January 1, 2026

Favourite Films of 2025

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2025 was disappointing, even frustrating in both personal and historical terms. At the beginning of the year, I had set myself simple goals, all of which I failed at. My reading plummeted to almost zero, as did my public writing. I had hoped to add more entries to the Curator’s Corner column, but it was not to be. A few projects and opportunities that I was looking forward to didn’t materialize. Not to mention a host of health issues and family emergencies.

The political optimism of 2024 proved not just short lived, but derisory given the impunity with which the lunatics in power and their rabid supporters continued to destroy everything decent, human and life-sustaining. In India, state and market censorship alike have reached absurd levels, awards are now so compromised as to make satirists twiddle their thumbs, festivals are pushed to the brink of dysfunction by a philistine information ministry, naked propaganda seems to be the only way to box-office salvation, critics have been harassed by industry insiders and barbaric hordes on social media for precisely doing their job, celebrities continue to toe the line or silence themselves out of a justified fear of reprisal. All this, just in the domain of cinema.

The only respite for me came in the form of encounters with interesting, reasonable and committed people, especially at the Jakarta Film Week and International Film Festival Kerala, both of which I attended for the first time. The passion and the international camaraderie that I witnessed were welcome assurances that, no matter its immediate currency, bigotry and parochialism will forever be uncool.

In more solitary undertakings, I had the chance to explore parts of Indian documentary history I was unfamiliar with. Among these, I strongly recommend Chalam Bennurkar’s Children of Mini-Japan (1990), Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar’s YCP 1997 (1997), David MacDougall’s Doon School Quintet (2000-04), Deepa Dhanraj’s Invoking Justice (2011) and especially R.V. Ramani’s My Camera and Tsunami (2011).

Besides acclaimed and popular films from Kerala made after 2010, I also caught up on a significant swathe of Malayalam cinema from the 80s and the 90s. This included two canonical masterpieces in Perumthachan (1991) and Ponthan Mada (1994) in addition to numerous remarkable features emerging from a short, bountiful period of heightened creativity: Irakal (1985), Deshadanakkili Karayarilla (1986), Thaniyavarthanam (1987), Amrutham Gamaya (1987), Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu (1988), Dasharatham (1989), Varavelpu (1989), Sandhesam (1991), Bharatham (1991) and Njan Gandharvan (1991), to name but a few. Farewell Sreenivasan, the recently departed actor-director-screenwriter behind many of these titles.

As always, the following list is based on an arbitrary eligibility criterion: films that had a world premiere in 2025.

 

1. Happiness (Firat Yücel, Turkey/Netherlands)

Fatigued and sleep deprived, a Turkish filmmaker in Amsterdam tries to find ways to reduce his excessive screen usage and catch some shuteye. But the horrors of the world, beamed onto digital screens in real time, know no respite. Firat Yücel’s extraordinary desktop essay departs from this premise in all directions, only to return to it with new insights and dizzyingly far-reaching associations. Tracing the agonized drifts of a sensitive, hyperconnected mind, Happiness lays bare a highly contemporary double bind: if the screens we are hooked to keep us away from living in the real world, it is these very screens that helps us make sense of our lived experiences. The filmmaker’s investigation into his bodily malaise leads him to unpack its historical conditions: the colonial legacy that underpins the prosperity of his host country, its flourishing happiness industry and its dubious foreign policies. Yücel’s inward observation takes him ever outward; his exasperation at the immediate present, into the distant past. Rigorous as it is witty and playful, Happiness perfectly embodies the agitations of the modern liberal consciousness, present everywhere and nowhere at once, all too aware of the immensity of human misery as well as its own impotence in the face of it. [World Premiere: Visions du Réel]

 

2. Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, USA)

Ira Sachs’ eminently cinematic re-creation of a tape-recorded conversation, from December 1974, between writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall) and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) is an object lesson in the creative possibilities of redundancy, a vital illustration of how the film medium can actualize itself, not by shunning the written word but, on the contrary, by faithfully embracing it. Over 76 condensed minutes, Hujar recollects a day from his life in New York City in rigorous detail — a fascinating mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary, recalling The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) — to an attentive, sympathetic Rosenkratz amid the changing light of his apartment. As Hujar’s endless stream of speech washes over us to the point of exhaustion, our focus turns from its specific content to the process by which memory becomes material. Drawing from transcripts of the conversation — and not Rosenkrantz’s original recording, now lost —Whishaw’s incredibly textured performance reveals the task of imaginative translation that underlies all actorly work. For all its thrilling verbosity, Sachs’s film is a tribute to the art of listening, to this intimate space of friendship in which the hierarchy between the memorable and the mundane ceases to exist. [WP: Sundance Film Festival]

 

