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

Harlan County, USA [1976]

 Barbara Kopple’s debut feature Harlan County USA – a stunning potpourri of cinéma vérité, leftwing political advocacy, reportage, and newsreel – remains a cornerstone for protest films and working-class cinema. The cinematic equivalent of the immortal labour anthem “Which Side Are You On?” that was written by Florence Reece and popularized by Pete Seeger – the song served as a recurring motif throughout – Kopple took a steadfastly partisan stance (she was no neutral) while delivering a riveting account of the fierce and defiant 13-month-long strike by the coalminers from the titular Kentucky town, against Duke Powers Company, to secure the right to join organized labour union. When she arrived to document the miners’ struggle and resistance, she was initially viewed with suspicion and scepticism as a hippie New York filmmaker; however, she won their hearts, stayed at their homes, became part of their community, joined them in the charged picket lines, heard their stories of exploitation and suffering, and filmed their dogged fight for survival for over a year. What particularly emerged through her images, with unforgettable impact, was the role played by women – who were fearlessly at the forefront, going heads-on with violent company-paid strike-breakers, thugs and cops – thereby making this a great feminist exercise too. The film’s extraordinary soundtrack comprised of a string of rousing protest songs by bluegrass and folk artists – Reece, Hazel Dickens, Marle Travis, David Morris et al – while the chronicle of the bloody labour battle was interspersed with historical reference points, ugly manoeuverings by those hungry for power and profit, exposé on the abominable working conditions, and a heartbreaking death that finally turned the tide, thus making this a haunting mosaic of moments, actions and voices.

Director: Barbara Kopple

Genre: Documentary/Protest Film/Reportage

Language: English

Country: US

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On [1987]

 Iconoclastic and rebellious Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s most emblematic work – and groundbreaking “action documentary” – The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On focused its gaze on a man who’s so fervently anti-war that, ironically, he’s even ready to use violence for his activism. Kenzō Okuzaki, a veteran of Japan’s notorious campaign in Papua New Guinea during WW2, was a one-man truth squad and defiantly anti-establishmentarian agitator – driven by righteous fury bordering on madness – against his country’s hideous war-time atrocities, and his monomaniac crusade to hold Emperor Hirohito and Japan’s military to account often landed him in long prison stints. Introduced to this fascinating provocateur by his idol and mentor Shōhei Imamura, Hara made a film – amalgamating anti-imperialist politics with gripping investigative journalism, cinéma vérité techniques and searing condemnation of militarism and blind nationalist obedience – that was as radical, complex and riveting as its subject. Okuzaki, with Hara’s camera in tow, goes about exposing a particularly horrific chapter from over 40 years back when two low-ranking privates were executed – supposedly for desertion – even though the war was already over by then. With their respective brother and sister as company – later, when they decide to part ways, replaced by his stoical wife and a fellow-anarchist as stand-ins – he goes about confronting the now-ageing officers and perpetrators, often bullying and even beating them to extract confessions. Hara alternated the edgy interactions in closed spaces, shot using handheld cams and unbroken long takes, with stunning panoramic shots and street footage of Okuzaki driving his van filled with political slogans and having passive-aggressive altercations with cops, for a work that pushed the limits of nonfiction filmmaking by inciting reactions, shattering social conventions and uncovering buried truths.

Director: Kazuo Hara

Genre: Documentary/Investigative Documentary/Biopic

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later [1984]

