With Hasan in Gaza
Dir. Kamal Aljafari, Qatar/Germany/France, Cinema Guild

In 2001, the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari set out to find a man he’d known while imprisoned in the late 1980s, when he was only 17. With only his memories, Aljafari embarked on a road trip through Gaza with a guide named Hasan in search of his friend. Together, they captured the realities of an occupied territory and its people on a MiniDV camcorder. Decades later, Aljafari, a celebrated filmmaker and artist whose work deals in the elusive grammar of memory, rediscovered the footage and compiled the material into a haunting historical testimony. With Hasan in Gaza functions as a travelogue of occupation and an archive of a people besieged by Israel’s version of Manifest Destiny. That the places Aljafari visited and the conditions he witnessed so eerily foreshadow the recent devastation of Gaza reflects the insanity of a history that rhymes.

While many viewers will know Aljafari for his feature debut The Roof (2006), With Hasan in Gaza is functionally the director’s first film. At the time of recording, Aljafari was 28 and living in Germany. He had left Palestine a few years before for film school and came back to make a movie about his experience in prison as a teenager. Not only does With Hasan in Gaza possess the energetic devotion of someone newly armed with and aware of the camera’s possibilities, there’s also a sense of fugitivity in the filmmaking. As Aljafari and Hasan drive around, they film carefully and with a keen eye for Israeli Defense Force soldiers who might mistake their camera for a weapon.

With Hasan in Gaza opens with a shot of a checkpoint, a physical manifestation of Palestinian confinement in Gaza. Aljafari and Hasan will continue to encounter these barricades and talk about them with the people they meet on the road. The director mostly shoots from the inside of a car, where he sits with Hasan, who fills him in on all that’s changed about his homeland. With these early moments, Aljafari establishes the haunting atmosphere of occupation, one defined by overwhelming surveillance and restriction.

Aljafari has returned to a region reeling from the Second Intifada. Despite announcements of a ceasefire and calls for peace, that chapter of the conflict lasted from 2000 to 2005. While they drive around, Hasan points out the new buildings erected by Israeli settlers and mentions the refugee camps that have become home to thousands of Palestinians. The pair make a trip to a market for breakfast and head to the beach, where they talk to a father who has spent the last eight years in prison. Standing by the water, as his children frolic, the man reflects on how long it’s been since he has seen the sea.

Disquieting testimonies like these punctuate the long stretches of exterior shots—buildings, people milling about, the landscape as seen from the side of the road—that make up most of With Hasan in Gaza. As Aljafari and Hasan travel through the city, they collect the stories of Palestinians who have lost their families and loved ones to Israel’s violence. One man takes the pair through an area of demolished homes, pointing out artifacts that reveal how little time the families had to evacuate. Aljafari uses wider shots in these moments to take in the breadth of destruction: buildings left half-standing, debris, crushed baby carriers, and other signs of a wrecked domestic life are everywhere. In another scene, Hasan points out how people repair their homes, repatching walls that have been shelled or putting pillows and sandbags in windows blown out by bombs. “You see how it is broken?” one woman asks while pointing to a part of the building just out of frame. “Last night, after they talked about a ceasefire.”

Part of what’s striking about With Hasan in Gaza is how this archive of 2001 mirrors the occasion of its release. Conversations about the toll of the occupation and the struggle of daily life that Aljafari has with the people parallel discussions in recent documentaries like No Other Land, the Oscar-winning film about the destruction of Masafer Yatta in the Occupied West Bank, and From Ground Zero, an anthology film produced by the Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi. There are moments in the doc that speak to current headlines, exposing patterns within the occupation: announced and subsequently broken ceasefires; soldiers deployed daily to roam the streets; bombs exploding in the distance at night, checkpoints and the insubstantial tours by the United Nations. When someone encourages the woman pointing out the broken windows to elaborate on her situation, to expound on her frustrations, she replies: “What should I say? We’re tired of speaking.”

And yet, as with all oppressed people, they still have stories to tell. Hidden in this makeshift travelogue is a narrative touched by the resistance that figures in Aljafari’s later works. Since The Roof, the filmmaker has used his experimental projects to construct counternarratives, ones in which he centers the rich history of Palestinian people and their land. In Port of Memory (2010), a narrative drama about a family in Jaffa on the verge of displacement, Aljafari focuses on rituals that anchor the characters. Six years later, in Recollection, he removes Israelis from the footage to tell a different story of Jaffa, which both comments on and combats the historical erasure of Palestinians. In With Hasan in Gaza, a rebellious nature lives on in the children, who gleefully ask Aljafari and Hasan to film them or to take a picture. At the early moment on the beach, the kids dance around, hold up the fish they caught and smile as widely as they can for the camera. Their enthusiasm in the face of persistent struggle is a damning reminder of how Israel and its co-conspirators have justified the murder of children for decades, but it’s also evidence of endurance. There’s a moment in the middle of the film when a curious little boy looks at the camera and asks: “Who is he filming this for?” I like to think the answer is—for you.

Forastera
Dir. Lucia Aleñar Iglesias, Spain/Italy/Sweden, Grasshopper Film

There’s an uncanniness to the experience of grieving in a beautiful place—like the iridescence that trails from the tide, gone the second you look at it. It’s as though the heart can’t process the lost thing in the midst of too much sunlight. Forastera, Spanish filmmaker Lucia Aleñar Iglesias’s refulgent directorial debut, explores this process from the vantage of Cata (Zoe Stein), a pensive teen from Madrid spending the summer in Mallorca with her grandparents. Bicycling in a bikini with her sister Eva (Martina Garcia), canoodling with a Swedish dude in a rocky cove, Cata breezes through the activities common to summer vacation movies. But rather than experience some sexual awakening, heartbreak, or lesson on the limits of libertinism, Cata comes to realize just how little she knows her own family—and, more so, her distinct place within it.

An atmospheric film in which the dramatic Balearic backdrop abuts a white sand beach, Forastera privileges crystalline shot composition and soundscape over expository dialogue. Over a dark blank screen, the placid crash of waves segues into a close-up of the heroine peacefully sun-bathing, the shadow-puppet of her sister’s hand playfully grazing the brim of her nose.

Catalina (Marta Angelat), Cata’s beloved padrina, reluctantly tolerates her husband’s chauvinism. Whether beckoning his wife to refresh his friends’ drinks on the new terraza he constructed or massaging his wife’s shoulders as he gloats of the garden he will build next, Tomeu (Lluís Homar) is generally a benevolent tyrant. In turn, Catalina is hardly passive; she badgers Tomeu to teach Cata to drive, despite their mutual lack of interest, and smokes a leisurely cigarette after insisting on filing Eva’s nails.

