Law and Order [1969]

 1960s were marked by fierce civil rights movements and anti-Vietnam War protests that deeply reshaped the US. Hence, when Frederick Wiseman decided to make a documentary on Kansas City’s police department – in the same year when the city, like many others, were rocked by massive unrest following Martin Luther King’s assassination and the ensuing police brutality – he planned an avowedly anti-police film. His approach, however, evolved as he and cameraman Bill Brayne embedded themselves into the daily patrols and rode with the cops for over 400 hours all-day long. The viscerally unsettling work, that remains topical to this day, was consequently more nuanced than what Wiseman had originally intended, while delivering a powerful critique on the entrenched institutional racism, sexism and violence blatantly cloaked in impunity. The filmmaker’s observational and “neutral” posture, along with the grainy 16mm B/W images, lent rich undercurrents to his freewheeling street reportage of a string of sequences both significant and mundane. The most chilling moment occurs midway when a group of cops viciously break into an apartment and one of them holds a helpless black sex worker in a chokehold; one can only guess if the camera’s presence stopped him from crossing the line, or if that even made any difference. Other unnerving instances included two teenagers carrying guns being apprehended in a clothing store, along with an unrelated guy with the same skin colour; and a delinquent young man, accused of hit-and-run, being handled with visible roughness upon his arrest. The crisscrossing episodes together underscored the brazen power imbalance that was on display where a majorly black town – mired in impoverishment, ghettoization and systemic oppression – is controlled by a decidedly white police force.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary/Institutional Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Cities of Sleep [2015]

 Shaunak Sen’s gritty and hypnotic debut Cities of Sleep – filled with dystopian poetry and cutting irony – was a miniature act of marvel. Made 7 years before his magnificent docu essay All That Breathes that earned him global acclaim, he composed this compact work using loads of footage that he shot over 2 ½ years. A subaltern city symphony and observational essay – with its deadpan gaze on Delhi’s most impoverished and marginalized inhabitants representing the city’s bottom-most socioeconomic rung – was themed around the politics and class dynamics of sleep. Two grim locales which the city’s destitute homeless outcasts frequent at nights were intermeshed into the loose-limbed narrative – Meena Bazaar and Loha Pul. Jamaal, a tea seller, is a tough but mercurial sleep entrepreneur who runs a night shelter at the former locality, often raising the rent for cots and blankets as temperatures plummet, while also oftentimes breaking the trend by waiving charges in lieu of a good Mohd. Rafi song or calling an ambulance for free. The dominant protagonist of the former strand, however, was the slippery, eccentric and roguish Shakeel, a cadaverous yet colourful migrant man obsessed with his relationship with sleep. As he’d frequently disappear for weeks, Sen included a parallel strand covering a sleep commune situated, rather befittingly, in the underbelly of an historic iron bridge on the Yamuna River (the latter site). Ranjeet runs an improvised movie theatre there where, for a pittance, people can choose to watch three back-to-back Bollywood flicks or sleep while the film runs in the background, and hands out pithy maxims on the philosophy and economics of sleep. These interwoven netherworlds were brilliantly shot and sparingly set to a haunting score.

Director: Shaunak Sen

Genre: Documentary

Language: Hindi

Country: India

State Funeral [2019]

 On 5^th March 1953, upon the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the massive erstwhile nation descended into 4 days of state-enforced grief and mourning. The spectacle – at once solemn and carnivalesque – was filmed in extensive details, in both colours and B/W, by a cohort of 6 Soviet filmmakers, and turned into a eulogistic documentary titled The Great Farewell; ironically, as de-Stalinization commenced soon after, it was buried. Sergei Loznitsa – the great purveyor of Soviet and post-Soviet experiences and identities, frequently through extraordinary found-footage and archival documentaries – discovered over 35 hours of the original material in the Russian State Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk, and transformed that largely unseen stash into State Funeral, a simultaneously droll, kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing observational reportage bordering on the surreal, on the final climactic gasp of the massive cult of personality that defined the Soviet tyrant’s dictatorial rule that lasted nearly three decades. The gorgeous Agfacolor images, with their striking maroons and greens, contrasted with muted B/W and a slyly designed soundscape, as we’re given a tour through the unfolding exhibition. The remarkable assemblage crisscrossed through the grand streets and buildings of Moscow, multiple cities and villages across the USSR, and even desolate landscapes and offshore oilfields, accompanied by drone-like voices from loudspeakers extolling the generalissimus’ greatness and providing excruciating details on how he died, alternated with absorbing classical music. The faces and gestures of the teeming crowds – both candid and performative – formed the most fascinating aspect of this symphonic montage, while the underlying disingenuity that underline the dry speeches made by Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov and Molotov gains additional meanings if one has watched Armando Ianucci’s terrific black comedy The Death of Stalin.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Reportage