3. Manal Issa, 2024 (Elisabeth Subrin, Lebanon/USA)

Where Elisabeth Subrin’s powerful Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022) — based on a televised interview of the eponymous French actress — created doubles, Manal Issa, 2024 proposes a negation. Here, Subrin asks the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa, one of the three participants of the former film, the same questions that Schneider was posed in the original interview. Vocal about her stances, Issa talks about the poverty of meaningful roles offered to Arab-origin actresses, the limitations of the capitalist production model, the choice of moving back to Lebanon during crisis and the importance of speaking up against political iniquity. She adds that she feels professionally isolated for voicing her opinions, for calling out Israel’s bombing of Gaza. While we listen to her responses, Issa herself remains offscreen, her refusal to sustain her career by censoring herself echoed by Subrin’s refusal to show her. “If I can’t be true to myself, there is no point showing myself,” the actress concludes. Like Schneider’s palpable reluctance, Issa’s self-negation stems from an outlook that privileges life over films, reality over fiction. Six hours after the shoot, an end card notes, “Israeli airstrikes escalated throughout Lebanon, killing over 500 people in one day.” [WP: Cinéma du Réel]

 

4. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

All appeal is sexual, political appeal especially so. Among other things, Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild, action-filled, hysterically funny ride through a caricatural America torn between white supremacists and antifa insurgents — each more paranoid than the other about imagined contaminations — lays bare the erotic drive animating ideological cohesion (and ideological sabotage). Leonardo DiCaprio’s failed revolutionary, mentally arrested in the 1970s, and Sean Penn’s boyish, waif-like sergeant are twisted projections of each other’s fears. Whether the film is reactionary, apolitical or progressive is beside the point. This is a work by an artist who contemplates a polarized society, its excesses and its mess-ups with sage amusement, or a stoner’s delight, without giving in to cynicism or misanthropy. DiCaprio delivers the performance of the year in a movie filled with performances of the year, each one on a different register, all of it nevertheless brought into perfect harmony by dint of sheer directorial orchestration. One Battle After Another stands tall in a movie culture dominated by safe, anaemic films calculated to say the right things and avoid broaching the wrong things. It made me wish we had more filmmakers who actually felt something between their legs. [WP: international commercial release]

 

5. Beyond the Mast (Mohammad Nuruzzaman, Bangladesh)

In this rapturous slice-of-life portrait, a small commercial boat with an all-male crew goes from port to port along a river in Bangladesh selling oil. When the crew’s kindly cook takes a stowaway child under his aegis, he runs afoul of the boat’s ill-tempered, scheming helmsman, covetous of the captain’s job. Despite a good deal of on-board intrigue, there is very little drama, strictly speaking, in Mohammad Nuruzzaman’s artisanal second feature, which doesn’t even seek to create lyrical moments in the vein of, say, Satyajit Ray. Yet, this is a highly poetic work, the poetry arising primarily from the filmmaker’s intent, non-judgmental way of looking at a small, enclosed world, its rituals, its diverse people and their human foibles: touches of jealousy, compassion, malevolence, ambition and camaraderie; a parade of life simply passing by. The form is meditative yet brisk — with very elegant camera choreography — and remains indifferent to fashionable arthouse formulas, stylistic shorthand or established screenplay structures. Even the film’s casual neo-realism doesn’t aim at traditional qualities of empathy and psychological description; it rather inspires Ozu-like contemplation. Just a lovingly crafted film. [WP: Moscow International Film Festival]

 

6. Roohrangi (Tusharr Madhavv, India/Netherlands)

With a camera in hand, a gay filmmaker from South Asia walks around in a park in Amsterdam known as a cruising hotspot. What he finds in this place of fleeting encounters is a kind of time warp, the apparent permanence of its majestic trees, their gnarled roots and variegated textures reminding him of his own roots back in Lucknow, India. They recall, in particular, his grandfather’s discoloured skin, caused by leukoderma, which made him look like a white man — a dual identity paralleling the filmmaker’s own. Echoing this image, Roohrangi starts to lose its colours too, shedding its skin to reveal various layers of memory, history and fantasy underlying a leisurely stroll, as different geographies and eras interpenetrate one another. Like in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the forest in Roohrangi is a liminal, essentially queer space that enables communion with other lives, other worlds — a glimpse into different possibilities of being. With curiosity and formal openness, Tusharr Madhavv mixes stylized, essayistic passages with casual interviews with the park’s denizens. The result is an evocative, visually striking work, at once experimental and accessible, that achieves the right balance of discursivity, mystery and invention. [WP: Ann Arbor Film Festival]

 

7. Past Is Present (Shaheen Dill-Riaz, Germany/Bangladesh)

In 2007, Berlin-based Bangladeshi documentarian Shaheen Dill-Riaz found himself in the midst of a family scandal: while studying abroad, his sister Mitul had secretly married her cousin to the great chagrin of her parents. As this taboo union began to tear the family apart, Dill-Riaz decided to mediate between Mitul in Australia, his elder brother Amirul in the USA and his heartbroken parents back home in Dhaka. In Past Is Present, Dill-Riaz turns his camera onto himself and his dear ones, producing a sweeping domestic saga shot over fourteen years and across four continents. Tracing his parents’ journey from rural Bangladesh to Dhaka, and their three children’s subsequent drift to far-flung corners of the globe, the filmmaker examines the complex personal fallout of voluntary migration, presented here in all its liberating and melancholic dimensions. Dill-Riaz seamlessly interweaves moments of torrid drama with passages of mundane poetry, his handheld camera adopting a transparent, unassuming style. The film’s international narrative produces a startling contrast of textures and lifestyles, but also crystallizes the profound continuities in emotional and moral values across cultures. A touching study in the tyranny of distance, Past Is Present actualizes the immortal struggle between the home and the world. [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

