging around frats and bars during football games only leads him further into isolation and a state of anxiety. The worried tone of his mother during their phone calls, along with his tendency to get violent whenever someone disagrees with him about football, spells out that something is off with Allen’s mental health, and as time goes on his precarious state only worsens.

Mckee’s direction stays close to Allen for the entirety of Fanboy but maintains some distance, as we never get an understanding of his psychology or motivations for his intense love of college football. The problem is that Mckee’s script is too schematic to make this character piece have much impact. Every piece of information, whether it’s a plot development or an expositional breadcrumb about Allen, is too deliberate in its functionality to ever give off a sense of the naturalism the film wants to achieve. These details don’t provide a sense of Allen or anyone who enters his orbit as well-rounded people. They only exist as pieces laid down in a specific order so they can lock into place at a later point.

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The 31st edition of the Slamdance Film Festival takes place in Los Angeles, California between February 20 and 26, 2025. The festival lineup will also be available to view virtually from February 24 to March 7 at https://www.slamdancechannel.com. You can buy a virtual pass for Slamdance over at the festival’s official website.

It was bound to happen at some point. The founding of Slamdance in 1995 was due to, among other things, Sundance. As the festival’s own timeline puts it, a “wild bunch of filmmakers” didn’t get their films into Sundance, so they created their own opportunity to screen their works along with other independent artists. The idea of a parallel festival in Park City, Utah made sense. It provided the chance to piggyback off of the small, intimate setting where people in the film industry gathered every January to get one’s name and work exposed. Back in the mid-90s, well before digital screenings became commonplace, a producer or buyer could easily hop from one festival to another if they wanted to check a film out.

Times have obviously changed since then. Sundance, now a larger institution for “independent filmmaking” in the US, has become too big for Park City, so it plans to move to a new location in 2027. That left Slamdance in a position where it had to make a choice. There would be no point staying in Park City once Sundance leaves, but at the same time a three decade long run meant Slamdance spent plenty of time existing in the shadow of Sundance. With these changes came the time for Slamdance to finally step out on its own.

This year, Slamdance kicks off its first edition in its new home of Los Angeles, just under a month after Sundance 2025’s start date. The move to the film industry’s capital city makes logical sense as a continuation of the festival’s convenient proximity. It’s a festival for and by independent filmmakers that can now operate in a more fully independent capacity than before. Whether or not it can exist entirely on its own remains to be seen.

My own history with Slamdance goes back almost a decade now, and my thoughts from 2023 haven’t really changed since then. It’s one of the more inviting and supportive festivals I’ve experienced, and I’ve seen plenty of highlights over the years to keep me coming back. It’s also nice to get to know filmmakers, with many of them doing their own publicity/promotion. And with Sundance as a more high profile and industry friendly event, Slamdance offers a more interesting mixed bag of independent films.

To keep things short in this first part of my coverage, below are my thoughts on Out of Plain Sight, the festival’s opening night film. Expect more coverage this week, both here and elsewhere, and remember that the festival lineup is accessible via a virtual pass that also comes with an annual membership for the festival’s online channel. Slamdance’s ongoing commitment to accessibility is admirable, especially compared to the other festivals that abandoned virtual components as quickly as they adopted them. And for a price that’s lower than two of Sundance’s virtual tickets, it’s an all around good deal.

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Out of Plain Sight (dirs. Daniel Straub & Rosanna Xia)

Out of Plain Sight makes sense as this year’s opening night feature for Slamdance. Given the devastation of the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, the environment is on everyone’s mind, so why not kick things off with an environmental issues documentary produced by the LA Times?

Maybe that’s a cynical way of summarizing things, but issues docs like Out of Plain Sight inspire a lot of cynicism. The documentary starts with a discovery made several years ago by scientist David Valentine: toxic barrels at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Southern California. Co-director and LA Times reporter Rosanna Xia published the horrifying results of an investigation into the toxic waste in 2020, where they estimated over half a million barrels had been dumped between 1947 and 1982 containing the “forever chemical” DDT. The belief at the time was that the ocean would dilute its toxicity. The reality is irreversible ecological damage likely to persist for generations to come.

Xia and co-director Daniel Straub opt for a structure that operates like a conventional thriller, starting small before pulling back the curtain to reveal the extent of environmental destruction. It’s a slick package delivered shoddily through a series of staged conversations between Xia and her subjects. Filmed in shot reverse shot, the wooden acting makes these scenes come across as separate talking head interviews poorly stitched together, made worse by Xia’s feigned shock at “revelations” she’s thoroughly researched before filming.

I kept wondering why Straub and Xia needed to package this subject into a conventional narrative. Of course, the answer will be that idea of broad appeal, that the public needs some sort of hook to spend their time with a subject as harrowing as this (“it’s like a conspiracy thriller but it’s real!”). I wish more documentarians considered the implications of this practice. While documentaries are inherently an act of reduction for complex topics, be it personal, political, and otherwise, more care should be taken when that reduction worships at the altar of narrative filmmaking. There’s an act of translation going on here, where a genuine crisis that demands a radical response gets expressed in a visual language commonly associated with self-contained escapism.

Narratives have their use and purpose, and that’s not to say a documentary can’t effectively use those tools. But like every tool, how they’re used depends on the people wielding them. Out of Plain Sight strives to emulate a product for consumption, without any efforts to interrogate how that contradicts the urgency it wants to shine a light on. That’s made most apparent in its appalling conclusion, where it uses footage of a rescued sea lion returning to the ocean while one of the film’s subjects talks about moving forward. It’s an attempt to tie some sort of positive bow on everything, and another example of the film’s need to adhere to conventions that it cannot come close to adequately communicating.