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Currents

This section complements the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices.

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The Tsugua Diaries

  • Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes
  • 2021
  • Portugal
  • 102 minutes
  • Portuguese and Romanian with English subtitles
In this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, a daily journal unfolds in revelatory reverse order, surveying the mundane routines of three housemates living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown; soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame.

All About My Sisters

  • Wang Qiong
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 175 minutes
  • Mandarin with English subtitles

North American Premiere · Q&As with Wang Qiong on Sept. 25 & 26

A major new voice in nonfiction cinema, Wang Qiong documents with unflinching and harrowing honesty her own fractured family, gradually revealing the personal and psychological effects of China’s one-child policy on the individual, the family unit, and women in society at large.

El Gran Movimiento

  • Kiro Russo
  • 2021
  • Bolivia/France/Qatar/Switzerland
  • 85 minutes
  • Spanish with English subtitles
Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs, set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas.

Haruhara-san’s Recorder

  • Kyoshi Sugita
  • 2021
  • Japan
  • 120 minutes
  • Japanese with English subtitles

North American Premiere · Q&As with Kyoshi Sugita on Sept. 28 & 29

Kyoshi Sugita creates an evocative portrait of a young woman’s interior world through impressionistic action rather than psychology, fixing his patient camera on meetings with friends, family, and strangers, lunches and teatime, and occurrences both mundane and mystical.

I Want to Talk About Duras

  • Claire Simon
  • 2021
  • France
  • 95 minutes
  • French with English subtitles

North American Premiere

A precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa, Claire Simon’s latest film is based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos).

Just a Movement

  • Vincent Meessen
  • 2021
  • Belgium/France
  • 110 minutes
  • Mandarin, French, and Wolof with English subtitles

Q&As with Vincent Meessen on Oct. 6 (with Dr. Dialo Blondin Diop) and 7

Vincent Meessen’s freewheeling yet highly disciplined documentary tells the story of Niger-born artist and Marxist intellectual Omar Blondin Diop, an organizer and communicator of anti-colonialist political theory in France and Senegal who died at 26 in prison after being arrested by the Senegalese government.

Nature

  • Artavazd Peleshian
  • 2020
  • France/Germany/Armenia
  • 63 minutes
  • France/Germany/Armenia

World Festival Premiere

Artavazd Peleshian’s first feature film in nearly 30 years is an epic return to his major theme: humanity in harmony and conflict with the natural world. Rendered in stark black and white, Peleshian’s elegant, relentless montage of found disaster videos imparts an overwhelming experience of nature’s vast, destructive processes of regeneration. Screening with Andrei Ujică’s 2 Pasolini, which follows the Italian auteur and his theological advisor, Don Andrea Carraro, on a trip through 1960s Palestine to scout locations for his 1964 biblical masterpiece The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

A Night of Knowing Nothing

  • Payal Kapadia
  • 2021
  • France/India
  • 96 minutes
  • Bengali and Hindi with English subtitles
Through a series of letters read aloud to an absent lover, we learn about the fears, desires, and philosophical identity of a young woman named L, a student at the Film and Television Institute of India, in writer-director Payal Kapadia’s brilliantly fragmentary film about contemporary Indian youths engaged in the politics of university life.

Outside Noise

  • Ted Fendt
  • 2021
  • Germany/South Korea/Austria
  • 61 minutes
  • German and English with English subtitles

North American Premiere · Q&A with Ted Fendt on Sept. 27

With his customary mix of narrative restraint and intellectual curiosity, filmmaker Ted Fendt follows a small group of young women through Berlin and Vienna over the course of several months, particularly Daniela, who has just returned from traveling in New York and is dealing with a bout of insomnia.

Prism

  • Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, Rosine Mbakam
  • 2021
  • Belgium
  • 78 minutes
  • French and English with English subtitles

World Premiere

The lighting for movie cameras has always been calibrated for white skin; three filmmakers collectively explore the literal, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of that reality in this discursive, playful, and profound work of nonfiction.

