Mangosteen + We Don’t Talk Like We Used To

Q&A with Tulapop Saenjaroen and Joshua Gen Solondz on Oct. 2 & 3

Mangosteen
Tulapop Saenjaroen, 2022, Thailand, 40m
Thai and German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Lensed with the fuzzy-edged resolution and smeary vibrancy of early-2000s standard-definition video, Tulapop Saenjaroen’s film blends family drama, process documentary, and narratological meditation through the story of a man named Earth, his sister Ink, and their family business, a mangosteen-processing factory. Disagreeing with Ink on the nature of the future, Earth embarks on a project of his own: to investigate the nature of fabulation and the transmutation of the material world into new stories and new images.

We Don’t Talk Like We Used To
Joshua Gen Solondz, 2023, USA/Hong Kong/Japan, 35mm, 36m
English and Japanese with no subtitles
U.S. Premiere
We Don’t Talk Like We Used To continues Joshua Gen Solondz’s loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing on-screen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into a vertiginous mosaic of encounters and eruptions that also reflects somberly on issues of aging and exile, love and artmaking, lust and wanderlust.

All NYFF61 feature documentaries are presented by:

NYFF61 Currents features are sponsored by:

Recommended Film Comment reading:

• The Film Comment Podcast: Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave + Prismatic Ground

Sign up to the Film Comment Letter for NYFF61 coverage and more original film criticism year-round.