8. Obscure Night – Ain’t I a Child? (Sylvain George, France)

The concluding chapter of Sylvain George’s trilogy on illegal immigration is an extraordinary object of close, unflinching observation. The film follows three Tunisian teenagers who take temporary refuge in Paris after having been shuttled by immigration authorities across various cities in Western Europe. With remarkable intimacy and equanimity, George’s camera films the gang at slightly below the eye-level as they wander the roads of night-time Paris, huddle around fire, get into nasty fights with their Algerian counterparts, listen to street music or make the occasional phone call back home. An indifferent Eiffel Tower glitters perpetually in the background as the boys find themselves prisoners under an open sky. Shot in stark monochrome with eye-popping passages of abstraction, George’s film lends a monumental weight to images and lives we would rather not see. As a white artist making films on vulnerable sans papiers, George is bound to ruffle some feathers. But his film demonstrates that, sometimes, you need to strain certain ethical boundaries to arrive at newer forms of looking and understanding. Neither incriminating its subjects nor making any apology for them, Obscure Night – “Ain’t I a Child?” reveals the herculean difficulty of creating a truly humanist work. [WP: Visions du Réel]

 

9. May the Soil Be Everywhere (Yehui Zhao, China/USA)

Yehui Zhao’s winsome debut feature begins as a personal documentary about the filmmaker’s search for her roots, but it gradually blooms into a sprawling examination of Chinese society and its evolving relationship to the land across modes of production. In her quest to unearth her family tree, the filmmaker finds herself peeling back layers upon layers of violent history — an excavation that takes her back to the soil, to a primordial ecology: caves that have now become sand mines, dogs that were once wolves, high-speed rail that now cut through unmarked graves. May the Soil Be Everywhere offers a rare and unusual glimpse into China’s pre-revolutionary past that takes us across vastly different terrains, time periods, generations: we learn of landlords who, during the revolution, became persecuted cave dwellers who then turned into Stakhanovite foot soldiers of Mao and are now digital filmmakers in a globalized world. The film’s direct and unaffected voiceover enables the overdone format of the personal documentary to break loose into a free-form essay featuring humorous animation and re-enacted tableaux. If the filmmaker’s attachment to familial lineage feels a little excessive, it undeniably carries a subversive force within post-revolutionary Chinese society. [WP: True/False Film Fest]

 

10. Admission (Quentin Hsu, Taiwan)

Panicked by the rejection of their six-year-old ward at an elite boarding school, an affluent tiger couple convenes an emergency meeting with their “fixer” and one of the school’s board members at a resort. Emerging from their negotiations and blame games is a stark portrait of a childhood labouring under someone else’s dreams. Quentin Hsu’s razor-sharp debut is a formalist kammerspiel that is Mungiu/Farhadi-like in its dissection of the moral corruption of the Chinese middle-class. But the approach to the material is entirely anti-naturalistic, pointedly theatrical. The film makes phenomenal use of its 4:3 aspect ratio and off-screen space, with the masquerade and subterfuge of the dramatic situation reflected in actors constantly gliding in and out of the frame, their bodies now eclipsed by the décor, now irrupting into the shot. The frame is constantly energized and de-energized by these microscopically choreographed movements in a way that recalls the Zürcher brothers. The actors are little more than props in the director’s precise, Kubrick-like design, but it’s bracing to witness a work that articulates its ideas through brute mise en scène, especially for a subject that would have called for a more psycho-realist treatment. [WP: Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival]

 

Special Mention: Living the Land (Huo Meng, China)

 

Favourite Films of

2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019

2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

 

December 11, 2025

Silence (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Glancing back at life during the Covid-19 outbreak, the atmosphere of dread that reigned – the pervasive fear of infection, suspicion of the other, the heightened awareness of the fragility of civilization – feels a little quaint and remote. The swift response of modern medicine in curbing the pandemic has made a cataclysmic past seem somewhat abstract, even if the ravages of the virus were anything but.

Spanning three eras, writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s sprightly tragicomedy Silence contemplates not one but two epidemics from the vantage point of the present. The first act, set in a gothic mansion in the 14th century, centres on a family of vampires grappling with an existential threat: with the bubonic plague raging, there are fewer healthy people left to feed on. Worse, one of them, Veronica (Ana Polvorosa), has fallen in love with a human, to the great dismay of her orthodox sisters. Seeking to save him from her siblings’ wrath, Veronica reveals the truth about herself to her lover, only for her trust to be betrayed.

