Hokum
Dir. Damian McCarthy, Ireland/U.K./U.S., NEON

Art is, by nature, derivative. The artistic drive comes, in part, through mimicry, emulation, the ambition to match or outdo that which inspired in the first place. There is no shortage of column inches devoted to Hollywood’s concerted lack of inspiration in the 21st century. Downstream from this conversation about IP fatigue and lucrative but mind-numbing appeals to the lowest common denominator is a discourse about how easily and quickly aspects of a successful film’s style can be cannibalized without any true understanding of how choices worked. This typifies an exhausting set of trends in mainstream horror filmmaking, all of which have been cribbed from prestige indie cinema: center-framing, extremely low lighting, desaturated color grading, split diopter and Dutch angle shots, crash zooms, ironic needle drops, the slow push-in on an emotionally muted protagonist trapped amidst an ever-escalating series of allegorical terrors, and the sudden cut to black.

These aesthetic choices, cut up and reposted without context to showcase little more than symmetry, have become a recognizable crutch in horror cinema, marshaled together as a means of signaling a seriousness and quality that is rarely reflected in the script. The narrative and formal demands of screenwriting are specific to cinema, but the ideas and choices that feed them need not be hermetically bound to a single medium. And yet, even within the wide field of their own chosen art form, it appears many filmmakers have an active disdain for the history and craft of cinema. In an essay titled, “On the Teaching of Shakespeare and Other Great Literature,” a 22 year-old Orson Welles, in collaboration with his high school headmaster, puts it succinctly, “The truth of it is that we in the field of English expression have been indoctrinated with the scientific approach theory so thoroughly that we are making dissecting-rooms of our English classes to the slight buildup of our own sense of importance but to the infinite detriment of our charges. We are tossing away their aesthetic birthright for a dubious and unsavory mess of analytical pottage.”

The films of Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy are a welcome reminder of how a reverence for and attention to classic tenets of filmmaking—indeed, to the rich history of cinema, both mainstream and independent—can still yield surprising, thrilling results. One of the very first thoughts I had after watching McCarthy’s 2024 film Oddity was that it had the rhythms and atmosphere of a short story. There is a distinctly literary quality to McCarthy’s work, which spans several shorts and three features. His settings, so far all staged in his native Ireland, are both mundane and mythic, featuring ancient houses, secluded cabins, remote hotels, and the unsettling sterility of hospitals hidden in the forests of a country whose landscape has eluded modernity’s grasp. The supernatural and uncanny lurk at the edges of this reality, rule-bound creatures of folklore as ancient as they are unforgiving. McCarthy’s films feature characters who exist in a world where a single aberrant request—say, being strapped into a chained harness that limits how far into an unfamiliar house they might travel, as in 2020’s Caveat—is perhaps unexpected but a natural part of its internal logic.

This fable-like milieu recurs in McCarthy’s newest film Hokum, distributed by Neon, making it his highest-profile American release yet. Adam Scott stars as prickly novelist Ohm Bauman, whose bleak Conquistador trilogy is coming to a frustratingly uncertain end. While laconically sketching out what, for Bauman, is a typically dark and violent conclusion to the series, the writer is continually haunted by the tragic murder of his mother when he was a boy. It is in service to her memory that he travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland, where his parents spent their honeymoon, to scatter her ashes. It is the week of Halloween, and in Bilberry Woods Bauman encounters the small hotel staff and the denizens that surround it, featuring characters by turns friendly and taciturn, though Bauman’s quick rudeness does him no favors. A deft comedian, Scott is a stiff dramatic actor in the mold of Keanu Reeves, though this is to Hokum’s advantage. His rationalist deadpan delivery turns Bauman’s every line into a pronouncement designed to stifle any intimation of internal depth, his harsh, cold behavior a smoke screen that few are willing to squint through. As such, Bauman is the perfect straight man to which McCarthy’s horrors reveal themselves.

Another literary quality of McCarthy’s films is their careful construction and pacing. The truncated space in which short stories are meant to introduce and convey a narrative privileges vivid but swift descriptions, as in the masterful works of Algernon Blackwood and Shirley Jackson. In Hokum, McCarthy utilizes quick flashbacks and simple idiosyncrasies specific to each character to move the story along. There is always one more wrinkle to smooth out, one narrative complication that heightens tension. Favorite among McCarthy’s stylistic identifiers, and quickly becoming his signature, are totemic props: the mangy stuffed rabbit in Caveat, the life-sized wooden doll in Oddity. There are several items that fit this description in Hokum, including a series of disturbing porcelain figurines, a gas lantern, and an old clock with the likeness of a boy golfer on the top, which are played with and rendered essential as tools of survival by both living and dead characters. McCarthy’s props almost never perform the function one would expect.

The same is true for the horror McCarthy is interested in mining. Immediately upon his arrival at the hotel, Bauman notes that the honeymoon suite where his parents stayed is closed off. The staff members playfully offer diverging explanations: the room is haunted, a witch has been trapped inside it. Bauman’s eventual journey to that room reveals a supernatural reality he did not think existed. McCarthy favors simple execution with his scares, setting up an empty frame, cutting away, then cutting back to show a shape occupying that same frame. Often, the camera is pointed at a shadowy corner or hallway in which something lurks, but McCarthy’s goal, particularly when it comes to his richly classical lighting, is legibility rather than confusion. As such, when something scary appears, the audience sees it clearly, even if the setting is dark or the frame is crowded with other objects or people.

Juxtaposed with the supernatural is another, more distressingly tangible fear. McCarthy’s films all deal with the silencing of inconvenient women by desperate, unimaginative men. In the parallax between the seemingly impossible and the mundane, McCarthy locates a uniquely uncomfortable niche within the genre, one which subverts the audience’s expectations as to who or where the antagonist will manifest. Ghosts feature prominently in his films, but their behavior is difficult to predict. The British writer Robert Aickman says, “The successful ghost story does not close a door and leave inside it still another definition, a still further solution. On the contrary, it must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the end, leave it open, or, possibly, ajar.”

For Ohm Bauman, not only is his conception of a rational and unsurprising world disrupted, but so is his understanding of the finality of death. The door opened to him can never be closed again. Trapped in the honeymoon suite while the hotel is unoccupied, Bauman dwells on his family’s tragic past and that of others who have met similarly violent ends. At the same time, Bauman is being toyed with by ancient forces that take memorably disturbing forms. McCarthy draws Bauman as a person who lives by the adage that hell is other people. Before the night is out, Bauman just might catch a glimpse of the real thing. The lethal inevitability of Gothic literature, where a threshold must be crossed, a repressed history must be violently revealed, or an ethereal force unlocks a terrifying essential truth about the universe is dramatized most potently in McCarthy’s decision to push Bauman into a kind of chamber of reflection where the writer must face the reality and meaning of his death, whether now or in the future, and a dizzying, unsettling question: what awaits him on the other side?

To the Victory!
Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych, Ukraine, no distributor

To the Victory! played at Museum of the Moving Image on April 26 as part of First Look 2026.

We first hear the title of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s new film To the Victory! during an early scene when Vasyanovych, playing a version of himself, and his best friend, Vlad, get drunk on a rooftop and make a toast to Ukraine’s recent victory in the war against Russia. Their simple cheers over a shared bottle of liquor places the film in a near, imagined future, one in which Ukraine has prevailed over their aggressor but is also left with an anguished population of young and middle-aged men who stayed behind to fight. In spite of this, Vasyanovych operates in a hopeful mode, colored by the homosocial camaraderie similar to what you might find in a war film, but transposed onto a creative class that now has to navigate its ambient grief.

During that rooftop scene, Vasyanovych and Vlad fall over each other in their mild stupors, embracing almost like lovers one moment and fighting like enemies the next, after he suggests his next film—the one we see him and his collaborators trying to make throughout To the Victory!—should be about the dissolution of Vlad’s family. Elsewhere, Vasyanovych’s son, Yaroslav (Hryhoriy Naumov), drops out of university, plays violent video games, and drinks to excess once he comes into some money from a new job—an understandable if predictable trajectory for a young man whose youth has been marred by war.

This culture of unattended alcohol consumption and erratic masculinity might recall Cassavetes's Husbands. Unlike Cassavetes, however, Vasyanovych doesn’t normally act in his films. Before production on To the Victory! began, he hired a professional actor who, due to his duties in the armed resistance, eventually had to back out. As he is playing a film director trying desperately to get his next project off the ground, Vasyanovych’s presence imparts extra import to a film about how art can best speak to a politically charged moment. The absence of professional actors in the cast (Vasyanovych notes in press materials that everyone in front of the camera had roles behind it) is a comment on the fragile state of Ukrainian filmmaking that goes beyond the normal logistical challenges of the craft. As the scraps of a news reports on the radio in the first scene highlight, Ukraine is in a demographic crisis. There’s no need to fret over logistics when there’s no one left to stand in front of the camera.

Vasyanovych’s presence also lends a metatextual layer to the film’s construction. To the Victory! is not just a film about the making of a film—it’s a film about the making of a film, in which that fictional film is also about a struggling filmmaker trying to make a film. The premise offers delightful, compounding formal surprises as the viewer becomes more attuned to its conceits. Where the opening scene—breakfast between Vasyanovych and Yaroslav that plays out with unremarkable naturalism—is ruptured by the sound of “Cut!” when Vasyanovych exits the frame, a later scene between Vlad and another friend/collaborator (Serhii Stepanskyi), far more natural and emotionally grounded, is subject to elements outside human control, namely a mine-inflicted pothole that violently jostles the car they’re shooting in. This time it’s Vasyanovych's sudden appearance in, rather than departure from, the frame (he was hidden with his monitor behind the backseat) that alerts us to the grim reality that, even under the best of conditions, a director has only so much control over his art.

Perhaps as an act of defiance to a seeming lack of control, there are 23 shots across To the Victory!’s 104 minutes, an even more extreme ratio than Vasyanovych’s 2019 breakout feature Atlantis (28 shots in 108 minutes). At an average of four minutes, each is a self-contained drama with its own formal conceits and emotional crests and falls. Taken together they feel like Vasyanovych’s attempt to make the most of the feature film form; as if, in an unaccommodating political and cultural context (Vasyanovych has been vocal about his displeasure with Ukraine’s film-related governing bodies), an edit would be akin to deprivation.

Adding to the reflexive nature of To the Victory!, Vasyanovych features a scene in which he and Vlad watch Atlantis and commiserate on their slim chances of getting their next film into festivals. As cynicism burrows its way into the conversation, Vasyanovych suggests he and Vlad shoot a sex scene together; “It’s trendy!”, he remarks, not entirely incorrectly. What follows is a jokey procession of pantomime erotic advances. His hand on Vlad’s upper thigh, rising up to his stomach and chest. Vlad protests through giggles until suddenly he’s straddling Vasyanovych. The whole charade is perverse and titillating for all the reasons you can think of—how haven’t they, as best friends in a world functionally without women, fucked already? But seeing these particular straight guys openly playacting queerness is all the more engrossing because of the reality of their bond. As sarcastic as their near copulation is, their tight, minutes-long embrace the morning of Vlad’s departure from Ukraine, captured by the camera’s uninterrupted gaze, is just as sincere.

A constant drive toward political import motivates the fictional Vasyanovych’s artistic choices. This moment in history, he says, calls for something more than simple relationship dramas; the perpetual tragedies of separation are what the film within the film should be about. Of course, in acknowledging this internal conflict, To the Victory!, the film without all the metatextual trimmings, ends up being precisely about family separation without ever spelling it out. Collapsing the emotional distance between a father and son can have the same, or greater, impact as the physical reunion of husband and wife. Making a film with your best friends can be as profound an experience as watching them depart for another country. That Vasyanovych chooses to focus on the former scenarios is proof of the necessity of hope—even if you have to make it up.

Silent Friend
Dir. Ildikó Enyedi, Hungary/U.K., 1-2 Special

Cinema usually relegates botanical life to mise en scène. Exceptions are notable enough to stand out. There’s the eponymous, sinister tree in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma (1999), which might be destroying its forest—and in the end, potentially the whole world. There’s the Tree of Life in Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), tempting a conquistador in the past and traveling the stars in a bubble spaceship in the distant future. There’s the camphor in Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988), possessing the gargantuan proportions of a child’s outsized imagination—the characters even have the courtesy to thank it for watching out for them.

Such films throw into sharp relief how movies usually feature plants as background elements or aesthetic objects, rather than living things to be understood. Now comes Silent Friend, which treats its botanical subjects with far greater gravitas. This is familiar territory for writer/director Ildikó Enyedi, who had a houseplant witness and solve a murder in Simon the Magician (1994). Here is a movie that includes the Latin names of every single featured flora in the credits, far dwarfing the human cast.

This is only Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s second non-Asian film after 2021’s Shang-Chi, but the true lead is a magnificent ginkgo in the University of Marburg’s Alter Botanischer Garten. Enyedi depicts the tree with reverence, composing the shots it shares with humans so that it occupies the frame with them as a character of equal importance. In a manner not unlike The Fountain, the film is divided into three time periods, with the ginkgo their sole shared character. In 1908, when young women dance in the tree’s grove to commune with nature, it seems to dance with them. In 1972, the tree cradles a university student in its branches. In 2020, there are shot/reverse shot exchanges of silent conversation between the tree and a visiting neurologist played by Leung. The director’s attention ensures that it never feels like a piece of set dressing.

Enyedi has a recurring fascination with lonely people connected by coincidence, magic-realist phenomena, or both. Think of the separated twin sisters who keep crossing paths in My Twentieth Century (1989), or the coworkers who become unlikely lovers after they realize they’re sharing dreams in On Body and Soul (2017). Interacting with the ginkgo bridges lonely people across decades in Silent Friend. In 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler) is isolated as the university’s first female student. In 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm) feels out of step with his peers due to his disinterest in the counterculture. In 2020, Tony (Leung) finds himself living on the empty campus during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Silent Friend is most engaging in how it uses its broad scope to accrue a Wunderkammer of vaguely related niche subjects. The film’s conviction that its plants are full characters is best realized through its investigation into how changing technology opens new ways for humans to understand them. Grete develops a fascination with extreme close-up botanical photography that’s inspired by the work of Karl Blossfeldt. A girl whom Hannes has a crush on has hooked a polygraph machine to her geranium to read its moods, which is based on the (highly questionable, consistently unreplicable) experiments of Cleve Backster. Tony, who came to Germany to further his research into infant cognition, finds himself drawn to the question of plant perception, hooking up brain-scanning devices to the ginkgo.

These glimpsed historical errata are more interesting to read about, or perhaps learn about in a well-researched video essay, than they are to watch play out through much of Enyedi’s film.(It doesn’t help that the movie freely blends legitimate open scientific questions and possibilities about plant intelligence with eye-rolling woo-woo, like the geranium sensing Hannes’s presence from a distance.) In too many ways, the script makes the mistake of attempting to induce empathy for plants by anthropomorphizing them. The pinging between time periods tries to capture the ginkgo’s perspective, portrayed as nonlinear within the context of a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades. But the film’s deliberate pace conveys the opposite effect. The idea that a long life is slow only makes sense from a human point of view. If the ginkgo is seeing these people over the course of its own life, shouldn’t they actually pass it by like flies? A true attempt to cinematically inhabit a lifeform with such a drastically different qualia from humanity might be too alienating for most audiences; think of how Deborah Stratman imagines the inner lives of minerals in Last Things (2023).

And yet I keep thinking about the ginkgo. Enyedi has at least rapturously captured a tree’s physicality, even if she can’t realize its interiority. The characters to whom the ginkgo is a silent friend are not nearly as vivid—and it barely factors into Grete’s and Hannes’s plotlines. The movie creates friction between its leads and their peers through conflicts that verge on the cartoonish. Academics in 1908 being over-the-top boors is believable enough, but the student activists in 1972 are broadly ridiculous, punishing Hannes for leaving a sit-in by… leaving the sit-in themselves to follow him home, where they fuck with the geranium, which is ’80s-movie-level bullying. By the 2020 section, a university groundskeeper is in a resentful petty feud with Tony that only gets more absurd when he discloses what spurred his anger.

It doesn’t help that the movie cuts between the three threads with little regard for meaningful thematic parallels, or sometimes just basic pacing. Hannes’s section feels less like it reaches a natural end than it does like the story stopped bothering to check in on him. The best example of the movie’s lack of conviction in its humans is its use of Léa Seydoux. She gets the first “with the participation of” acting credit I’ve seen, and “participating” aptly describes her here, present only via screens as she advises Tony on his experiments. Its depiction of a socially distanced friendship feels entirely removed from the strides taken in making technologically mediated communication more cinematic, and Seydoux’s affect is of gentle disinterest. Silent Friend’s trees and flowers are wonderful characters; its humans are lacking.

Moonglow
Dir. Isabel Sandoval, Philippines/Taiwan/Japan/U.S., no distributor

Moonglow screens May 3 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

In her long-awaited follow-up to Lingua Franca (2019), writer-director and star Isabel Sandoval returns to the Philippines and turns back the clock. As with Sandoval’s other films, Moonglow invites viewers down pathways through her cinephilic lodestars from the atmospheric Wong Kar-wai–inspired vintage neon colors and simmering melodrama to the plot mechanics of hardboiled film noirs like Out of the Past and Double Indemnity. The film is not an all-out pastiche but is rather playful with its genres, remixing and pushing against their conventions. Ultimately, Moonglow is a film about how national memory interlinks with personal, romantic memory. It opens with the James Baldwin quote, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” The characters find themselves in an uneasy age of corruption, defeatism, and Martial Law under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. In such difficult times, nostalgia remains a lifeblood for characters who risk losing themselves. Moonglow looks back down roads not taken, images and gestures emanating through the hazy humidity of the Manila night like cigarette smoke.

