7.7
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes, not the least of whom is Welles himself. Charming and inventive, F FOR FAKE is an inspired prank and a clever examination of the essential duplicity of cinema.
6.2
Forty years after Wim Wenders asked leading filmmakers at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival to offer their thoughts on the future of cinema in his documentary Room 666, Lubna Playoust poses the same question—“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”—to a new generation of directors. Utilizing the same minimalist, fixed camera format as Wenders, Playoust invites thirty directors who attended the 2022 festival—including Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, Lynne Ramsay, Asghar Farhadi, James Gray, and Wenders himself—to give their unfiltered perspectives on the state of the industry. Touching on upheavals in the technology, distribution, and economics of filmmaking as well as on larger questions of politics and culture, their answers provide a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning and relevance of cinema in the twenty-first century.
8
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, the killings fueled by anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, when the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. In STATELESS, director Michèle Stephenson traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, issuing an urgent warning about what can happen when racism runs rampant in the government.
6.9
The life and work of celebrated American writer Patricia Highsmith are revealed through her diaries and notebooks and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends, and family in this fascinating documentary. While many of her most famous novels—including “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and the partly autobiographical lesbian love story “The Price of Salt”—were adapted into acclaimed films, Highsmith herself was forced to lead a double life and had to hide her vibrant same-sex affairs from her family and the public. Only in her unpublished writings did she reflect on her rich private life. Excerpts from these notes voiced by Gwendoline Christie are beautifully interwoven with archival materials to create a vivid, touching portrait of a complex artist.
6.5
A poetic exploration of the fluid nature of identity, MY TWO VOICES introduces us to Ana, Claudia, and Marinela, three Latin American women who share their intimate experiences of immigrating to Canada while reflecting on themes of violence, belonging, motherhood, and reconciliation. Weaving together carefully framed close-ups of hands and faces with contemplative images of private and public spaces against a richly layered soundscape, this unique documentary from acclaimed director Lina Rodriguez creates an impressionistic tapestry that resists a centralized perspective and echoes the protagonists’ fragmented and hybrid identities.
7.8
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography VARDA BY AGNÈS is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
7.3
SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF is accompanied by The Cinema 5 Story, a series of films distributed by the legendary Cinema 5.
7.6
This epic, indispensable work of cinema scholarship from archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a remarkable, in-depth portrait of director Jiří Menzel (CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS) and the Czechoslovak New Wave that he helped forge. Featuring extensive interviews with Menzel and compatriots like Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jan Němec, and Ivan Passer, CZECHMATE is a deeply personal tribute to a singular artist and an illuminating look at the turbulent social and political circumstances that gave rise to one of the most explosive creative movements in all of cinema history.
7.2
In Japan, there is a special way to grieve after having an abortion. Inspired by these Buddhist rituals, MIZUKO is an intimate look at how a half-Japanese American woman reevaluates the controversial drawing of “the line” in abortion ethics when she becomes pregnant herself.
6.2
Having spent his career examining the Cambodian genocide that claimed the lives of so many of his family members in acclaimed documentaries like THE MISSING PICTURE, director Rithy Panh turns his attention to the myriad atrocities that haunt twentieth-century history. Dividing the screen into a triptych of panels, Panh presents soul-shaking images of war’s devastation and mankind’s capacity for evil, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima to Vietnam and beyond. Set to poetic and thought-provoking narration, the result is a harrowing but undeniably necessary confrontation with real-life horror that challenges us to face it head-on.
6.4
From master director Jia Zhangke comes a vital document of Chinese society and its transformation since 1949. Jia interviews three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—born in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, respectively. In their stories, we hear of the dire circumstances they faced in their rural villages and small towns, and the substantial political effort undertaken to address it, from the social revolution of the ’50s through the unrest of the late ’80s. In their faces, we see full volumes left unsaid. Weaving it all together with his usual brilliance, Jia constructs an indispensable account of a country navigating seismic social change.
7
Death haunts a close-knit Mexican community in this evocatively spare, slow-burn documentary spellbinder. With a remarkably unobtrusive camera, director Juan Pablo González chronicles the everyday rituals and rhythms of life in a small, struggling rural town in the state of Jalisco where daily conversation seemingly turns again and again to one topic: the recent suicide of a young caballerango (horse wrangler) whose death, we soon learn, is only the latest in a rash of suicides that have plagued the village. Finding stirring poignancy in seemingly quotidian moments, CABALLERANGO is a transcendentally sad and beautiful reflection on vanishing traditions and disappearing lives.
6.9
In this stylistically dazzling, deeply moving, and unclassifiable short, a film crew follows three grieving participants in Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model RIP T-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead.
7.9
Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government—going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.
7.1
This heartfelt tribute to the little studio that could charts the unlikely rise of HandMade Films—the independent producer/distributor that revitalized the 1980s British film industry with its idiosyncratic, auteur-driven ethos—through the eyes of filmmakers, key personnel, and the man who started it all: former Beatle George Harrison. Through unseen archival footage of Harrison and interviews with the artists he championed like Terry Gilliam and Bob Hoskins, AN ACCIDENTAL STUDIO explores HandMade’s baptism by fire, the risks it took in producing uniquely crafted and intelligent films, and the stories that grew up around it.
6.9
A dystopian plunge into an enormous Moroccan dog shelter teeming with hundreds of strays doubles as a haunting commentary on poverty and the plight of refugees.
7.1
Get to know the siblings whose films have captured the frenetic pulse of New York’s city streets. An original documentary featuring footage from the making of their new thriller, GOOD TIME, along with several of the brothers’ early shorts.
7.3
This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. The film draws the viewer through the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement—all just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects of South Jamaica, Queens. Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle, and survival, ruminates on the essence of “swing,” activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan to perform at a school for children with autism. Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm, and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’s music.
6.9
This haunting, lyrical documentary recounts the long untold story of gay men who were imprisoned on a remote island by Mussolini’s Fascist regime in the 1930s.
6.2
You never know when someone may be miscarrying; it could be happening right next to you. In this this fearlessly frank essay film, director Lori Felker relives the tangle of emotions she felt while attempting to hide a miscarriage in plain sight.
6.6
Part poetic essay, part documentary, this rapturous film by director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION) analyzes the complexities of his relationship to his native country of Lesotho from his new home in Berlin. Addressing a mother figure who embodies the idea of home, the narration unfolds over an elegiac procession of gorgeous black-and-white images. Exploring the links between land, history, and spirituality, this stunningly assured vision announces the arrival of a major filmmaker.
7
Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved hyenas, a ritual he has practiced for over thirty-five years. Shot in black and white, HAIRAT is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relationship between man and wild beast.
6.6
Traversing New York City, a dancer seeks freedom and peace through movement.
6.8
In the Florida Everglades, rabbit hunting is considered a rite of passage for young men. THE RABBIT HUNT follows seventeen-year-old Chris and his family as they hunt in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farms in the U.S. The film records a tradition by which migrant farm workers in the communities surrounding Lake Okeechobee have been hunting and preparing rabbits since the early 1900s.