Cut to the 20th century. It’s the late 1980s, and the plague has given way to the AIDS epidemic. Broke, bedridden and as conservative as her sisters once were, Veronica is under the care of her daughter Malva (Lucía Díez), a bleeding heart who prefers synthetic blood to the real thing. Malva is in love with a human too, a drug addict to whom she isn’t confident enough to disclose her identity. But when the contagion outside comes home knocking, she is forced to set things straight.

Full of comic situations and lines, dramatic compositions, rapid-fire editing, and baroque musical passages, Silence is a buoyant, quick-footed work. It bends vampire lore to humorous ends, using it, for instance, to satirize generational differences and political correctness. Yet an unmistakeable tragic undercurrent courses through the film. In the figure of the vampire, Casanova locates both the shame of having to lead a double life and the anguish of having to outlive your loved ones.

More importantly, Silence processes the trauma that the queer community had to suffer during the AIDS epidemic, or what was dubbed the “gay plague” in an act of political weaponization. The prohibitions on love, the stigma of contamination and the self-imposed invisibility that Veronica and Malva endure mirror the experience of the protestors outside their apartment. “Silence = Death,” goes their slogan, questioning the omerta that reigns around the subject of HIV.

Looking back from a more humane world in 2030, the closing stretches of the film evoke at once a sorrow for those who succumbed to AIDS and a relief at the normalization of the disease, which has ceased to be the death warrant that it once was. As Malva and her lover exchange bodily fluids in passionate embrace, Silence becomes as much a celebration of this freedom from mortal fear as the inescapable sensuality of cinema itself.

 

December 6, 2025

The Bride (2024)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Strolling home through the countryside, insouciant teenager Eva plays mock bride, gathering white flowers to adorn her billowing hair. Her aunt warns her about the danger that lies buried in these parts. “Keep playing in those bushes, and you’ll say bye to those legs,” she cautions. In a few moments, Eva’s life will indeed turn upside down, but these landmines, remnants of the recent civil war in Rwanda, won’t have been the cause.

After her aunt walks ahead, Eva’s dreamy idyll is interrupted by a group of young men who whisk her away. Eva, now a kidnapped bride, finds herself in a suburban house, married to a functionary named Silas. If the casualness with which Eva loses her freedom is shocking, it pales in comparison to what follows. Deferring to tradition, Eva’s relatives advise her to accept her fate, which entails not just a psychological adjustment to her new situation, but also painful acts of forced sexual maturity.

Eva spends her days in silent protest, yielding to Silas physically but without an iota of emotional involvement. However, she finds solace in the company of Silas’s female cousin, residing in the same house, who informs Eva of the unfathomable trauma their family had to endure during the Civil War.

Bonding over a shared history of deprivation, the two women forge an empowering dynamic that oscillates between the maternal and the sisterly. As Silas’ cousin, Aline Amike cuts a wise, world-weary figure who navigates this male-centric world with a mix of resignation and caution. Sandra Umulisa’s Eva is the image of innocence defiled, her residual girlishness exorcised in agonising routines of precocious conjugality. Together, the women engage in nourishing conversations and rituals of mutual care, carving out a space of healing from the violent strictures of family life.

The premise of The Bride is the stuff of high melodrama, but in her assured debut feature, director Myriam U. Birara adopts a measured, pared back approach that keeps the temperature of the material in check. There is no musical score here to amplify the emotions, only occasional acapella vocals of a haunting quality. The austerity of the sound design makes Eva’s helpless cries all the more harrowing.

To the same end, Birara develops her scenes entirely in static shots whose simplicity belie their exquisite colour and compositional balance. Shot by Bora Shingiro in soft natural light and an earthy palette of browns and whites, the film keeps us at a critical distance from Eva even as it makes us intimately familiar with her predicament.

 

December 1, 2025

Some Notes on the Current Situation (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

What are conscientious artists to do, especially those dependent on state support for their work, when their country is waging a lopsided, genocidal war? Challenging the state, if it is possible at all, could invite reprisals. Dramatizing one’s personal anxieties risks producing narcissistic exercises in self-flagellation. Trying to find nuance might amount to little more than well-intentioned handwringing, while dodging the political altogether would smack of cynicism.

In Some Notes on the Current Situation, Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin gestures at one possible way out of this impasse, crafting a work where politics exists as a substructure, as a kind of collective unconscious that rises to the surface in all its nastiness every now and then. Bearing the subtitle “a film set before World War 3”, Kolirin’s 79-minute feature is divided into half-a-dozen loosely connected chapters, several of them set in nondescript countryside, devoid of all signs of the ongoing war. In fact, if not for its title, one could hardly say that the film deals with “the current situation” at all.

