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
At a time when Daesh funds itself by trafficking cultural artifacts and Europe announces asylum for threatened art works, Sokurov’s marvelous, piercing film offers nothing less than a revisionist historiography of art itself. For Francofonia, History is not the content of art but its very skin. Museums flatten time, and justifiably present their contents as the highest achievements of a culture, obfuscating, in effect, their history as objects involved in power brokerage, class conflict and market manipulation. Sokurov’s film flips this perspective inside out, identifying art as being frequently the currency of diplomatic power possessing the capacity to purchase peace and as being instruments in service of totalitarian collaboration. Napoleon, 
The jeu de mots in the title says it all. Not only is this deeply death-marked, Ozuvian film an unordinary home movie, but it is also a film about not having a home. Composed of footage shot in the filmmaker’s mother’s Brussels apartment and recorded video-conference sessions between the two, No Home Movie contrasts Akerman’s professional nomadism with the perennial confinedness of her mother Natalia. Between Chantal’s constant off-screen presence and Natalia’s self-imposed captivity (within the apartment as well as the computer screen), between Here and Elsewhere, lies the film’s true space – a part-real, part-virtual space of filial anxiety and affection. Akerman’s matrilineal counterpart to Porumboiu’s 
Taxi opens with a shot of downtown Tehran photographed from the dashboard of a car. Announcing Panahi’s first cinematic outdoor excursion since his house arrest in 2011, this shot sets up the dialectics that would define the film: home/world, individual/social and freedom/captivity. Through the course of Taxi, the spied-upon filmmaker drives around the city in the guise of a cabbie, chauffeuring clients-actors from various strata of the society, and realizing a pre-scripted scenario with them whose urgent, didactic purpose can’t be more obvious. The Iranian state has forged a private prison for Panahi from the public spaces of Tehran, allowing him a mobility and false freedom that’s regulated by its watchful eyes. Panahi turns this power dynamic upside down, transforming the private space of the vehicle into a public space for debate, discussion, instruction and critique. Watching the film, I was constantly reminded of that saying beloved of Wittgenstein: “It takes all kinds to make a world”. Panahi’s very presence in the film – his image, his voice – becomes an audacious act of political defiance, a gesture of tremendous existential courage that stares at the possibility of death floating in the air. Taxi makes cinema still matter.
A beautiful marine cousin to Guzman’s previous film, Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button turns its attention from the arid stretches of the Atacama to the waterfront and ice field of Southern Patagonia. Threading metaphor over metaphor, the director fashions a typically associative, richly suggestive essay film that turns the nature documentary form on its head. Guzman’s film plumbs the depths of the ocean, trying to uncover traces of suppressed, unseen history embodied by countless “missing people” – a project that derives its impetus from the filmmaker’s bittersweet childhood experience of the sea. Despite Chile’s economic indifference to its 4000-kilometer-long coastline, he notes, the sea has been indispensable those in power, serving first as the entry point of the European invaders, who wiped out the Patagonian natives, and then as the dumping ground of political prisoners during the Pinochet regime. Guzman teases out the different values that the sea holds for him, the autochthons and the Chilean state, in effect politicizing and historicizing that which conventional wisdom takes to be apolitical and ahistorical: geography and the perception of it. The result is a film of immense poetry and horror – a horror that only poetry can convey.
The most impressive debut film of the year, Alexandra Gerbaulet’s ambitious, intoxicating Shift excavates the evolution of her hometown, Salzgitter, along with that of her family with archaeological care and scientific detachment. In Gerbaulet’s heady narration, anchored by a powerful, quasi-declamatory, rhythmic voiceover, Salzgitter’s transformation from a Nazi mining stronghold and concentration camp, through a waning industrial hub and to a nuclear waste dump parallels the gradual disintegration of the Gerbaulet family under the weight of unemployment, sickness and sexual repression. The filmmaker closely intercuts photographs and diary entries of her mother with impersonal material from popular and scientific culture, weaving in and out of both registers with ease. Gerbaulet’s film is literally an unearthing project, as the director scoops out the various historical, political and geographical layers of this war-weathered city whose tranquil current-day model housing sits atop a makeshift Jewish graveyard consisting of camp workers buried using industrial debris. “Man gets used to everything, even the scar”, declares the narrator bluntly. Shift unscrambles such a habituated view of things, observing the tragicomic tautologies in which history revisits the city. The more you dig, it would seem, the more of the same you get.