Whether impersonating her namesake on the phone or fitting perfectly into her vintage clothes, Cata bears a tender likeness to her grandmother central to the film’s pathos. If anything, more time between the pair onscreen would have fueled the slow burn to follow. Instead, about 15 minutes in, Cata returns home to discover Catalina lifeless on the staircase outside the house, a trash bag in her moonlit hand. The rest of the film explores the gulf left between members of the family after her death—and the guilt endured by Tomeu, who heard nothing of his wife’s fall. “Was she still alive when you found her?” he begs Cata through tears. “No, she wasn’t,” she stoically replies.

Most of what we learn about the fallen matriarch is based on old photographs or recollections shared among friends and family. But lines like “Remember when she hid in the pantry to eat cookies?” between two sisters don’t reveal much aside from a secret sweet tooth, hardly revelatory. Learning more about Catalina would leave viewers all the more haunted by her absence. Her spirit lingers on in the flickering fluorescent kitchen light—the “ghost” joked about in an early scene—and in the sudden beauty mark Cata spots on her cheek after trying on her grandmother’s ’70s wrap dress. But, amidst the film’s other characters, Catalina the person feels a bit overlooked.

Self-conscious about her inability to express her sorrow, Cata doesn’t shed a tear the weeks after her grandmother dies, and her healing seems predicated on mediating between her squabbling mother and grandfather. If Cata is quietly perceptive of Tomeu’s grief, her mother Pepa (Núria Prims) is reactive and confrontational, finding her father's obstinate nature harder to swallow in Catalina's absence. Cata is more adept at handling Tomeu, revealing how capably a young woman can admire a flawed paternal figure while still recognizing his flaws. “Am I ridiculous?” he asks while she poses him for a series of photographs with an old manual film camera. “No, very handsome,” she assures. Sitting in her grandmother’s empty chair on the terrace, smoking her cigarettes, she serves as a living, breathing reminder of Catalina’s legacy; she also becomes a temporary companion for Tomeu, to whom she refuses to condescend.

The film’s tranquil pace and preponderance of teenagers languidly hanging out nicely evokes its Mallorcan setting, a place marked by siestas and village festivals. Yet Cata feels very contemporary, an outsider to Tomeu’s rule, and unafraid to challenge the implicitly sexist order of her family home. She stands up to her grandfather when he barks at her to “brake!” during a driving lesson. When he privately disparages her own mother as “disrespectful” in his house, she replies, “I don’t know what your issue is, but she doesn’t deserve that treatment.” In witnessing Tomeu’s hostility toward her mother, and experiencing similar harshness herself, Cata is able to empathize as she never could before. For her, growing up is less about superficial milestones than seeing how she is shaped by the forces that preceded her.

Forastera—the feminine word for “stranger” or “foreigner” in Spanish—is most invested in how families must reorient themselves when an elder suddenly passes on; authority isn’t necessarily handed off to the other elders, and intergenerational bonds can both strengthen and falter. The film further reflects on the liminal borders of selfhood—though stunned by her own sadness, Cata fills her grandmother’s shoes with confidence and grace. More subtly, the film confronts the ways in which gender roles can be flipped after a serious loss, and a grounded young woman can help her family see the light.

The Currents
Dir. Milagros Mumenthaler, Switzerland/Argentina, Kino Lorber

Argentinian writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler’s third feature opens with a woman staring out of a high-rise window, her expression partially obscured by the reflection of the wintry landscape before her. After receiving an award from an applauding crowd, she heads to the toilet, where after washing her hands, she glances at her glass trophy and casually pushes it into a garbage bin as a kind of afterthought. Wandering the cobblestone paths of the city, she strolls by a shop whose window display catches her eye. Now carrying a small package, she walks to the center of a bridge. And then, in a long shot that obscures her expression but clarifies her unhesitating movements, she jumps into the water. When we next see her, she is walking into a hotel lobby wrapped in a shiny emergency blanket.

With this enigmatic, elliptical, entirely wordless prologue, Mumenthaler makes it immediately apparent that her film will center squarely on the mystery of her protagonist, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola). When she returns to her home in Buenos Aires, after what we learn was a trip to Switzerland, we are gradually woven into the fabric of her everyday existence—her professional obligations as a fashion designer, as well as her domestic life with her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi), and young daughter, Sofia. But given what we have seen, the details of her routine take on far less importance than her attempts to reacclimate herself to it. Reeling from the vertigo of that destabilizing prologue, we search for clues that would explain her behavior, scanning every image for the source of her disaffection. Who is this woman? Why did she jump? And why has she chosen to return?

Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to these questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water. A significant part of her readjustment thus involves negotiating the practical consequences of this new situation—such as her inability to care for her daughter as she bathes, and the complications this introduces into her marital sex life. These details, and others like it, might incline one to see Lina’s hydrophobia as a kind of metaphor—a body-horror stand-in for her alienation from her upper-crust existence. Yet Mumenthaler concretizes Lina’s dilemma in ways that push against such a neat reading. Turning away from her social circles, Lina seeks help from an old acquaintance, Amalia, with whom she shares an evidently significant, though largely unspecified history. A hairdresser by profession, Amalia helps Lina by putting her under with gas, washing her hair, and then cleaning her nude body—an act that registers like nothing so much as the preparation of a corpse. This is also to say that if Lina’s phobia is a metaphor, it is one whose significance is much less straightforward than it may at first seem.

Played with mesmerizing opacity by González Sola, Lina takes her place alongside the inscrutable heroines of such films as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s The Passion According to Berenice (1976), Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), and, closer to home, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008)—all alienated from their environments, all troubled for reasons that they are unable to fully explain. Like those directors, Mumenthaler does not simply withhold the reasons Lina might have for behaving the way she does. Many basic narrative details, such as what her husband does for a living, are indeed elided. Nonetheless, by the end of the film, we are able to identify several plausible sources from which to trace the roots of her discontent—not just her anxieties about motherhood but also the sublimated class tensions between her and her husband’s family. What The Currents resists, then, is not the idea that there might be some cause of her present predicament, but that identifying this cause would really resolve anything. What Mumenthaler resists, in other words, is the assumption that Lina’s behavior could be accounted for by locating a past traumatic event.

