First Look 2025

With a lineup of twenty features and eighteen short films, the fourteenth edition will open on Wednesday with Bonjour Tristesse (2024), Durga Chew-Bose’s reinterpretation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel. Lily McInerny takes on the role Jean Seberg made famous in the 1958 adaptation directed by Otto Preminger. Eighteen-year-old Cécile luxuriates in the adoration of her father, Raymond (Claes Bang), as they holiday on the French Riviera, and all’s well until Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old family friend, arrives and begins siphoning off Raymond’s time, attention, and affection.

“While the novel takes Cecile’s viewpoint,” wrote David Schwartz for Screen Slate when the new Bonjour Tristesse premiered in Toronto, “Chew-Bose expands the emotional canvas, adding depth to all of the characters; each is as flawed as they are sympathetic. Chew-Bose revels in the sensuality of the setting, and the physical beauty of all of the characters, while also remaining true to the underlying tragedy—the tristesse—of the tale.”

Sunday’s closing night film will be Diciannove (2024), the debut feature of Giovanni Tortorici, who has worked as an assistant director for Luca Guadagnino, one of the film’s producers. Nineteen-year-old Leonardo leaves his family home in Palermo to study business in London, but it isn’t long before he switches to courses in literature in Sienna.

In Variety, Guy Lodge observes that Tortorici “evidently remembers that disorienting sense of being released (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before you’ve quite found yourself; if you don’t, his funny, nervy, aptly unformed film will give you quivery flashbacks. It’s an auspicious arrival for both the filmmaker and his intense, mercurial young star Manfredi Marini, who holds the camera with the guilelessness of a newcomer and the ease of a natural.”

MoMI has lined up three showcase screenings. “Having explored the U.S. civil rights movement with The Black Power Mixtape (2011) and colonialism in Concerning Violence (2014),” writes Wendy Ide in her review for Screen of Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989, Göran Hugo Olsson “now digs into the conflict between Israel and Palestine in this illuminating, even-handed magnum opus . . . As a primer to the backdrop of the exceptionally bleak current situation, the film is invaluable.”

Serbian director Iva Radivojević has “dealt with themes of displacement, migration, and connections that cross space and time in her essayistic and conceptual features Evaporating Borders (2014) and Aleph (2021),” writes Carmen Gray at the Film Verdict. “Personal yet stark and distanced, When the Phone Rang is based closely on her own experiences of a childhood disrupted by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. It revisits ‘a country that doesn’t exist anymore,’ as it’s termed by the narrator (childhood acquaintance Slavica Bajceta), who refers to the eleven-year-old protagonist in the third person as she tries to make narrative order of an early life that was fragmented by war and societal collapse. There is a sense of emotional repression to this painful history, which is stylishly framed and narrated with cool detachment, but it quietly works its way under the skin.”

Fresh from its premiere at Sundance, where it won this year’s NEXT Innovator Award, Zodiac Killer Project is the film Charlie Shackleton made when he failed to secure the rights to Lyndon Lafferty’s 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. “A work of criticism as well as a work of art,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Shackleton’s film is “a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.”

Elsewhere in the program, The Fifth Shot of La Jetée focuses on a still from Chris Marker’s 1963 film that reveals to French filmmaker Dominique Cabrera what may be a glimpse into the history of her family. Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia won a FIPRESCI Prize when it premiered in Cannes last year. And Claire Simon’s Elementary, filmed at a public school in a Parisian suburb, is “a quieter and more distant work than Our Body [2023], but it is no less poignant,” finds the Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye.

Dispatching to Film Comment from Toronto last fall, José Teodoro noted that Measures for a Funeral is “the latest—and, thus far, lushest—in Sofia Bohdanowicz’s series of autofictional films concerning Audrey, an academic embodied with great precision and minimal affect by cowriter and longtime collaborator Deragh Campbell.” Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen’s Violin Concerto, Op. 28, long believed to have been lost, is performed in full in one concert sequence “whose images shift locales while its soundtrack remains firmly in the concert hall,” and this passage is “itself a piece of music: its dynamics feel guided by rhythm, variation, and accumulation, and by a willingness to surrender narrative and character development to the dictates of emotional suspense and release.”