7
Winner of the SXSW Audience Award for Documentary Feature, RESYNATOR marks filmmaker Alison Tavel’s directorial debut, chronicling her ten-year journey as she uncovers the revolutionary synthesizer her late father created in the 1970s. What begins as a resurrection of the instrument evolves into an intimate and deeply personal journey—one that unexpectedly forges a profound connection with the father she never knew. Featuring appearances from Peter Gabriel, Fred Armisen, Mark Ronson, Grace Potter, and more, this heartfelt documentary is both a touching family portrait and a captivating deep dive into a nearly forgotten chapter of synth history.
In this contemplation on the meanings of movement in the experience of migration, the grace and skill of a Filipina domestic worker are juxtaposed with devotional dances to the Santo Niño statue that Magellan brought to the islands in 1521. The ensuing galleon trade of silk and porcelain for New World silver initiated the global economy, and the cycle in which female care labor is now the commodity in demand.
A SEASON WITH ISABELLA ROSSELLINI catches up with the celebrated actor, model, animal-behavior expert, and all-around creative force as she is turning seventy, facing life with the same spirited curiosity and playfulness that have sustained her singular career across decades. Following her at work—on the set of Alice Rohrwacher’s film LA CHIMERA and rehearsing her own new play, “Darwin’s Smile”—and at home on Long Island, surrounded by her herds of sheep and goats, the film shows Rossellini at home in multiple worlds: a cosmopolitan European with a rich family history and an American pioneer with a twenty-eight-acre sustainable farm.
7.1
When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. FLIPSIDE documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures “This American Life” host Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable-television hero, and uncovers the unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch. This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive—a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.
8
“To call RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS a concert film would be correct and also drastically inadequate . . . A testament to the artistic spirit and, above all, an act of love.” —Sheri Linden, “The Hollywood Reporter” “A spare, lovely work . . . The culmination of a lifelong journey.” —Bilge Ebiri, “New York Magazine”
7.5
An intimate and haunting portrayal of a quest for love and acceptance at any cost, this powerfully personal, compassionate documentary depicts the insidious influence of a secretive matriarchal religious order on three generations of the filmmaker’s family. In her captivating feature debut, Lebanese-American director Jude Chehab—who also shot the film—gracefully documents the unspoken ties and consequences of loyalty that have bonded her mother, grandmother, and herself to the mysterious organization. A captivating portrait of the toll that decades of unrequited love, lost hope, abuse, and despair take on a person, Q weaves a stunning multigenerational tale of the eternal search for meaning.
7.1
An existential journey with the filmmaker’s parents as its human yardstick and the primordial forces of the earth looming in the bedrock.
7.2
In ANSELM, Wim Wenders creates a hypnotic portrait of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and important painters and sculptors of our time. Shot in 6K resolution—and released theatrically in 3D—the film presents an immersive cinematic experience of the German artist’s work, which explores the overawing beauty of human existence, landscape, and myth, and confronts the horrors of his country’s history, seeking to undo the postwar silence in which Kiefer came of age. Through archival footage, reenactment, and direct access to his subject at work in the massive installation in Southern France where he now lives amid his creations, Wenders traces the arc of Kiefer’s career, provoking an engagement with creativity through the senses, intellect, and spirit.
7.6
The latest from acclaimed Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (BACURAU, AQUARIUS) is a multidimensional journey across time, sound, architecture, and filmmaking that explores the rich, complicated history of the filmmaker’s home city of Recife—the coastal capital of the state of Pernambuco—through the great movie theaters that served as spaces of conviviality during the twentieth century. Paeans to dreams and progress, these temples of cinema have also come to reflect major shifts in Brazilian society and politics. Combining archival documentary, mystery, film clips, and personal memories, PICTURES OF GHOSTS is a map of a city through the lens of cinema, offering a delightful tour in the company of a master storyteller.
7.8
Timely, intimate, and deeply empathetic, OUR BODY observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, veteran documentarian Claire Simon questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity, and beauty of patients at all stages of life. We see cancer screenings and fertility appointments, a teenager dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, a trans woman considering the beginnings of menopause. The specific fears, desires, and struggles of these individuals illuminate the health challenges we all face—even, as it comes to pass, the filmmaker herself.
7
“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography” as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers with their gender fluidity as well as their physical and spiritual metamorphoses across a three-hundred-year span. In making his film, Preciado invited a diverse group of more than twenty trans and nonbinary people to play the role of Orlando and to participate in this shared biography. Together, they perform interpretations of the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of transition and identity formation. Not content to simply update a groundbreaking work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of “Orlando” in the ongoing struggle to secure dignity for trans people worldwide.
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.
Agnès Varda takes a walk with Pier Paolo Pasolini through 1960s Times Square and records his thoughts on aesthetics, religion, and reality vs. fiction.
At night, a stranger digs graves, buries the dead, and watches over them. In the dark, he reveals the personal belongings of the deceased to us. These objects, separated from their owners, bear their scars and story, while others melt until they become enigmatic.
6.9
“A must for film nerds, Oz-aphiles and anyone who’s wondered why so many of Lynch’s characters wear red shoes.” —David Fear, Rolling Stone
6.6
An electrifying portrait of Brazil’s fraught contemporary moment that blends documentary with narrative and genre elements, DRY GROUND BURNING reunites filmmakers Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós (ONCE THERE WAS BRASILIA) to offer a unique vision of the country’s possible future. Just out of prison, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva) returns home to the Brasilia favela of Sol Nascente and relives her past experiences with her half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), the fearless leader of an all-female gang that once stole and refined oil from underground pipes and sold gasoline to a clandestine network of motorcyclists. Living in constant opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s fiercely authoritarian and militarized government, Chitara’s women claim the streets for themselves as a declaration of radical political resistance on behalf of the incarcerated and the oppressed.
7.5
This immersive sensory odyssey from Academy Award–nominated documentarian Sam Green (THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND) explores the elemental phenomenon of sound by weaving together thirty-two specific auditory explorations into a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. Featuring original music by JD Samson (Le Tigre, MEN), 32 SOUNDS takes the audience on a journey through time and space, exploring everything from forgotten childhood memories to the soundtrack of resistance to subaquatic symphonies, and inviting us to experience anew the astonishing sounds of everyday life.
7.9
Sam Harkness was fourteen years old when his mother, Jois, abruptly disappeared. Tracking cryptic clues of her whereabouts years later, Sam and his half brother—director Reed Harkness, who has been making short films with Sam since childhood—head out on a West Coast road trip to try to find her. But solving the mystery of Jois’s disappearance is only the beginning. What unfolds is a remarkable emotional journey that gradually reveals the ripple effects of trauma across generations of the Harkness family. Stitching together twenty-five years of home movies and filling the gaps in the archive with play, SAM NOW is a vibrant mosaic of love, longing, and loss, as well as a deeply empathetic attempt at healing.
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.
7.3
L writes letters to her estranged lover. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
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.
6.3
Go behind the scenes with the ’80s rock hitmakers as they head to the Bahamas to film a music video for their number one single “Stuck with You.”
6.8
A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties—holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the intoxicating influence of the drug itself, FAYA DAYI unfurls as a hallucinogenic cinematic reverie, capturing hushed, intimate moments in the existences of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from the region’s political strife. The film’s exquisite monochrome cinematography—each frame a masterpiece sculpted from light and shadow—and time-bending, elliptical editing create a ravishing sensory experience that hovers between consciousness and dreaming.
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.