Sandoval plays Dahlia, the name of a flower but also a nod to film noir (the Raymond Chandler-penned The Blue Dahlia). Dahlia is not a classic femme fatale, however; she is a deeply disillusioned police detective in Manila. Dahlia is also not a conventional detective, even beyond her gender making her a minority within her field at the time. Not yet fully hardened by the Marcos regime, she has been using her position to funnel money to the poor under the nose of her corrupt superiors and uses the Catholic church, with help from her Aunt (Agot Isidro), a nun named Sister Therese, to help hide the money. The Robin Hood-like nature of this scheme nods more to Dog Day Afternoon’s Sonny Wortzik than The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle. Technically, Dahlia is committing a crime, but she’s not a “crooked cop.”

Soon, her boss, Bernal (Dennis Marisigan), tasks her with leading the investigation of the crime she committed. Dahlia's rationale for her actions is resolutely unwavering and well-calculated; being Bernal’s right-hand allowed her to observe the ways in which she could manipulate the system. The irony of her self-investigation is compounded when Bernal recruits his magistrate nephew, Charlie (played by Filipino actor-turned-politician Arjo Atayde), who is Dahlia’s former lover. Charlie is an unconventional romantic lead in his bookish looks, which are further contrasted against the oafish and lumbering Bernal, a strongman to the corrupt dictator.

In flashbacks to the late 1960s, Charlie and Dahlia’s past is pointedly tied to a pre-Marcos period, although there are oblique nods to what was to come. This past world is more colorful and realized with a recognizable traditional Hollywood glamor. The film's cinematography, by Isaac Banks (who also shot Lingua Franca with intimacy and notes of solitude), shifts between this brighter, richer palette of the past and a darker, more nocturnal present, filtered through a Gordon Willis–esque vision of the 1970s. The jazzy Keegan DeWitt score and the accomplished soundscape by longtime Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien collaborator Tu Duu-chih bring the past into echoing conversation with the present, highlighting analog technologies, from the of pop music echoing in the distance, to the street and rotary telephones, to radio broadcasts crackling through the airwaves. Yet, despite the evocative period detail and production design, Moonglow does not get lost in nostalgia for its time period, nor does it lose sight of the corrosive realities of the Marcosian era.

Sandoval's breakout Lingua Franca was a New York–set immigration story with a doomed romance at the center, sharing with Moonglow characters navigating systems and red tape, and bending the rules—both personal and lawful—out of romantic and heroic impulses. But that film’s central character, Olivia, was far more circumspect and the narrative was in a more social realist register than Moonglow. It is Apparition, Sandoval's film about a 1970s monastery set in a remote Filipino forest, that Moonglow most resembles. Both films are “ghost stories,” asking what one does as a member of an institution seen as a beacon of morality in a time and place where autocratic kleptocracy rules with an iron fist and immorality begins to consume one’s surroundings. The Marcos regime in these films tests the “better angels” of individuals within these systems who seek out their own forms of resistance.

In Moonglow, we see that resistance is not limited to Dahlia but also applies to everyday, like-minded people, such as the journalist Nick Garcia (Rocco Nacino), who wants to confront the corruption head-on. In much of 1970s cinema, these efforts were often portrayed as futile or reckless actions that inflict collateral damage on innocents. Contemporaneous Hollywood titles such as Alien and Apocalypse Now are seen on cinema marquees, and one character even expresses a love for Robert Redford. This was also the time of Filipino auteurs Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon, and Ishmael Bernal (referred to by Sandoval as “the holy grail” of Filipino cinema) at their zeniths, making names for themselves with urban-set dramas featuring overt social commentary. These films would turn them and other national filmmakers into targets of the censorious Marcos regime during the period of Martial Law. Their critical voices persisted even after the People Power Revolution toppled the authoritarian rule in 1986 and were directed at the succeeding government. Moonglow refuses to define itself strictly in terms of what existed pre-Marcos versus the Marcos era but instead points to the possibilities for what might emerge in the Philippines after the regime change, especially in a jolting flash-forward image. Dahlia is preoccupied with what lies ahead, whether it is her wealth redistribution scheme or a possible future with Charlie even as she is being closely followed by Bernal’s goons.

There is perhaps no film genre more cynical or bleak than noir, yet Sandoval's oeuvre upends conventions by never defaulting to outright cynicism, even when her characters are faced with impossible dilemmas and cruel disappointment. Ultimately, Moonglow is less about the intricacies of double-crossing and money laundering than about finding what can galvanize you through the harshness and cynicism of the times in which we live. While the political currents of today show how challenging that can be for all of us, Sandoval's romantic filmmaking offers an atmospheric, tantalizing tonic.

Humboldt USA
Dir. G. Anthony Svatek, U.S., no distributor

Humboldt USA plays May 2 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

Alexander von Humboldt was a German scientist who explored South, Central, and North America in a series of expeditions between 1799 and 1804. He was, by all accounts, a great humanist and his extensive research across the then-uncharted wilderness of the Americas has earned him recognition as the “father of ecology.” There are more species and places named after him than any other human being. These include the South American Humboldt Penguin and Berlin’s prestigious Humboldt University. Here in the United States, his surname is everywhere: in parks, museums, reserves. Yet if you were to ask most people on the street about him, chances are they’d reply, “Who?”

An admirer of Humboldt, documentarian G. Anthony Svatek decided to focus his feature debut on three locations in the United States named after the renowned naturalist: Humboldt County in Nevada; Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California; and Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, New York. These sites bear zero trace of Humboldt’s influence despite their names. And, perhaps more importantly, these are all places contending with their own environmental challenges, something Humboldt predicted would only worsen with time in his writings about the emergence of industrial factories. In Nevada, Svatek observes the plight of the dwindling big-horned sheep population; in California, he documents a couple’s attempts to create a 3D render of the state park in the (very possible) event it disappears; in Buffalo, he interviews a couple that lives in what’s considered one of the most polluted stretches of land in the state. Although Svatek’s film is constructed as a love letter to Humboldt, it reveals something larger: the state of a nation that has abandoned his wisdom.

Ahead of his travels to the United States, Humboldt wrote a letter to President Thomas Jefferson expressing his wishes to visit. For Humboldt, like many other Europeans of a romantic bent, the United States’ emphasis on democracy and equality signaled the future—an alternative to centuries of small-minded monarchic conventions. Jefferson welcomed Humboldt with open arms; later on, he’d refer to him as “the most scientific man of the age.”

Jefferson makes an appearance in Humboldt USA. At a shopping center in Nevada, there languishes a Jefferson automaton that can recite his presidential address at the push of a button. He stands alongside his peers—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and so on—ignored by most shoppers. In what might be the film’s standout sequence, Svatek cuts between these sad automatons and overlaps their speeches so as to produce pure gibberish. It’s a perfect metaphor for a film about forgotten history and a clear example of Svatek’s dark comedic wit. As he cuts between the lonely automatons and the voice-over grows denser, it becomes obvious how distant the U.S. has gotten from its foundational tenets. Propped up to deliver their presidential addresses on demand until they fall into disrepair, the automatons offer a strange vision of a country that appears future-less, its historical highlights transformed into entertainment and its scientific ambition reduced to spooky toys. Later on, Svatek will film a casino in Nevada that loops videos of nature reserves while customers gamble. Few filmmakers have been able to capture American stupidity with such precision.

Another kind of hopelessness presents itself in Svatek’s documentation of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. In one area of the park, Svatek films researchers photographing the forest to create a digital twin that will be fed to machine-learning models. (This process recalls those discussed in Svatek’s 2017 short .TV, in which the citizens of the disappearing island nation of Tuvalu decide to upload a digital copy of their country.) Elsewhere, Svatek follows a ranger who makes TikToks for children about the environmental challenges facing the park. Between the 3D model and the TikToks, Svatek makes it seem as though the park doesn’t exist IRL anymore. Whatever grand natural landscape Humboldt fell in love with in his travels appears abandoned and displaced, only accessible via the Cloud or social media.

Questions of displacement resurface in the scenes Svatek devotes to Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, where an expressway has replaced the famous green loop that used to connect the city’s two largest parks. It seems that every place in the United States bearing the title “Humboldt” is synonymous with some sort of environmental failure. “Everything is interconnectedness,” Humboldt once wrote in his nature diaries. He penned this to describe symbiotic relationships in nature, his hope being that the maxim would make people more aware of their own impact on the environment. But, in Svatek’s worrisome portrait of the United States, the phrase takes on new meaning.

Present-day America, Svatek argues, is not connected by nature, national pride, or shared ideals. Rather, it is a web of indifference and ignorance: to environmental disaster and of manmade technological damnation. That Svatek never connects any of the discrete chapters in his film is telling and points to how isolated battles against environmental destruction have become. On one coast, an old-growth forest faces imminent danger; on the other, a couple risks lung cancer due to the replacement of trees with concrete. Yet these are separate battles, isolated, much like the kids who tune into the ranger’s TikTok dispatches but can’t hike the same park trails he shows them. Svatek’s documentary, though made with a deceptive lightness of tone, is a tragic one, and it aptly ends with a scene of a middle-aged man who records himself on an iPhone dancing to dubstep in the middle of one of our nation’s most hallowed natural reserves. That image alone should serve as a wake-up call to a new generation of environmentalists… Unless it’s too late.

The Whole World Is a Lie
Dir. Charlie Birns, U.S., no distributor

The Whole World Is a Lie screens May 1 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

Since Lee Strasberg’s death in 1982, Method acting has fallen out of favor with the public. Former students of Strasberg like Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn have attempted to preserve their mentor’s legacy with their celebrity status as co-presidents of the Actors Studio, but his teaching lineage has shifted toward niche environments rather than major institutions. Now, pupils like Tony Greco, an acting coach perhaps best known for teaching Philip Seymour Hoffman, carry on Strasberg’s lineage in a smaller, some might say cult-like, pedagogical setting.

Greco’s acting class at the Gene Frankel Theatre in Manhattan is the primary location of Charlie Birns’s reflexive documentary The Whole World Is a Lie. It’s here that the director, once a student, wants to “elucidate ideas and associations” he discovered while taking this class with Greco 10 years ago. Unfortunately, his vague thesis, tentative demeanor, and camera crew, with its observational yet disruptive position, seem to rub everyone in class the wrong way. The resulting tension undermines Birns’s initial project and becomes the film’s subject, revealing the uneasy power dynamics at play between filmmaker and participants while simultaneously exposing the performative nature of the space, where “emotional truth” and staged expression is often blurred.

Greco establishes his authority with Strasberg’s basic relaxation exercises. As his students chant, slump forward, and roll their necks in foldable chairs, Greco reminds them that this tension is the enemy of the creative process. He’s teaching the fundamentals of Strasberg’s work, but rather than exerting a zen aura, he embodies his former acting teacher’s dogged spirit. Greco maintains this dominance during his first class with Birns in attendance. He calls the director a tool, much to his students’ enjoyment, and reminds everyone that the cameras will heighten and change their classroom dynamic before breaking the fourth wall. This brief moment of eye contact with the camera underscores Greco’s awareness of the filmmaking apparatus. Rather than accepting Birns’s obscure, and possibly self-serving premise for a documentary, Greco controls every scene he’s in. He’s aware of the camera’s presence and actively resists its absorptive framing through direct address that is sometimes passive and other times openly hostile.

Birns is in many ways the polar opposite of Greco. His muted, go-with-the flow mentality is perhaps inspired by all the random talking heads in his film. He enlists tarot card readers, movement researchers, and Buddhist monks to provide commentary on consciousness and transformation. Their anecdotes leave more questions than answers, like why is this happening and who is this film for? Birns’s exploratory nature structures the film, but this doesn’t make his presence any less frustrating for his classmates. It’s clear that the director needs guidance and is struggling with some sort of emotional block, the same one that is holding him back in Greco’s class. During one heated exchange, a group of students attack Birns over his indecisiveness, eventually mutinying. He never matches their vitriol, but the camera captures his disappointment after Greco delivers the death blow, “you’re a very bad producer and director.”

The Whole World Is a Lie has a conventional visual language that highlights its reflexiveness. Birns includes scenes where he consults his cinematographer, Peter Butaine, and camera operator, Marina King, who remind him that “actors are crazy,” and he doesn’t shy away from the less glamorous moments of moviemaking (lights being repositioned, boom mics dipping into frame). But because Birns’s on-screen persona is often verbally withholding, these choices suggest he has the intelligence and financial resources to assemble a skilled and capable crew. When the director’s father, Michael, asks, “How much money are you wasting on this documentary?” while driving around the Hamptons in a BMW, the question registers both as a cruel joke and a pointed reminder that Michael is most likely funding the film’s production in one way or another.

Method acting is built around the conviction that audiences desire access to an actor’s emotions. Unlike real life, in which people are often self-conscious, Method performances are expressive. Michael adheres to this principle despite, like Greco, playing himself. As a self-made man from the Lower East Side, he embodies a certain chutzpah despite his age. Michael is not afraid to chastise his son in front of the camera, perhaps as a way of toughening him up or asserting his dominance. Rather than arguing with his father, Birns shows himself taking most insults on the chin, internalizing his pain rather than reacting to it. The director admits as much during one of Strasberg’s “song and dance” exercises. After singing “Happy Birthday” and looking his classmates in the eye, he becomes visibly upset as Greco presses him about his complicated relationship with his father. His voice cracks as he admits to numbing himself so that he could “move through these violent spaces without seemingly being affected.”

The Whole World Is a Lie can be read as an unintentional form of filmmaking-as-therapy, aligning with executive producer Robert Greene’s process-based documentaries, where performance becomes a way of working through experience rather than resolving it. This is evident during the film’s final scene rehearsal of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Birns admits to Butaine that he needs to give the audience what it wants: catharsis, so he moves to stage it. He experiences affective memory, the core component of Strasberg’s Method techniques, and for a brief moment, Birns, not Greco, is in command of the film as both an actor and director. He is present, unguarded, and momentarily at ease, suggesting that the film is less invested in resolution than in the process of working through the past.

Joybubbles screens May 2 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

The overwhelming presence of smartphones and laptops reduces in-person opportunities for human connection. Archival producer Rachael J. Morrison examines what life looked like pre-social media in her debut feature, Joybubbles. Her subject is phone phreak subculture luminary Joybubbles. Born blind and into a working-class family, Joybubbles (which he adopted as his legal name later in life) whistled and tapped specific patterns over a landline at age four and discovered the telepathic wonders of the world when he could call people domestically and internationally without paying. Despite his talents and tabloid fame, he was harassed by authorities during his time at the University of South Florida, where he was suspended and fined $25 per illegal phone call, and faced systemic ableism in the marketplace.

Her film includes interviews with phone phreak experts like Phil Lapsley and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, but Morrison largely draws on archival media and relies on soundbites from Joybubbles’ “Funlines” (offline radio shows) Dial a Conversation, Zzzzyzzerrific, and Stories and Stuff, to trace his legacy and reflect on the many forms of loneliness he endured. (He says early in the documentary that he likes the word lonely.) Through clips from mainstream films like Penny Marshall’s Big (1988) and episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Morrison examines how certain methods of spreading joy have been policed by managerial figures as childish, indecorous, and unprofessional. If Joybubbles, both the film and the person, taught us anything, it’s that relationship-building transcends order and that happiness makes ideas come to fruition.

I caught up with Morrison at a Brooklyn cafe before the film’s New York premiere at First Look on May 2. We spoke about crafting Joybubbles’ story through audio, how he expressed his inner child in an ableist society, and living in a highly digital reality that is the polar opposite of the eponymous protagonist.

Reverse Shot: What was your relationship with Joybubbles, the person, before you embarked on the doc?

Rachael Morrison: I never knew him, so I found out about him when he passed away. I read his obituary in the New York Times. And I didn’t know that there were phone phreaks. I didn’t know there were people hacking phones before computers. So, I was just fascinated by the fact that he changed his identity later in his life, and I thought there would be a movie about him, or a book, or something, and there wasn’t really any big piece of art or work about him. And so that’s when I decided to start making the film. So, I got to know him, you know, posthumously, like through the process of making the movie. Like a lot of people, they would call his fun line, listen only to his fun line, and that’s how they “knew him.” And so I feel like I kind of had a similar experience. I never talked to him. But because I listened to all these tapes of him talking, I know him, almost as if I were listening to him.

RS: You have a background in archival producing and working in libraries. There's a great deal of media on Joybubbles. Were you aware that you would have to primarily use archival materials to tell Joybubbles’ story?

RM: I knew right away that I would have to use archival [material] because when I first started making the film, I hadn't discovered any. I barely found any audio of him, and I only found it through interviews with people. That really changed the whole scope of the documentary. But my plan was always to use archival material to fill in the visual elements.

RS: How many hours of tapes did you work with?