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine

General Report on Certain Matters of Interest For a Public Screening [1977]

 Pere Portabella, a giant of Spanish political cinema and documentary filmmaking, fused formal experimentation with dissident activism through his films, and carried his progressive commitments into post-Franco Spain and Catalonia through active political participations and drafting the new Spanish Constitution. His involvements, as Spain begun its complex transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late-1970s, found a rich and sprawling manifestation in this hybrid documentary essay – made following the fascist Generalissimo’s death – that remains a landmark of radical cinema. Clocking at over 2 ½ hours, it began on a moody note as we’re given a sombre tour of the Valley of the Fallen memorial. It switched gears right after, and the next 10-odd minutes contained some of the most thrilling footage of protests by Spain’s antifascist brigade – public demonstrations, furious battles with the cops on the streets, and brutal reprisals – set to a pulsating score. The work, thereafter, drifted into deep political discourses, debates and conversations. While these were primarily between representatives from various left-wing parties – Communists, socialists, trade unionists, social democrats, independent Marxists, reformists, Catalan left intellectuals – Portabella included even a conservative and a monarchist into the mix, as they explored the routes that Spain must pursue as it prepares for democratic elections and electoral coalitions. In a fascinating formal choice, he alternated these pluralist viewpoints, and parallel meditations on the past – through collective memories, narrations and visuals – with performative elements. The latter facet was daringly expressed through a particularly unnerving sequence wherein violent interrogation and torture sequences by Franco’s extrajudicial security apparatus, enacted by actors and carrying the feel of a visceral political thriller, were juxtaposed with articles being read out from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Director: Pere Portabella

Genre: Documentary/Political Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: Spanish/Catalan

Country: Spain

Grands Soirs et Petits Matins [1978]

 May 68 remains a defining political, social and cultural touchstone in France; many French films and books, consequently, have sprung from and meditated upon this epochal moment. However, while they largely did that post facto, William Klein’s absorbing documentary recorded it in the present. He was smoking outside a ciné-club when, upon hearing students asking around if anyone’s interested in making “Cinema Sorbonne”, he jumped right in. As  intellectuals engaged in Marxist and dialectical discourses in the quintessential French spirit of debates, in between demonstration marches and inside the hallowed institution; militants verbally sparred with moderates; blue-collar workers argued with students, Klein’s roving hand-held camera observed the electrifying revolutionary fervour with the curiosity and empathy of a radical participant, and archived them in gorgeous B/W images with the consummate skills of a street photographer. These were often interspersed with protestors collectively singing Internazionale; regularly complemented with flareups, violent unrest and furious street battles with cops; and culminated into a short and energetic climactic montage. Klein assembled his visceral footage – charged with the immediacy of direct cinema and the reflexive qualities of an essay – ten years later, but avoided the ensuing disillusionment from seeping in. In French parlance, as he explained in an interview, a grand soir signifies “revolution” that lights up an evening, while petit matin implies the “hangover” of the following morning, and these complementary aspects suffused haunting undercurrents into this dazzling exercise that Joao Moreira Salles actively referenced in his blazing docu-essay In the Intense Now. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, with his cool charisma and sharp wit, featured prominently, along with blink-and-you-miss glimpses of Resnais, Rivette and Duras, though I was hoping to catch a view of Godard too.