Mumenthaler’s refusal of such explanations manifests clearly when Lina narrates the events of her Swiss trip to Amalia, and we flash back to the day of the jump, filling in the ellipses of the prologue. Here, one might expect some dramatic passkey—a plot revelation such as one might find in a classic Hollywood noir or a Hitchcockian thriller à la Spellbound, with their explicitly psychoanalytic frameworks of character action and behavior. Yet instead of some traumatic event, we see an unsensational scene of Lina buying a hand-stitched textile from a Swiss shop. The pattern on the cloth she buys depicts three women weaving, recalling the Greek Fates, traditionally seen as the personifications of destiny—a detail which might prompt one to trace the thread of Lina’s life still further into her past. And by the end of the film, we will indeed have seen Lina visit her troubled mother, and perhaps understood something more of her unease regarding her daughter. But over the course of the film, we are also led to question the sort of vulgar Freudianism which would simply identify a childhood trauma as the source from which one’s present neuroses spring.

Much of this questioning derives from the way The Currents conveys Lina’s discontent not through concrete dramatic situations but through reveries and ever more surprising digressions from her perspective. Stepping away from the set of a photo shoot, Lina wanders into the corridors of the building and happens upon a man playing the timpani drums—an incongruous, unremarked-upon event that recalls a similar scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), where Tilda Swinton’s heroine is momentarily waylaid from her search to observe a jazz session in full. Later, as Lina waits in the hallway of a client’s home, contemplating a sculpture at its center, the scene suddenly segues—in what may be a daydream, a flashback, or some amalgam of the two—to the sight of Lina’s client wandering an art museum, offering up images of Monets and Goyas entirely detached from the central narrative. Near the film’s climax, having momentarily lost sight of her daughter, Lina finds her perched on the lighthouse of their apartment building—at which point, Holst’s “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” swelling on the soundtrack, the camera ranges into the streets of Buenos Aires, following the lives of three women known to Lina, but venturing far beyond her limited acquaintance with them. In this rapturous passage, it’s as if Lina were attempting to escape her own life by projecting herself into the imagined identities of others, searching the cosmos for a way to break free from her world.

The Currents eventually builds to a moment where Lina feels that she must choose between her present life with her family on the one hand and the prospect of solitary reinvention on the other—in short, between staying still and moving forward. But without revealing just where the film ends up, suffice it to say that Mumenthaler ultimately rejects the terms of this opposition. In the film’s closing image of Lina laying down on her bed in a silk red nightgown, listening to the soft patter of rain outside, the filmmaker locates something beyond a simplistic equivalence of freedom and movement. After all, in a life lived after the flood, being swept away may be easier than staying in place.

The Nintendo NES’s ROB. The Dance Dance Revolution floor pad. The GameShark. The Guitar Hero and Rock Band instruments. Rumble packs. The myriad attachments for the Nintendo Wii’s remote controller, like the steering wheel or the gun. The Sony EyeToy. VR rigs. Various microphones, like those for the Gamecube or Dreamcast. From the beginning, there have been games that employed peripherals that break the traditional control paradigm of controllers, button consoles, and keyboards. Video games have a complex moment-to-moment relationship with their audience, and changing the fulcrum of that relationship can change the experience of a game in fascinating ways. In this multiplayer roundtable, Kambole Campbell, Holly Green, Esther Rosenfield, and Dan Schindel discuss examples (successful and not) of accessories and add-ons and what they do for their respective games.

Dan Schindel: To start with, what are your favorite and least favorite game peripherals? My favorite was always the Game Boy Camera, and by extension, the Game Boy Printer. It was a—now quite crude, but for the time revolutionary—swivel camera that captured low-pixel images. If I wanted to play psychologist, I might imagine it played a role in my interest in visual culture. People make genuinely beautiful images with the camera—there’s a whole virtual exhibition you can access through Itch. On the flip side, there was the e-Reader, a card-swiping attachment for the Game Boy Advance. Nintendo manufactured these cards with special barcodes that you could run through the reader to get extra levels, characters, or whatever. I mostly remember it being associated with Pokémon—for a time, every Pokémon trading card had an e-Reader barcode on the side, for synergy. I think I used my e-Reader to pretend I was in Digimon Tamers exactly once and then never used it again for anything else.

Kambole Campbell: That e-Reader looks like my knife sharpener. Anyway, when we say "peripherals," I wonder if we count regular controllers here, too. I thought the Joy-Cons for the Nintendo Switch look a little toyetic, like so many Nintendo products do, but also feel like they have a more ergonomic design than their previous controllers—like the Nintendo 64 and GameCube pads. But that more minimal look doesn't mean cutting back on functions: you can play it like a traditional NES controller, or you can use it like a more modern gamepad if you use the grips that come with the console. It's unique to have a modular console which acts as a hybrid of Nintendo Consoles to date, and miraculous that even the act of changing between these modes feels quite satisfying in hand.

If we were to narrow the definition of "peripherals" to mean accessories that aren't required to use the console, I think I would go for the GBA Wireless Link. Might be a boring choice, but the Game Boy Advance (and its follow-up, the SP) was the only console I owned until about 2006. So the social aspect it opened up for the Game Point Advance—mostly trading Pokémon—meant quite a lot in terms of making my own console more sociable compared to going to my friends for their PS1.

For least favorite: the Rock Band drum kit. It's gigantic, they sound horrible when you hit them.

Esther Rosenfield: The one that came to my mind immediately was the Wii steering wheel. To me, that is the most iconic peripheral ever. The key to the peripheral as a concept is to make the video game less abstract. The Wii wheel is a great example of a peripheral where the whole point is to collapse the distance between the actions you’re undertaking in the game and the actions you’re performing in real life. You are literally steering the Mario Kart. If you move to the right, the kart moves to the right. It felt so cool as a kid to feel less like I was figuratively driving. This feels like I'm physically holding the wheel of the kart. I still have very fond memories of that.

My least favorite is the GameCube microphone. There was a Mario Party game—Mario Party 6, maybe—that came with a little gray plastic microphone. It looked like an old '60s game show host microphone. There were various games that would require you to speak into the microphone or blow on it. My sisters and I had heard this rumor that if you said a number out loud while rolling dice, it would influence the dice to land on that number. It never worked.

DS: The Wii was big on this in general. Along with mobile games, it helped create what’s now called the “casual” demographic. At the time, a lot of “real” gamers made fun of waving the Wiimote around, but plenty of people thought it looked fun and simple.