RM: So, the audio probably had like, maybe almost 50 hours of stuff. Yeah, because somebody recorded all of his “Funline” called "Stories and Stuff." And those were what I had and are on archive.org. And so those episodes were like 20 minutes each, and they recorded like 72 of them. We sifted through all those, and then I had a bunch of other cassette tapes I had found from people along the way, so, more than footage, we were sifting through a big archive of audio, and that's kind of how we started the edit. We did “a radio edit,” where we just did an edit of the audio, only as a bed at the beginning, and then we layered the visual elements on top of that. So, for a while it was just interviews and audio, because that's really where the story comes from: the phone. It felt right.

RS: How many of the storytelling decisions you made were more determined by listening rather than seeing? Most people never saw Joybubbles’ face.

RM: It was an audio-focused story, for sure. The storytelling is 90% through the audio. I consider a talking head interview to be audio because you're just listening and the visual is not wildly compelling. When you're watching someone being interviewed, it's nice to see them, but it's more about what they're saying than what they look like. Then it was like finding the archival footage that would fill in the visual space.

RS: I want to ask about age regression, because people with disabilities—mental or physical—experience the childhood that they never truly got after acquiring their disabilities in their youth. Joybubbles was experimenting with telephones before he would get criminalized for something that he didn't know was illegal.

RM: When he discovered how to make a free long-distance telephone call, he had no idea that he was doing something illegal. He was just a kid, and his intent was never malicious. When he was making free calls and hacking into the phone, he was sort of a pure hacker. He just wanted to take the machine apart and put it back together. He wasn't trying to break something. I think he wanted to relive a childhood that he felt was lost to trauma. But I do think it might have been a response to feeling like people had infantilized him his whole life, which you do see in the film, like people just didn't believe. You know, at one point, he says that his boss wouldn't let him get up and walk around the telephone office because he thought he was going to trip or fall over or something ridiculous like that. So, I do think it was a response to feeling that way and maybe sort of trying to take control over that feeling, but I don't know. I can't speak for him, but I do think it's complicated for sure.

RS: As depicted in Joybubbles, phone-hacking later evolved into computer hacking. This occurred before the smartphone.

RM: Oh my gosh, way before. Did you know that people were hacking into phones before computers? Before you watched the movie.

RS: No.

RM: Most people don't. So it's cool to be giving him his due. He's an important person in the history of tech, but no one's ever heard of him.

RS: The phone is a device that should unite people instead of adding barriers in how to communicate.

RM: I totally agree with you. One of the big things that I want people to take away, and it sounds like you did, is the beauty of human connection, like a one-on-one connection with someone, just a phone call. It's so simple, and now we're just so saturated with technology. It's like we forget that that was the beginning. You know? It was just like talking to a friend, a family member, or a co-worker.

RS: Do you think modern day technology has benefited humanity or put us as a society backwards?

RM: It's complicated because, you know, when I work as an archival producer now, I am remote. I don't go to an office anymore, and I don't work with people in person. So that's a bummer, because it's nice to get, you know, face time with people and be with people, and it can be a lot more collaborative, but at the same time, I work with people who live all over the United States, so it can be like a totally different group of people. It's certainly very easy to communicate with people, but it's kind of too fast, and so we don't feel as precious or valuable.

RS: I wonder how the modern-day smartphone affects phone hacking today. I can't whistle to a digital button.

RM: In the ’80s, when the telephone system switched from analog to digital, it was really just the analog system where you could use tones. The phone company got hip to this whole thing because it did get out of control, and it was a major security flaw. So, when they were, I think, building the new system, they made sure that they were putting measures in place that would not allow people to do that. If you wanted to hack a phone, now, it's just a completely different game. Because back then, they were hacking a free long-distance call, and that's meaningless now. We have our plans, and we can call anywhere in the world. Now, hacking is just really malicious. It's like all the spam that we're getting and stuff like that on our phones.

RS: Joybubbles lived in a different world than ours.

RM: I wonder what he would think about the world. He passed away in 2007. He could have been doing things with computers, but he just wasn't interested. He just loved the phone from the beginning to the end.

As ridiculous as it sounds to speak of a director responsible for My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (1996), Esther Kahn (2000), and A Christmas Tale (2008) in this way, Arnaud Desplechin has become something of a marginalized figure in the U.S. in the past few years. For one, his last three films, Deception (2021), Brother and Sister (2022), and Filmlovers! (2024), failed to secure stateside distribution. In my own experience, I have encountered more cinephiles who regard him as a once-great filmmaker past his prime like Philippe Garrel than those who count him among such contemporary French cinema’s luminaries Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis, who made their feature debuts just a few years before Desplechin did. It is then especially heartening to see that his latest project Two Pianos is receiving a theatrical release in the U.S.

Two Pianos revolves around Mathias (François Civil), a renowned concert pianist who returns to his hometown of Lyon after an indeterminate period of self-imposed exile in Japan. Two women in his orbit are his musical mentor, Elena (Charlotte Rampling), and his old flame Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). On his way out from Elena’s party, the pianist faints upon sighting the latter. Years ago, Claude, married to Mathias’s best friend, Pierre, had a passionate extramarital affair with our protagonist; consumed by guilt and unresolved romantic regrets, he subsequently left the country and abandoned his illustrious career in music. Soon after his return, he finds himself mired in familiar interpersonal conflicts, which take on more urgency when Mathias discovers that Elena is about to retire and Claude’s son Simon is, in fact, his child. After Pierre’s sudden death from an automobile accident, Mathias rekindles the stormy affair, which prompts him to settle down in Nice against the mentor’s wish for him to resume his life as a globetrotting musician.

At a relatively brisk 115 minutes, Two Pianos is not as sprawling as some of his better-known ensemble pieces, and it does not go to incredible depths to reveal all the emotional and existential intricacies of its characters like Esther Kahn and My Golden Days (2015). However, it is an exquisite melodrama that further explores Desplechin’s pet motif of ghosts from the past haunting vulnerable characters who face impossible choices. Don’t make the mistake of taking its shorter runtime and seemingly reduced narrative scope for lesser artistic ambitions. The film seems Desplechin challenging himself in numerous ways: for instance, his idiosyncratic use of jump cuts produces completely different effects in the film’s first and second halves. He never went away, but Two Pianos feels like a triumphant return for Desplechin, a testament to his maturing style and the observable fact that he is still a filmmaker to be reckoned with.

I sat down with Desplechin at the Kino Lorber office in Manhattan during his most recent visit to New York, coinciding with the film’s U.S. premiere at the 2026 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. We spoke about his fascination with ghosts, the joys and challenges of working with musicians, and how Issey Miyake and Edward Yang served as inspirations for Two Pianos.

Reverse Shot: Since the movie revolves around music and the world of musicians, I was wondering if you grew up playing any instruments?

Arnaud Desplechin: Alas, no. It's one of the big regrets in my life. My companion loves and is quite aware of classical music. I'm not a specialist in any kind of music, you know. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to classical music, jazz, and hip-hop, whatever pop music or world music a lot. But my companion, she's quite [knowledgeable] about the classical music of the 20th century. So, she helped me quite a lot with that. It’s one of the wonderful things about cinema. It was a big regret for me not to be able to play any instrument, but I was making films. I met Grégoire Hetzel, who has composed the scores for most of my films. And Grégoire, when I'm working with him, allows me to correct him or make changes. Today I'm able to read sheet music written for the orchestra. So I read it. He plays it on the piano, and I say, “You change the horns, okay?” But I can't say which notes. I can sing them. And Gregoire, because we have such a friendship, takes my notes. When we worked with a jazz score, like with the saxophone and the piano, he allowed me to enter the booth with the musicians to direct them. I can't play any music, but I can direct real musicians.

RS: I imagine building scenes where actors playing musicians and real musicians work together comes with a unique set of challenges. What was that process like?

AD: I’ve attended so many music recording sessions in London and Paris. That's something that I do know. I know where to put the camera behind the orchestra. With [cinematographer] Paul Guillaume, I was trying to find a way to tell stories [through the musical performances]. Because actually, in most films, you have a scene where you can see musicians, and that’s implied in the storytelling. It's a moment where nothing happens. But let's take the first scene when you have music for two pianos. [Before the scene], Mathias gets drunk. He is in jail after that. He’s just hanging out in the garden, seeing his body double with the face of a child. He arrives. He is still hungover, but now he has to play. He plays like shit, and Elena is pissed at him. So it’s about the action, not the music. It’s about the relationship between the two characters, between Elena and Mathias. So, each one of the musical scenes leads to the final one—the audition. Will he win the contest? Will he lose it? Will he play better?

As for mixing actors with musicians, it was easy because Charlotte Rampling knows everything about classical music. When I met her, she said, “Okay, I won't play one note because I know that I'm not a musician.” So, I asked, “Could you play one note of the Debussy?” “Okay, I will play the opening note of the Debussy.” It was lovely. But François Civil can't read music, unlike Charlotte. So, he memorized all the positions and practiced for a long, long time before we directed him with Gregoire to have the right interpretation of these moments. We would tell him, “No, no, you don't play these notes like that, try it like this instead.” When we were working on the last audition scene, when he is supposed to play Chopin’s étude, I saw François plotting something behind my back with the sound recordist. And I found out he told the sound recordist to put a mic in the piano, because it could be useful to me. When we had met months before, François arrived at our meeting and said, “I love the script, and by the way, I can’t play the piano.” I said, “Who gives a shit?” What I'm interested in are the feelings of Mathias—why he is so passive in front of this woman he loves and his strange relationship with Elena, who is like his mother.

RS: A couple of words that often get used to describe your film are “sprawling” and “novelistic.” And when I first saw Two Pianos, I thought I was going to learn more about Mathias’s life outside of Lyon, but we barely do. Was there a reason for that?

AD: There is a wonderful thing that I didn't unfortunately come up with, but François said it. One time, we were presenting the film in France, and there was a question from the audience, and it had to do with how Mathias faints in front of Claude early in the film. “So is the film just a dream and nothing happened?” That was the question. And François said the answer was the opposite. At last, Mathias is waking up when he sees the beloved, when he sees Claude. All his life in Japan, he was asleep, and now he's awake. And during the film, he would be awake. It was not a proper life in Japan—that was just a dream. But now that he can see her, and when he faints and bangs his forehead against the door, he wakes up. I thought that was a beautiful way to put it.

RS: Over the course of the film, Elena’s response to her impending retirement is expressed through her outfits. First, we see her in a striking red suit. And the second time we see her during a rehearsal—it’s one of my favorite shots from the film—she's wearing this beautiful Issey Miyake top. When you wear Miyake’s clothes, the micro-pleats don't conform to the body. They create these unruly bumps, almost to protect the body. And towards the end, her sadness becomes all the more startling precisely because she is standing in a shower booth, completely naked and vulnerable. Without the armor, the stage, and the music, she doesn't have much left in her life.

AD: I love your way of describing the costume evolution of Elena. The fact that she's always wearing armor. I noticed that many spectators were afraid of Elena. But I think she's fun. She's frightening and funny when she says she had a dog once but sold it after three months. She lights a cigarette and insists that you smoke with her too. She's so insolent and brutal. I love her for that.

RS: There seems to be this tension between life outside of art and the total devotion to art.

AD: Is art compatible with life or not? Well, actually, there are two films here. Mathias is balancing between two women and is in love with both. I remember telling François before the shoot that some people who read the script found the male character to be passive. I responded by quoting Ian Holm from Esther Kahn—an actor is doing actions. So, I said to François, “If you were to become Mathias, you would still have to act something even when you’re passive in the scene descriptions. So how will you sort out this contradiction?” He said that he’s been through love and knows all about it. At each step, Mathias chooses to obey love and Claude’s orders and chooses Elena as his mentor. In both cases, he’s taking an action.

The first section is the love story with Elena. Although they don’t go to bed together, there’s still intimacy. She’s with a lovely blonde girl, who is sitting beside her and caressing her thigh, and the girl leaves the room when Mathias shows up. Elena’s glance seems to tell him, “Not this one, this one is for me.” So, you can imagine that in the past, they might have been playing games like this. Definitely something sexy between the two. Then the second part of the film, after Pierre’s death, is of course the love story with Claude. What’s funny is that at one point, Claude is jealous of Elena and calls her “the skinny bitch.” It’s true that Elena wins Mathias’s heart in the end. He leaves Claude for Italy to do what Elena wants him to do. A competition between the two women who have been loved by Mathias.

RS: I noticed that there are jump cuts/abrupt cuts throughout the film. You mentioned the scene where Elena asks Mathias to smoke with her, and there is a jump cut there. Almost like the film is snapping, because Elena is very frustrated and angry. But when I see the same technique used in a scene between Mathias and Claude in a park, it doesn’t feel like the film is fracturing. On the contrary, it feels like you're conjoining these fragments from the past in the present moment.

AD: The two actors were actually surprised when they ran lines. They initially thought the scene was going to be one continuous moment. But I told them, “No, let’s start by the tree. And after that, let’s have this second section on the bench.” All of a sudden, it became an endless moment. You know, I’ve seen some films in my life, and I remember the films I love and learn from them. The problem is, what do I do with the fact that I cannot steal from these films that I worship? There is a scene toward the end of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi—a masterpiece—which breaks my heart. [NJ and Sherry] are in the park, and they get to relive their past love, an impossible love. And that was my inspiration. I hope I didn’t take the same path that Edward Yang took because he’s the master and I’m just his student.

RS: Had you previously wanted to make a film about musicians?

AD: I wanted to work with an old friend and a new writer whose name is Kamen Velkovsky, and it was great. He does not live in France, so we had Zoom sessions. One day, Kamen asked, “Okay, Arnaud, we’ll try to write something together. Tell me what you have.” And my answer was, “I’m thinking about this young widow. She’s too young. And this guy Pierre just passed away [clicks his fingers] like that. Then, it’s a Jewish funeral and she’s a Gentile woman. The widow makes a speech and recounts a joke from her husband, saying he was a wonderful storyteller. It’s an obscene joke, very embarrassing for everyone at the funeral. Suddenly, she feels so alone and stupid. This is what I want to film, this funeral. I want to film this joke, which I think is funny, but not funny in this particular context. I want to save her from the embarrassment I will plunge her into. I will try to save her, to rescue her after a while. This is what I have. What do you have, Kamen?”

And Kamen told me, “I have a different story. It’s about a pianist coming from exile, arriving in his hometown. He’s hungover at a park, and he sees his double with the face of a child. That’s it, it’s him as a child.” It was a ghost story, and I love ghosts. So, the film became a marriage between these two stories. One story about impossible love, and one story about ghosts. Once we began writing, the ghosts started to appear everywhere in the script, mainly the ghosts of Pierre. There’s also the ghost of Elena’s disease. The ghosts were providing a mystery element to the love story, kind of like German mystery tales from the late 19th century—there’s me and this child, but is the child actually me?

The story became quite mysterious. Then, I asked Kamen, “But how come? How will you fix that story? I have this widow at the park with the child. And I have this other guy. How do we put these two stories together?” And he said, “Yes, but it’s the pianist’s child.” So, that’s how we wrote it.

RS: Simon is obviously a real child, but he’s also a ghost from Mathias’s own past that he doesn't quite remember. For instance, he doesn’t remember why he gave up on the violin at first. But through the child, he recalls that part of his childhood. That might be quite comforting, but contending with the lost past can be intimidating. Did you intend to convey something frightening about Mathias’s encounters with Simon?

AD: Frightening, certainly like in German ghost stories written by Hoffmann or other writers like him. We learn at the swimming pool that Mathias lost his father around Simon’s age. To be a classical musician as a young child is nightmarish. You basically have no childhood. Mathias never had a real childhood because he was constantly practicing. So, to him, looking at Simon is looking at the childhood he never experienced.

When Mathias sees the child for the second time, Simon throws stones at him with absolute hate. And that’s exactly what I wanted to film. I was terrified after that, back in my hotel room. Then, I thought to myself, how can I share with an audience an image so upsetting and uncomfortable? Mathias is struck by fear and can’t cope with it. He has to tame the kid by having discussions with him, trying to adapt to each other’s ways. In some ways, Simon has to adopt Mathias, and Mathias has to adopt Simon.

Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)
Dir. Lucrecia Martel, 2025, Argentina/U.S./Mexico/France/Netherlands/Denmark, Strand

Operatic music lends a view of Earth’s orbiting satellites an air of drama and grandeur. The opening shot of Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks), Lucrecia Martel’s long-awaited follow-up to Zama (2018), looks like it could be out of a David Attenborough–narrated documentary. Martel doesn’t frequently indulge in establishing shots. In the critically acclaimed SaltaTrilogy, which established her as an auteur of the New Argentine Cinema, as well as the beguiling colonial epic Zama, she throws you right in the middle of her novelistic worlds, which are built in delirious close-ups, unexpected cuts, and alien soundscapes that subvert her asymmetric visuals. Martel’s perspective is so intimate and surreal, watching her films can feel like putting your eye up to the keyhole of a stranger’s motel room and seeing something you weren’t supposed to see. That Nuestra Tierra—co-written with María Alché, who played Amalia in Martel’s The Holy Girl (2004)—begins not up close, but zoomed out into space, is instructive, then, inviting us to think beyond location and time, before even meeting the subject of this story. The all-seeing satellite, an artificial Eye of Sauron, suggests that the cumulative record of humanity is in question. All of human history is on trial.