Director: William Klein

Genre: Documentary/Political Reportage

Language: French

Country: France

Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) [1997]

 Pedro Almodóvar – who’d pivoted from campy, lowbrow farce with his fabulous preceding film The Flower of My Secret – did a free adaptation of British writer Ruth Rendell’s crime novel with this sexy and absorbing tale of pathological obsessions and jealousies setting off violent crimes. Balancing hot-blooded passions with barely controlled restraint – and demonstrating that style IS substance in his films, and thereby the indistinguishability between the two – the Spanish filmmaker mixed the proceedings with romantic and marital complexities, outrageous coincidences, lush melodrama, and sardonic commentaries on Spain’s Francoist past, for a feverishly imagined ménage à cinq. Naïve 20-year-old Victor (Liberto Rabal), who’s become besotted with the ravishing Elena (Francesca Neri) in her 30s after a one-night-stand, inadvertently triggers a catastrophic shoot-out that perennially changes their lives as well as two cops – the saner David (Javier Bardem) and the more volatile Sancho (Pepe Sancho) – and Sancho’s wife Clara (Ángela Molina) who Sancho is insanely suspicious of for her supposed infidelity. That baroque sequence puts Victor in jail and turns David paraplegic. Fast-forward few years later, and a now-hardened Victor is craving for a saucy revenge upon finding out that David has become a star basketball player at the Paralympics and married to Elena, but gets embroiled into a fervent clandestine affair with the much-older Clara instead, who’s desperate to leave Sancho. David, meanwhile, is convinced that David plans to seduce Elena, who’s toned down from his drug-addled past, and this unapologetically contrived setup accelerates rearrangement of equations and reckless flareups. Filled with voluptuous emotions, bold colour palettes, sumptuous soundtrack, and teasing Buñuel references, the film was bookended by trippy “nativity” sequences, with the former featuring Penélope Cruz in a cameo.

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Magellan [2025]

 With his hypnotic film Magellan – through co-existence of sublime beauty and harrowing monstrosity – Lav Diaz delivered a searing peek into the horrors, madness and violence of colonial adventurism, and a trip into the heart of darkness. Sitting alongside such spellbinders on this theme as Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Martel’s Zama, the great Filipino auteur’s smouldering latest exercise in formal rigour and slow cinema – at a “mere” 2 hours 45 minutes it’s among his “crispest” works, but there’s apparently an 8-9 hour director’s cut waiting somewhere – depicted a demythologized examination of the colonial campaigns to Malaysia and the Philippines by 16^th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (played by Gael Garcia Bernal, an international star, which is a first for Diaz, even if in a non-heroic turn). It begins with the capture of Malacca under Afonso de Albuquerque’s command, in which Magellan participated and returned with a slave. Back home in Lisbon, while dealing with the accusatory gaze of widows of dead compatriots and marriage to Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo) who nurses him to health, he first tries in futility with the Portuguese king and then successfully convinces the Spanish king to sponsor a crazy circumnavigation voyage. The film – composed through ethereal and visually splendorous static frames straight out of classical oil paintings – thereby covered the exhausting expedition that begun Magellan’s descent into zealotry and brutality, and then his obsessive attempts at converting Cebu’s residents en masse into Christianity, while punishing “heretics”, that ended in bloody carnage. Epic in scope, minimalist in form, staggering in ambition and viciously powerful in its anti-imperialist stance, this is a bold new direction in Diaz’s life-long meditations on his country’s past and present.

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Historical Epic/Biopic/War/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Spanish/Cebuano

Country: Philippines

Sentimental Value [2025]

