Back Home + Ecce Mole

NYFF63 Currents features are sponsored by

Back Home / 回家
Tsai Ming-liang, 2025, Taiwan, 65m
North American Premiere

Over the course of three decades, Tsai Ming-liang has mastered a mode of observational, durational filmmaking that reshapes our relation to the space and time we inhabit. This style translates seamlessly to the documentary portraiture of Back Home, where Tsai depicts Anong Houngheuangsy (star of Tsai’s Days, NYFF58) and the daily life of his home village in Laos. We witness buildings in varying states of habitation and disrepair, farm animals, rice fields, religious sites, domestic scenes, a sun-dappled food market, and a dog adorably trying (and failing) to escape a carnival ride. Bestowing a different kind of moving stillness from his recent works, with sequences that convey a radiant atmosphere and buzzing natural life, Back Home draws attention to the brilliance all around, a homecoming of sorts after a string of films about a Walker in exile.

Followed by:
Ecce Mole
Heinz Emigholz, 2025, Italy, 28m
No dialogue
World Premiere
The latest entry in Heinz Emigholz’s (Slaughterhouses of Modernity, NYFF60) incisive, decades-long inquiry into the cinematic representation of space contrasts two Turin landmarks designed by Italian neoclassical architect Alessandro Antonelli: the narrow Casa Scaccabarozzi and the towering Mole Antonelliana, now home to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. With Emigholz’s signature metrical cutting and oblique framings, Ecce Mole explores cinema’s own spatial and symbolic dimensions through the buildings’ opposing scales and functions—interior and exterior, domestic and civic, modest and monumental.

Travel support generously provided by the German Film Office.