Martel’s first documentaryis about the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an activist and leader of Argentina’s indigenous Chuchagasta community, during a dispute with a local landowner. Chocobar’s murder was recorded by his killer and posted on YouTube, sparking national outrage and demands for justice across the country and leading Martel to make a film. The attack that led to Chocobar’s murder wasn’t an isolated incident. It was emblematic of a history of violence against native people over the rights to their lands, while the federal government looked the other way. Nuestra Tierra follows the murder trial from beginning to end, supplementing courtroom footage with troves of personal archives and oral histories, gradually building a damning account of 500 years of dispossession and violence against indigenous citizens. All nations are founded on myths. Declarations of independence often involved janky handovers of power and land claims from crumbling empires to a wealthy elite. As those claims changed hands through history, their legitimacy was never questioned, while the communities who lived and worked the land were bullied, intimidated, silenced, and killed. Martel strips Argentina’s mythmaking down to its colonial foundations, going all the way back to the 17th century to tell the story of the Chuchagastas.

It happened on October 12. Defendants Dario Luis Amín, a local landowner, and two former police officers, Luis Uberto Gomez and José Valdiviesoare, drove up through the hills of northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province. Their intention was to evict the Chuchagastas from their lands. When they were met along their path by members of the community, the men parked and got out of their trucks. Amín was armed and recording. He claimed to own the official titles to the land. Chocobar and others defended their right to be there. The argument turned physical, and Amín drew his gun, shooting Chocobar dead. Gomez, Valdiviesoare, and Amín were all arrested, but it took nine years for the case to go to trial. Only in 2018 were they tried and convicted.

Martel and cinematographer Ernesto de Carvalho make heavy use of drone footage in Nuestra Tierra. After the shot of space, we see aerial views of the rural landscape. A drone camera swoops into a girls’ soccer game. As the trial begins and the cameras enter the courtroom, instead of diegetic sound, we hear disembodied audio that screeches and thumps like a microphone being set up and plugged into an amp. It sounds like something a band might leave at the end of a song recording to give it more texture. Martel’s sound design is characteristically fascinating; she layers artifice over a reality that’s already in contention. These digital elements suggest an imposing modernity that clashes like cymbals with the natural environment. At one point in the film, a drone captures an ethereal white horse on a hillside. The animal stares boldly into the camera, as the machine flies closer, before galloping in the other direction. This unwanted attention echoes, in spirit, the intrusion that Amín captured on his handheld camera on October 12, 2009, in blurry footage that’s projected and analyzed in court.

Amín’s video from the day of the murder is at the center of the trial. The defense tries to cast doubt on the identity of the shooter, while claiming that the men feared for their lives, and the shooting was in self-defense. The defense attorney pauses the video at a moment where one of the former cops pushes a community member and shuffles back, and his client asserts, “The Argentine state taught us to do that.” It’s a moment of revelation that suggests the state had a role in Chocobar’s murder—perhaps speaking unintentionally to the filmmaker’s thesis. The footage operates on symbolic levels, calling back, implicitly, to a long history of violence against indigenous people that began with the Spanish conquistadores who arrived in Buenos Aires in the 1500s. The way the video of the murder proliferated online has echoes of a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd, which also achieved a grim virality, and the videos circulating social media of the genocide and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, violent attacks and land grabs in Palestinian villages are frequently recorded on phones and posted to TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. In each of these cases, like Chocobar’s murder, the dissemination of disturbing images—indisputable evidence of state and state-supported violence—enraged and mobilized scores of people across the globe.Martel’s fixation on the “digital eye” motif in the film is both commentary on surveillance culture as well as a rejoinder to the ubiquitous government warning: “We’re watching you.”Technological progress has undoubtedly been a double-edged sword for human rights, both advancing malevolent government agendas and undermining them. For the disempowered, themarginalized, and the colonized, these videos function as illusion-shattering proof, loosening the state’s grip on collective memory.

Marteljuxtaposes the digital video with weathered photos taken by members of the community on older analog cameras that she and her team scanned over the course of years. The Chuchagasta community’s archive is rich with pictures, videos, and paintings that tell a different story than the one outlined in legal contracts and titles paraded by the defense as evidence of ownership. As the images fill the screen, Chocobar’s widow, Antonia Hortensia Mamaní, describes black-and-white photos developed from her husband’s camera, which she says he always had with them. Mamaní talks about long days of cutting sugar cane, getting married at 21, and how Chocobar made horse saddles. In the end, Martel presents two competing narratives—the Argentinian state’s, and the indigenous community’s—about how we got here. Together, they reveal a deeper truth about how these kinds of injustices have persisted over time despite new leaders across new generations. The Kafkaesque maze of bureaucratic hurdles the Chuchagastas repeatedly navigated in their quest to legally claim the hills where they have resided for centuries was no accident. These obstacles were part of a deliberate and sophisticated plot to separate indigenous people from their lands.

As complex as the power dynamics illustrated in this film are, you can understand why Martel’s first nonfiction film might not register as formally inventive as her narrative masterpieces. The search for “truth” is a slippery enough concept as is, without adding the ambiguity of experimental film techniques. Documenting the high-stakes Chocobar trial and unraveling the state’s deceptions requires a certain amount of linear and coherent storytelling, which Martel has traditionally resisted in her films. Nuestra Tierra’s stylistic flourishes—the satellites, drones, and sonic atmosphere—don’t overwhelm so much as complement the Chuchagasta community’s personal archive, which needed the room to speak for itself. It’s hard to know what justice looks like for the community. Chocobar’s killers were convicted and given lengthy sentences, but were ultimately released after just two years. Amín later died from Covid. But Nuestra Tierra is bigger than one case. It’s about preserving the history of Argentina, told by those who were conquered, and supporting the ongoing struggle for indigenous survival. Martel’s filmmaking here is intentionally straightforward and precise, wielding careful storytelling as a cudgel against the bludgeoning power of the state, in order to credibly represent and affirm the existence of a history and culture that has been “officially” denied. It hardly seems like a concession considering what’s at stake.

Tropical Park
Hansel Porras Garcia, U.S., no distributor

Tropical Park screens May 3 at Museum of the Moving Image’s as part of the 2026 First Look festival.

The first thing you see in Tropical Park is a Trump 2024 banner through a car windshield. The windshield is grimy at first, but soon enough Frank (Ariel Texido) comes out to wash it; it’s his driveway, and presumably his Trump banner on his front porch. The car, though, belonged to his late father, and now he’s going to give it to his sister Fanny (Lola Bosch), who, 20 years since the two last met face to face, has followed her brother to Miami from their native Cuba. The only way to get around Miami is by driving, Frank explains—and anyway, public transportation is “communist crap”—so he’s going to give her driving lessons.

Hansel Porras Garcia’s film is shot in a single take from a camera set up in the back seat of the car, and consists entirely of Frank and Fanny’s outing from beginning to end, as they drive from somewhere in West Flagler or Little Havana to the northern parking lot of the titular green space (the camera does not pick up the equestrian statue of Ronald Reagan, by the Havana-born Florida artist Carlos Prado, at the park’s entrance), take a few spins, and return home. The film’s opening image displays the private sanctums that define the American nuclear family—detached home surrounded by well-kept lawn, automobile—and makes them stridently politicized. The interpersonal drama that follows gets at interrelated ideas of property ownership, kinship, and freedom (meaning either independence or loneliness), as the automotive sprawl of America’s built environment flows past.

The recent film which Tropical Park most resembles is the Australian director David Easteal’s The Plains (2022), which was similarly shot from a fixed backseat camera, across several iterations of an office worker’s drive home, each fundamentally the same but also distinguished by variations in weather and light, music and radio, phone calls and the occasional carpool. At three hours long, The Plains gives one of life’s most mundane rituals an epic scope, as if the daily commute from city to suburb is a pastoral return and culmination of a hero’s journey. The car in The Plains was a Hyundai Elantra, and the camera was jammed in behind the center console, peering beyond the backs of driver and passenger heads bounding the frame to take in a low-angle proscenium view of Melbourne. Tropical Park is an American film and so naturally was shot in a larger vehicle—the director’s own Nissan Kicks—and the camera is further back from the front seats. Glimpses of the tree-lined streets of Coral Gables and the billboards of Bird Road are visible through the windshield, through the passenger and driver side windows and the windows over the rear doors, for a wraparound widescreen view that also feels swaddled, the world kept somewhat at bay. The car, no less than the home, is a man’s castle, and this private transport is more absorbed in domestic dramas than the world at large.

Privacy and autonomy are main concerns of the dialogue: Fanny doesn’t know how to drive, having arrived from Cuba just a month ago; with a half-serious childish whine, she says she doesn’t want to learn, but Frank insists it’s necessary for her to become self-sufficient, as he did. He came to this country with nothing, he reminds her, but now takes immense pride in his home, his two little girls, and his “gringa” wife Erika, who stood by him when he was no one (and whose parents, in their benevolence, helped set him on the road to financial success).

Frank’s paternal guidance comes with more than a little boot-strappy ideology, which is underlined by the ulterior motive of today’s sojourn: he wants to shove Fanny out of the nest as soon as possible. Fanny is trans, a fact that Frank, who remembers her as the kid brother he left behind, and corresponded with through their parents’ deaths, only found out when he picked Fanny up at the airport. Though he slips between “hermano” and “hermana,” Frank accepts his newfound sister, and even professes to admire her bravery, but his personal compassion and heartfelt offers of charity, intended to give her a leg up as she seeks housing and employment, are on his terms, and hardly the material support needed by a gender-nonconforming Spanish speaker likely to face discrimination on multiple fronts in Florida as in Cuba. Erika, who callously misgenders Fanny in a speakerphone call, comes from a very conservative family, and Frank is eager to resume hosting her parents for their regular Sunday-afternoon visits—it’s a nonstarter to expose them to his transgender Cuban sister, and he feels, perhaps, more ashamed of himself, and more precarious in his hard-won American life, than he is willing to admit.

There’s symmetry to Fanny and Frank’s backstory: she was with their mother when she died in Cuba, while he was with their father when he died in Miami, after emigrating in his widowerhood. You see in Tropical Park’s setup the formula for a movie that contrasts a macho individualist and a feminine communal definition of thriving and gets at the whiplash contradictions of Cuban-American identity in which each character has the values and blind spots of the context that shaped them. That’s not really the way the movie goes. Fanny protests a little at being sacrificed to the imperatives of normative family structures and shows flashes of her tendencies toward avoidance and naiveté. But mostly, she can barely get a word in edgewise. Frank explains his poverty upon arrival, his hustle to survive, his heart-swelling responsibilities as head of his own brood, and his hairshirt guilt at having no choice but to put out his own flesh and blood; soon enough he breaks down sobbing at the enormity of his obligations.

It’s accurate enough, one supposes, that the exchange between these two characters ends up dominated by a patriarch’s lectures, his histrionic self-justifications, his weaponized tears; of course Fanny, who exists outside the family unit that guarantees social and economic capital, would be pushed to the margins of this conversation, and have to listen more than talk, and understand more than argue. The conversation only achieves parity as the two return to their store of shared memories and their parallel sadness over the deaths of their parents. Porres Garcia, whose father taught him to drive in Tropical Park, and who then taught his mother to drive there, pushes his fictional family toward a raw and tender rapprochement, expressing hope that collective history and love in the abstract can outweigh the very real social and economic conditions demanding their estrangement.

The film is quite a formal achievement, its single 80-plus minute take executed after just one rehearsal, with the director listening from a following vehicle. Texido and Bosch improvised their dialogue from a brief outline and respond to the alternating chaos and longueurs of Miami traffic, embedding the high melodrama of confession and catharsis in the banal rhythms of rolling stops and slow merges. The driving-lessons conceit is a bit of misdirection, as Fanny takes just a couple circuits around the lot before shifting gears into park so she and Frank can have a real conversation—but there’s a logic to this choice. What’s more American, after all, than pulling into a parking space and crying in your car?

A Date with Shirley
Dir. Ken Jacobs. Photographed by Ken Jacobs, Azazel Jacobs, Nisi Ariana, U.S., no distributor

A Date with Shirley screens Sunday, April 26, at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

Visiting Ken Jacobs inevitably meant taking a walk to Chinatown with him and Flo, his partner. From their fifth-floor walkup on Chambers Street, you’d head past the phalanx of large, pale government buildings near City Hall, and emerge, as if in The Wizard of Oz, into a burst of color as you entered Columbus Park, a kaleidoscope of ground-level urban energy, with the bustle of people playing Mahjong, Xiangqi, basketball, tai chai, and soccer, and varied music mixing with the squeals of playground children. This was often on the way to a dim sum meal, after popping into stores and making other stops along the way, usually for Ken to capture moments on camera. One outing with Ken, Flo, and my three-year-old son Caleb resulted in an hour-long home movie, and I have a few friends who also possess long videos by Ken starring their children. Archivist Andy Lampert has one with his daughter, Zazie, walking around Chinatown with a handful of dollar bills, getting a lesson from Ken about how money works.

Whether making a home movie or a work of avant-garde cinema—or breaking the boundaries between them—Ken, who died last October, turned daily life into mind-expanding perceptual adventures. It is fitting that his final long-form work is a record of his own haircut in Chinatown by his favorite barber, Shirley, at the V1 Hair Salon on 50 Bayard Street. As she deftly snips away we see Ken, reflected in a mirror, recording the action with equally agile hands. As he did for so many years, he is capturing a quotidian moment so that he can freeze it but then later transform it into a Cubist motion painting. For Shirley, with straightforward vérité footage as the base, he later (with his computer-savvy editing partner Antoine Catala) unlocked the energy latent in the imagery with an array of techniques, using flickering, solarized colors, negative imagery, stroboscopic stutters, and matting that blacks out parts of the frame to focus on vivid details.

A clump of fresh-cut gray hair on the floor is animated. A circular mirror at the base of a barber chair creates distorted abstract images. A cluttered table with hair products, an iPhone stand, and a jar of peanut butter, becomes a fascinating 3D still life. As with so many of the films he made over the past 70 years, his 1950s training under abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman informs his approach, particularly its play with tension between flatness and depth, stillness and motion, and its activation of the entire frame.

But what makes A Date with Shirley especially resonant, and one of his most emotionally rich works, is the family dynamic at its core. Along with Ken for the haircut were his two children—his son, the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, and daughter, multimedia artist Nisi Ariana. Both of them were filming, alongside Ken, and we watch the action from multiple viewpoints—Ken looking, and being looked at—with the mirrors in the salon adding to the complexity of the shifting perspectives. It’s like Velázquez’s Las Meninas in Chinatown. But beyond the visual play is the simple, deeply bittersweet undercurrent that these two adult children are spending precious time with an elderly parent. Ken, who barely says a word, except to acknowledge Shirley’s work as “amazing,” looks glad to be holding a camera, and also wistful; one feels an awareness that he knows these images will outlive him. Azazel and Nisi are both smiling throughout, relishing the rare chance to make a movie together, to honor their father by following in his footsteps. In one shot, we glimpse Azazel from behind, filmed by Nisi, his camera pointed at a green plant by the window; we later cut to Aza’s shot, the plant in the foreground with a dusty window beyond it partly obscuring the view of street traffic beyond, the kind of image that Ken would have filmed. Nisi does most of the talking in the film; she seems to be trying to bring cheerfulness to what feels like a poignant moment. “You’re still handsome, Dad,” she exclaims towards the end of the haircut, a loving compliment that also acknowledges the simple fact of his aging. The entire film is simultaneously suffused with an awareness of time passing and an embrace of the vitality inherent in any present moment.

This duality is present in Ken’s name for the hundreds of short 3D video pieces he created in his last years: Eternalisms. Ken’s art went through many different phases, but he always worked close to home, and he was never more prolific than in his final decade, when he made hundreds of Eternalisms (many available here), shooting and editing until just days before he died. Haircuts are ephemeral, but this one with Shirley lives on. And you can get your own haircut there; the credits include the salon’s phone number, 212-693-3388, and cuts start at eight dollars.

The Little Stabs program screens April 25 at Museum of the Moving Image’s as part of the 2026 First Look festival.

In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, American avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs reflected on his prolific career, concluding: “my fundamental interest…is [an] expansion of consciousness with all the take-for-granted or ignored ways of the world.” For Jacobs, a contemporary of Jack Smith and Stan Brakhage, filmmaking is a participatory endeavor that actively engages and agitates both an audience’s vision and mind. Sometimes Jacobs challenges his audience’s political consciousness with found footage like in Perfect Film (1985), comprised entirely of preserved TV news discards of Malcom X’s assassination. Other times, Jacobs repositions our relationship to the cinematic image as in Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), wherein he rephotographs Billy Bitzer’s 1905 film of the same name, adding camera movement, freeze frames, and other editing techniques to enact an exhaustive analysis of Bitzer’s film while simultaneously constructing his own original work.

While expanding consciousness can be generative, it can also be discomforting, as First Look’s 2026 avant-garde shorts program “Little Stabs” suggests. Deriving its name from Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), these twelve films curated by Genevieve Yue and David Schwartz encapsulate Jacobs’s “expansion of consciousness” through both visual and aural directives, invitations, or provocations that sometimes eschew looking altogether. Each film wrests us from passivity and unsettles or incites us to question (or forego) the image, the frame, and the aforementioned “take-for-granted or ignored ways of the world.” The programmed films’ capacious approach to the cinematic both celebrates and perpetuates Jacobs’s patrimony.

Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s unsettling The More I Zoom in on the Image of These Dogs, The Clearer It Becomes That They Are Related to the Stars (2023) opens “First Stabs.” Composed of a single shot, the film methodically zooms in on a pixelated picture of two dogs staring through the metal railings of a train station. From the start, the film is, to quote Hito Steyerl, “a poor image.” Nothing is in focus or, to borrow language from the film’s title, “clear.” As the zoom continues, further degrading the legibility of the picture, the image becomes pure abstraction, a blurred division of various colors and shades. Hungarian composer Mihály Vig’s score spawned Koberidze’s short for the Film Fest Gent’s 2x25project, an initiative where twenty-five composers write a short piece of music and twenty-five filmmakers craft a film in response. Vig’s harmonic minor key infuses The More I Zoom with a plaintive quality while the cello’s low register adds an ominous tone. Just over halfway through the four-minute runtime the frame’s composition deepens from beige to browny mauve. The colors are indeed saturnine and planetary as we drift further away from any intelligible understanding of what we’re seeing onscreen, into a depthless, digitized blur.

What follows from Koberidze’s atmospheric opening is Jordan Strafer’s disquieting and hypnagogic Dissonance (2024) which takes place on a 1990s talk show stage while a World War II vet leads the audience through a meditation. Staring into the camera, Ray (played by Jim Fletcher) states, “In order to participate in this exercise, you first need to relax yourself. Recall the first home you can remember as a child. And actually look for, and try to visualize, yourself as a little child in that house.” From there, Ray leads the audience (which is also Strafer’s audience) through a breathing exercise, inviting them to close their eyes. As a result, Strafer’s film is a participatory one. If we take Ray’s invitation at face value, the remainder of Strafer’s film is meant to be heard but not seen.

Lewis Klahr’s Orpheus (2024), which closes part one of the program, similarly instructs the audience to shut their eyes, albeit with text on screen. “When you have finished reading these instructions please close your eyes,” Klahr writes. “When the song finishes playing please open your eyes.” As the text fades, a flicker of light, like a fluttering eyelid, reddens the frame before cutting to blocks of blue, then black, yellow, then black, then green. Sometimes the blocks of color are textured, as if fabric swatches or handmade paper. Sometimes each frame flashes across the screen so rapidly that the pulsations of light seam our eyelids shut. Though Klahr’s text insists this is a “closed eye film,” the flashing blocks of various colors onscreen trouble Klahr’s assertion. There is something to be seen but, like the Greek myth, the challenge is to avoid that chromatic temptation. Orpheus is almost like a condensed version of the 15-minute sequence in the middle of Lois Patiño’s Samsara (2023), a sequence Patiño described as a “perceptual, even neural experience.” Like Patiño, Klahr and Strafer underscore how perception doesn’t end with vision. Both of their films amplify the myriad ways in which cinema affects the body, not just through sight.

The desire to move the body (emotionally, neurally, affectively) has been present, intentionally or not, since cinema’s beginnings. Consider the myth surrounding the Lumière brothers’ first screening of L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) where their audience, panicked by the seemingly life-sized approaching train, ran screaming from the theater. Six decades later, when Ken Jacobs started making films, expanded cinema immersed audiences in multimedia performances or site-specific events, wresting them from passive spectatorship to active involvement. In this vein, it is a shame that Peng Zuqiang’s Afternoon Hearsay (2025) cannot be experienced in its original format as a three-channel video installation. That said, itis still a richly textured and haptic experience which pairs its soundscape with a combination of contemporary Super 8 footage, 16mm and 35mm colored negatives. The film explores fragmentation, memory, and historical research by foregrounding its own construction.

Afternoon Hearsay opens with a filmstrip running down the right side of the frame. The filmstrip’s perforations are visible as it wavers across the dark screen, rippling and luminous. Peng utilizes reels of 8.75mm film here, a medium developed in 1960s Communist China to disseminate information. Since 8.75mm film has no camera, it is a material intended only for distribution, rather than recording. In Peng’s film, 8.75mm is thus a historical record of an obsolete technology as well as an image in and of itself. The movement of the material is the subject.

Kate Solar’s (for once I dreamed of you) (2025) shares Peng’s interest with how handling film elicits a haptic response in the viewer. Shot on high contrast 16mm film, pastoral images of wheat and wildflowers are bright white against a glittering black backdrop. The film’s hand processing showcases myriad scratches and thumbprints. These intuitive lo-fi interventions allow Solar to illuminate celluloid’s grain and body. While some filmmakers might avoid such technical “errors,” Solar’s mistreatment of the 16mm film becomes another ghostly presence—she foregrounds materiality through the spectral remnants of her own touch. Later, a series of single frames of a dirt road creates little leaps in time and perspective, little stabs of disorientation in what might otherwise be a continuous movement. The spatial disruption, like the hand processing, makes the film more beautiful, not less. And these leaps, scratches, and stabs haunt (for once) by reminding us of the human hand and technology that rendered these oneiric scenes possible.

Ken Jacobs once said, “I want to get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain.” Instructions or directives are one way to achieve Jacobs’s goal; ludic presentations of film’s materiality another. If the Greek root of cinematograph is kinēma, meaning movement, then each of the films within this program explores movements of celluloid, light, or sound as physical and psychic eruptions. Between the eyes, and beyond the eyes, is where such movement becomes mimetic, and moving.

It Goes That Quick
Dir. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus, U.S., no distributor

It Goes That Quick screens April 25 at Museum of the Moving Image’s as part of the 2026 First Look festival.

In a perfect world, every family would have its own version of It Goes That Quick. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’s tender film captures the banality and the beauty of family with a cinematic flair that adds a distinct structural and artistic dimension to everyday conversations and events. The film functions as a kind of documentary hybrid, with real family members playing themselves and doing things they would presumably really do but for the camera. At the beginnings and ends of some scenes, we hear Connor’s and Stankus’s voices directing, or maybe more correctly, guiding, the action, but the result is far from fiction, alighting upon a special truth. And this truth is that family is funny and sad, unique and commonplace, and that time passes and so do people.

It Goes That Quick is broken up into six chapters that follow different pairings of family members. The result is a web of connections with Connor and Stankus in the middle of it all, yet largely unseen outside of hazy archival home videos and professional cinematographer Connor’s own gorgeously self-shot home movie footage. In Part I: Grandparents and Mother, Stankus’s grandfather is torn from a game of computer solitaire by a phone call from his daughter, Stankus’s mother, Andrea. She needs a ride, so her aged parents get ready (with grandmother taking time to apply a generous amount of perfume), hop in the car, and pick her up. On the way they discuss plans for the upcoming seder. When Andrea joins, she has her own unwelcome ideas about it. Grandmother explains that she’s “got to make a lot of gravy,” to which her daughter responds with exacerbation, “Who likes gravy?” It’s a moment of family irritation that will elicit laughter and a shudder of recognition.

Similarly in Part II: The Uncles, quotidian scenes reveal the more universally relatable. While shopping for a plant, Connor’s Uncle Mike is on the phone with his husband. He tells him, “[W]hen it comes to death, it is what it is, it’s a part of life, and people die.” Herein lies the beauty of Connor and Stankus’s film: in its totality it gives a shape and a grandeur to a collection of humorous and painful particulars that turn nebulous family connections into something perceptible. This idea is furthered by the film’s score: a collection of Chopin piano sonatas that give musical form to melodies that feel pulled from the romanticized ether of human memory, creating a contrapuntal dimension for the fleeting moments that might otherwise pass before our eyes without remark.

Connor and Stankus’s project began ten years ago with a short film featuring the latter’s grandparents titled The Backseat. For the next eight years the couple continued to film their family performing, in their words, “semi-scripted ‘scenarios’ from their daily lives.” While watching the married Connor and Stankus’s nakedly personal film, I recalled postmodern master John Barth’s 1982 novel, Sabbatical: A Romance. In that relatively minor work, the story of a married couple’s romance is told through the story of a sailing journey, and in Barth’s typical metafictional fashion, explicitly focuses on the mechanics of writing. Similarly, It Goes That Quick tells the story of a family and more abstractly a couple through the lens of Connor and Stankus’s shared filmmaking practice. Sprocket holes run along the left side of the frame as we watch home movie footage of their wedding, a trip to Paris, and images taken during Connor’s pregnancy. Connor handles the cinematography and Stankus the sound as they film their families, gazing on them through a love language of close-ups and wide shots that are sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply poignant. Connor and Stankus’s film shares stylistic and reflexive affinities with Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who (2020), but their film comes without the shocking family revelation of Sachs’s experimental documentary. Instead, what It Goes That Quick offers is their gracefully sculpted unsensational material.

The film culminates in Part VI: Everybody, with the seder that was being planned in Part I. After watching the home video footage from family parties years before throughout the film, we see the family together once again, much older and grayer. For anyone with aging relatives and good memories from the family gatherings of their childhood, it’s a touching and achingly bittersweet scene. There seems to be no remedy for melancholy that comes when we become acutely aware of the intractable passage of time, and Connor and Stankus’s film bravely confronts us with this reality. Connor’s Uncle says “it is what it is” earlier in the film, but It Goes That Quick doesn’t take the people who populate its gentle, fractured narrative for granted. Most of them are still here now, albeit older and in an increasingly shabby world. Through the compassionate lens of these filmmakers, their lives and their family become art.

Split into two parts, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, Sho Miyake’s Golden Leopard winner at the 78th Locarno Film Festival adapts a pair of Yoshiharu Tsuge mangas: A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo. The first half cross-cuts scenes of Li (Shim Eun-kyung) penning a screenplay and the filmic rendering of her writing. The Korean expat imagines a young man (Takada Mansaku) and a vacationing woman (Kawai Yuumi) meeting at a summery seaside town. The pair engages in intimate conversations, swapping their respective memories. Two Seasons, Two Strangers’ second half begins when this film within the film ends. Li is no longer writing; she’s with the movie’s male director for a post-screening Q&A. The audience peppers her with questions and comments, such as her former mentor calling the film “sensual,” which reminds Li that she can’t control how a male director adapts her words for the screen. Li decides to change that. Armed with a camera, she ventures to a ramshackle wintry inn owned by the melancholic Benzo (Tsutsumi Shinichi) to find her own images.

For Miyake, the quiet narrative contours of Two Seasons, Two Strangers demonstrate a continued interest in lonely characters, particularly women, that began with his debut, Payback, and found greater shape in the forlorn two-hander All the Long Nights. His classical style, which crystallized with his modest Slow, Small but Steady, about a deaf female boxer, owes much to Yasujirō Ozu and can sometimes belie the liveliness of his soulful reflections. As the platonic relationship between Li and Benzo deepens, Miyake’s aims become apparent. The stillness of his framing allows the audience not to be distracted by a harsh whip pan or an elaborate tracking shot, but instead to focus on the characters’ joy, sadness, and surprise.

I spoke with Miyake with the assistance of Japanese-English interpreter Monika Uchiyama over Zoom about his minimalist camera, appreciating life’s small moments, and centering women protagonists.

Reverse Shot: This is one of a few adaptations you’ve done. When you’re translating books and mangas to the screen, are you making visual choices first or narrative ones?

Sho Miyake: Whether the visual elements come first or the words come first, it really depends on the particular scene or project. I work in a very varied way. The one thing that is consistent throughout my works is the process of location hunting, or even prior to location hunting, just walking around trying to find where the story is going to take place. It's through that process that these ideas about the visuals and the words really start to come together. I feel like my works come to life not solely through the images or words, but really through this preproduction process, through this kind of stretch before the sprint.

RS: Your films have an exceptional sense of space, in which the setting informs these characters, like the gym in Slow, Small but Steady. What’s your approach to marrying place with people?

SM: It's really hard to put it into words, but with this film, I think there's some importance in what it means to stand very still. Because for instance, there are so many different road movies throughout cinema history. In those movies you see people walking very long distances, and you'll depict that by panning the camera and following along with the characters. But in this film, it's really all about standing still. A character will look to their left, look to their right, look at their surroundings, and I wanted the viewers to also experience that moment along with the characters so that not only are they seeing the character, but they're also taking in the landscape.

Just in my day-to-day life, if I’m walking through the city at a very quick pace, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of details. I might not notice that the flowers are blooming. Likewise, being in a movie theater and sitting still for a time allows a viewer to really be able to appreciate those small movements. I want to evoke a kind of surprise from these small moments to distract from the repetitive sense of the everyday, which can become very boring and also very psychologically tiring. If we can notice the small changes, then that might help us appreciate that every day is a little different. Monday is different from Tuesday, which is different from Wednesday.

RS: From what I understand, the original manga is in black-and-white. Why did you opt to shoot in color?

SM: For a period, I did think it would make sense to shoot it in black-and-white, just like the manga had been. But upon visiting the island that we shot the summer portion in, it's just that the color of the ocean was so vivid and beautiful that when I looked at the upcoming weather, it seemed like we were going to get some really beautiful days. At that moment, I knew that we had to shoot in color. I eventually also thought that we'd be able to create more contrast with the monochromatic winter portion of the story by shooting in color as well.

RS: I figured you might’ve considered black-and-white first since your first two films, Playback and Good for Nothing, were shot that way. Interestingly, your last two films were shot on 16mm. Why did you decide on digital here?

SM: There are two reasons. The first is very practical. I needed to shoot in the ocean, and also in these very cold climates that featured winter scenes. For those, it would be very hard to shoot on film. The second reason was more of an aesthetic choice. With film there's always going to be that graininess—even when you are photographing a very still shot, that grain is alive and moving. With digital, on the other hand, if you stop and don't move the camera, and if there's nothing moving in the scene, it really does look like a photograph. Everything is completely still. It's almost as if it's dead. That kind of still texture seemed very apt for adapting a manga into a film.

RS: Li as a character kind of follows your last two films—All the Long Nights and Slow, Small but Steady—in terms of being centered around women. In the early part of your career, your films were male-centered. What’s been drawing you to stories about women?

SM: It's hard to say why, but I think it has a lot to do with the actors that I've been connecting with. I just happen to have encountered these incredible actors who are women. Of course there are many wonderful male actors too, but it just so happened that I encountered these women actors who have made me want to collaborate with them. But I haven't tried to make sense of why that is. As a filmmaker, I don't think of my starting point as wanting to make films for self-expression. I'm trying to figure out what I don't understand. The more that I make films, the more I don't understand. So, when I think about my process as being something of discovery, of trying to learn something new, then it would make sense that because I'm not a woman, I don't understand their perspective. There are more questions for me. Perhaps that could be a reason why I'm drawn to women characters.

RS: Your films also witness these women trying to find ways to control their own stories, whether it’s through boxing in Slow, Small but Steady or the point-and-click camera Li has here.

SM: I think the similarities for me between the two characters of Li and Keiko are that they try to be more honest to themselves. They also try not to ignore the various frictions in their respective lives. If they're 90% satisfied, but 10% unsatisfied with their life, they're the types of people who really want to get to the bottom of what that 10% is and why they can't be satisfied. Perhaps for Keiko, the answer to that is boxing. For Li it's screenwriting or any other ways of expressing herself.

RS: In that regard, I’m intrigued by the casting of the Korean actress Shim Eun-kyung in a Japanese film. Was that casting a conscious choice to further instill a sense of isolation in Li?

SM: I don't think I was trying to depict any kind of isolation based on one's nationality. It's really about each person's lived experience, like when they feel like they don't fit in the society that they're in. I think that's a big theme of the film. Earlier I talked about that idea of being 90% satisfied, but then there’s the 10% sense of dissatisfaction with one's life. These characters are the types of people who wouldn’t pretend to be happy just because everyone around them was extremely happy and lively. They're not going to go along with everyone else. They're going to really consider why they're not feeling the way they feel like they should be feeling. For instance, let’s say Shim's character happened to not be Korean; if she were Japanese, I think she would still feel the same kind of isolation.

RS: Your films always find a shred of hope. That is, these stories could make for darker films in someone else’s hands. Is optimism an important part of your filmmaking?

SM: I think hope is an important aspect. Yoshiharu Tsuge, who wrote the manga, was a person who tried to depict a lot of despair through his work. When I was spending years reading his mangas, there were moments when I was getting pulled toward that despair. But I also think that Tsuge was making a lot of creative progress through these depictions of despair. I think the act of creation and being able to produce something creatively is a way of taking a step forward, even if the themes of the work are not particularly optimistic. For myself, as a filmmaker, I want viewers to be able to come out of the theater not feeling any particular way per se, even though I think that you can come out and feel a lot of hesitation after watching my films. Instead, I want people to be able to see the world in a new way. So, hope or happiness might not be the right term. But it's about having a new perspective, being able to see the world in a new way, hear sounds in a new way. That kind of fresh outlook is something that I want people to leave the theater with.

Carousel screens March 24 at Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2026 festival.

Rachel Lambert and I got off on the wrong foot. My questions seemed convoluted, her answers were curt, and we quickly realized we just weren’t clicking. But after ditching the script for a few moments, we found a rhythm, one based on our shared connection as fellow human beings as opposed to rigid roles of interviewer and subject.

It occurred to me that our initial awkward brush could have just as easily been a scene in one of her films. This is especially true of her self-described trilogy of sorts—I Can Feel You Walking (2021), Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023), and now Carousel—which depict the innate awkwardness of attempting to forge an interpersonal connection. In Walking, Lambert and Milton Katz play neighbors who form a bond after one overdoses on the other’s front porch, while Dying centers on Fan (Daisy Ridley), an introverted office worker whose macabre daydreams take a backseat to chasing the affection of new co-worker Robert (Dave Merheje).