Holly Green: Esther, I love that you brought up the steering wheel for Mario Kart, because I feel as though games are such a strong self-insertion fantasy. And when we improve upon or strengthen the bond in that self-insert, I think it leads to improved performance. When I was learning to drive, video games, even with just a regular controller, actually helped me learn things like remembering which direction to turn when I'm trying to back out of a parking spot. Peripherals are amazing in terms of sports psychology; there's a bond between visualizing an action and the success of that action.

And I believe that I'm absolutely a better Mario Kart player when I have the Nintendo Wii wheel. I have a bucket that my husband and I use as a graveyard of all my Wii peripherals. I was getting all the stuff as they were coming out, experiencing their novelty, and enjoying how much they improved my performance. I think my favorite, going way back, is the Nintendo Zapper. So many of those early peripherals, if you look at their history, are guns, which is unsurprising. It was such a fascinating early application of the technology. You got your NES, you got Super Mario Brothers, and you had your Duck Hunt. Duck Hunt made you feel so powerful, telling yourself you would be such a good shot if you had a real gun, because you could get these little flapping birds. It's sad because the Zapper probably could've had a lot more applications, but it didn’t really happen. And that would kind of be true of Nintendo for the next couple of decades, where you would see them try certain things and it wouldn't really happen at first, but then decades later, it would come back around in a much better way. And you can see the result of that evolution now with the Joy-Cons. Peripherals became a big part of their identity and were so well implemented and supported that they could become a part of their identity.

My least favorite peripheral is probably the Nintendo Labo. When that came out, my husband and I had been married about a year, I decided to get him Nintendo Labo, because we thought folding and putting them together would be a cute activity to do with my young son and niece. The concept is so smart. It's a system of build-it-yourself peripherals that support different mini-games. Family-friendly, much cheaper than buying a different peripheral for every game.

But those peripherals ended up taking up a lot of space. I wasn't able to store them very well either, especially because they're rather fragile and sensitive to moisture. Also, they actually didn't end up being as well supported as you might've thought, considering that particular era of Nintendo devices. When the Wii Remotes first came out, their success really depended on how much Nintendo supported the developers making stuff with them. Whereas the PlayStation Move was an optional device that wasn't well supported internally, PlayStation didn't have as much control over its developers as Nintendo did.
If Nintendo had made a second generation and brought that back in some way with better support, maybe it would still be a thing. Although it had a lot of potential, it only lasted about two years before dying out.

DS: So many peripherals end up as historical footnotes for precisely these reasons you describe. That’s a symptom of a broader issue within the game industry, which is constantly chasing new technology. It fits their bottom line well, forcing consumers to continually upgrade. And it’s exponentially more difficult to preserve a game along with whatever arcane controller they made specifically for it.

KC: Since I basically missed a generation of consoles, my experience of this is, again, primarily through the Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero genre of games with bespoke peripherals that you would buy with those games. Sometimes, the player base innovates by having these quirky adaptations of those controllers to see if they can beat Halo 3 just using a Guitar Hero controller or something similar. But outside of this, I wonder how much said adaptability was supported by developers as well. Did anyone think, "What if we could use the DJ Hero controller for our own purposes, and figure out how to build around that?" It's almost like having a single-use tool for your kitchen. "This crushes garlic and doesn't do anything else."

HG: Yeah, honestly, that right there is the reason I avoided some of the more popular games that did have those single-use peripherals. There was that Donkey Kong game that you play with the Bongo drums—Donkey Konga? Beautiful pun. But not having all the space for that in my 900-square-foot condo is definitely a deterrent; that space issue is part of why I didn't get into Rock Band. For a long time, I was a Dance Dance Revolution player. And the nice thing about those games was the dance mats, which you could fold up and store pretty well. Then the Kinect came out and solved that space issue once and for all. Just one small device that took up a little bit of space outside your TV.

I'm really fascinated by the modded uses of these peripherals in order to extend their usability, but also just their general usefulness. If you do some research about the Kinect, you’ll see it has all these different medical applications that, because of the emphasis on commercial entertainment, never really met their full potential. People used the Kinect to train surgeons and help stroke patients recover from injuries, and also elaborately modified Wii U devices, which is probably the most use the Wii U got at all.
In the Dance Dance Revolution community, for example, some people use the dance mats to improve accessibility by changing out the controls to be foot-based instead of hand-based. On the opposite end of that, some increase the difficulty of games by playing a game of Elden Ring with no kills entirely with the Dance Dance Revolution mat. It's absolutely fascinating the range and the spectrum between those two experiences. Not only is it a wonderful way to eliminate the waste of these plastic peripherals, but it’s also a way to give these devices a new life and increase the range of our experiences.

ER: I'm glad you brought up the “beating Elden Ring on a DDR pad” phenomenon. What's interesting to me is the novelty o fartificially inflating the difficulty. The challenge comes from using an "improper" method of input to beat the game. First of all, you have to sync up all the different parts on the pad to particular functions on a controller, essentially translating the input from one device to another.

Peripherals that are unique and have a lot of different capabilities run into the same issue: people who play a lot of video games are accustomed to the traditional controller layout. I remember when the Kinect came out around the same time as Mass Effect 3, and there were promotional videos showing players using voice commands to activate abilities. Instead of pressing a button to tell Liara to use Warp, you can say, “Liara, Warp!” as though you’re actually commanding her in battle.

It seems cool in a commercial, but a lot of people would look at that and say, "Well, I can also just press left on the D pad and do the same thing." We have these items that have interesting, fun use cases, and a lot of the time, the reason they don't succeed or catch on is that the traditional controller has just become too ingrained. So instead, they take on the second life as like, "I used the DDR pad to beat Elden Ring” because it's way more finicky and complicated. The peripheral creates an extra barrier, whereas the peripheral was created to eliminate it.

HG: I do a lot of research and writing on the topic of cognitive issues within games, and what you're bringing up relates to how our brains map onto controllers, assigning certain buttons to do certain things, and then we map our brains onto that configuration. Anyone can tell you, switching between the PlayStation and Xbox controllers is no big deal. Switching from one of those to the Nintendo controller with just a two-button swap of what creates functionality, you're in shambles, right? And that constant remapping is very taxing and fatiguing to our brains. When I'm playing Mario Kart with that steering wheel, I'm Fast and Furious–style, arm locked straight out ahead of me, pretending to rev that gas pedal. It just gets me there, because I feel like I'm actually driving. I would love to see more studies done on that sort of thing. How do peripherals improve our performance by improving the self-insertion fantasy?
Anyone remember that one Wii peripheral that looks like a gun, where you’d slide the Wiimote in?

