Having established a reputation as something of a bad-boy provocateur with his first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas made an unexpected about-face with this austere drama set in a modern-day Mennonite community on the outskirts of Chihuahua. Filmed entirely in the German-derived Plautdietsch language and starring a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, Silent Light weaves a poetic and affecting tale of a marital and spiritual crisis, revolving around the affair between married farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) and a neighbor woman (Maria Pankratz), while Johan’s wife (Miriam Toews) suffers, knowingly, in silence. An NYFF45 selection.