Carousel, Lambert’s latest film, follows Rebecca (Jenny Slate), who puts her political career in D.C. on pause and moves to her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, in order to help her aging parents move out of the family home. She unexpectedly reunites with Noah (Chris Pine), her high school boyfriend, now a local physician and single father of a teenage daughter, Maya (Abby Ryder Fortson). As the title suggests, all of these characters exist in constant flux, but they must eventually make the decision to get off the ride and land on solid ground. Rebecca must choose between Capitol Hill or building a life with Noah in her hometown, ironically losing access to the house she grew up in herself; Noah can’t come to terms with selling his father’s practice, his daughter’s fast-approaching adulthood, or the idea of potentially losing Rebecca again; Maya has yet to process her parents’ divorce, leaving her emotionally raw and prone to anxious outbursts that could potentially hinder college prospects.

Lambert’s characters tend to possess an almost painful relatability, as the awkward silences, boring small talk, and daily minutiae of their lives are made out to be of utmost narrative importance. In the filmmaker’s view, the quietest moments of our lives are perhaps the most authentic, making them just as worthy of cinematic depiction. In Carousel, DP Dustin Lane captures the quotidian in dreamy pastel hues, while composer Dabney Morris scores ordinary activities with dramatic sonic swells.

I spoke to Lambert via Zoom a few days before Carousel’s April 24 screening at Museum of the Moving Image. We eventually got to discussing her longstanding “allergy to the artificial,” why all artmaking should feel like playing jazz, and the spontaneous cinematography behind the film’s final scene.

Reverse Shot: Your films are rooted in the quotidian realities of your characters. I noticed a familiarity of the sonic texture through your collaboration with composer Dabney Morris. Can you tell me about differentiating the approach between this film and your last?

Rachel Lambert: Yeah, quotidian is a great word. That's Chris Pine's word for this film, so he'll be thrilled that you used it. This is sort of the third in a trilogy of films that me, Dabney, Ryan [Kendrick, editor] and Dustin [Lane, cinematographer]—though he wasn't involved on one of them—knew were in conversation with each other. We spoke deliberately about this one having some syncopation and jazz-like play with these pieces that have a root structure in the romantic classic period but then take on a rhythm that has a truly American sound. Brass is really heavy in the music because it just conjured America to us. There's very little string work—I think there are only strings in an airport scene actually meant to conjure carousel music. Dabney had never played saxophone before, but we were really searching for the instrument for Noah's theme. I'm pretty sure that the music that starts the film is one of these jazz interpretations of Noah's theme, and Dabney was teaching himself how to play it on the saxophone. He was innovating on this instrument in a really free way.

I think the reason why I love doing what I do, even though it can be really tough, is that I love conspiring—whether it be with my script, or someone else's script, or random idea—to get artists that I adore together and watch them work. I'm not a director that tends to get into people's minds. I don't like to manipulate people that way. I'm really interested in what people come to me with. I would say that's probably my M.O.

RS: With your previous films, you’ve utilized improvisation with your actors. Did that technique also make its way into Carousel?

RL: Definitely. I feel like I'm always using it, though in some films more than others. This one didn’t have as much as the previous two, so there was more of a dividing line between when we were improving and when we weren't. Chris is very text obsessive. He's a true theater actor, so he took every period, pause, and ellipsis like gospel, which I love. And Jenny is a writer, she loves language. They were like pirates finding the treasure in all the scenes.

I tend to shoot quickly, so I always have a little extra time every day to be able to have these moments that we call “bonuses.” There are moments where I didn't end up using what was scripted and only used what was improvised. I'd be in the editing room going, “This is more real.” The writing got them in the right mindset, perhaps, but then they took off and now the scenes are better than anything I wrote. For instance, when Sam Waterston talks about going to Rome, that was informed by the history document that I've given [the cast]. There's a whole backstory to Sam in this novella that I wrote for them, a whole passage about Sam's final trip to Rome with his wife the year that she was dying. They kiss in the Santa Maria Maggiore while she's wearing that little piece of paper that you have to wear over your shoulders. Because Chris read the same thing, he had this instinct to set Sam up to say something rich from that backstory.

RS: Noah’s clothes possess a timeless, almost vintage quality, while Rebecca has an enviable denim collection. Did the actors work with costume designer Fernando Rodriguez to bring their characters to life, or did the aesthetic input come from you?

RL: Fern was a wonderful addition to the team. They work with such meticulousness. It comes off as effortless, but it’s beyond thorough. On every film I do a color meeting between the art department, camera department, costume, and me. Dan [Maughiman], my production designer, already knew I was going to do this because he was on the last one. He came in with paint chips, and we spread them on the table. We made color groups, then assigned characters and certain symbolic emotions to them. There’s one color that we called “the connective tissue,” a dark maroon color that you see on characters in very specific moments, always a shirt that's close to the chest.

Speaking of silhouettes, that was always rooted in who these people are. What are their daily routines? What are their demands? What's their relationship to clothing? How do they shop? Where do they shop? I love these sorts of conversations because it’s like being a writer. A writer thinks about these things, and Fern thinks this way. I really enjoyed this with Chris’s character the most. He looked like a completely different person when he was Noah. We had dinner on our last day, and he showed up as himself and it was truly jarring. That is such a credit to Fern and I'm just so thrilled that we got to benefit from their work.

RS: I noticed David Merheje, co-star of Sometimes I Think About Dying, in a very small role here. What prompted you to bring him back for this film, even for just a brief moment?

RL: There's a couple of ways to answer that. One is that when you're shooting in an airport, you want people that you can rely on. I can rely on Dave and Milton [Katz], who plays the other guy in that scene. I wanted Chris to be supported and be able to take his time and play with things. The second reason, and this is a very self-indulgent reason, is that Carousel is the third in a line of films that are all related to each other. Milton is the male star of I Can Feel You Walking, and Dave is the male star of Sometimes I Think About Dying. So, for a very dumb, selfish reason, it gave me a giggle to have a scene with all three of these men together.

RS: In terms of the location in this film being Cleveland, what was your experience capturing the essence of this city in the film?

RL: [Laughs] Can its essence ever truly be captured? Yeah, I grew up there. Rebecca's house is my childhood home. We actually cut down my dad’s apple tree. We actually remodeled my parents' house. [Rebecca and Noah] kissed in my backyard. They had a conversation while he’s getting dressed in my sister’s childhood bedroom. We shot at my high school. The farmer’s market is my town's farmer’s market. The doctor's office is my dentist in the town square. The streets are my streets.

RS: How did you decide how your characters were going to interact with places you were so familiar with?

RL: By being familiar with these places, [I possess] a certain authority about what's real. It comes back to my thing about how I don’t get super into people's brains, but what I do get is the opportunity to really be curious with people. An example is that I don't tell Dustin where to put the camera all the time. We talk rigorously about what's important. We ride around in the car together going, “That's beautiful, we need that.” We shot-list the whole movie before we're fully through prep. No scene is approached in any way that we haven't discussed rigorously, but he's the photographer in charge. Like, why is he here if I'm not interested in what he wants to shoot? If I'm just going to be a dictator, then I might as well be a novelist. The ultimate reward is in these moments where you're really having to fly because there's that trust. You’re just playing jazz with each other. Jazz is the ultimate expression of human beings.

I'll give you an anecdote about this film. The final scene was staged in a totally different part of the house. The script just says that the actors can do whatever they want, essentially. It’s written in such a way where anyone can say any of these lines in any order. The actors have to rehearse together and decide who’s saying what and why, and then don’t show me until the day of. Dustin and I thought we were going to shoot it from a different angle into the room. We're getting ready to set up and he goes, “This isn't the side of the room to shoot on.” So, I went and looked at the image and I went, “Yes, I agree with you.” We move this furniture out of the room so that we can back the camera up. Then I said, well, “What if we really fucked around and just did it all in one shot and just pushed in on one mag?” And he was like, “You want me to lay track right now?” And I was like, “Yeah!” I was so pumped, it gets your adrenaline up. I didn't know exactly how he framed it up. I didn't really care. I knew it would be beautiful; we were playing jazz. So, I explained to the actors that Dustin is going to time the push in off of your performances. There’s nothing to worry about, you can do whatever you want. So, then they do it, and that moment at the end where the film runs out really happened. The heartbeats [that you hear] are really Chris and Jenny's heartbeats.

I mean, you're learning in this interview that I’m pretty subdued, and that’s just my personality, but I was not subdued that night. I was celebratory. That made everyone go, “Woah,” because normally I’m very serious. But it was hard not to feel electrified by this perfect combustion of every department, every instinct. It timed it to the second. I guess the other moment of jazz is the fight scene. Some people hate that scene because they don’t want to deal with it. They’re like, “Well, it doesn’t make sense.” And I'm like, “When have your fights ever made sense?”

RS: What are moments in your everyday life that you feel compelled to pay attention to and mine for your creative work?

RL: I have such an allergy to the artificial. It's why I can't stand exposition. I just fucking hate it. It's not how people talk. I think that I'm most inspired by documentaries, which I watch more than anything else. Frederick Wiseman is probably the greatest inspiration to the scene work I do. I mean, who could ever be a better model? The other inspiration for me is Anton Chekhov. I started in the theater.

RS: I know you trained as an actor.

RL: Yeah, and I directed theater and made theater. When Anton Chekhov entered my life, it was a fusion of [passions], because I love literature. I love Raymond Carver. He really helped me form confidence around how I saw storytelling. But I had never seen anyone then take that point of view and put it into a dramatic structure. Anton Chekhov is like, “These people are just at this country house.” What's the plot? The plot is that these people want a life that's different from the one they're living and they don't know what to do about it. So, they're going to destroy themselves and each other to get there. He made the quotidian monumental, made the casual violence of disregarding another human monumental, and [made] casual the monumental experience of love.

I speak to the inspirations because I think it's important to contextualize what guides me. One of them is turning back to those inspirations when I'm looking to make something new. I tend to be in a very melancholic state after I’ve made something. You happen to be meeting me during that time. I get very depressed, and the only way out of it is through art—for me, anyway. So, I go and I see my friends, who are unfortunately dead and can't talk to me except through their work. I look at their work, I read their work, I watch their work, I think about their work. By resuscitating these inspiration points, it puts me in a frame of mind of curiosity. It gets me to care about the world and myself again. Like, this woman the other day on the subway threw a couple of ZYNs in her mouth and pounded a Celsius with this rhythm and this urgency. It was the first time I felt curiosity in a long time, probably since making this film.

100 Sunset
Dir. Kunsang Kyirong, Canada, no distributor

100 Sunset screens April 25 at Museum of the Moving Image’s as part of the 2026 First Look festival.

Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel), a teenager who lives with her aunt and uncle in the towering Toronto apartment building that’s home to a community of Tibetan immigrants, is a thief. The protagonist of Kunsang Kyirong's debut feature, 100 Sunset, steals things from the coat pockets and bags of her neighbors as they gather in local Himalayan restaurants and for card games in each other’s apartments. The items she takes—a rare nine-eyed Dzi stone that’s thought to bring luck to its owner, a MiniDV camera used to capture endearing footage of a neighbor’s ex-wife, a suitcase full of money raised by her uncle—are not insignificant; they’re direct representations of what her community values. The second of the Five Precepts in Tibetan Buddhism addresses stealing, advising practitioners not to take what has not been given. Kyirong’s film, a wintry work of slow cinema, is a meditation on what is taken, what is freely given, and what cannot be returned.

The Tibetan diaspora began in the early 1950s, growing substantially with the 1959 Uprising and flight of the Dalai Lama from Lhasa to India. In the intervening years, amidst multiple waves of emigration and the establishment of their government-in-exile, Tibetans have fought to preserve the cultural traditions, language, and religious practices that have become restricted in their home country. The late 1990s saw a large relocation of Tibetans to the Parkdale neighborhood of Toronto, making the enclave the largest concentration of Tibetans in North America. Serving as the setting of Kyirong’s film, Parkdale, and its fictional 100 Sunset building, is presented as a place that’s isolated, both from Toronto’s blustery cold and from the heavy-handed influence of other cultures. The community members trust and rely on each other. They contribute to a Dukuti, the traditional Nepalese credit and savings system paying out big to one high-bidding member at a time, run by Kunsel’s Uncle Geysar (Tsering Bawa). They keep an eye on each other—between English classes, Kunsel watches both a neighbor’s young daughter and her elderly mother. And the community members gossip about each other incessantly, never mentioning anyone from elsewhere in the city.

Kunsel, however, speaks very little in either Tibetan or English. She’s taciturn but not entirely withdrawn, her saucer eyes roving over her surroundings as if she’s recording the events and conversations her reserved nature won’t let her participate in. When she steals the camera from her statuesque neighbor, Gyatso (Tsering Gyatso), it morphs into a new appendage. Filming becomes her mode of connection, her lifeline, a way to probe deeper into a world that she wants to rebel against. When Passang (Sonam Cheokyi), an alluring and mysterious 25-year-old, moves into the building with her much older husband, Kunsel finds her second form of liberation. The two young women become fast friends, and soon they’re giggling in English class, taking the train around the city, and sharing intimacies on walks in its wooded environs. Kunsel films her friend and their adventures, occasionally in manic, unexpected angles that recall the protagonists of Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop (1998), who quickly snap photos of each other as they run around Tokyo, other times she shoots Passang up close, and a bit out of focus, as if blinded by a romantic gaze.

But Kunsel steals shots, too. In fact, they’re the only things she’s caught taking. Passang finds footage of herself saved on the camera that Kunsel filmed through her window. She’s in a towel and applying lotion, completely oblivious to being observed. This discovery changes the way Passang sees Kunsel, and catalyzes the older girl’s decision to ask her neighbor to steal what will essentially lead to her freedom. Kunsel’s heist of the Dukuti money may seem at first of little consequence to the teenager—she’s never accused or apprehended. But really, her sentence is to stay in 100 Sunset alone without Passang, among her people, yet alienated.

Building on her short work, like Dhulpa (2022), which followed a group of Tibetan immigrants from India who work in a laundry facility in Canada, Kyirong’s film captures the particular sense of ennui that comes from being separated from the implicit acceptance and normalcy of home. And like the recent anthology film State of Statelessness from the Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective, 100 Sunset subtly unpacks how this is a particularly Tibetan phenomenon. The film’s gentle pacing, owing to the graceful editing by Brendan Mills (Lucky Lu) and Nikolay Michaylov’s pensive camera, builds a sense of isolation and tension between Kunsel and her neighbors and surroundings. For films like Matt and Mara (2024) and Measures for a Funeral (2024), Michaylov has been tasked with capturing Deragh Campbell, a Canadian actress known for her portrayals of steely introverts—projects that have clearly prepared the DP for this one.

In 100 Sunset, Kunsel’s reticent performance and deep, meaningful gazes are supplemented by the footage she captures, adding dimension to her character. Woven throughout the film, the DV footage can seem to rip through Michaylov’s long, meditative takes like a burst of energy. The Kunsel reflected in the DV cam sequences isn’t the girl we see sitting alone in the apartment and staring; instead, we watch her feet pound the pavement or woodland path as she’s running, the camera bobbing like it’s her own heaving breath. In one of the film’s most arresting sequences, this vigor and the languid mystery of the film’s more grounded shots coalesce. The girls are seen talking in a snowy landscape just beyond train tracks, their voices low and gestures intimate. A train passes, momentarily obscuring them, its whizzing cars rendered as blurry abstract streaks of color—a Gerhard Richter painting in motion. In that moment, the nameless train could be going anywhere in the world. Perhaps it could steal the girls away, taking them somewhere they’d consider home.

Hidden in plain sight within Too Much Harmony (1933), an ordinary Bing Crosby backstage comedy directed by A. Edward Sutherland, is an extraordinary musical number that highlights a “new” cinematic technology. The production’s release print materials promise: “Speaking of spectacle, ‘Black Moonlight’ will introduce startling lighting effects.” “Black Moonlight,” the number in question, features a remarkable cinematographic trick, imagining a Harlem nightclub where leggy chorines seamlessly change skin color from white to Black and back again, accompanied by a bluesy torch song played by a Black jazz orchestra.

Like many films of the early sound era, especially Paramount’s new Bing Crosby vehicles, Too Much Harmony distinguishes itself cinematically by moving beyond the traditional stage, while revivifying tried-and-true theatrical scenarios in a lively, self-reflexive backstage setting. Still, these films never stray far from previous technologies and stagecraft to explore or exploit the intriguing, underlying cultural presence of racial others. Of the imaginative ways that film characters might enter into blackface to disguise or perform—such as blowing up in a gas stove; falling into mud or another dark, viscous fluid; happening upon some shoe polish or a stray champagne cork—the “Black Moonlight” white dancers’ shift into darkness is unusually graceful and, yes, startling.

“Black Moonlight” might be why Too Much Harmony doesn’t get programmed more frequently. The film was popular and enthusiastically reviewed in its day. As a Crosby stan (don’t judge), I was quite familiar with his recording of the sultry ballad accompanied by Jimmie Grier & His Orchestra from the 1930s. Like the other popular numbers he sings in the film, it was composed by songwriters Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow. The song wasn’t covered much by other singers, and in 1954 Crosby reminisced about his affection for the song and recorded a version for his musical autobiography. Imagine, then, my disappointment when Crosby’s character doesn’t croon the song in the big number midway in the film, but also imagine my delight and surprise experiencing “Black Moonlight”’s surreal production.