 Memory, mortality, familial fissures, and complex filial relationships, were blended with art as therapy, cinema as a tool for personal and political catharsis, and weights of history in Joachim Trier’s self-reflexive, ravishingly composed and emotionally rapturous film Sentimental Value. Trier’s ability to interlace weighty thematic inquiries with exuberance, vitality and humour – carried forward from his smash hit Worst Person in the World – made this a bittersweet and richly realized expression. Upon their mother’s demise, brilliant theatre actor Nora (Renate Reinsve) – battling inner demons, from crippling stage fright to depression and suicidal urges – and her restrained sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic researcher living a quiet family life, find themselves having to reckon with the arrival of their estranged father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) – a renowned but now semi-retired filmmaker who had a torrid marriage with their mom and chose his craft over them – back into their lives. He intends to return to filmmaking with his most personal script yet – ostensibly based on his mom who was part of the Norwegian resistance against Nazis and committed suicide when he was seven – and offers the role to Nora. However, when she refuses to work with him, he casts American star Rachel (Elle Fanning) who’s become his admirer upon attending his retrospective at a film festival. Skarsgård and Reinsve were magnetic, and Lilleaas no less incredible, in this nuanced yet expressive, and delicately strung piece that reminded me of Mia Hansen-Løve’s marvelous Bergman Island in their shared association with the Swedish giant and meta-cinematic flourishes. The film’s most standout moments included a third-person chronicle of the Borgs’ beautiful family house, a stirring film-within-film sequence, and an intimate heart-to-heart between the sisters.

Director: Joachim Trier

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: Norwegian/English/Swedish

Country: Norway

Sound of Falling [2025]

 Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling – her sophomore feature, made a decade after her debut (Dark Blue Girl) – was a haunting and unsettling multi-generational saga steeped in desire, angst, resentments, trauma, violence and death, and propelled by spectral undercurrents, feminine ferocity and tumultuous historical forces. The riveting feminist exercise complemented its disturbing moments and disquieting tone with poetic and ethereal lyricism, and unfolded in the intersection of Tarkovsky, Haneke and Lynch. The formally audacious script weaved a complex tapestry cutting across more than a century, albeit set in the same rural farmhouse alongside the Elbe. The eerily tranquil locale complemented the tormented lives of female characters across four interconnected periods – little Alma (Hanna Heckt), who becomes infatuated with the photograph of a dead sister who looked exactly like her, and her mischievous but doomed elder sister Lia (Greta Krämer) in early 20^th century just before WW1; Erika (Lea Drinda), an impish young woman in the 1940s during WW2, who’s become carnally fixated on her amputee uncle with a harrowing backstory; the rebellious and anguished Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), who lives with her pensive mother in the 1980s – in what was then East Germany – and must deal with the lecherous gazes of her uncle and cousin, and her own suicidal impulses; and adolescent Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), who gets intensely drawn to an enigmatic teen (Ninel Geiger) grieving her mother’s demise. The strangely elliptical narrative – the four marvellously enacted ensemble stories were nonchronologically intercut, thus indicating how the future and the past simultaneously mimic and inform one another – was stunningly shot using roving ghost-like cameras over dazzling long takes, disconcerting POV shots and close-ups, voyeuristic peeks, claustrophobic interior spaces, and vivid outdoor vistas.

Director: Mascha Schilinski

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Coming-of-Age/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

With Hasan in Gaza [2025]

 In 1989, during the 1^st Intifada, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari – a teenager then – had befriended a fearless fellow inmate called Abdel Rahim upon being imprisoned. Twelve years later, during the 2^nd Intifada, Aljafari – he’d emigrated to Berlin by then and was still 2 years away from his debut short – returned to Gaza with a MiniDV camcorder and a guide named Hasan by his side, whose whereabouts remain unknown, in search of his lost friend. It would be another over two decades, as a ghastly genocide is being carried out with brazen impunity, that Aljafari – now with 5 feature-length films under his belt – recovered and strung together the found footage from 3 MiniDV tapes on roads, the sea, locales, people, destroyed homes and chance encounters, thereby providing a haunting and achingly intimate meditation on memory, oppression, loss, personal resistance, collective defiance, and the heartbreaking meaning of home for a Palestinian. Interspersed with lyrical Arab songs, the restrained images – of living under oppression, apartheid, surveillance, and daily violence – foreshadowed the devastation being wreaked upon Gaza. Recalling Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi’s magnificent docu essay Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Israel-Palestine, this quietly melancholic road movie – bursting with understated vitality – captured a man enjoying his freedom after 8 years in jail; women on the edge due to incessant shelling; a wary young guy at a loss at the wanton destruction of homes; being warned of the risks of his camera getting mistaken for a gun by an overzealous military; people playing cards and enjoying family gatherings amidst the occupation; sights of a ravaged landscape from the car; and, most unforgettably, the infectious excitement among kids whenever they notice the friendly camera.