 A landmark political documentary and masterpiece of Latin American cinema, Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s genre-fluid cinema vérité essay traversed from resistance to lamentation to healing over the course of three episodes that were woven into it. In 1964, he started making a hybrid docu-drama – blending neorealism with agitprop – on João Pedro Teixeira, a fearless activist who was brutally murdered 2 years back by the military police and lackeys of local landowners, for his outspoken advocation of land reforms and peasant rights. Coutinho cast non-actors, including Teixeira’s widowed wife Elizabeth playing herself, and shot for 35 days at a recently collectivised farm before being shut down by the military coup d’état in Brazil. Nearly everything was seized, some folks were arrested, and rest – including Elizabeth, who’d become a rebellious voice herself after her husband’s death – went into hiding. The self-reflexive and kaleidoscopic middle chapter, shot in 1981 as the dictatorship was losing its grip, sees Coutinho returning and reconnecting with the stalled film’s participants, screening the recovered footage, and recording memories from 17 years back, reflections on lost years, and stories of harsh punishments, reconciliations and survival. In the extraordinary final segment filmed over the following 3 years, Coutinho first tracks down Elizabeth – she’d escaped overnight and had been living incognito ever since – so that she’s finally able to reclaim her identity, voice and life, and then her many children, most of whom have grown up dispersed, carrying fading recollections of their mother. This deeply moving final chapter powerfully extended the individual histories of direct participants, for a meditation on the personal costs of resistance, chronicle of interruption, and expression of cinema’s capacity for defiance, endurance, remembrance and driving closure.

Director: Eduardo Coutinho

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

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

25 Favourite Films from 2025

1. The Secret Agent | Kleber Mendonça Filho | Brazil
2. It Was Just an Accident | Jafar Panahi | Iran
3. One Battle After Another | Paul Thomas Anderson | US
4. Our Land / Nuestra Tierra | Lucrecia Martel | Argentina
5. Peter Hujar's Day | Ira Sachs | US
6. Sentimental Value | Joachim Trier | Norway
7. With Hasan in Gaza | Kamal Aljafari | Palestine
8. Young Mothers | Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne | Belgium
9. La Grazia | Paolo Sorrentino | Italy
10. Sinners | Ryan Coogler | US
11. Two Prosecutors | Sergei Loznitsa | Ukraine/Germany
12. Sound of Falling | Mascha Schilinski | Germany
13. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk | Sepideh Farsi | Palestine/France
14. Magellan | Lav Diaz | Philippines
15. The Encampments | Michael T Workman & Kei Pritsker | US/Palestine
16. Sirāt | Oliver Laxe | Spain
17. Kontinental '25 | Radu Jude | Romania
18. Miroirs No. 3 | Christian Petzold | Germany
19. Dead Man's Wire | Gus Van Sant | US
20. No Other Choice | Park Chan-Wook | South Korea
21. Resurrection | Bi Gan | China
22. The Mastermind | Kelly Reichardt | US
23. Father Mother Sister Brother | Jim Jarmusch | US
24. What Does That Nature Say to You | Hong Sang-soo | South Korea
25. Romería | Carla Simon | Spain 

Blue Heron [2025]

 Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari transitioned from short diaries to a nakedly personal feature-length debut with Blue Heron, thereby providing a culmination of her explorations thus far and an assured step forward. This lyrical and intimate meditation on memories – therapeutic attempts at filling the gaps and reconciling with them – was weaved as a fragile diptych of two interlocking canvases. The first half, presented from the nostalgia-laden perspective of 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), narrated a Hungarian immigrant family’s relocation to Vancouver Island in the 1990s and the struggles of the parents – the father (Ádám Tompa) who’s mostly lost in his artistic pursuits and the exasperated mother (Iringó Réti) who takes care of the kids – in dealing with Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), an adolescent and the eldest of their four children born of a different biological father, who’s irreconcilably sliding into self-destructive and dangerous behavioural disorders. The second half took us a couple of decades ahead, from wistful past to melancholic present, as thirtysomething amateur filmmaker Sasha (Amy Zimmer) strives to document and comprehend Jeremy’s losing battles with mental health, his tragic inability to fit in and the eventual fading away of his existence, and therefore come to terms with her grief and loss. The film was composed using gorgeous images of the exquisite locale and their messy home, shot in soft tones and shallow focus through evocative framings and angles, windows and reflections, close-ups and wide-angles, and sun-kissed colours. One can’t help but pair it with Carla Simón’s Romería – another intimate autofiction from 2025, which too comprised of the filmmaker’s adult stand-in piecing together her prismatic and palimpsest memories, including at one point walking into them by breaching the boundaries of realism.