DS: That was the Wii Zapper, named in tribute to the NES Zapper. I had that. I only used it for the game it came with, Link’s Crossbow Training, and with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, one of the worst Resident Evil games. You’re getting at how peripherals can strengthen the mimesis between your own action and what you’re doing in the game. With a gun peripheral, you’re actually aiming a weapon.
The YouTuber Nerrel has explored different control schemes for shooting games in multiple videos. In one video, he runs a performance test for a control stick vs. a mouse vs. a trackpad vs. gyroscopic aiming. The conventional wisdom goes that a mouse is the best way to aim, that it’s fastest and most precise. But he found that gyro controls actually worked best. Gamers have this idea that it’s too much physical movement, but it actually allows for some very subtle control. You don’t even need a gun-shaped peripheral; tilting a traditional controller works perfectly.

KC: I did find that using gyro aiming made using the bow and arrow in Breath of the Wild much simpler than aiming with the stick, even if I didn't like the idea at first. Your suggestion of the Zapper as a halfway point between the analog stick and the keyboard and mouse also makes me think of it as recognition of the controller having some limits. I'm playing Marathon at the moment, and there are people coming up with combat strategies intentionally made to wrong-foot console players, basically aiming to duke around console players so fast that they can't use the stick to turn in time compared to a keyboard and mouse player. I guess this ties back into what Esther was saying at the beginning, that the best peripherals are literalizing the way we feel playing these games, as well as anticipating what we instinctively want to do in reaction to playing them.

HG: In that sense, there’s one peripheral I've always wanted that has never existed, or not a peripheral, rather, but an effect that we could have but don't: when I'm playing stealth games or any games where I have to sneak around, and there's an enemy that's particularly sensitive to noise… I want there to be a situation where the mic has to be on, and if I make any noise in real life, it blows my cover. When I'm playing Fallout 76, I'll be sneaking around and suddenly cough or say something to my husband in passing, then get all tensed up as if a nearby ghoul is actually going to hear and come after me. Obviously, my cats and the ambient noise of city life would sabotage me at times, but I think it would add a lot of fun to certain experiences.

KC: Someone on the street yells at you, and Mr. X turns around.

HG: We talked earlier about preservation issues from video games and how peripherals infinitely complicate that. There was a long time when I never would've thought they'd try to bring back the Virtual Boy in any form, but it’s actually heartening that they did with the Switch 2 and the Nintendo classics collection, keeping that alive and helping people play those old games.I just really respect how Nintendo will try new things, and they maybe don’t land the first time, but they'll hang on to those ideas even if they only come back decades later and find a better way. Sometimes Iask, is it just that they were so fascinated with the idea that they wanted to make it work later? Is this a saving face kind of thing? Or do they simply refuse to be beaten by their own ideas?

DS: Kam already mentioned the Joy-Cons. In some ways, they feel like the actual realization of what was promised with the Wii. Nintendo has been iterating constantly. When the Wii was first released, you could only make broad gestures that would loosely correlate with actions in the game. It wasn’t until the Wii Motion Plus attachment came out that a Wiimote could actually match your precise movements. And now, with Joy-Cons, motion controls work very smoothly. And in between, there was the Wii U, which was Oops! All Peripherals! Did anyone even have a Wii U? I didn’t.

ER: It's funny, though, because they really proved themselves right with the Switch. The dream of the Wii U is that you can just grab it and turn it into a handheld, and other people can use the TV. They did that with the Switch to great success. It's another great example of Nintendo just not giving up on a concept and saying, "You don't like it now, but we will be proven right eventually.” They've been vindicated by other companies as well with the PlayStation Portal and the Xbox ROG Ally.

DS: We talked earlier about how the Kinect and other peripherals have found unintended usages in medical contexts. Fellow Reverse Shot gamer Forrest pointed out that the Kinect has also found a second life amongst ghost hunters. It was featured in Paranormal Activity 4, and this led real-life ghost hunters to believe its motion tracking could spot ghosts.

ER: There's the implicit idea that the Kinect can see better than the human eye. And of course, no, not really, but we naturally assume that if this device is designed only to see things, it must be extra good at seeing things.

DS: That goes back to reducing the abstraction involved in control. A successful peripheral has that balance. The Guitar Hero controller lets you feel like you're playing a guitar, but you don't have to actually know how to play a guitar to use it. At least theoretically; I also sucked at using it.

ER: Something that makes games unique as a medium is that the controller presents a learning curve to interaction. I've been playing games and I know what all the buttons do and I don't have to look at the controller, but that's a barrier for a lot of people. I saw a post not too long ago where someone said, it would be great if games had a feature that gives you a refresher on the controls if you haven’t played in a while.

For people who don't play games as much, they don’t have the ingrained muscle memory to know what to do when told to “press triangle.” Especially if you're coming from another console. I remember when I got my first PlayStation but had grown up on Xbox, I had to create this mnemonic system: Y is now a triangle, and the Y shape, the shape of the prongs of the Y is kind of a triangle. And if you look at the circle, the B is kind of a round letter, so that's a circle. This is a barrier that no other medium has to contend with. It's funny to think that while a lot of peripherals are designed to break down that barrier of entry and make the act of playing the game more natural, it's clear that some are about making your interaction more elaborate and complicated.

KC: We've been talking a lot about the tactile experience of playing games, and that feels like something unique to how you engage with it as a visual medium. Many of my favorite peripheral or controller experiences inspire different ways of thinking about how your hands interact with what's on screen. And even something as small as the quirks of the PS5's Dualsense, not the fancy haptic rumble but how developers [like Housemarque on Returnal or Insomniacon Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart] have sometimes been playing with different levels of trigger squeezes and how that can serve different functions. So you're not just thinking about the button on the face of the controller, you're also thinking about the pressure that you're applying. It's interesting seeing new ways of tactile interaction open up to different game pads and stuff, like the touchpads on the Steamdeck.

ER: I love the touchpads on the Steam Deck, by the way. It's such a good fidget toy to roll your thumb over and it feels like you're rolling a ball.

KC: I cannot wait for the Steam controllers. They've done the Steam controller before, but this time it's maybe with the understanding of the SteamDeck and how it can replace a mouse touchpad. And the extra buttons on the back. Those minor iterations on very traditional console game pads have been interesting, even if the number of more bespoke peripherals has thinned outside of Nintendo's work.