One of my favorite films of the year is a commercial for a major power corporation made by a 106-year-old artist. 
Thomas McCarthy’s dramatization of Boston Globe’s exposé of child abuse in the Church is a robust, smart procedural that is less about picking apart the Catholic establishment than about elucidating the epistemological processes of the Information Age. Set at the transitional period between print and online news media, the film underscores the soon-to-be-outmoded physical nature of journalistic investigation. There are no antagonists of the traditional kind in Spotlight. The only obstacles to the knowledge required to carry out the exposé are the numerous procedures and institutional protocols that have for objective the protection or publication of information. It is telling that the entire film is about a pack of newswriters seeking information that’s already out in the open. What’s more, the film recognizes that the Spotlight team’s attempts to mount an institutional critique is itself inscribed within kindred ideological biases, operational strategies and structural iniquities of Boston Globe as an institution and that the metaphysical crisis that their story can potentially wreak amidst readers is but similar to the disillusionment the newsmen experience vis-à-vis their Protestant weltanschauung. With relatively uncommon formal and ethical restraint, McCarthy crafts an arresting film about how a society’s narratives are made, predicated they are as much on the dissemination of information as on their marginalization.
ergei Loznitsa’s formidable follow-up to Maidan (2014) furthers the earlier film’s exploration of the aesthetics and mechanics of revolution, capturing a people coming together to make sense of a political limbo. Without context or a framing perspective, the film drops us straight into the streets of St. Petersburg just after the attempted reactionary coup d’état in Moscow in 1991. Confusion and mundanity – not heroics and determination – reign as we observe the formative process of a people’s movement and the imagined/imaginary social glue that causes individuals to cohere into a group. State apparatuses compete with each other for imposing a narrative onto the events, while the very toponymy of the city becomes an ideological battleground. Working off priceless archival footage, much of which is incredibly reminiscent of the filmmaker’s own cinematographic style, Loznitsa provides an invaluable glimpse into the unfurling of history, chronicling how numerous banal, unsure gestures and actions snowball into Historical Events. If Eisenstein’s better-than-the-original recreation of the October Revolution was the abstraction of materialist history into ideas, Loznitsa’s film, taking place at the same Palace Square 63 years later, rescues history from the reductions of ideology and brings it right back into the realm of the material.
A remarkable American counterpart to J. P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), In Transit unfolds predominantly as a series of interviews with a mixed bag of travellers on board The Empire Builder, a long-distance passenger train running over 3500 kilometers and spanning almost the entire width of the United States. The accounts of passengers seeking out professional and financial breakthroughs evoke the pioneer myth hinged on a “Go West” imperative while the stories of those aboard in search of their ‘calling’ demonstrate the essentially spiritual, even religious nature of their pilgrimage-like journey. The diversity and range of the interviewees and their interactions help the film depict the train as a miniature America, à la Stagecoach, and carve out a quasi-utopian space in which members across class, race and gender divides get an opportunity to converse with each other without personal baggage. Nonetheless, In Transit is less a cultural vision of a possible America than an existential meditation on what makes people embark on these journeys. One elderly war veteran remarks that he’ll never be able to see these plains again. To cite John Berger, “the desire to have seen has a deep ontological basis.”
One of a piece with Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010), Wake continues its precedent’s important investigation into the ecological consequences of the presence of America’s largest military bases in the Philippines during most of the 20th century. Like Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), Wake is guided by the spirit of Howard Zinn’s approach to history and sketches an economically-founded account of US-Philippines political and cultural relations – a history that seems to be have been lamentably wiped off from the Filipino national consciousness. Gianvito juxtaposes images from the Philippine-American war with current day images from the contaminated Subic naval base area, suggesting, in effect, the poisonous persistence of an agonizing, unacknowledged history. Wake is imperfect cinema – unwieldy and resourceful – and employs fly-on-the-wall records, talking heads, on-screen text, photographs and news clips to mount a potent critique of a historiography defined political amnesia and economic opportunism. More importantly, it is a necessary reminder that imperialism is not always about presence, action and exercise of power but sometimes also about the refusal of these very elements, that history is not only a matter of events but also processes and phenomena and that geography is always political.
The Seventh Art 