Kolirin, though, is no stranger to tackling politics head-on. His last feature, Let It Be Morning (2021), was an Arabic-language adaptation of Palestinian author Sayed Kashua’s Hebrew-language novel of the same name. It featured an all-Palestinian cast that boycotted, with Kolirin’s approval, the Cannes premiere of the film in protest against what they perceived as the Israeli state’s appropriation of their work. Like Morning, Notes is backed by the Israel Film Fund, but it’s a much smaller project with a cast of Jewish actors donning multiple roles.

Each chapter of Notes is something of an absurdist sketch, centring on rituals or interactions that defy rational explanation. In the film’s overture, for instance, a woman pushes against a concrete building with all her might, in the zealous belief that it is collapsing. She demands a passerby to lend her a hand. The man is confused, but obliges nonetheless. With the help of two others, they manage to prevent the impending catastrophe and, in the process, restore colour to their monochrome world. What begins as an individual delusion snowballs into a collective psychosis.

In another segment, a couple drives endlessly around the desert, their delivery truck loaded with snow, looking for the set of Theo Angelopoulos’ new movie. It turns out that the pair are time travellers from the past who have teleported themselves to a country they don’t recognize anymore. Elsewhere in the film, a sadistic military drill becomes the occasion for a return of the repressed.

This mosaic of humorously bizarre vignettes, a little reminiscent of the work of Roy Andersson, doesn’t yield easily to interpretation. The pleasure, on the contrary, is in their thought-provoking elusiveness. In the film’s Coen brothers-like coda, an elderly rabbi encounters a wayward husband and tells him the tale of a young Jewish scholar who meets his Inuit fiancée’s family. Suffice to say, the story ends with broken teeth and a tear-filled feast.

What moral lesson the husband, or we, are to draw from this outlandish parable is not immediately clear. But the inchoate, oppressive feeling of meaninglessness that it leaves behind is undeniable. Faced with film’s many Kafkaesque situations, we find ourselves in a state of fugue, just like the characters. Coursing through Notes is a strong sense of confusion and dislocation, the sentiment of finding oneself profoundly out of step with the logic of the world. In that, the film is perhaps entirely emblematic of “the current situation”.

 

November 26, 2025

Nova ’78 (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

 

In December 1978, the Entermedia Theatre in East Village, Manhattan, was host to a three-day celebration of writer William S. Burroughs and his vision of the space age. Titled Nova Convention, the event brought together a range of avant-garde artists and thinkers who responded to Burroughs’ work through readings, conversations and performances. The then-64-year-old writer was a central presence himself, dressed in grey suit and a green fedora hat, reciting various unpublished pieces with his distinctive nasal twang.

A student at the New York University, Howard Brookner filmed the convention as part of his ongoing documentation of Burroughs’ life. Much of this material remained unseen until 2012, when Brookner’s archive was rediscovered in Europe and the USA, and subsequently restored through the efforts of his nephew, the filmmaker Aaron Brookner. In Nova ’78, the younger Brookner and co-director Rodrigo Areias offer a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of the event, liberally mixing on-stage performances with intimate behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with friends and other everyday vignettes.

Each number is emblematic of the freewheeling nature of the convention: Philip Glass producing hypnotic loops on a synthesizer, Merce Cunningham dancing to a baritone vocal piece by John Cage, Patti Smith offering to reimburse disappointed viewers before shredding her guitar, Frank Zappa reading the ‘talking asshole’’ bit from Naked Lunch (1959), or Laurie Anderson performing her song “From the Air”, assisted by Bobby Bielecki’s electronic effects.

Armed with a zoom lens, Brookner’s nimble camera floats around the artists and the audience, now capturing Burroughs lost in thought, now filming street scenes around the theatre. Inspired by the writer’s style, Nova ’78 juxtaposes starkly disparate material, such that actual poetry often rubs shoulders with poetry of a more mundane kind, one that grasps life in motion. Emerging from the film is an image of Burroughs as a fiercely independent, politically committed figure, opposed to every stripe of fundamentalism and authoritarian control.

Above all, Nova ’78 provides a precious glimpse into a creative community untouched by the logic of technocracy and corporatization. The convention isn’t any ‘gig’, and the artists and thinkers gathered here register as real individuals with eccentricities, not self-styled brands in thrall to showbiz mandates. The ease and spontaneity with which they participate in the event, and the unaffected warmth and respect with which they speak of Burroughs, attest to a high degree of personal integrity as well as a sense of genuine camaraderie. In that, Nova ’78 truly feels like a time machine.

 

November 21, 2025

The New Man (2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Cape Verde, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Time seems to stand still in the village of Ribeira Funda, tucked between the boundless ocean and the majestic mountains on the island of São Nicolau in Cape Verde. The moss-laden rocks, dilapidated stone houses, jagged pathways that comprise its expressionistic scenery appear to have existed since time immemorial.

Haunting this eternal landscape is old man Quirino, at once a king and a castaway, who leads a self-sufficient life in one of these houses, with a rooster for company. Signs of history soon surface — a radio bringing news from elsewhere, batteries, razor blades, cigarettes — cutting down this mythical figure to human scale. On the voiceover, Quirino recounts his memory of Ribeira Funda, once a thriving agricultural land, now drought-stricken and deserted.