DS: That gets back to what you said about how controllers themselves are peripherals. And games are continually iterating to fit more complex interactions within the confines of what a controller is, how it fits into human hands, and what's possible for mapping the buttons in ways that are intuitive and comfortable.

I Love Boosters
Dir. Boots Riley, U.S., NEON

The sway of a tailored, wide-legged trouser. The swish of a circle skirt against a stairwell. The sheen of a cinched turquoise dress—or is it aquamarine?

The sumptuous pleasures of clothing don’t start or end with the label but are stitched from a series of banal but glorious bodily encounters. Anyone drawn to fashion likely intuits this truth, and those drawn to fashion tend to also be drawn to movie screens. Prankish polymath Boots Riley is one such figure, but unlike many aesthetes, his penchant for excess accompanies a firm commitment to leftist principles. With its gumball visuals and zany costumes, Riley’s sophomore feature, I Love Boosters, joyfully indulges in sensory splendor—on screen and on skin—while equally insisting on a just world.

“I’m lonely,” Corvette (Keke Palmer) admits to her friend Mariah (Taylor Paige) early in the film, while sitting in the shuttered fried chicken joint in which she squats and schemes. Along with single mom Sade (Naomi Ackie), they form Oakland’s notorious “Velvet Gang”—whose motto “Fashion Forward Filanthropy” justifies their “booster” ambitions: filch clothes from local shops and resell for discount prices. But the thrill of the haul—and the constant hustle—has left Corvette running on empty. Stealing and shilling drip can’t compare to creating her own designs—designs “too weird” to submit to the contest run by fashion titan Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the self-proclaimed “visionary” whose Metro Designer franchise is a steady Booster target.

Corvette needs a purpose, which comes in the form of sweet sartorial revenge. Upon discovering that Christie has pilfered a jumpsuit idea from Corvette’s Insta-feed, she gathers the troops to do the impossible: clear every Metro Designer store in the Bay Area. But first they need to infiltrate enemy quarters. “I just want to take it all home, eat it up, and shoot it out of my eyes,” is the reason she gives for seeking Metro Designer employment—the “it” referring to the clothes themselves. “Give it to me. It’s mine anyway.”

Boosters hyperbolizes the cycles of appropriation within the fashion industry: the Velvet Gang’s urban community admires and desires Christie’s take on the avant-garde, while the designer “fucking making art” blithely rips off Black subculture. A character who functions as a jab at the impractical pretenses of the creative class, Christie lives in a glassy tower slanted at a 45-degree angle; she strains to walk up and down the floor of her own home, as do her browbeaten entourage of Gen Z employees.

Boosters also doesn’t shy from mocking film archetypes. A pinky-ringed parody of a romantic male lead, LaKeith Stanfield plays a mysterious man who, when not brooding over Midnight’s Children, courts Corvette’s affection. But his overwrought pickup lines are mostly for laughs; the real heart of the film thumps between the women of the Velvet Gang and those they come to platonically love outside their tight-knit circle. In many ways, Boosters is as much about kinship networks of support as class-conscious comeuppance.

When a rival thief surfaces in the form of Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a bubbly vigilante teleported from China to fight Christie’s exploitation of garment workers, the gang adopts a fourth member with a more noble immediate cause. Boosters’ femme-tastic moxie and time-travel twist might remind one of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), but a more salient influence might be Věra Chytilová’s New Wave classic Daisies (1966), a surrealist smorgasbord that invites us, like the women onscreen, to gleefully consume to the point of exhaustion, all while indicting the larger systems that disempower its plucky heroines.

Like Daisies and Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), Boosters relies on traditional practical effects to achieve its zany vision. But unlike his debut film, made for a meager three million dollars, Boosters spared no expense in crafting its Wonka-hued universe. The film was shot with specialized vintage anamorphic lenses to maximize the visual content available onscreen; to intensify the color palette, cinematographer Natasha Braier manipulated the lens surface, in some cases physically painting their edges. Production designer Christoper Glass incorporated miniatures, matte paintings, and stop-motion animation to achieve a viscerally nostalgic vibe. Even the trippy title font, hand-drawn by children’s illustrator J. Otto Seibold, contributed to this effect—reminiscent of Disney’s animated Robin Hood (1973). Merrell Garbus and Nate Brenner, of Oakland-based art pop duo Tune-Yards, composed and performed the loopy, polyrhythmic score. The end credits span a full ten minutes, revealing the collective labor and creativity celebrated onscreen, and integral to the film’s existence.

“People don't want to be the art,” Christie’s bookish assistant tells her toward the film’s raucous climax. “They want to be artists.” Christie might see her consumers as “human canvases,” but the pleasures of commodity culture pale in comparison to creating something—on one's own or with others. Solidarity in the fashion ecosystem—between the cash-strapped buyer, the midlevel retail staff, and the factory workers toiling abroad—trumps the fleeting highs of shopping every time.

During a spring when union organizers staged a runway show to protest the Met Gala and Everlane fans are livid that the sustainable brand has been sold to fast-fashion behemoth Shein, I Love Boosters’s anti-capitalist credo feels especially timely. In the long run, the film’s appeal will rest on Riley’s singular mix of polemics and pleasure: our eyes may deceive us, but shared delight might lead us somewhere better.

The next time you go to the movies on a hot summer’s day, try to be conscious of that moment when the first wave of cold air hits your skin—your heart might soar a little—and spare a thought for the guy who invented air-conditioning: the Chinese engineer Ding Huan. Like nearly all inventors, he didn’t come up with the idea himself, nor was his version the very first. But Ding Huan researched, designed, recorded, and effectively patented two different mechanical air-conditioning methods: evaporative cooling and his own prototype of the rotary fan (on wheels). I should mention that Ding Huan lived and worked during the Han dynasty, in the 2nd century A.D. The subject of this essay is based on a sister invention of Huan’s: the stabilization mechanism known as a “gimbal.” It permits an object (in Huan’s case, an incense burner, explicitly designed for use amongst highly flammable cushions) to remain stable, while outside forces operate to disrupt it. A gimbal uses rotational impulses which work counter-cyclically to the stimuli that are brought to bear upon it, meaning that a camera rig comprising two or more gimbals can stabilize a moving image that would otherwise look uneven or skittish due to the circumstances of its capture. In other words, cinema really has a lot to thank Ding Huan for.

