32 of the most exciting new feature films from around the world.
Opening Night · World Premiere · Q&As with Joel Coen & cast at 6pm & 9pm screenings on Sept. 24
Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition, starring a strikingly inward Denzel Washington as the man who would be king and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand as his Lady.Centerpiece Selection · Jane Campion, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst & Kodi Smit-McPhee in-person at 6pm & 9pm screenings on Oct. 1
Jane Campion reaffirms her status as one of the world’s greatest—and most gratifyingly eccentric—filmmakers with this mesmerizing, psychologically rich variation on the American western, in which a melancholy young widow (Kirsten Dunst) on a Montana cattle ranch in the 1920s is tormented by her new husband’s sullen and bullying brother (Benedict Cumberbatch).Oscar Nominated for Best Actress & Best Original Score!
Two women, a generation apart, find themselves inextricably linked by their brief time together in a maternity ward, bound by a secret with ties to a deep trauma in Spanish history. Charismatic stars inhabit characters who are singular among those drawn by AlmodĂłvar in a career defined by striking portraits of women.Q&As with Jonas Carpignano on Oct. 2 & 3
A rising star of a resurgent Italian cinema, Jonas Carpignano continues his deeply felt project of observing life in contemporary Calabria with this gripping character study of a teenage girl, Chiara (a revelatory Swamy Rotolo), who gradually comes to discover that her close-knit family is not all that it seems.Romania's Oscar Entry
In his angry, gleefully graceless Berlinale Golden Bear winner, Radu Jude crafts an invigorating, infuriating film in three movements centering around the trials of a teacher (Katia Pascariu) at a prestigious Bucharest school whose life and job are upended when her husband accidentally uploads their private sex tape to the internet.A masterful blend of the personal and the meta-cinematic, Mia Hansen-Løve’s meditation on the reconciliation of love and the creative process casts Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth as married filmmakers who venture to the remote Swedish island of Fårö, where director Ingmar Bergman lived and made many of his masterpieces.
Oscar Winner for Best International Feature Film!
Inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story, Hamaguchi spins an engrossing, expansive epic about love and betrayal, grief and acceptance, charting the unexpected, complex relationships that a theater actor-director forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity.Q&A with Avi Mograbi on Sept. 25
In his provocative and direct new documentary, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, acting as his own on-screen narrator, very specifically and pointedly asks what are the circumstances, logic, and day-to-day processes that have allowed the normalization of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories.Q&As with Jonas Poher Rasmussen on Sept. 28 & 30
This illuminating and heartrending animated documentary tells the true story of Amin, whose life has been defined by escape: first from Afghanistan, then from post-Soviet Russia. Now planning to marry a man he met in his new homeland, Denmark, Amin begins to look back over his life, opening up about his past, his trauma, the truth about his family, and his own sexuality.U.S. Premiere
A collective of three Italian filmmakers known for their politically acute cinema—Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden), Francesco Munzi (Black Souls), and Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro)—revealingly interview a cross-section of their nation’s youth about their hopes, dreams, and fears for the future.U.S. Premiere
The son of acclaimed, embattled Iranian master filmmaker Jafar Panahi makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and ultimately deeply moving comic drama that takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns.U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Radu Muntean, Alexandru Baciu, Maria Popistașu, and Alexandru Bogdan on Oct. 5 & 6
Leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean knowingly plays off and subverts conventions of horror films and social realist drama as he follows a trio of well-meaning aid workers from Bucharest on a food delivery mission to the rural hinterlands of the ĂŽntregalde area of Transylvania, where they find themselves trapped.Q&A with Apichatpong Weerasethakul on May 4
In the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá, becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days. It’s a personal journey that’s also historical excavation, yielding a film of profound serenity.U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman on Oct. 2 & 3
Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision co-directed with Anisia Uzeyman, a sci-fi punk musical that takes place amidst the hilltops of Burundi, where a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community.Q&As with Rebecca Hall, Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, and André Holland on Oct. 3 and Oct. 4 (joined by Nina Yang Bongiovi)
A cornerstone work of Harlem Renaissance literature, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is adapted to the screen with exquisite craft and skill by writer-director Rebecca Hall, and features meticulous performances by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as reacquainted childhood friends whose lives have taken divergent paths.Exclusive video intro from Céline Sciamma before all screenings!
Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) proves again that she’s among the most accomplished and unpredictable of all contemporary French filmmakers with the gentle yet richly emotional time-bender Petite Maman, concerning 8-year-old Nelly’s complicated response to the death of her grandmother.Q&A with Tatiana Huezo and producers Jim Stark & Nico Celis on Sept. 30
In her delicately wrought yet devastating first fiction feature, adapted from the 2014 book by Jennifer Clement, Tatiana Huezo naturalistically chronicles the growth of young Ana, who lives in a mountainous town in rural Mexico gripped by fear of the drug cartels who ruthlessly control the region.U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Julia Ducournau, Agathe Rousselle, and Vincent Lindon on Sept. 26
The winner of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or, Titane is a thrillingly confident vision from Julia Ducournau that begins as a work of intense horror and ends as something else: a film that questions our assumptions about gender, family, and love itself.Q&As with Kira Kovalenko on Oct. 5 & 6
Kira Kovalenko won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for this vivid, concentrated rendering of one woman’s desperate, almost bestial need to escape from her suffocating family life in North Ossetia, located in the Caucasus region of Southern Russia.U.S. Premiere
Finding new depths of tenderness without forgoing the uncompromising fatalism that defines his work, Gaspar Noé guides us through a handful of dark days in the lives of an elderly couple in Paris: a retired psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and a writer (Dario Argento) working on a book about the intersection of cinema and dreams.Oscar Nominated for Best Original Screenplay & Best International Feature Film!
Acclaimed Norwegian director Joachim Trier catapults the viewer into the world of his most spellbinding protagonist yet: Julie (the magnetic Renate Reinsve), a med-school dropout navigating her twenties and juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men.