Director: Kamal Aljafari

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Road Movie

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk [2025]

Mobile phones have made the world appear smaller than it actually is while also underlining the massive distances separating us; this remarkable film – a disillusioning tableau of a broken world, yet radiating with profound empathy and camaraderie – indelibly demonstrated this dichotomy. Iranian documentary filmmaker and activist Sepideh Farsi, living in exile in Paris since fleeing Tehran in 1984, and Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, locked in Gaza City, were able to interact for a year and form a deep bond through video calls, allowing us to get a first-hand account of the horrors and the resilience, despite all three – Farsi, Fatima, and us – fundamentally unable to bridge the irreconcilable chasms, barrier and borders. The devastating state-backed genocide in Palestine has killed 250+ journalists, and Fatima’s death – a targeted missile, just as this docu was selected for screening at Cannes, wiped out her entire family to stop her from recording, archiving and bearing witness using her camera – would’ve been just another count on paper if not for this personal memorial and remembrance. Their seeming differences notwithstanding – Farsi is older, left-wing, atheist, feminist, cynical, was once a political prisoner, and now able to roam the world; Fatima was in her mid-20s, devout, filled with irrepressible hope despite the despair surrounding her, never able to explore her dreams and aspirations, and forever a doomed refugee in her own land – the two women engaged in candid conversations through patchy mobile networks, blockade and bombings. Two facets made this a particularly stirring and expansive ode to courage and resistance – Fatima’s contagious smile, in defiance of the deaths, food shortage and loss of loved ones; and her terrific street photographs that Farsi displayed at regular intervals. 

Director: Sepideh Farsi

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Epistolary Film/War

Language: English/Arabic

Country: Palestine/France

The Encampments [2025]

 There’s something magical about documentaries that capture, with rousing political urgency and here-and-now, the collective resistance by civilians who’ve taken to the streets to protest against a boorish establishment. The electrifying co-directed docu The Encampments, simultaneously observational and immersive, belongs to that breed where the throbbing crowd – in this case progressive, defiant and courageous college students – is its protagonist, as they decide to go about being on the right side of the history with daring abandon. The agitprop filmmaking, blending on-ground reportage with political activism, chronicled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that the Columbia University’s students set up in April 2024, demanding complete financial divestiture by the institute’s complicit management from companies enabling Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza, and amnesty for students censured by it. Their stirring pro-Palestine dissent and speaking of truth to power in the face of ugly vilification and repression by politicians and the media spread like a contagious wildfire across university campuses in the US and beyond, and – in parallel – eloquently recalled how, during the 1960s, Columbia’s students had similarly defended that era’s civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War against similarly heavy-handed authorities. The organic and decentralized movement, whose lead spokespersons were Mahmoud Khalil and Sueda Polat (among others), witnessed student and alumni participation that cut across religious, ethnic and national backgrounds, and their intoxicating passion and resilience were paralleled with gut-wrenching footage from Gaza and shocking brutality by NYC cops inside the campus. In perhaps the film’s most enduring moment, the students briefly occupy Hamilton Hall and rename it Hind Hall, in honour of the martyred seven-year-old girl whose harrowing story was memorialized by Kaouther Ben Hania in The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Directors: Michael T. Workman & Kei Pritsker

Genre: Documentary/Political Reportage

Language: English

Country: US/Palestine

Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) [2025]

