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/Film a Clef/Coming-of-Age/Autobiographical Cinema

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

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

Nouvelle Vague [2025]

 Richard Linklater composed Nouvelle Vague as a love letter to the eponymous French movement and Jean-Luc Godard’s trailblazing genius through a quirky, breezy and enjoyable “behind-the-scenes” making of JLG’s seminal debut feature Breathless. The latter film, with the way it embodied radical creative freedom – in its conception, making, expression and all-round irreverence – became the movement’s most emblematic work, and Linklater’s ode was therefore also a gushing celebration of movies itself. Shaped like a picaresque caper, it began with The 400 Blows’ rapturous Cannes screening, the unforgettable debut of Godard’s friend and fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic Truffaut. With most others belonging to Cahiers’ pioneering cohort having made feature debuts already, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) decides it’s high time for him to jump from theory to action. He hustles a meagre budget from producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), somehow lures Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) – fresh out of her success with Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse – into the cast, and pulls in his friend Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), largely unknown at that time, as the Bogart-admiring anti-hero. Former war photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who’d become a Nouvelle Vague legend himself, joins the crew, and thus begins a whirlwind and hilariously unpredictable 20-day shoot when Godard fought with Beauregard, annoyed Seberg, broke every cinematic grammar, charmed everyone and created history, while proving to be alternately mercurial, infuriating, enigmatic, wryly funny and inspired, uttering pithy philosophies and advised by his zen gurus Rosellini, Melville and Bresson. Despite its fleeting qualities, playfulness and verisimilitude – gorgeous B/W photography on 35mm film, digital recreation of 1960s Paris, and made fully in French – Linklater’s approach, ironically, stood at odds with Godard’s guerrilla, improvisational and political filmmaking.

Director: Richard Linklater

Genre: Comedy/Docudrama

Language: French

Country: France