The most technically advanced example of a gimbal in existence predates even Huan’s: it’s the three-axis stabilization instrument located inside the human eye. Everything we watch and see in our daily lives, and to a lesser extent on a cinema screen, is stabilized by the floating mechanism lodged inside our heads, heads which tend to move across three axes (four, if you were to count the eye’s ability to focus, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole). If we didn’t have gimbals in our eyes, our entire lives would look and feel like a Neill Blomkamp movie. Huan’s original incense burner gimbal (180 AD)—based on the Ancient Greek antikythera—begat more prominent inventions, such as Léon Foucault’s gyroscope, which he used to demonstrate the rotation of the earth (1852), and closer to our theme, Garrett Brown’s Steadicam (1975). These were all essentially defensive contrivances, attempts to overcome instability by replicating or emulating the unimpeachable biological magnificence of the human eye.

Naturally, the Steadicam has for the last half-century provided a hyper-effective gimbal-based stabilization mechanism for long traveling takes. It removed the need for miles of dolly track, and opened up an intimacy with the action in spaces where a dolly won’t fit, as well as new aesthetic dimensions. Whereas Alan Clarke uses the persistent, lingering effect of Steadicam to create raw psychological intimacy in Christine (1987), Kubrick harnesses the same technology to situate Eyes Wide Shut (1999) in a dreamlike state. Here and now, the makers of the Indonesian martial arts film The Raid 2 (2014) have demonstrated an additional development, which takes that spatial facility and adaptability one step further, by freeing the camera from the body rig of a Steadicam and enabling the whole gimbal apparatus to be held in either one or two hands. This liberates the movement of the camera much more than before: exponentially multiplying the positioning options, allowing shots to evolve at high speed. It also eliminates numerous obvious obstacles which would otherwise obstruct a Steadicam operator or appear in the take, while preserving the crucial narrative and forensic impact of the single-take aesthetic, and in many cases boosting it.

The Raid 2 (AKA Berandal—“thug” in Indonesian) is ostensibly a sequel to the breakout 2011 crime flick The Raid (for the few who haven’t seen it, imagine the political conceit of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, but being set in a tower block, vertical instead of horizontal, with a higher body count and a more credible payoff). In truth The Raid 2 is only a sequel to The Raid in the sense that The Hound of the Baskervilles is a sequel to The Sign of Four—the two stories have nothing in common except their central character: Rama (Iko Uwais), an incorruptible police officer inhabiting a world of violent gang crime. In The Raid 2, supercop Rama inveigles himself into an Indonesian criminal gang by befriending the gang boss’s son, Uco, in prison. Naturally, Rama needs to pass a series of self-imposed and ultraviolent tests while in captivity, to both seduce and convince his new friend Uco that he is thug material. On release, he learns that his new gang buddies are in a triangular turf war with a rival Japanese mob and a third-party Indonesian pretender, Bejo. Uco, who has terrible daddy issues, joins forces in secret with Bejo to destabilize his own father by fomenting a breach of a truce with the Japanese. He promises Bejo a cut of the business once he has taken over. Rama does his best to navigate this ungodly mess while keeping his own nose relatively clean. There is a pleasing classicism, in action terms, to this kind of crime film screenplay, which is designed to keep the violent confrontations rolling along while slowly releasing a persistent stream of suspense around the risk of Rama being burned.

Uwais, who comes from a family of martial artists, shares with Buster Keaton an immaculate stone face and a gift for jaw-dropping physical performance. In addition to being the leading man, he served as the fight choreographer and stunt coordinator in both Raid films, exhibiting his mastery of pencak silat, a specific strain of hand-to-hand martial arts native to Indonesia and Maritime Southeast Asia. The improbable director of these violent films, the genteel Welshman Gareth Evans, was originally working in Indonesia on a documentary about silat when he “discovered” Uwais and immediately set out to build a fictional genre film around him, which became Merantau (2009).

The simplest way to distinguish silat from more familiar cinematic martial arts, such as those within the vast Chinese umbrella term of kung fu, is by its emphasis on speed and aggression as the most effective methods of self-defense. A silat master advances swiftly toward an opponent, even—especially—if they are armed, and refuses victim status even when palpably outmatched. The dynamics of silat are characterized by relentless and lightning-quick mini-attacks designed to destabilize, through a mixture of anticipation, surprise and pain. In response to a single flick of a knife by an aggressor, a silat master would deploy at least a dozen blows (even more, if the assailant doesn’t immediately go down). Unlike more traditional screen pugilism, the fighting on screen in the Raid films is not designed simply to provide an emotional catharsis (e.g. seeing bad people getting hurt), but a cardiac event: it raises the pulse through the multiplication and acceleration of intricate moves.

Crucial to this hyperdynamic effect on a cinema audience is the single long take, engorged with movement and clarity. Cutting would add kinesis artificially, which would destroy our appreciation of the natural speed and evolution of the movement itself, and thereby dilute the intensifying effect which organically belongs to silat. The ability of Evans and his crew to capture and harness the controlled chaos of silat in minute detail without cutting is fundamental to the formal design of The Raid 2. Without image stabilization, a lot of that precious detail, and consequently the viewer’s appreciation of the pace and skill on show, would be lost.

In addition, a key stylistic asset of the handheld gimbal’s relatively low mass is in the camera’s ability to jerk quickly away from the center of a particular confrontation to follow a rogue element (such as a new weapon being unsheathed, a new assailant appearing, or even an impact spatter), then return the camera back to its original position with tremendous speed, without destabilizing the viewer’s visual understanding or breaking the rhythm of the action. Immediately we can detect that the handheld gimbal outperforms not only a straight handheld camera, which could not make such a capture with clarity, but also a Steadicam body rig, which would be too slow. By retaining the structural integrity of what is being filmed, and expanding the possibilities of gimbal technology, Gareth Evans and his DP Matt Flannery may have created a new normal in practical action cinema.

An early example of the ambition and scope of The Raid 2’s action credentials is a close-quarter fight between at least a dozen men in a prison toilet cubicle built to fit two at most—where Uco’s men first attack Rama. This is followed in short order by an epic prison courtyard free-for-all, characterized by being shot in driving rain and ten inches of mud, where Rama first performs heroics on Uco’s behalf. The toilet sequence is overtly stylized around the space and features an overhead shot in the manner of the moment from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) when Henry Fonda is filmed in high angle long shot as he is thrown into a tiny jail cell. But where Evans and Flannery take the adaptability of the handheld gimbal into uncharted territory isin the epic mud fight. The camera shifts seamlessly between individual confrontations, and in the same shot closely follows a more developmental chase sequence over the fence of the courtyard—a shot that would not have been physically achievable with the Steadicam. Although filmed in a completely different way, the courtyard scene bears striking resemblances to the battle of Shrewsbury in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965). While both sequences showcase the terrible challenge and vulnerability of fighting in mud—the drag on movement, the exhausting weight of everything, the risk of drowning—Welles cut furiously, assaulting the viewer with shot after shot (many less than a second long) piling on the filth, death, and degradation. Gareth Evans by contrast keeps everything rolling as the bodies romp and die in the mud. Welles’s film deplores the violence by exaggerating its monstrosity, while Evans revels in its choreographic dimension and doesn’t let you draw breath while you do the same.