The number opens with a gloved hand tearing an entry ticket and the curtain rising to reveal Kitty Kelly, standing downstage smoking under a streetlight on a bridge illuminated by watery reflections. In the background, dark, velvety drapery sets the scene. Kelly (dubbed by Barbara Van Brunt) sings the opening notes of the number: “Oh, Black Moonlight/where everything reflects your color/Darkness that is endless/Nights that leave me friendless, blue…”

Another dancer, a distraught woman of the night (“Just like me you're faded, jaded and degraded, too!”), tries to catch the eye of a swell in a top hat and other wealthy men. (This being 1933, the film’s overall narrative revolves around money and the financing of the diegetic show.) Society women mock her as they pass by. After being assaulted by a drunk, she flings her cloche hat and bag into the abyss. Deciding to end it all, she begins to climb over the railing, but a passing beat cop gives her the once-over, preventing her jump. She gathers her dignity and walks off stage as the curtain behind this scene lifts to the sound of a kettle drum driving the song’s tempo forward, revealing an Art Deco cityscape with a vertical “Harlem” sign locating the dramatic action in the storied uptown New York neighborhood.

The drums introduce the Chickadees, a Paramount troupe of select chorus girls who appear to be dancing on a colossal drum. The number begins with a dancer in full-body, ostensibly brown makeup wearing a high-split, rumba skirt and bandeau top, wriggling at the center of a round platform. She is surrounded by white dancers in dark, leg-revealing leotards and strappy bodices. Their frizzy blond hairdos echo the lead dancer’s brunette curls. The view shifts to a jazz band compressed into a tight space with actual African American men playing the kettle drums and miming instruments as the camera dollies back to the drum top. The dancers in short skirts with lengthy trails appear statuesque, posed in rows behind the center dancer, standing on the sides of the drum and sitting on the edges of the stage bordering each side of the screen. The dancers’ legs used as frames is a design motif that runs throughout the movie. Their movements emphasize their columnar white limbs, forward thrust hips with their arms posed like angular Egyptian hieroglyphics or exotic but majestic statues.

The snaky lead dancer slinks off upstage as the chorus line takes over. The tempo changes from jungle tom-tom rhythms to a jazzy Charleston, and the women from the sides run onto the stage and appear to seamlessly metamorphose into Black dancers now clothed in light silvery costumes. They move in a complicated roundelay, bent over at the waist, smiling and doing fancy footwork. Slapping their thighs, they transition back to white blondes yet continue to dance loosely and expressively. Shimmying in circles, they become dark again, swinging their arms and holding out their skirts by the hems. Wearing bright smiles and rolling their wide, upturned eyes, they are spontaneous, playful hoofers rather than alabaster chorines. During the song’s climax, the dancers are now (B)lack, executing semi-sculptural poses but imploring with their arms reaching skyward. The singer returns to the center of the drum and intones: “Madly, I await you…Black, black moonlight!” During the crescendo, she stretches her hands up towards the lunation as the Black chorus girls surround her on their knees, crouching and encircling her, creating a corona of dark supplicant bodies in tableau.

What’s extraordinary about the Art Deco minstrelsy of “Black Moonlight” is the head-to-toe transformation of the female dancers, requiring consistently applied full-body makeup rather than concentrating only on (usually male) facial blackening with contrasting white eyes or exaggerated whites of the eyes, coarse short wigs, and blanched, enlarged lips. Unlike concurrent Busby Berkeley numbers, whose productions Too Much Harmony was seeking to emulate or surpass, in this number there are no close-up images of the various chorus girls’ faces, only the lead white singer Kitty Kelly, whose blonde head seems disembodied because of her black dress obscured by the black background.

*****

Throughout my art career, I have always depended on the “kindness” of newly accessible prosumer tools to annex studio-era sounds and images. In such cases I use the newest tech to copy prior duplications (in the lexicon of letterpress printing, these multiple copies of copies are called stereotypes). These include filming a TV set with a Super 8 camera; taping shows on a primary-colored Panasonic TAKE-N-TAPE recorder held up to the kitchen radio; electronically dodging VHS tape copy-codes by camcorder; or digitally writing DVDs of DVR-ed classic movies, many now captured via existentially ephemeral online downloaders, all to be amassed and edited on—fittingly—a timeline. My labored, personal appropriations critically echo Hollywood’s tenacious expropriation of cultural (and corporeal) Blackness by means of outmoded, commercial media technologies. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Case in point: my 2024 video installation Black Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show, which centers my hypothesis on how this spectacular cinematographic effect was achieved. This three-channel video work is an addition to my ongoing research project that interrogates the cyclical re-emergence of blackface minstrelsy, ethnic cross-dress, and masquerade when established or legacy technologies transition to emergent new media prior to the standardization of visual advancements. At these moments, entertainment industries seem to always return to their theatrical, racialized roots. My installation elaborates on this process by suggesting that Hollywood’s innovations are used to maintain the stereotypical tropes of film minstrelsy. The song’s oxymoronic lyrics (black/light/moon) serve as secret descriptors of the methods to create the race-changing effect. Black moonlight, where everything reflects your color.

The “Black Moonlight” sequence runs 4 minutes, 11 seconds. However, in reworking, recutting, and remixing the sequence, I extended the length of the song to almost 12 minutes out of the total 17-minute running time of the installation. The prolonging of the footage invites the viewer to feel bewilderment or even shock, and then intrigue, trying to figure out how the number combines film style, editing, and special effects to produce the blackface—or more precisely—the resulting black bodies.

Black Black Moonlight is synchronized across three channels. The piece is loosely modeled, both physically and narratively, on tripartite minstrel shows, one of the theatrical predecessors of early musical films. A large video projection on a gallery wall painted a dark grey that is almost charcoal black represents the center stage traditionally led by the show’s “interlocutor,” a character who usually doesn’t appear in blackface makeup. Typically, the dark wall would have a white space matted out for the projection to light up the image, but the grey wall creates a softer image that blends the varying resolution quality of the disparate source materials. Smaller CRT (cathode ray tube) monitors sit on pedestals painted the same color as the wall, flanking the left and right sides of the projection, serving as the two minstrel “sidemen” eponymously named “Mr. Tambo,” with a tambourine, and “Mr. Bones,” who plays the bone castanets. Ideally, the room is low-lit with an overhead projector for the center image and audio. A bench also painted grey allows the visitor to sit while watching the looping videos.

This project began as an investigation into how a bit of film trickery was done, conjoining lighting, filtering, makeup, choreography, dancers’ bodies and performances, and music, all wrapped in studio screen style. Akin to a jeweler filing down a small dark pit in a piece of silver, an ugly cavity opens beneath the polished surface of the film.

The greater mystery is why this was done. “Black Moonlight” employs minstrel imagery from previously recognized formats to a new pre-code technology, producing a modern but titillating entertainment spectacle. Is it “Love and Theft,” as Eric Lott speculates in his book analyzing the ongoing and uneasy attractions of 19th-century minstrelsy? Perhaps the song holds the key to Too Much Harmony’s brief engagement with Blackness: “I’ve lost all power to resist you/Madly I await you/ Even though I hate you/Black Moonlight!”

*****

The centerpiece of the installation is, of course, the remixed “Black Moonlight” number, repeated forward and backward, trying to replicate the examination of the footage on a digital timeline. The piece was built using a process that allows cutting and pasting, reversing and duplicating, all intrinsic to digital editing software. The number plays through once as it appears in the film and then is broken down to analyze the footage and play with the image design. The transitions from white to black occur, and then as it gets toward the climax, it reverses and flips.

Repeated viewing reveals that the transitions are not edits but something smoother. There is the use of full-body makeup, but on which dancers? Are all the dancers the same? Red and green light bulbs appear on the sidemen CRTs who give hints about the methodology throughoutand, like the Tambo and Bones characters, provide comic commentary and asides about the main action of the show. As the dancers alternate from white to black, they are overlaid by red and green filters.

This section is accompanied by audio descriptions of a horror makeup trick innovated by Karl Struss in 1931 for Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which might help finally shed light on Too Much Harmony’s odd special effect. This was a process unique to black-and-white photography: “So, in black-and-white, when you shine a red light onto red makeup, the camera can't tell the difference between the two. So it looks like the makeup’s not even there. So, when you bring in a contrasting color like blue light, the makeup suddenly appears creating a really cool in-camera transformation effect.” Black Black Moonlight hints that the minstrel performer is, like a white person showing their “Blackness” through blackface makeup, like Jekyll and Hyde, the two selves somehow residing in the same body.

The Misconceived screens April 23 as Opening Night of Museum of the Moving Image’s 2026 First Look festival.

What can movies do? Movies may be uniquely able to impart images of the real world, but this only happens through distortion. They train us to seek “authenticity” in an assemblage of artificial elements; certain tropes in lighting, editing, sound, and performance have become conventionally accepted signifiers of the real. At the same time, we know we’re surrendering to an illusion.

The narrator of James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s 2015 short B-Roll with Andre suggests that images that are too high-fidelity have turned perception into an intellectual exercise: the higher-definition the camera, the more you obsess over how real the image looks. “We need to get to the highest level…understanding,” he continues. “Pure ideas, pure form.” This has come to be a structuring ethos for Wilkins’s cinema. Is it possible for movies to house a thought process when film production seems designed to thwart nuance and complexity? Narrative cinema is about communicating subjective experience through a toolkit of objective forms and familiar frameworks: cast, setting, camerawork, music cues. When an emotion or an idea finds a concrete form, it limits it, transforms it, keeps it from feeling so fluid, surprising, or unique. Viewers have internalized the rhythms of three-act structure and are primed to parse characters through stock types. Every aesthetic choice reminds the audience of a lineage of earlier filmmakers. Plus, before they’re even made, movies are pitched and funded based on a packet of digestible themes and buzzwords, then marketed based on the profile of the director, importing the “right” industry credentials and institutional affiliations to a project. Isn’t there supposed to be a movie at the heart of this—that is, a person, a perspective, an author?

When it comes to filmmaking, the idea of the author—the auteur—is something of a convenient fiction, always at odds with conditions of production and reception. Wilkins’s narrative films center on artists trying to make ends meet, spending most of their time overcoming obstacles to artmaking, sidetracked by humiliating and mundane rituals at the intersection of art and commerce. In his 2017 feature Common Carrier, a filmmaker writes a treatment for a lowest-common-denominator horror movie so that he can pay back legal fees; the monster in the film is called the “Jibber-Jabber,” spouting a torrent of marketing copy and nonsense words. Another character, a young actor, seeks help making a reel for the sake of creating a generic Backstage profile, a requirement for entry but far from a guarantee of success. All of Wilkins’s projects are preoccupied with language—many are anchored in monologues, a mode that suggests a filibuster toward something unfiltered, “pure thought, pure form.” But all of these films are also comedies, and something funny happens when these ideas are released into the real world, mutating like an Animorph from individually authored screenplay to collectively realized fiction. Though auteur theory might train us to say that these films reflect Wilkins’s individual vision, they’re also all made with a small cohort of regular collaborators, including cowriter Robin Schavoir and producers Emily Davis, Paul Dallas, and Joey Frank.

His newest feature, The Misconceived, catapults his recurring constellation of themes into his craziest visual world yet. You never know what you’re going to see when you watch a Wilkins film—it could be a 30-minute shot of a coffee cup (This Action Lies), an hour-long succession of press stills from ’80s and ’90s Hollywood movies (Still Film), or a three-and-a-half-hour gradient shift from a black frame to a white frame (The Republic—the narration is a hyperverbal five-act play about libertarian social outcasts). But it still comes as a surprise that Wilkins has made a film in Unreal Engine, a 3D graphics engine that was originally designed in the late ’90s to animate video games.

Gaming engines have since become popular in the film industry to craft virtual sets; these surroundings can be rendered on LED volumes in real time behind the actors, like exceptionally good-looking rear projections that cameras can easily track around, eliminating the need for finicky green-screen in post. They’re also used to animate characters through motion capture, but instead of making something like The Mandalorian or the photorealistic Lion King, Wilkins here uses Unreal Engine to render a script that is decidedly not sci-fi or fantasy—it’s a low-budget drama requiring a single set and maybe a dozen actors, but for which he and his team could not secure traditional financing. The result is deeply uncanny, making immersion impossible; just when you get used to the way some of the figures move and speak, a few new characters will show up whose animation style seems to come from an entirely different aesthetic universe, throwing you off balance. By the same token, it’s also impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.

The plot has to do with physical construction—a home renovation project—which is a good framework for a movie that foregrounds its digital tools. At the heart of the film is an unlikely reunion: fortysomething Tyler takes a carpentry job remodeling the vacation home of a sculptor named Tobin, who happens to be his former best friend from college. Tobin remembers Tyler as a burgeoning filmmaker, but Tyler never broke into the industry; now, he is the primary caregiver for a young son, and wonders if his own unproduced screenplay has mostly become a “therapeutic” exercise. Although Tobin is more conventionally successful than Tyler on paper, he reeks with desperation to remain relevant in the art world, courting the attention of the Whitney Biennial curators as he enters middle age. He and his wife, Gwen, leave the workers—alongside Tyler, that’s lead contractor Widget and young helper Mikey, a gleefully crass aspiring screenwriter—at the mercy of their own whims and neuroses. Their relationship is transactional, and newly fraught because of circumstances that brought Tyler on the job in the first place; he was invited aboard as a replacement for a contractor who experienced some sort of a breakdown.

Most of the characters are animated fairly photorealistically, with intentional, unresolved stiffness in body language and mouth movements. Tyler looks a lot like Keanu Reeves, pulling in A Scanner Darkly and The Matrix as visual reference points, suggesting a labyrinth of signifiers and surveillance. He perpetually regards the high-strung, self-absorbed Tobin—sort of a funhouse-mirror Jason Sudeikis, gritting his teeth at the exact midpoint of a smile and grimace—with a world-weary fatigue, exhausted by his privilege to obsess over his art-sphere standing and tune everyone else out of his field of vision. But this consistency of style breaks down soon enough. Mikey, for one, looks like more of a cartoon than everyone else; his pointy ears evoke an elf, or an imp, suiting his personality. His jarring appearance also reflects the other characters’ classist perspective toward him—for a gag late in the film, it’s revealed that his contact is saved in Tyler’s phone as “Mikey Worker.” These sudden deviations from visual expectations beg the question of whose gaze is shaping the world we’re seeing—the more cartoonish or one-dimensional a character appears, the more we have to work to overcome the artifice of the film and afford them greater depth. As The Misconceived progresses, Mikey becomes something of a bizarre force unto himself, transcending this reductive reading through sheer will of disruptive comic relief.

*****

The Misconceived was pitched as a companion piece to Wilkins and Schavoir’s 2019 feature, The Plagiarists, which is built around a highly specific deception. After their car breaks down in Upstate New York, a white yuppie couple finds shelter with a middle-aged Black man (Clip Payne of Parliament-Funkadelic), and he delivers a moving monologue of reminiscences about his own childhood—only for them to discover months later that this was a word-for-word quotation from Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. This sends one half of the couple, aspiring memoirist Anna, into a complete tailspin; it brings her own racial and class biases to the surface, perhaps all the more acutely since for her, these words were more than a searing moment of authenticity and poetic vulnerability. This conversation was the sole motivator that got her to buckle down and finish her book—and, with Clip’s encouragement, declare herself a writer in her own mind. There is often anxiety in Wilkins’s films about the gap between ideating and producing work, especially when producing and completing a film can come at massive personal expense—it’s why Tyler in The Misconceived frames his screenplay as a form of therapy. The Plagiarists was shot on a Sony Betacam, producing visuals that evoke TV news or independent filmmaking from the ’90s, self-consciously tapping into the aesthetic of Sundance’s heyday; characters continually note that the “video” look is associated with authenticity—they wonder, were filmmakers in the ’90s aware that they were doing that as a choice, or was it more naïve? That is, genuine? Clip’s Knausgård monologue is delivered over test footage shot on these cameras—displaying random B-roll of different rooms in Clip’s house, a ceiling fan, the forest by night—and the oddest part of the film is how perfectly matched these throwaway, banal shots seem to be to the confessional mode of the voiceover. When Clip’s words are revealed to be a quotation, the images of the B-roll register with a newfound intentionality. It’s all about context: these otherwise unremarkable images should feel so tossed off, but in the specific vessel of the movie, everything comes together to signify something “real.” And to that end, perhaps the greatest trick the film pulls off is that Clip and the central couple were never in the same space at the same time during production—their conversations, framed entirely in isolated medium shots, were stitched together in the edit.

In contrast, The Misconceived does away with every single image that may suggest a shortcut to indie-movie authenticity. Besides, “it’s all CG these days,” as Tyler says to Tobin, a reminder that even the unlikeliest movies might be digital composites, as evinced by this VFX reel for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Instead, the film makes these ideas explicit in-text through two conversations about the modern state of filmmaking, the audio offering an ironic counterpoint to the visuals. The first is a long conversation between Tyler and Tobin after work—Tobin downs beers; Tyler looks on—during which Tobin encourages Tyler not to give up on his dreams of directing. He name-checks a torrent of filmmakers who have seemingly been able to shoot movies on the fly and impart something “gritty” or “real”: the Safdies for their 1970s New York style; Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh for shooting quickly on iPhones. Neon and A24 are into that, says Tobin—those famously homegrown incubators of microbudget talent, rather than the new moneyed award-season disruptors—but Tyler brushes it off.