Returning to Reims

  • Jean-Gabriel Périot
  • 2021
  • France
  • 83 minutes
  • French with English subtitles

North American Premiere

In just over 80 minutes, filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot provides a fleet, thorough, and incisive sociological examination of the French working class over the past 70 years, using decades’ worth of artfully deployed archival footage, film clips, and TV news reports to illustrate the rise, fall, and hopeful rebirth of the country’s proletariat, as well as how social identity is gradually constructed.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces

  • Shengze Zhu
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 87 minutes
  • Without dialogue, featuring Chinese and English text

U.S. Premiere

Documentarian Shengze Zhu’s becalmed, wordless meditation on the vulnerability and resilience of urban spaces before and after the COVID outbreak intersperses exquisitely composed images of life and hope along the Yangtze River with onscreen text translating letters written to loved ones affected by illness and death.

Social Hygiene

  • Denis Côté
  • 2021
  • Canada
  • 76 minutes
  • French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Denis Côté on Sept. 25 & 27

Mischievous Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté’s absurdist comedy is constructed as a series of frank and often hilarious repartees between an insolent petty thief named Antonin and a succession of largely fed-up women, keeping a pandemic-worthy and humorous distance from one another as they verbally parry and thrust in static long takes.

Ste. Anne

  • Rhayne Vermette
  • 2021
  • Canada
  • 80 minutes
  • English and French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

In her evocative, collage-like 16mm film, Rhayne Vermette immerses the viewer in the sounds, textures, and atmosphere of her native Manitoba to limn the outer edges of a twilight-toned narrative centering on a long-missing young woman’s unexpected return to her indigenous Métis community.

The Tale of King Crab

  • Alessio Rigo de Righi , Matteo Zoppis
  • 2021
  • Italy/Argentina/France
  • 106 minutes
  • Italian and Spanish with English subtitles

Exclusive Run

Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano (a bewitching Gabriele Silli), a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy, whose life is undone by indulgence, leading him to hunt for a mythic treasure in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego.

Currents Program 1: Acts of Seeing

  • Various
  • 2021
  • 81 minutes
Featuring Zhang Dalei's Day Is Done, Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand's 38, Luise Donschen's ELLE, and Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro's Sycorax.

Currents Program 2: Critical Mass

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 85 minutes
Featuring Tiffany Sia's Do Not Circulate, Christopher Harris's Dreams Under Confinement, Eliane Esther Bots's In Flow of Words, Haig Aivazian's All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes, and Virgil Vernier's Kindertotenlieder.

Currents Program 3: Free Form

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 72 minutes
Featuring Justin Jinsoo Kim's Personality Test, Aykan Safoğlu's Dog Star Descending, Pablo Martín Weber's Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse, and Guillermo Moncayo's (No Subject).

Currents Program 4: Still Life

  • Various
  • 2021
  • 66 minutes
Featuring Vika Kirchenbauer's THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER, Morgan Quaintance's A Human Certainty, and Carl Elsaesser's Home When You Return.

Currents Program 5: Pattern Language

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 64 minutes
Featuring Mike Crane's Cutting the Mushroom, Ross Meckfessel's Estuary, Zachary Epcar's The Canyon, and Ericka Beckman's Reach Capacity.

Currents Program 6: Camera Lucida

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 72 minutes
Featuring Rhea Storr's Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical, Miranda Pennell's Strange Object, Shireen Seno's To Pick a Flower, and Morgan Quaintance's South.

Currents Program 7: New Sensations

  • Various
  • 84 minutes
Featuring Kevin Jerome Everson's May June July, Allison Chhorn's Blind Body, Hope Strickland's If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever), Shun Ikezoe's What is it that you said?, Richard Tuohy's In and Out a Window, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Night Colonies.

Currents Program 8: Vibrant Matter

  • Various
  • 2021
  • 93 minutes
Featuring Daïchi Saïto's earthearthearth, Los Ingrávidos's Tonalli, Manuela de Laborde's Fictions, and Tomonari Nishikawa's Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 1.