The old man, we learn, has continued to live in this ghost village decades after its original inhabitants abandoned it for greener pastures. But now his faculties are failing him, and he must prepare for the great voyage beyond.

In his second feature The New Man, Carlos Yuri Ceuninck adeptly blends historical fact, lived experience and personal memory, crafting an ambitious, contemplative work that ventures beyond simple documentary portraiture. Part a sociological sketch, part a philosophical parable, Ceuninck’s film interweaves intimate observational vignettes, breathtaking landscape photography and a polyphonic voiceover in a way that both explains its subject and endows him with an irreducible mystery.

The New Man stands in interesting conversation with Wang Bing’s Man with No Name (2010), another absorbing record of a recluse at the edge of civilization. But where Wang remains a strict chronicler of the present, Ceuninck introduces what seem like visions from the past and the hereafter. Unfolding on a metaphysical stage lit by the celestial bodies and the scored to the churning seas, The New Man seamlessly melds myth, dreams and reality, illustrating that even a single, unremarkable life embodies the drama of the cosmos.

Ceuninck keeps pace with Querino’s quotidian rhythms, developing his film in long shots with little dramatic action, relieved regularly by glimpses of young boys playing, dancing or working the fields. Are these images from Querino’s own youth? Or are they part of the many legends that surround the village?

Querino’s sense of self is evidently bound to his memories of growing up in Ribeira Funda, but we also perceive that the land has an identity only insofar as its inhabitants bestow it with meaning. “There were many storytellers here,” Querino laments, “but death came, and it spared nothing and no one.” The New Man thus registers as an elegy, not for the man or his land, but for the intangible ties that bind them together. Death is on Querino’s mind as he too prepares to leave the village, but something far more significant will have died before his mortal end.

 

November 16, 2025

Judas’ Gospel (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

“My whole trouble was that at no point was I able to lose my administrative and critical faculties,” remarks Judas in Paul Claudel’s short story The Death of Judas (1933). Claudel’s bracingly revisionist account makes a case for the twelfth apostle, recasting him as a sardonic, inquiring man who saw through the intellectual obfuscations of the miracles and the cowardice of his fellow disciples. This Judas celebrates his philosophical freedom even in death, suspended from a tree, unbound by the constraints of the cross that consumed his master.

Taking over the baton from Claudel, writer-director Giulio Base gives the devil its due in Judas’ Gospel, fully humanizing the treacherous figure and dramatizing his tussle with reason and faith. In Base’s retelling, born under a cursed star, Judas endures a harrowing childhood in a brothel. Wielding a bloody dagger, he rises to power and fortune, only to give it all away when Jesus (Vincenzo Galluzzo) summons him. Wise in the ways of the world, Judas is moved not so much by the Prophet’s supposed miracles, but by His simplicity and capacity for grace.

Base presents Jesus as a radical egalitarian, a proto-hippie whose following comprises men and women alike, without authority or hierarchy. With a forgiving smile, He condones the libertine goings-on in the group, which He leads from place to place over three years. In a subversion of the injunction against idolatry, Jesus is visible, front and centre, throughout the film, anchoring the image with His radiant presence. Even so, we don’t hear His voice except at choice moments, as when He beckons Judas or eulogizes Joseph at his funeral.

Judas, on the other hand, is simply a cloaked figure whose face never once shown to us. Yet it is his lucid, layered monologue that propels the narrative. Drawing us into an entirely subjective space, this voiceover (delivered by the gravel baritone of Giancarlo Giannini) accompanies us through the maze of Judas’ mind, his confusions about Jesus’ plans for him, his sense of superiority over his unlettered peers, and his messiah complex undone by his human failings.

As one’s image complements the other’s voice, Jesus and Judas become inextricable entities bound by prophesy. “Everything in the world exists thanks to its opposite,” Judas notes, implying that his treachery and Jesus’ ascension are mandates of the same divine will. Judas’ labyrinthine reasoning brings him to the conclusion that he was the only apostle faithful enough to carry out the betrayal, yet he succumbs to human logic at the moment of Crucifixion. Thematically and formally thought-provoking, Base’s film unveils Judas in all his fascinating contradictions. Ecce homo.

 

November 11, 2025

Keep Quiet (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Review | Tags: , , , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

“We are all squatters here, Toto”, quips officer Teddy Sharpe (Lou Diamond Phillips) to his rookie beat partner Sandra Scala (Dana Namerode). A half-Filipino working for the tribal police in Thunderstone indigenous reservation, Teddy is an ethnic outsider. But as someone who has grown up among the Native Indian community, he is intimately familiar with the ways of the reservation, now under the sway of drug cartels and warring gangs. “We have our laws and punishment, the streets have theirs”, goes another of Teddy’s nuggets to Sandra.