 The rotten history of settler-colonialism in Argentina – and the accompanying erasure of indigenous communities – has undergone progressive explorations in Lucrecia Martel’s blazing filmography. Ethnic populace – and their treatment by white bourgeois Argentines – manifested on the fringes of La Ciénaga, became a narrative catalyst in The Headless Woman, and provided the backdrop in Zama. And now, in her incisive and magnificent feature-length documentary Our Land (which was initially conceived as a hybrid essay), they’ve now moved into the foreground. Based on the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, 68-year-old leader of the Chuschagasta community and land rights’ activist in the country’s Tucumán Province, while resisting eviction by three men who claimed ownership of the place where they’ve existed for generations, and the much-belated trial of that in 2018, Martel trained her gaze for a rich portrayal of both the community and the deceased individual alongside a cutting reportage on the crime and the trial. The film, consequently, operated along multiple intersecting strands, coalescing murky historical contexts with contemporary fault-lines, and collective with the personal. Alongside, it navigated through “real time” legal proceedings; investigations into the incident from 9 years back; profoundly affecting memories of Chocobar through his widowed wife; seething examination of exploitation, otherization, power imbalances and persisting colonialist tendencies; and a kaleidoscopic testament to the Chuschagasta peoples’ resistance and resilience through a blend of oral and archival histories. Co-written with María Alché, her mischievous heroine from The Holy Girl, Martel stitched this multilayered tapestry through disparate visual choices – static images and jerky handycams juxtaposed with ravishing panoramic and drone shots – and reminded me of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light by prefacing the grimy incident with majestic images from space.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Two Prosecutors [2025]

 Sergei Loznitsa’s stark, gripping and viscerally crushing film Two Prosecutors – a rare narrative feature by the exiled filmmaker and politically outspoken activist-archivist who’s best-known for his formally rigorous found-footage documentaries – delivered a devastating parable on the horrors and banality of totalitarianism. The Kafkaesque work, with Gogolian and Orwellian undercurrents, is set in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge, and was adapted from a novella by Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Demidov who was himself a political prisoner for eighteen years on charges of being a Trotskyist. However, its Stalinist period setting notwithstanding, it powerfully speaks to all totalitarian bureaucracies and nation-states across eras, geographies and political spectrums. While destroying evidences of protestations by political prisoners, the man ordered with the task carries out a small act of disobedience by sneaking out one of the letters. That triggers the arrival of doggedly idealistic prosecutor and young Bolshevik Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) to the Bryansk prison, who obstinately believes in the ideas of truth and justice much to the detriment of his physical wellbeing. After overcoming psychological gamesmanships by the brutish prison authorities and labyrinthine prison corridors, he meets an old Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko) who’s been dubiously imprisoned and tortured by NKVD. Kornyev decides to travel to Moscow to meet the country’s real-life Procurator General Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), hoping for his intervention… he does intervene, but not in the manner Kornyev had hoped for. Shot in desaturated colours, long takes and austere framing which amplified the oppressive, claustrophobic and ominous atmosphere, it comprised of two particularly nerve-racking waits and two darkly funny asides – viz. a rambling monologue by an amputee Leninist (Filippenko again) and a deliberately incongruous song by two ominously effusive men.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Drama/Political Thriller/Historical Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Germany/Ukraine

La Grazia (Grace) [2025]

 Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, on paper, shouldn’t work, as at its most elemental it’s about a white, ageing, well-off, conservative, heteronormative man in a position of power and beset with moral dilemmas, religious inhibitions and political indecisiveness. It, however, harboured a mischievous coexistence of austere tones and solemn themes with punkish undercurrents and a subversive streak, and this interplay between seemingly incongruous elements made this a surprisingly enthralling experience. Predominantly an exercise in narrative minimalism and weighty themes, it comprised of exquisitely restrained performances by a small cast led by an exceptional Toni Servillo as fictitious Italian president and renowned former jurist Mariano De Santis (incidentally, he played real-life Italian premiers twice in earlier Sorrentino films); judicial debates with his exasperated lawyer-daughter (Anna Ferzetti); mulling on a new bill legalizing euthanasia awaiting his ratification and proposed presidential pardons for two people in jail for having committed murders (Linda Messerkliger was especially riveting as a striking woman who’s brutally killed her abusive husband); being haunted by the memories of his dead wife who he loved immensely, while also consumed by her infidelity from four decades back; and ample moments of silent introspection, solitary smokes and inaction. Further, set mostly inside the Quirinal Palace, its grand visual compositions were dominated by vast, empty spaces. In parallel, it occasionally cut loose with idiosyncratic bursts – a Rastafarian, moped-riding Pope; an electrifying contemporary dance sequence that reminded me of Pablo Larraín’s dazzling film Ema; a disastrous walk through torrential rains by a superannuated Portuguese President, shot in stylized slo-mo; acerbic jabs by Mariano’s close friend and nonconformist art critic (Milvia Marigliano); sardonic undertones frequently cloaking the melancholic airs; and a terrific, sparingly-used techno score.

