 I'm Still Here. Source: Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center One of Brazil's most celebrated directors, Walter Salles (Central Station, Motorcycle Diaries), is out with his most sprawling and ambitious film yet, which tells the story of the "disappearance" of Rubens Paiva, a former Brazilian congressman, in Rio de Janeiro in 1971, and the subsequent transformation of his wife, Eunice, into a civil rights legend. The movie's first hour feels a lot like Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or Fellini's Amarcord—a leisurely journey into the richly detailed past to visit a big happy family. It starts in a gracious home, right on the beach at Ipanema, where Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice (Fernanda Torres) are raising their four daughters and one son and enjoying a lively social life in Rio's intellectual circles. Salles himself visited the Paivas' home as a child and drew on those memories to weave this lively, multitextured tapestry. After agents of the country's right-wing dictatorship abduct Rubens, Eunice faces a series of impossible choices. What should she share with the children? Are they even safe? How is she going to pay the bills? These straightforward concerns—all of them nightmares—are soon supplanted by an even larger challenge. Eunice and her children go from playing volleyball on the beach to mobilizing for battle. Torres gives a towering performance and should definitely score an Oscar nomination (as her mother, the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, who has a cameo here, did for Central Station). With right-wing nationalists edging into power around the world—or, as in the US, hoping to return to power—I'm Still Here poses a tough question. How would your family react when that knock on the door comes? The film's release date is still unknown, but Sony Pictures Classics has acquired the North American rights.  The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Source: Courtesy NEON This chilling film starts with a man counting bullets. Iman (Missagh Zareh) has been promoted to be an investigating judge in Iran's Revolutionary Courts, and, in addition to a bigger apartment, his new job apparently comes with a gun. He regards the weapon with some hesitation and tucks it away, out of sight from his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). Shortly after, Mahsa Amini dies in police custody, and the country explodes. Day by day, the newly radicalized Rezvan and Sana grow bolder and bolder, and their parents, used to keeping their heads down and terrified of losing their hard-won advancement, grow more and more anxious. The cast is outstanding, especially Golestani as Najmeh, who finds her sense of normalcy slipping away. When tempers flare after a friend of the girls is badly wounded at a protest, she realizes she's trapped, trying to broker peace between her husband and her children. Things only get worse when the gun goes missing.
Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof filmed The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret in Tehran over 70 days beginning in December 2023, then smuggled the footage to editor Andrew Bird in Germany. This secrecy gives the film a suitably chilly, claustrophobic vibe. Everything important happens behind closed doors, most information is passed in whispers. The girls, as most young Iranians did in those turbulent months, are living on their phones. For their small screens, Bird cut in actual video of women protesting and burning their hijabs in the fall of 2022. (The Seed of the Sacred Fig was one of several films in the festival to incorporate documentary evidence right into the narrative.) This one small family emerges as a stand-in for a whole country coming apart. And for Rasoulof, the story's end is all but certain—when Seed was chosen for the Cannes Film Festival, he fled Iran on foot, beginning a 28-day journey to Germany to avoid flogging and eight years in prison. In select cities on Nov. 27.  On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Source: Source: Courtesy of A24 In Rungano Nyoni's assured second feature, Shula (Susan Chardy), who's just returned home to Zambia from the UK, is driving down a lonely road at night when she stumbles across her uncle—dead. Thus begins an intriguing mystery-drama: Not so much about how the man died, but who exactly he was in life. Nyoni sprinkles her film with dozens of silly-sad encounters between Shula and her many aunts and cousins, but it slowly becomes clear that all the women in the family are putting on a front. Shula, try as she might, can't quite shatter their denial. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, at its core, is about loss and anger. Women are almost powerless in Zambia's patriarchal society—but worse, the system sets them against one another. As the funeral approaches and different factions in the clan go to war, the film's meandering pace becomes taut. The ending—and god is it a marvelous ending—is strange and unsettling, but not at all ambiguous. It sounds a piercing note of rage. In select cities on Dec. 13.  