In Keep Quiet, Vincent Grashaw (Bang Bang, Locarno Film Festival 2024) offers a gritty, long–fused crime drama that puts the conventions of the genre at the service of a complex sociological reality. The reservation, in Zach Montague’s close-grained screenplay, is host to competing moral codes and regimes of authority: indigenous gangs who fashion themselves as a brotherhood above American law, the district police who only view them as anti-social elements to be clamped down, and the tribal police who perform an interstitial peacekeeping role.

At the centre of this vortex is Teddy, who uses his official power to curb delinquency in the reservation, but who is also mindful of the larger needs of the community. Having possibly wronged the community in the past, he is desperate to keep children away from both the streets and the law. But when Richie (Elisha Pratt), a reckless ex-convict, returns to the reservation with vengeful motivations, Teddy’s hopes of stemming the cycle of crime and violence are severely tested.

Shot by Brandon Waddell with an acute feeling for shadows, Keep Quiet offers a shining example of lean, no-frills genre filmmaking: invisible craft deployed to draw us into a believable, realistic world. Despite the richly detailed backstories to the characters, Grashaw succeeds in imparting immediacy and momentum to the narrative, never allowing the film to wallow in psychology. In that, he is aided by convincing performers such as Namerode and Pratt, who bring to life, with admirable economy, individuals fighting their own demons.

But the beating heart of the film is Phillips, who distils classical Hollywood models of middle-aged masculinity into Teddy: wise, sardonic, measured in action and word, with occasional touches of irascibility that only reveals an impatience with empty niceties. His moral sense is derived from a spontaneous, practical intelligence rather than theory or self-analysis. Yet he can be lucid when necessary, evoking a knotty, painful past with razor-sharp clarity and concision. Phillip’s Teddy is John Wayne and James Stewart rolled into one.

 

November 6, 2025

Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Lesotho, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

It only takes a few seconds into Ancestral Visions of the Future to perceive that it is a markedly different work from Lemohang Mosese’s two breakout features from 2019: the epistolary essay Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. and the community portrait This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. To be sure, there is a remarkable continuity of thematic concerns across the three films by this Lesotho-born, Berlin-based artist, chiefly the fraught political and religious history of his home country, its spiritual amnesia and its desolate present mired in crime and violence.

But while Mosese’s earlier outings were framed through designated points of view — an unnamed letter writer in Mother and a diegetic storyteller in Resurrection — the new work is direct in its address and features a first-person voiceover by the filmmaker himself. Dense and florid, this voiceover lends the film the texture of a highly stylised poetic memoir. We learn, for instance, that Mosese’s mother always fought for a better life, dreaming of a comfortable home for her children and “stubbornly refusing to greet the hand of permanence”.

Yet Visions ventures beyond the confessional mode, unfurling alternatingly as a personal essay about the filmmaker’s native country and as a fragmentary fiction involving symbolic characters. Prominent among these is Sobo (Sobo Bernard), a healer-puppeteer who preserves the nation’s pre-colonial consciousness, and Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a wandering woman who stands up to the ominous gangland cars that zip through the streets and leave bloodshed in their wake. Through these characters, Mosese constructs a layered assessment of his homeland, marked both by an appreciation for its bygone splendours and a profound disillusionment with its current-day perversions.

This ambivalence is echoed by Mosese’s own feelings as an artist in exile, someone whose work revolves around questions of memory and identity, yet whose own identity remains in flux. Steering clear of nostalgia, Visions refuses to separate fond recollections of the past from their material reality. At one point, for example, Mosese speaks of falling in love as a child with cinema in a hall that also reeked of human waste.

Evocative of the words in the voiceover, but never merely illustrative, the imagery of Visions weaves together impressionistic documentary footage with surreal, Sergei Parajanov-like tableaux. The film’s slightly oblique visual organisation expands the oral descriptions while also opening up secondary associations between sound and image. The resulting work hovers entrancingly between the familiar and the strange, reality and myth, fact and metaphor.

 

May 12, 2025

Showcase: The Light for the Rest of the Walk (Naresh Hegde Dodmari, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

A few days ago, I watched the Malayalam classic Irakal (1985). K.G. George’s dark and disturbing picture of youthful anomie finding outlet in sadistic violence. Irakal locates the root of its protagonist Baby’s malaise in his environment, namely his feudal, power-hungry household of landgrabbers, liquor barons and assorted self-seekers. The family in George’s film is a hotbed of pragmatic evil, Baby being simply its Platonic ideal. A new independent Kannada film by Naresh Hegde Dodmari, Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk), crafts a counter-portrait of sorts, offering a gentle domestic drama where the family is a source of support and salvation for a sensitive young man losing his bearings in life.

A poet who grew up in Honnavara and Yellapura in northwestern Karnataka (not far from the home of his near-namesake Natesh Hegde), Naresh Hegde wasn’t particularly drawn to films in his childhood. It was during his days as an engineering student in Bangalore – and later as an employee in Pune, where he had the chance to interact with film school students – that he became acquainted with international cinema through pirated DVDs and public screenings. Like a number of his self-taught peers, Hegde began his journey with short films made for YouTube before scraping together private equity to produce his first feature.