Director: Sophy Romvari

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Docufiction/Coming-of-Age/Diary Film/Autobiographical Cinema

Language: English/Hungarian

Country: Canada

Mussolini: Son of the Century [2025]

 It often takes distance to relook at an infamous tyrant’s hideous rise, along with the toxic idea of fascism (or its codification, to be more appropriate), and that’s what one senses while watching the biopic miniseries on Benito Mussolini’s surge from a relative nobody to two decades’ reign as an ultra-right-wing dictator of Italy. Adapted from Antonio Scurati’s novel, this was directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright – best known for his fine 2007 film Atonement and having never made anything outside the English language, leave alone in Italian – and produced while conscious that populist right-wing nationalism has once again been raising its ugly head across continental Europe, including in Italy. The brutal, power-hungry and self-serving strongman’s ascent – from founding the ‘Fasci Italiani di Combattimento’ in 1919 and stoking pent-up frustrations from WW1, through establishing the savage ‘Blackshirts’ militia, exponential growth in political clout and snatching the Prime Ministerial chair, and up until the cynical assassination of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti by his bloodthirsty thugs in 1924, culminating with a chilling speech in the Parliament on 3^rd January 1925 which effectively signalled the advent of totalitarianism – has been presented in the form of a punk, stylized and tar black satire that made it a volatile fusion of political history with gleeful formal experimentation, punched with the ethos and machinations of a gangster movie. The deliberately grotesque, hideous, hyper-violent and vulgar tone and palette – composed with compelling exactitude over 8 episodes of an hour each – were accompanied by a techno score, contemporary self-awareness, and a fiery – and frequently fourth-wall breaching – performance by Luca Marinelli as the smug, insecure, uncouth, self-serving and cunning despot who embodied the absolute corruptibility of absolute power.

Director: Joe Wright

Genre: Biopic/Black Comedy/Historical Drama/Political Satire/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) [2025]

Marathi filmmaker Rohan Kanawade’s tender and assured feature debut Sabar Bonda – weaved with intimate semi-autobiographical elements, memories and reflections – was an intensely muted expression of barely contained emotions. A contrapuntal evocation of grief and desire, two supposedly antithetical emotions, it also captured with subtlety what could’ve easily made for acrid parody, viz. the very Indian habit of family elders and “well-wishers” freely encroaching into private spaces and imparting unsolicited advices on life choices and marital decisions. Informed and shaped by the director’s own experiences upon his father’s demise a decade back, which necessitated a rather uncomfortable trip back from Bombay to his village that he hadn’t visited in many years, the film too opened with a similarly reluctant “homecoming” of Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a 30-something gay man employed in a middle-income job in Bombay, to his ancestral village for performing his father’s last rites. Though he’d “come out” to his parents long back, his extended family members aren’t explicitly aware of his sexuality – though not fully unaware either – and consequently, along with instructions on how he should mourn, also doggedly badger him on marriage. However, contrary to societal expectations, he rekindles his intimacy with Balya (Suraaj Suman), an old friend who’s similarly single and a farmer who’s craving to escape from his rural environs. Naturalistically shot in soft colours, lyrical exteriors and framed in rounded edges like old photographs, Kanawade’s understated depiction of the fraught situation – and toned-down evocation of the homophobic atmosphere – was laced with undercurrents of defiance and a wish for the mundane. Alongside the two male leads, competently played by theatre actors who’ve known each other for long, Jayshri Jagtap was also memorable as Anand’s mother.

Director: Rohan Kanawade

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Slice-of-Life

Language: Marathi

Country: India

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

Romería [2025]