All We Imagine as Light. Courtesy Sideshow/Janus Films All We Imagine as Light, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, begins with documentary footage from the Mumbai waterfront. It's before dawn, but the great city is already roaring to life, with vendors setting up stalls to buy and sell electronics, clothes, fruit. The vast engine of global trade is grinding on, dispatching countless millions on their daily mission of survival. Soon writer-director Payal Kapadia narrows her focus, and we're on a train with Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who's heading to her shift as nurse in a big city hospital. She hasn't seen her husband, who moved to Germany for a factory job, in many years and spends most of her off hours with her found family: Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger roommate and a fellow nurse, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital. We watch the three women negotiate the ups and downs of life in Mumbai as gracefully as they can. Eventually, when Parvaty decides to move home to her village on the seaside, Prabha and Anu come along. It's mesmerizing film, aching with empathy, with a light touch that immediately reminded me of some of my all-time faves, the Italian Neorealist masterpieces Bicycle Thieves and Nights of Cabiria. Kapadia tells a big story by focusing on single faces and small moments. Through the eyes of these three struggling women, the director takes the measure of globalization itself. In select cities on Nov. 15.  Viet and Nam. Source: Strand Releasing In his first feature, Vietnamese documentarian Trương Minh Quý knocks it way, way out of the park. In 2019 he'd just finished his last documentary, The Tree House, when news broke that 39 Vietnamese immigrants had been found dead in a tractor-trailer in England. As Trương tried to comprehend this grim news, Viet and Nam began to take shape. What he ended up writing is a love story—and a gay love story at that. But Viet and Nam is much more than a romance. At a NYFF talk back, Trương said his film was banned in his home country, not because of the queer content, but because the authorities felt its portrait of Vietnam was negative. And, sure, it's somber, it's grim—but it's also about a place that's healing. The film is set in a small mining town somewhere near the former frontier between the North and South in 2001, before the country's economic reinvention had really taken hold. Viet and Nam (we never learn which is which) are miners. When we first see them, they're on a break, covered in dust, lying against a black wall of sparkling ore. They'll return to these hidden places in the mine from time to time, sharing intimate moments that morph into pure abstraction—lying against their bed of shimmering coal, the men could be floating across a starry night. You forget how filthy and unhealthy the mine is; they are living in a dream. Viet or Nam (again, we don't know which) lives at home with his mother downstream of the mine. By day she sifts through the slurry in the filthy creek by their shack, to make muddy coal briquets she sells to her neighbors; by night she tells her son about the father he never met, who was killed in the war while she was pregnant. She'd like to someday find his grave, and an old neighbor, who fought with him in the war, thinks he knows where the body is. Viet and Nam is a film about digging—digging for coal, digging for bones, digging for truth. In one scene, the men even dig into each others bodies, as if they could ingest their mysterious essence. As the movie exposes the heart of the country, we realize that the lovers/twins/doubles at its heart are Vietnam's two halves. They are a family slowly, painfully knitting back together. Strand Releasing bought the North American rights to Viet and Nam but has not yet set a date.  No Other Land. Photographer: Rachel Szor But if you see only one movie this year, make it No Other Land, the searing documentary about Israel's occupation of the West Bank made by a courageous quartet of Palestinian and Israeli activists and journalists. One of the most acclaimed films of the year and best documentary winner in Berlin, it shows Israel's inch-by-inch, year-by-year appropriation of Palestinian land in heartbreaking detail. The film zeroes in on Masafer Yatta, a small corner of the territories, where Israel's courts ruled in 2022 that the Israeli military could raze a collection of centuries-old Palestinian villages to make way for a tank-training installation. Periodically a group of soldiers in armored vehicles rolls up the hill, leading a procession of bulldozers. They surround a single home, harangue the people inside to evacuate and drag their belongings outside. While the family frantically collects its possessions, corrals screaming children, and helps the elderly to safety, a crowd gathers to protest the demolition. Their outrage is moot: A bulldozer tears into the building, and soon it's a pile of rubble. The film also traces a second, more intimate storyline. When Yuval Abraham, a freelance reporter for an Israeli paper, comes to Masafer Yatta in 2019 to report on the conflict, the activist Basel Adra and his family are naturally suspicious. Hearing that Adra has footage of the encounters with the Israeli military going back years and years, Abraham suggests they work together to properly tell the story. (Hamdan Ballal, another activist from Masafer Yatta, and Rachel Szor, an Israeli cinematographer, complete the quartet, but they stay mostly off-camera.) Slowly the two men develop a friendship. Some of the most exciting footage in the film is shot from the dashboard of Abraham's car, as the pair springs into action during moments of panicked anxiety or drives back to Adra's home in exhausted resignation. They are not merely colleagues, more like brothers. Toward the end of the film, Adra jokes, "So, when are we getting married, Yuval?" That would be a tricky proposition, Abraham replies, and they rehash the impossibility of their situation. Their solidarity, at least, offers a glimmer of a different future. The film has not yet found a North American distributor, although New Yorkers can see it at Lincoln Center for one week beginning Nov. 1. | 
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