In later fight sequences, as Rama further embeds himself into the criminal organization and takes on Uco’s rivals and unhappy collaborators, another stylistic brushstroke emerges, relating to the viewpoint of the camera. Here, The Raid 2 contrasts sharply with established gun-fu methodologies. For example, when a man goes through a plate glass window in a John Woo film, the camera will generally film around him (from a gap in the set) with a dolly track or Steadicam, giving a fluid, balletic quality to the action. Conversely, when a man goes through a plate glass window in The Raid 2, the camera goes through the window as well, filming the stuntman so tightly that as he lands, the shot finishes up—as he does—at a 90-degree angle. One imagines that on these occasions, if the gimbal is used, it must be locked at the crucial moment to allow this shot to be performed without the gimbal trying to correct it. This effect is deployed numerous times in The Raid 2—most notably in a climactic kitchen fight between Rama and a terrifying hoodlum played by Cecep Arif Rahman. This kitchen scene—dramatizing a situation where Rama has finally met an opponent at his level—is the centerpiece of the film: a pulsating exhibition of martial arts prowess, camerawork, choreography, and editing.

Despite the gimbal’s abrasing mechanism, the images within the fight sequences in The Raid 2 are not entirely “fluid” in themselves. They are frenetic, and they still contain a handheld quality (in the same way as the Panaglide image in Halloween, for all its smoothness, still uncannily reflects the cameraman walking). But the key is that within this frenzy, thanks to the gimbal, the finer details are both accessible to, and processable by, the viewer, rather than confusing or destabilizing. The outcome brings us closer to the rhythmical appeal of an immaculately timed dance sequence by Stanley Donen, where the impact of a particular dance move, however eye-catching or explosive, cannot interrupt or detract from the overall musical flow.

Along the way, The Raid 2 introduces us to more colorful assassins and their set pieces, including a man who kills people by barreling baseballs at their heads (played by Very Tri Yulisman), and a terrifying young woman with dark glasses (Julie Estelle). In a clear homage to Cheng Pei-pei's character Golden Swallow from King Hu’s Come Drink With Me (1966),Estelle dispatches an entire gang of men in a tube-train with the aid of just two clawhammers, a scene for which the handheld gimbal negotiates the chaotic speed and tightness of space without any need to cut out a wall from the set.

Perhaps the ultimate example of the handheld gimbal’s flexibility in The Raid 2 occurs during the central freeway car chase, where Rama—being transported by his captors as part of a convoy of Mitsubishi SUVs—is rescued by Uco’s men, driving Nissan saloon cars. This features perhaps the most technically accomplished and recognizable single take in 21st-century action cinema, wherein the camera approaches a speeding car from the front, enters the car from the front passenger side window, witnesses the driver being shot at, then arcs across and through the car, finally exiting through the rear driver’s side window to identify where the shot came from (a sniper mounted on a car approaching from behind).

This shot was executed with much ingenuity and meticulous planning. The passenger side front seat is in fact a second cameraman disguised as a car seat, who suddenly comes to life out of shot, grabs the camera from the first cameraman (on the low-loader outside) films the action inside the car, then completes the shot by handing the camera through the rear window to a prone cameraman attached by a steel cage to the other side of the car. Behind-the-scenes footage of this stunt, widely seen and vaunted on YouTube, shows how the two-handed gimbal rig needed to be light and nimble enough for such a shot even to be contemplated. The result is as clean as can be expected, which, like much of the film, is a testament to the craftsmanship of the crew as much as it is to the technology itself. While a Steadicam may require a more highly developed skillset to operate than a gimbal, Evans’s ambitions still place significant demands on his crew, who operate almost as stuntpersons in themselves.

As with most technical innovations, cinema purists haven’t all immediately aligned behind the positive potential of the handheld gimbal. After all, great cinema has survived to date without over-stabilizing the image, and very bad cinema is often over reliant on it. Advertorial content places a gimbal in the same “smoothing” category as airbrushing or photoshop, with all the dishonesty that carries. The compromise lies between absolute truth and the ability to express truth. If all that a gimbal does is create a cozier, cleaner image which is more socially acceptable but less meaningful, then it is being wasted. The cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Good Time) has thus far refused to use a gimbal, considering it “a step toward an AI look” and he adds for ironic measure: “the machine is perfect—the only mistake can be with the operator/human.” Evans and Flannery take up the artistic challenge: they see corrective technology not purely as a replacement tool but as a means of preserving and improving the highly tangible effect on audiences of what are essentially still very practical images (before everything becomes/became computerized and painted in). In doing so, they retain the forensic richness of highly choreographed physical movement on screen by capturing it as closely and truthfully as possible, as devotedly and successfully as Frankie Manning’s “Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers” sequence in Hellzapoppin’ sought to do.

In the same way a martial arts audience appreciates the precision and capture of the fighting itself, all cinephiles occasionally enjoy lifting the hood on how a film is made. The thought processes that accompany a demonstrative “single take” sequence (be it in I Am Cuba, Le Plaisir, or Children of Men) can sometimes ride roughshod over the Bazin/Clarke concept of the long take as a portal to reality, by having the opposite effect of removing the viewer from the story and catapulting us into the realm of the filmmaking itself. Analogous to the appeal of stage illusion, part of loving cinema is in our imagining how it came into being. Martin Scorsese, for example, adores the imprecise jump cut in Powell & Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman, where a necklace appears in Robert Helpmann’s hand (one feels his fondness for this visible slip must have inspired the grotesquely—and magnificently—imprecise dummy cut of Robert De Niro before the car explosion in Casino). Better to think of this not as alienation—as Brechtian scholars would have it—but inclusion. In genre, spectacle is everything, but more than ever today—as we find less to trust in what we watch—a degree of human, physical truth must exist within the eye of that spectacle for the spectacle to have any weight or power. Physical and technical dexterity are both a means and an end in action cinema: the “how” is as important as the “why.”

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.