 Romería – Carla Simón’s delicate, melancholic and gorgeously sun-kissed third film was a nakedly autobiographical work from her. The Catalan director lost her parents to AIDS when she was six, grew up with her uncle and his family, and went on to study filmmaking. Her delicately realized alter-ego Marina (Llúcia Garcia) has a similar personal arc, and her haunting quest for her deceased parents – alongside reconciliations with her hazy memories of them – informed this deeply personal film. The striking 18-year-old protagonist, who intends to study film at university, needs to get recognized on her father’s death certificate to be eligible for scholarship, and hence travels to the coastal city of Vigo in the hopes of getting a notarized attestation from her paternal grandparents who she’s never met. There, over the course of five days, she meets uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces all of whom welcome her with a mix of warmth and curiosity; her seemingly genial grandfather attempts to “bribe” her with money that’ll allow her to pursue her studies without the need for scholarship and therefore the legal formalities; and her stern grandmother openly disapproves her presence. Armed with her mom’s diary that steers her “homecoming” and a digital camcorder frequently complementing her own eyes, she starts piecing together what really happened to her parents – who embodied Spain’s “lost generation” – through interactions with her newly found family, their oftentimes conflicting accounts, and an unsaid sense of shame surrounding their tragic backstories. Led by the wonderful Garcia and a lively cast, this visually sumptuous work reminded me of such recent films as Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and in particular, Karim Aïnouz’s docu essay Mariner of the Mountains.

Director: Carla Simon

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Autobiographical Cinema/Diary Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

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

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You [2025]

 Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s wackily titled film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – her first feature direction in 17 years which she shot over just 27 days, including two additional ones by trading her director’s fee – began on a dry note with Linda (Rose Byrne) grudgingly agreeing with her daughter’s remark that “Mommy is stretchable”. However, as physics teaches us, nothing is indefinitely stretchable, and an over-stretched object inevitably snaps. The woman is already simmering with nerve-racking anxieties and teetering on the edges, having to care for an overdependent daughter with a mysterious feeding problem that necessitates difficult medical arrangements, and do so helplessly alone due to a perennially absent husband who keeps alluding to conventional gender roles, while also managing her own job, dealing with a damaged apartment, and indefinite relocation to a shabby motel. As a result, it doesn’t take much for her to unravel, and which Byrne portrayed with aplomb. The movie was claustrophobic, tense and distressing, but it was also oftentimes darkly funny and borderline unhinged. Linda, despite being a spiralling trainwreck, is ironically a psychiatrist herself, who – further ironically – takes psychiatric help from her colleague (Conan O’Brien) with whom she shares a passive-aggressive relationship. Additionally, she must continuously engage with people who keep getting on her frazzled nerves – a supremely irritating motel receptionist, a pedantic parking guard, and a couple of overbearing patients, including a teenaged guy who’s physically besotted with her. The script, unfortunately, felt overloaded at times, a serial embodiment of Murphy’s Law, and tad heavy on metaphors; a lighter-footed approach might’ve better complemented the emotional battleground. This, was, nevertheless, a gusty work that courageously navigated through motherhood at its most strained.

Director: Mary Bronstein

Genre: Psychological Drama/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: US

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

The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station / Berlin Hero [2025]

 Like his much-loved 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker crafted a playful tragicomedy – recalling East Germany, which disappeared from the map upon reunification with West Germany, using an absurdist and gently satirical lens – with The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station. However, while the former was set as the wall was coming down, Becker’s final, posthumously released film – adapted from Maxim Leo’s novel – looks into that thirty years later through the porous devices of memory and history. The film’s middle-aged Berliner protagonist Micha (Charly Hübner), who runs a struggling video store, is “discovered” by an opportunist journalist (Leon Ullrich) – looking to write a career-defining article while commemorating the 30^th anniversary of the Wall’s fall – as the mastermind behind a “mass escape” from the erstwhile GDR in 1984. No matter that it was an honest mistake by the then callow railway worker in East Berlin that’d inadvertently rerouted an S-Bahn carrying 127 passengers to West Berlin, and that everyone barring 2 had returned, as who’d want truth to come in the way of a great story – especially one that goes well with how the former Communist country is remembered today in mass media and popular cultural memory. Though uncomfortable with the half-truths and lies that get spun, he starts enjoying being a media sensation. Things, however, are complicated when he finds himself falling for a woman (Christiane Paul) who happened to be one of the 2 people who’d stayed, and former dissident Herald (Thorsten Merten) starts digging into the story. The endearing and vibrantly composed film had moments of ironic humour, as when Herald subverts expectations by praising aspects of East German life that today’s consumerist Germany finds impossible to accept.

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Genre: Comedy/Political Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: German

Country: Germany