The new Currents section complements the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices.
An endlessly generative work of politics, humor, and philosophy, Ephraim Asili’s feature-length debut takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists.
Nicolás Pereda’s ticklish and dark-toned feature mixes realism and absurdity in the story of a television actress who joins her estranged brother and new boyfriend to visit her parents’ rustic home in the Mexican countryside, where they encounter culture clash and familial tensions. But Pereda has a metafictional trick up his sleeve.
Berlin-based filmmakers Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy fashion a poetic and deadpan 16mm work of fanciful nonfiction based on historical attempts to bring back the aurochs, a breed of wild cattle extinct since the early 17th century.
In his new film, John Gianvito (The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein) meditates on a particular moment in early 20th-century history: when Helen Keller began speaking out passionately on behalf of progressive causes. The film is a rousing reminder of Keller’s undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women’s suffrage.
In Heinz Emigholz’s ambitious and surprisingly funny film, five cities around the world become the backdrops for a series of spiraling tête-a-têtes on such issues such as war crimes, racism, family, religion, sex, and cosmology. As one character says, it’s a film of “social taboos, the paradoxical logic of dreams, an infinite round dance.”
An Old White Male (John Erdman) holds court in the lobbies of various apartment buildings in Buenos Aires and expounds with measured disgust on death, consciousness, and the state of contemporary human relations. Heinz Emigholz’s spare continuation—and sardonic distillation—of certain themes explored in The Last City is morbid, confrontational, and hilarious.
Mid-century home movies in glorious color and onscreen subtitles taken from the diaries of one Vivian Barrett provide the narrative skeleton for a singular exploration of storytelling in Nuria Giménez’s first feature, an imaginative cinematic sleight of hand.
In this first film from The Living and the Dead Ensemble—a collaboration among artists and performers from Haiti, France, and the United Kingdom spearheaded by artist Louis Henderson and curator Olivier Marboeuf—a group of young actors translate, rehearse, and debate their Creole production of Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint, creating a space in which the ghosts of Haiti’s colonial past return to address its present.
Economical yet expansive, and largely wordless, The Plastic House takes place inside and around a dilapidated greenhouse that belongs to filmmaker Allison Chhorn’s Cambodian family; in this quiet environment, she oversees inspiring regrowth despite the sometimes harsh natural elements.
The thriller genre is exploded and reassembled in DeNardo and Felten’s funny and alluring work on paranoia, surveillance, and performance, featuring an intriguingly eclectic cast: experimental theater performers Stephanie Hayes and Scott Shepherd, the musician Eleanor Friedberger, and Chloë Sevigny, among others.
Nicolás Zukerfeld’s third feature is a wry, surprising work of filmmaking-as-criticism that traces a mysterious and amusing arc across the vast oeuvre of pantheon auteur Raoul Walsh, before suddenly reinventing itself as an essayistic investigation into memory, cinema, and their shared mutability.
This latest dispatch from beyond the grave by the legendary Chilean director Raúl Ruiz (completed, as ever, by his widow, the filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento) tells the surrealistic tale of a sickly literature professor haunted the memory of his wife and attempting to carry on as normal despite the ever-weakening boundary between his dreams and waking life.
English, Japanese, and Swedish with English subtitles
Five seasons, four parts, eight hours: the dimensions of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s film are as incommensurable as its central figure. Tayoko Shiojiri, a vegetable farmer who works and cares for her ailing husband in a small village north of Kyoto, Japan, is the nominal core of this monumental work, observed through precise tableaux and dense sonic collage that bend distinctions between fiction and documentary.
Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a smoky snack bar, with occasional interruptions by archival news bulletins and TV commercials, Luis López Carrasco’s second feature excavates the forgotten histories of 1992—a pivotal year in which Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and ushered in a new age of neoliberalism.
Featuring Ismaïl Bahri's Apparition, Pilar Monsell's A Revolt Without Images, Vika Kirchenbauer's UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS, Mouaad el Salem's This Day Won't Last, and Jafar Panahi's Hidden.
Featuring Akosua Adoma Owusu's King of Sanwi, Simon Liu & Jennie MaryTai Liu's - force -, Suneil Sanzgiri's Letter From Your Far-Off Country, Shobun Baile's Trust Study #1, and Riccardo Giacconi's Ekphrasis.
Featuring Luis Arnías's Malembe, Alexandra Cuesta's Notes, Imprints (on Love): Part I, Ute Aurand's Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995, Carla Simón & Dominga Sotomayor's Correspondence, Ayo Akingbade's Claudette's Star, and Mathilde Girard's Episodes - spring 2018.
Featuring Sylvia Schedelbauer's Labor of Love, Ben Rivers's Look Then Below, Mary Helena Clark's Figure Minus Fact, Burak Çevik's While Cursed by Specters, and Andrew Norman Wilson's In the Air Tonight.
Featuring Aya Kawazoe's Humongous!, Jacqueline Lentzou's The End of Suffering (a proposal), Sofia Bohdanowicz's Point and Line to Plane, Phạm Ngọc Lân's The Unseen River, and Graham Foy's August 22, This Year.
Featuring Sarah Friedland's Drills, Ricky D’Ambrose's Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday, Noah Kloster & Lewie Kloster's Shots in the Dark with David Godlis, Neo Sora's The Chicken, Tayler Montague's In Sudden Darkness, and Jay Giampietro's The Isolated.