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Peter Hujar's Day [2025]

 In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz – who loved harnessing casual conversations and gossips – invited celebrated photographer and her friend Peter Hujar – who was still operating in the margins at that time, even if he was already a part of New York’s underground cultural circle, and died at the young age of 53 a decade later due to AIDS related complications – to her Upper East Side apartment to share how his previous day had been. The freeform “interview” that was recorded on tape as part of an intended larger project was unfortunately lost, but the manuscript resurfaced nearly half-a-century later in 2021, and which filmmaker Ira Sachs discovered at a Parisian LGBTQ+ bookstore. Peter Hujar’s Day is a delectable adaptation of that interaction – at once a meticulous, word-for-word transliteration of the text and a self-reflexive interpretation through such playful gestures as changing attires, the day transitioning into night in sync with Hujar’s recap, jump cuts, and the film’s crew bleeding into the frame on occasions. This warm, droll and captivating work provided a fascinating time capsule of 1970s NYC while also revealing, through gentle touches, the deep friendship that Rosenkrantz (tenderly portrayed by Rebecca Hall) had with Hujar (played with terrific panache by Ben Whishaw). Over the course of this intimate pas de deux, an exceptionally chatty Hujar recounts activities both consequential (Allen Ginsberg’s photoshoot, receiving tips for winning over William Burroughs, phone call from Susan Sontag, the challenges of getting paid, etc.) and banal (napping, eating Chow Mein, etc.), and their rambling exchanges – mostly indoors but at times on the balcony with the NYC skyline as backdrop – were captured in rich, grainy and exquisitely zeitgeisty 16-mm photography and art décor.

Director: Ira Sachs

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/Biopic

Language: English

Country: US

Young Mothers [2025]

 Teenagers struggling to break free from the vicious cycle of marginalized existence, abandonment and abuse – a recurrent theme in the Dardenne brothers’ films – formed the underlying premise in their tender, poignant, compassionate and delicately weaved portrayal of teenage motherhood in Young Mothers. Marking a terrific return to form after a couple of strained efforts for the septuagenarian brothers – two years shy of completing 50 years of co-directing films – it emphatically underlined the radical empathy, bleak social realism and spare, documentary-style form that the Belgian duo has been identified with since their international breakout with the unforgettable La Promesse 3 decades back, while expanding their palette through a hyperlink film that traversed between the interweaved stories of four working-class teenagers housed in a state-run shelter in Liège. Soon-to-be-mother Jessica (Babette Verbeek), having always struggled with abandonment, is desperately seeking to establish contact with her biological mother (India Hair); Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), meanwhile, has an extremely complicated relationship with her volatile mom (Christelle Cornil), a recovering alcoholic who was in a toxic affair, and consequently wants to give up her baby for adoption to a grounded middle-class couple; the increasingly agitated Perla (Lucie Laruelle) wishes in futility to have a conventional life with the distant father of their child fresh out of institutionalization; former drug addict Julia (Elsa Houben), on the other hand, has a loving boyfriend and is on the verge of making it if only she can avoid sliding back. Ariana’s story stood out as the most complex and heartbreaking in these edgy, moving and outstandingly performed tales bereft of any moral grandstanding or contrivances, and where harsh socioeconomic realities fiercely combat for hope (howsoever fleeting and tenuous).

Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Urban Drama

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Umberto D. [1952]