At the centre of Tingl Belku is Sandeep, an engineering student who returns home to Kumta, Uttara Kannada, for the summer vacation. Once an active poet, Sandeep has become, per his editor friend, sporadic and abstruse in his writing. He often takes off on his bike, spending his days alone away from home. Concerned with his aloofness, Sandeep’s parents seek the help of Harish, a local lawyer whom they are in talks with for marriage with their daughter. We gradually learn that Sandeep is under the influence of drugs and that he has been keeping away from college due to a police raid in the campus. As Harish tries to get to the bottom of things, Sandeep becomes increasingly incommunicative and introverted.

Tingl Belku stands out from the horde of cautionary drug dramas in the way it steers clear of the sensationalism inherent in the subject. There are no dramatizations here of withdrawal symptoms, no writhing in underlit corridors, no shocking glimpses of syringes or tie-off belts. Not once do we actually see Sandeep take drugs; we don’t even get to know what kind of drug it is. Part of this elision has to do with Hegde’s abstract treatment of the topic, which doesn’t really delve into the nitty-gritty of substance abuse or its sociological reality; the filmmaker is rather interested in the effects of addiction on the fabric of a rural middle-class family. But it is also the result of a consciously dialled-down approach to drama in which conflicts are defused as soon as they arise and characters are treated with a great deal of dignity.

Hegde depicts Sandeep’s affliction without condescension or pity. A dreamy-eyed poet of a philosophical bent, Sandeep views his drug habit as an exploration into expanded consciousness, a way to access realms of artistic inspiration inaccessible in waking life. Played without frills by Sharath Raysad, Sandeep shares little of the screen conventions of a discontented young man. Although his haze keeps him away from his family for long periods, he is well aware of the implications of his addiction on his near and dear. Not one to vocally rebel, Sandeep lays low and takes particular care not to upset the family cart, dutifully helping his father renovate the house and making sure that his situation doesn’t jeopardize his sister’s impending wedding.

These moral nuances extend to the secondary characters as well. Harish (Naresh Bhat), the prospective brother-in-law, fashions himself as a community leader, a problem solver who likes to make his presence felt everywhere he goes. But he is also a genuinely nice guy who goes out of his way to help Sandeep and his family. Above all, there is Sandeep’s soft-spoken father, Gopal (Venkatraman Gudaballi), the antithesis to the authoritarian patriarchs that dominate Indian cinema. Gopal, who defers to Harish in handling the situation, understands the limits to which he can probe his dodgy ward, the boundaries that he must respect with a son who now towers above his shoulders. More than anything, it is in these closely observed textures of everyday living that the film comes alive.

A beautiful sense of proportion and discretion marks all the relationships in the film: the palpable feeling that these are delicate bonds that it would be unwise to stress beyond a point. The film’s form reflects this reserve. In its leisurely pacing, soft naturalism and refusal of cable-TV hysteria, Tingl Belku may remind one of the telefilms that used to be broadcast on Doordarshan in the 1990s. Scenes are built elegantly, with no more than two (largely static) camera setups and attention paid to the flows of everyday interaction. Even when the style is uneven, caught between description of facts and an elaboration of the Sandeep’s interiority, there is a uniformity in tone that holds the film together.

Hegde imbues Tingl Belku with a heightened sense of place and time, with its scenes unfolding in strikingly varying landscapes that showcase the visual richness of the Uttara Kannada region: vistas of plains, woods, low hills, beaches, highways and fields all find prominent representation. Even if one doesn’t remember plot details, it would be hard to forget the stairways leading down to Sandeep’s house, or the one inside the living room connecting to the young man’s attic. This visual approach lends the film a subtly expressionistic quality where the settings reflect Sandeep’s fluctuating moods: the reclusive forest, the expansive sea, the melancholic horizon and so on.

An admirable debut feature of overarching benevolence, Tingl Belku had its world premiere in competition at the Rajasthan International Film Festival and is currently awaiting its international premiere.

 

Bio

Writer and director Nareshkumar Hegde (33, BE, MBA) was brought up in the Western Ghats and coastal region of Karnataka. He developed an interest in poetry and creative writing during his college days, which later transitioned to visual storytelling. Before completing his debut feature-length film Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) in 2024, he made six short films which were selected and awarded in various short film festivals. Three of his short films, Mehnat, Bennigelliya Kannu and Parallel Lines, were finalists in three editions of the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival.

Contact

nareshandfilms@gmail.com | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Filmography

  • Feet & Patience (2012), 4 min., mobile phone
  • Three Boxes (2014), 12 min., digital
  • Feathers (2016), 20 min., digital
  • Mehnat (2017), 17 min., digital
  • Samantara Geregalu (Parallel Lines) (2018), 10 min., digital
  • Bennigelliya Kannu (Uncover) (2020), 23 min., digital
  • Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) (2024), 108 min., digital.

Showcase

Teaser for The Light for the Rest of the Walk (2024)

 

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