Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning cinema of courageous resistance sees a man encountering someone he believes was his former prison torturer in this picture of genres that is tonally masterfully juggled, exploring themes of cycles of violence and circles of victimhood in Iran.
An oddly-paced yet riveting plunge into covert histories, Filho’s Cannes award-winning work plays like a spectral puzzle—pulpy, sly, and quietly haunting, turning Brazilian political trauma into a carnivalesque memory piece.
A nuanced, layered, and finely acted work about art, memory, and fractured familial bonds, Trier’s latest is quietly absorbing and emotionally intelligent, centering on an absent father who is a famous auteur hoping to get his elder daughter to star in his new, personal film.
Realism without filters, Chernov’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning ’20 Days in Mariupol’ is a devastating war vérité that strips conflict of rhetoric, leaving only attrition, absurdity, and the unbearable weight of patriotic labour carried by ordinary Ukrainian men.
Unadorned in form yet uncompromising in purpose, Jacir’s invigorating new work about the late ‘30s Arab revolt in Palestine shows that power lies in the clarity with which one reframes both past injustice and present responsibility.
Shot nearly entirely in one location, and very close to real time, Linklater’s sublime chill pill of a Berlinale entry centers on the legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, who suffers a severe morale dip, played by Ethan Hawke in an Oscar-worthy performance.
Linklater brings his ‘hangout’ cinema vibe to the French New Wave era, centering on Godard’s attempt to direct his first feature, in this breezy, blissful ‘comedy’ (for cinephiles at least) that is nostalgia-laden and wonderfully cast.
Messy, chaotic and overlong but perverse, thought-provoking and utterly ingenious, the Romanian provoc-auteur channels A.I. in his filmmaking with a humongous smirk on his face, as his meta-film implosively deconstructs ‘Dracula’.
A father, with son in tow, follows a group of ravers to find his missing daughter in the dusty desert of North Africa, in Laxe’s stunning, foreboding road movie about faith and despair, marked by thumping beats, shuffling bodies, and bellowing trucks.
Winner of Best Director at the Berlinale, this assured work about growing up in a Chinese village in 1991 as the winds of modernity begin to change lives, reminds one of a cross between Zhang Yimou’s early rural dramas and Yang’s Yi Yi.
Eternality Tan 