 Umberto D. – Italian Neorealist movement’s final definitive film and Vittorio De Sica’s personal favourite – alternated between extreme desolation and sentimentalist tendencies. The former led to it being attacked by the then conservative government for demeaning Italy’s image abroad, and was rejected by domestic viewers who wanted to ignore their plights for rosier images. The latter, conversely, has slightly diluted the film’s standing today in some quarters. To the remarkable credit of De Sica and his frequent collaborator, the great screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, it continues to remain a revered classic for its eloquent invocation of their conception of “collective actions” – viz. how “no story is ever truly individual” – as the primary lens for neorealism. Tellingly, therefore, it begins with a street demonstration – strikingly shot by G. R. Aldo as if straight out of a newsreel – of retired elderly men, demanding a raise in their pensions. As their protest gets broken with utter apathy by the cops, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (septuagenarian Carlo Battisti in his first and only role), emerges from the crowd of bitter, hapless men as one out of many. A former civil servant having to live a life of penury and indignity on account of his measly pension and mounting debts, he’s on the verge of being evicted from his accommodation by his cold-hearted landlady for overdue rent. Umberto is profoundly attached to his dog Flike, and makes a rare human connect with a sympathetic maid (Maria-Pia Casilio), in a world that has discarded compassion, empathy and human decency as meaningless liabilities. Despite the occasional propensity for titillating the tear-buds, the film tackled its bleak themes – societal indifference, loneliness, suicidal impulses – with equanimity, immediacy, irony and deep humanism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Brief Encounters [1967]

 Kira Muratova, best known for Asthenic Syndrome, made her solo directorial debut with Brief Encounters, after a couple of films co-directed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov. Made at Odessa Film Studio during the “Khrushchev thaw”, this freewheeling, idiosyncratic and loosely-strung work exhibited her love for the French Nouvelle Vague and its radical figurehead Jean-Luc Godard. Like her dazzling next film The Long Farewell – which was even more avant-garde and formally eccentric – this earned the displeasure of the state censors for being too individualistic, and remained suppressed for the next two decades. Its delicately weaved love triangle – between pragmatic, unsentimental and bourgeoise city council planner Valentina (played by Muratova herself with deadpan poise); her free-spirited, vagabond husband Maxim (played by legendary Soviet folk singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotskiy), a traveling geologist who loves strumming his guitar; and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman from the countryside who Maxim met at a roadside café, and who’s incidentally now hired by Valentina as a domestic help at her sprawling apartment – is told through a mosaic of impressionistic perspectives, flashbacks and digressive allusions. The diffused B/W images, along with music splashes and fragmentary conversations, imbued the film with poetic-realism and a meditative air. These, in turn, were complemented by sardonic moments, like when Valentina is coaxed into attending a conference bearing no relevance to her work, or when she muses “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? – turning the grand Macbethian dilemma into comically banal – or when she adamantly ignores the pleas of families to classify the newly constructed public housing buildings as hospitable. Most interestingly, Muratova impishly subverted expectations by never having the two women find out about their shared love interest.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

World on a Wire [1973]

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2-part 206-minutes-long television miniseries World On A Wire – the German wunderkind’s sole foray into science-fiction, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3, and recently restored after years of obscurity – was a gloriously trippy, luscious, paranoid and prescient work where the dystopian future is here and now. Flamboyantly blending the sci-fi genre with noir, melodrama, conspiracy, philosophical meditations, existential anxieties, and distinctive Euro-arthouse sensibilities, and with cold, sleek, metallic and modernist décor complemented with disco-tinged sensuality, it recalled Godard’s magnificent Alphaville in its evocation of one non-compliant individual’s battle against a supra-national techno-totalitarian society, and presaged the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in positing that we might be trapped inside a simulated, hyper-real, virtual reality environment. The film’s protagonist, cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), succeeds as the technical director of a powerful government-corporate mainframe program called Simulacron which has created an artificial world with thousands of “identity units” and has the ability to predict industry trends well into the future, when his boss, Professor Vollmer, dies under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to sense and uncover a massive corporate conspiracy with monomaniac zeal, and before long becomes a hunted fugitive as he gets into loggerheads with the institute’s malicious CEO Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau). Along the way he gets close to two duplicitous women – Stiller’s personal assistant Gloria (Barbara Valentin) who’s essentially been plugged in to spy on him, and the deceased super-scientist’s sultry daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) who Stiller becomes enamoured with. Co-written by Fassbinder, this deliciously ominous and tantalizingly foxy film – photographed in lush, grainy 16-mm by Michael Ballhaus, and featuring a rich soundtrack, including Fleetwood Mac’s hypnotic ‘Albatross’ – was populated with RWF’s regular gang of actors.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Romance

Language: German

Country: Germany