We learn why toward the end of the film, when the Whitney Biennial curators pay Tobin a studio visit. He and Tyler duke it out with two dueling monologues on the state of the art world: Tyler asserts that the feature film—as a platform for original vision and an artistic format—is “outdated,” doomed to be swallowed up by a tsunami of content, with no screening or streaming venues that would allow it to cut through the noise and connect with audiences. At worst, a debut feature is a “cynical prelude to directing a Marvel movie,” a “lifestyle add-on at 1.5x speed” that exists only to be consumed. Tobin, doing worse than Tyler in his bid to hold the curators’ attention, freaks out in response, insisting that feature films must have their place as transmitters of collective narratives to make sense of the world: boss-battle electro music plays as he breathlessly yells, “It’s belief that makes the real world real and not a surrealistic nightmare!” (These monologues, it’s revealed in the end credits, smuggle in quotations from a few arts writers, including Richard Brody and Violet Lucca.)

The Misconceived is, on its face, a surrealistic nightmare—and that feels right for the state of affairs it’s describing. But Wilkins and co. have found a way for the surrealistic nightmare to convey something personal and homegrown. The Misconceived is about the layers upon layers of human-made artifice that always stand between the maker and the viewer; by making that plain to see, the nuts and bolts of the construction project become the film’s subject. Motion-capture animation serves as a perpetual reminder of the human labor that brought The Misconceived to life, allowing the film to function as an anti-AI provocation. In a 2024 essay for Triple Canopy, Wilkins touches on the discomfiting nature of these sorts of visuals: “The 2023 remake of the 1989 [Little Mermaid] is an unsettling CGI extravaganza with Javier Bardem playing Ariel’s father, King Triton, whose head looks like it’s falling off his neck (a common side-effect of bargain-basement motion capture, for which Disney has no excuse).” It’s a perverse conceptual stunt for The Misconceived to use these same tools to reckon with humanity in filmmaking at a fraction of The Little Mermaid’s budget.

But The Misconceived takes things a step further, transcending its status as a single film to expand on a self-referential, deeply idiosyncratic body of work. It is definitely set on Planet Wilkins: it begins in a Dunkin’ Donuts, a frequent setting and point of obsession across his work; all of the music is sourced from royalty-free Shutterstock affiliate Pond 5, which may as well be Wilkins’s house sponsor; and the bottle of wine at the Whitney Biennial party, Ménage à Trois, is the same wine in Clip’s house in The Plagiarists. These in-jokes call to mind his 2023 work Still Film: the voiceover here takes the form of a deposition with four speaking roles, all performed by Wilkins, giving the sense of a split-personality internal monologue. The psyche is putting itself on trial, or at least trying to get to the bottom of something. All the while, we’re looking at press stills from films in the ’80s and ’90s—the period of Wilkins’s childhood—taken by on-set photographers for lobby cards and promotional purposes, and showing a different angle on scenes than the actual camera of the film. Why, you may ask, have these images occasioned a legal proceeding? The lawyers fret over the porous boundaries between movies and lived experience—the way that pop culture can hijack our memories of childhood, and certain scenes feel like they happened to us. It’s all too much: the movies bombard us with an overwhelming amount of narrative information, especially at an impressionable time like childhood. “No one knows what matters anymore,” one of the lawyers says, explaining that this deposition is about clarifying the facts of Wilkins’s memories and lived experience. “All facts are equal in value,” he adds, and only legible in aggregate—in the context of the larger body of evidence, deposition, or thought process.

Movies dwell in the ambiguous space between narrative information and individual affect—the constructed form, and the people behind it. Desperate to separate out these two elements, one of the lawyers chirps up “object to form” so frequently that the phrase devolves into pure sound, a grouping of syllables. Instead, Wilkins’s cinema is perched on that thin line between legibility and abstraction: narrative cinema can impose some comforting coherence on the world, but then, these familiar devices collapse on themselves if we look at them too closely. Even if a film is an exorbitantly pricey oversimplification of reality, there’s still the drive to pick up one’s tools and build something new. Tyler might ask, how do you reach people? A voice from a childhood memory might offer a parting reassurance that you can take or leave: if you build it, your audience will come.

Mother Mary
Dir. David Lowery, U.S., A24

In a recent conversation with his friend and peer Chloé Zhao for Filmmaker, David Lowery was prompted to explain the “origin story” of his new psychodrama Mother Mary, which observes the turbulent reunion of the eponymous fictional popstar (Anne Hathaway) with her former costume designer Sam (Michaela Coel) years after a falling out. In response, Lowery recalls the cognitive dissonance he experienced working on his prior A24 passion project, The Green Knight (2021), while simultaneously lining up his second Disney live-action remake, Peter Pan & Wendy (2023). The perceived contradiction made him question his choices as a filmmaker: “I started writing a dialogue between the part of me that could make Disney movies and the part of me that could make The Green Knight. It sounds reductive to say it that way because of course I can make both. I love all forms of cinema. But in that moment, I was confused, and that confusion—my search for clarity—became the early pages of the screenplay.” In this context, the key players in this strange, stagey two-hander come to embody an archetypal creative opposition.

That Pete’s Dragon (2016), Lowery’s first mainstream project for Disney, remains his best film is no small irony. Ditto the fact that The Green Knight’s savvy social media marketing and frictionless, screen-cap-ready contents further evince how even an Indiewood “one for me” project can smack of corporate branding and studio notes. To his credit, Lowery’s words display an awareness that these naive distinctions between commerce and craft are frequently porous. It’s fitting, then, that the two protagonists of Mother Mary seem to resist such a binary as well.

Their psychic connection is teased out in the film’s distended opening montage, which depicts the two women lurching inexorably toward each other. An introductory shot of Mother Mary, awaiting her big entrance behind a partition, finds her at the crest of a shimmering sartorial wave, panning up from ripples of scrunched silver fabric to the metallic “halo” affixed atop her head like a crown. Accompanying this elaborate shot, Sam addresses Mary abstractly in voiceover, delimiting the thin line between love and hate before proclaiming venomously, “You deserve neither.”

Ironically, the cape is cast off almost as soon as Mother Mary hits the stage, revealing the singer in an angular leotard and stilettos as she performs “Burial,” a disappointingly listless song written for the film’s seven-track tie-in album by Jack Antonoff and Charli xcx. This tentative opening number serves as a fleeting showcase for the markers of pop-world credibility at Lowery’s disposal, which he doesn’t seem especially interested in (scenes of Mary actually performing are few and far between).

Immediately after, dizzying crosscuts set to the bouncier “My Mouth Is Lonely for You” (FKA Twigs’s contribution) show Mary’s dressing-room crash-outs over costuming and Sam’s preparations for her upcoming show in parallel, rushing us toward their confrontation. (In light of the impressive supporting cast whose screentime is paltry, the film gives the impression of having been cut down from a longer version.) By the end of the song, Mary has impulsively decamped to Sam’s remote fashion house outside London, barged in past her harried assistant Hilda (Hunter Schafer, grossly underused), and zeroed in on the designer’s bedroom as if she knows the building like the back of her hand. Sam, sensing her arrival, sits up to face her just before the door swings open. Their exchange quickly boils down to: “I need a dress.” They have four days to pull it off.

Verbal standoffs abound in the film that follows, which, confined to the barn where Sam does her work, takes the form of a chamber piece. The bitter couturier spends most of their hurried collab cutting this desperate diva down to size, effortlessly establishing artistic dominance and wielding grandiloquent jibes with a preternatural sense for the weight and force of her words. Through Mary’s brittle mannerisms, we see how her evident guilt converges with the pressures of the impending comeback show––blurry footage prior to the A24 logo suggested an onstage injury that eerily resembled self-harm. As the women negotiate the details of Mary’s wardrobe––“no red,” she insists at the outset, and you’ll never guess what color the eventual garment will be––they exhume past betrayals and thumb their sores. Eventually, they surmise that these festering wounds have manifested something spectral, an occult presence that demands to be addressed.

Mother Mary is relentlessly talky, perhaps Lowery’s most writerly film so far. It is also self-aware in this regard––Mary complains that “these metaphors are getting exhausting,” in response to one of Sam’s typically lofty remarks. Their conversations lead to flashbacks, which are staged as physical extensions of the same set. While Lowery frequently struggles to stylize Sam and Mary’s tête-à-tête, his approach to the figurative spatiality and sinuous artifice of memory fares better. Multiple stand-out, long-take tableaux follow Mary through stages of exhaustion, terror, and exaltation, the most striking being a cyclical climb up and down an interlocking series of backstage staircases as she whispers repeatedly “this what I do.”

When the supernatural turn comes, the imagery does the heavy lifting. Supposedly born from the tooth Sam––freshly booted from Mother Mary’s creative team––cracked while clenching her jaw during a performance, this ghostly apparition manifests as a floating cluster of crimson fabric. Mary, who divulges subsequent encounters after Sam set the spirit free, describes it as “the idea of a she,” a telling metaphor that better describes the film’s human characters.

Mother Mary’s explorations of the psychological effects of fame are mostly decorative, frequently splitting the difference between timeless and timeworn. The argument could be made that this befits a film that dramatizes the process behind decorating a cultural icon, and once again, Lowery preempts criticism in his dialogue when Mary suggests that one of Sam’s ideas is obvious, to which she retorts that obviousness can beget clarity––Mother Mary bets big on the veracity of her statement.

Such are the bewildering pleasures and pitfalls of Lowery’s self-defeating project, an ungainly almost-horror movie filled with labored abstractions that it can’t help but acknowledge. Rather than soften the impact of Lowery’s ostentatious swings, these conceits merely undercut the disquieting images and scenarios Mother Mary frequently stumbles upon. By holding up a mirror to his own movie, Lowery obscures our view, and clarity, despite a wealth of obviousness, recedes further from our reach.

Blue Heron
Dir. Sophy Romvari, Canada/Hungary, Janus Films

Binaries can be a security blanket for the brain. How convenient, pacifying, and self-affirming to seize on a person from our past and either venerate or vilify them, to be struck by a fugitive memory and adjudge its tenor either light or dark, to rummage through a period of life and resolve that it was either conducive or detrimental to all that followed in its wake. Discarding this thought pattern is an eternal exercise, most difficult to unlearn—at least, in my experience—when it comes to considering those closest to us. Blind adoration can sustain us, but a grudge can anchor even as it enervates its holder. It is harder to make peace with indecision, to allow room in one’s heart for love and hurt and ambivalence.

Such feeling suffuses Sophy Romvari’s humbling and quietly awe-inspiring first feature Blue Heron, which could only half-accurately be described as an autobiographical coming-of-age drama. The subject matter is familiar and familial terrain for the Canadian filmmaker. Her previous short films—including 2020’s intriguing Still Processing—have largely been creative experiments in what she describes as “memory retrieval,” pivoting around relations near and far. Her practice is grounded in the understanding that the real and the merely remembered are separated by the finest and slipperiest of lines.

Romvari’s parents and three older brothers emigrated to British Columbia from Hungary in 1989, a year before she was born, and subsequently settled in the suburbs of Vancouver Island. Her film bears all the markers of a normal turn-of-the-millennium childhood: water balloon fights with the neighbors, hours slumped in front of boxy TVs, primitive forays into Microsoft Paint as dad plays his ambient German electronica from the same device. But Romvari’s youth was clouded by the deteriorating and increasingly disturbing behavior of her eldest sibling, a late half-brother produced by her mother’s previous relationship. The toll that his short and troubled life had on the family is immeasurable, her early life warping around a single member. Resentment, by Romvari’s own account, has been claimed like a legacy.

Blue Heron strikes a far more nuanced balance in its recreation of the writer-director’s upbringing during the family’s first tumultuous summer on Vancouver Island in the late nineties, a breaking point in her parents’ ability to care for her rabble-rousing brother. He is fictionalized here as Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a lurking, lanky, close-lipped presence with a strong jaw and a pair of clunky, corrective spectacles that magnify a mutinously numb stare. “The older I get, the more I feel like I never knew him at all,” a voice intones over the opening images of a recording iPhone zooming in on hilly, tree-lined streets, the narration and composition equally signaling that the ensuing film is less straightforward and beholden to realism than meets the eye. For the next 50 minutes, Romvari places us in the perspective of her placid, eight-year-old avatar Sasha (Eylul Guven), occasionally veering away to focus on her parents: her sweet-natured father (Ádám Tompa), who is glued to the desktop on which he works from home, and her stress-ridden mother (Iringó Réti), who shepherds Sasha, Jeremy, and their very nearly indistinguishable middle brothers (Preston Drabble and Liam Serg) from outing to outing.

In these scenes, Blue Heron evokes recollections with the muted, clear-sighted precision of Charlotte Wells’s father-daughter drama Aftersun (2022), an unavoidable forerunner. But Romvari bends the time-hopping, fourth wall-breaking impulses of that film even further, not just reenacting the past but unsettling and transmuting it in order to see this past—and her brother—anew. The house becomes a stage for Jeremy’s escalating misbehaviors. He lies supine on the porch like a corpse for hours on end, arrives home in handcuffs with a police escort after getting caught shoplifting, and gashes his wrist when he puts his arm through a glass window in the dead of night. When Jeremy creeps along the house’s gable roof in another scene, what proves more unnerving than the prospect of his falling is the pleased smirk that he offers his pleading parents, as if proud to hold them prisoner to his chaos.

Incidents like these send both of them, but particularly his mother, through a rotating door of interactions with doctors, psychologists, social workers, and law enforcement, who only seem to create more confusion, pulling them down a sinkhole of reckless exploits, punitive measures, unconfirmed disorders, and life-draining despair. Finally, a representative from social services pays a visit to the house and recommends that Jeremy be voluntarily placed with a foster family. After much indecision, his mother consents and later agonizes over the decision on the phone. But there is someone surprising reassuring her on the other end of the line: a curly-haired adult woman sitting in a cozy apartment, speaking into an iPhone.

This is the present-day Sasha (Amy Zimmer), who both is and isn’t Romvari. She, too, is a filmmaker, a fact we learn as we are relocated to a conference room where she assembles and records a panel of social workers as they retrospectively examine Jeremy’s behavioral issues and muse on how her family’s thwarted attempts to help might have been bolstered by modern knowledge and practices. It is at this point that Romvari entirely upends our expectations, not so much maneuvering between the past and the present as establishing a liminal space where the traumas and uncertainties of the past reside keenly and mutably in the here and now. With Blue Heron, Romvari serves as the architect, constructor, and inhabitant of her own memory palace. As Sasha returns to the home of her childhood, she encounters her mother and father, her brothers, and herself unchanged from when we last encountered them. Through reenactment, Romvari holds an impossible intervention between daughter and parents, the former’s cautionary monologue unleashing a perpetual cycle of what-ifs. What if Jeremy had found the aid he required? What if her parents had summoned the self-preservation to give up searching for the assistance that was never to come? Perhaps all unhappy families are alike in their pattern of sorry speculation, their penchant for raising hypothetical questions without answers; they are held captive by the grim comprehension that things could have been done differently. Their gaze is persistently trained backwards.

It is enough that Romvari’s film inspires such solemn and rigorous meditation, enacted by performers working in tandem with a trusting and intuitive director. Romvari draws an especially graceful and deeply shaded performance from the Romanian-born Réti, the piercing, playful, and immensely sympathetic standout in an instantly credible ensemble of actors. But Blue Heron also announces its maker as a self-assured stylist who maintains narrative clarity while engendering a bracing disorientation on visual and sonic planes. Working again with the talented cinematographer Maya Bankovic, Romvari alights on unexpected sights that assume an eldritch power: a couple’s twinned reflections in the swirling glass frame of their living room mirror, neglected potato pancakes burning in a cast-iron skillet, the empty, fluorescent-lit hallways of an office space that could be anywhere and nowhere. These images linger, as do the jolting sensations of the sound design: at one point, the heightened thwack of a basketball ricocheting off the side of a house brings to mind nothing so much as the “rumble from the core of the earth” in Memoria (2021).

Of course, the source of this ruckus is Jeremy. And yet Romvari’s meta-segue suggests that we are witnessing the warning signs of a young man’s decline, rather than its exceedingly harrowing episodes and woeful outcomes. The fuller history remains deliberately elusive, the extremity of Jeremy’s disobedience and his loved ones’ grief more often verbalized than depicted outright. One of the most chilling details emerges during a Zoom conversation between Zimmer and a real-life support worker named Bonnie Murrell, who knew Romvari’s eldest brother and reveals that he stowed gasoline in his room, should he choose to make good on a recurring threat to burn the house down with everyone inside.

It is a struggle to summon up untroubled memories of a brother who tapped his family’s patience and vitality with vampiric rapacity; to not prioritize the residual anger of the aggrieved and willfully remember a sibling’s love of maps, bursts of clownlike whimsy, and capacity for tenderness; to allow him all of his dimensions despite the bitter regrets and destabilizing bouts of anguish that are the inheritance of the bereaved, though not its sum total. In one scene, young Sasha and her father watch with bemused curiosity as Jeremy coats his brothers with a cascade of powdered sugar. Given all that we have seen of Jeremy thus far, this moment of spontaneous levity could beggar belief. But in the midst of sorrow and strife, there it is.