New Directors/New Films 2025, Week One

Chalfant plays Ruth, a widow in her eighties being checked into an assisted living facility by the young man she thought she was dating. But Steven (H. Jon Benjamin) is her son. Familiar Touch is “a straightforwardly structured character study, humane but not sentimental, that stands out for the priority it grants to Ruth’s perspective throughout, presenting her not as a victim or a patient, but as the lucid, capable woman she still mostly feels she is,” writes Guy Lodge in Variety.

At Filmmaker, Nicolas Rapold notes that Chalfant “has spoken of her best friend, playwright Sybille Pearson, as having dementia, lending a special bond with the character.” And writing for Sight and Sound, Ela Bittencourt points out that Friedland has worked with retirement communities in the past, which “accounts for her verité depiction, though not her tremendous skill in distilling just the right detail in a subtle, Chekhovian manner.”

The Village Next to Paradise, Mo Harawe’s first feature and the first film from Somalia to be selected for Cannes, opens with a British television report on a drone strike against a presumed terrorist. The focus then immediately shifts to Mamargade (Ahmed Ali Farah), a single father who takes on odd jobs (such as digging a grave for the slain Islamist militant); his young son, Cigaal (Ahmed Mohamud Saleban); and his sister, Araweelo (Anab Ahmed Ibrahim). They live and work in what Adham Youssef describes at the Film Verdict as “an underdeveloped and marginalized village named Paradise, where the bright blue water and beautiful beach are perfectly accessible, but the residents are too busy making ends meet to enjoy them. Everyday is a struggle and a privilege.”

The Village Next to Paradise is “a quiet movie, one with little dialogue, sparse scoring, and rich in the ambient sounds of crashing waves, ringing bells, and threatening drones,” writes Conor Truax at In Review Online. “Harawe proves himself capable of cultivating a transcendental story, one absent media’s hyperbole and hyperstition, attuned to the connective universalities underlying the banal rhythms of quotidian life.”

Drawing from Mariana Enríquez’s 2009 short-story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and written by Benjamin Naishtat (Rojo), Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is “an intriguing fable where teenage desire explodes in a white-hot ball of fury,” writes Christopher Reed at Hammer to Nail. “Set in the suburbs of Buenos Aires shortly after Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis began, the movie evokes a specificity of time and place that feels lived-in from the first frame.” When Virgin premiered at Sundance, Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov found it “weirdly low-key and definitely destined to disappoint genre-hounds” but also “kind of fun.”

“Beguiling blends of fiction and nonfiction are the highlights of this year’s edition,” writes Richard Brody in his ND/NF curtain-raiser for the New Yorker. Lorena Alvarado’s Lost Chapters is a “literary detective story that’s rich in the fine grain of daily life” featuring Alvarado’s real-life father as Ignacio, a book collector; her sister as Ena, who discovers a note in the library that sends her in search of an author who may never have existed; and her grandmother as Adela, “a former poet now showing signs of dementia.” Alvarado and cinematographer José Ostos’s “keen sense of light, color, and tempo invests Adela’s tender observations and enigmatic digressions with drama and passion.”

When Laurynas Bareiša’s Drowning Dry premiered in Locarno,Carmen Gray, writing for the Film Verdict, called it a “deeply felt psychological reckoning with the cruelty of chance, which recolors the past and makes a mockery of future plans.” Bareiša then won the Best Director award and the four leading actors shared one of the festival’s two awards for Best Performance. Now, Gray has included Drowning Dry on her list for the BFI of ten great contemporary films from the Baltic region.

The story of two families on holiday together “has a fragmented structure that echoes the disorienting ruptures of traumatic memory,” writes Gray. “As we veer back and forth in time between the lead-up and aftermath of a calamity, easy sensationalism is resisted, as puzzle shards of information are teased out about how a family’s sunny getaway went so wrong, and how they are able to go on.”

Friday sees repeat screenings of Familiar Touch and The Virgin of Quarry Lake as well as the New York premiere of one of the great new films set in the city, Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo). Nineteen-year-old Rico (Juan Collado) has his pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriend (Destiny Checo) move in with his mom (Yohanna Florentino) and sister (Nathaly Navarro) for now, but he’s got big plans for his budding family. “An archetypal scenario of young masculinity drawn into self-doubt when confronted with the practical and emotional needs of others, the film may be conventional in its drama, but it is exceptional in its deep-space immersion in its characters’ lives and world,” writes Daniel Kasman in the Notebook.

Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o morte!, the winner of this year’s Tiger Award in Rotterdam, blends archival footage and light-spirited reenactments to tell the story of the short-lived protofascist state created by Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in Rijeka, Croatia. “The movie powerfully conveys the eerie sense of experiencing history in the present tense,” writes Richard Brody.

Saturday offers second shots at seeing Lost Chapters, The Village Next to Paradise, Fiume o morte!, and Mad Bills to Pay. Maxime Jean-Baptiste will take part in Q&As following screenings of his debut feature, Listen to the Voices, the winner of a Special Jury Prize and Special Mention from the First Feature Jury in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente.

Thirteen-year-old Melrick (Melrick Diomar), who has grown up in a Parisian suburb, spends a summer holiday with his grandmother in French Guiana, where his uncle was murdered. Listen to the Voices is “both achingly personal (it was inspired by the real-life death of a cousin and the three leads are all playing versions of their real-life selves) and universal in its depiction of the terrible legacy of violence and how it continues to linger long after the bodies have been buried and the blood has been scrubbed away,” writes Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com.

In Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, Ke-Xi Wu and Haixpeng Xu play Didi and Amy, roommates working in a massage parlor in Queens. Didi is drawn to Cheung (Tsai Ming-liang regular Lee Kang-sheng), an older man who has his eye on Amy. “But this sensitive drama—which is punctuated by a shocking act early on—is more concerned with how immigrants navigate the feeling of being perpetual outsiders,” writes Screen’s Tim Grierson. “All three performances are deceptively muted, as Tsang’s quietly revelatory scenes hint at the layers of loneliness and despair within her characters.”

Callie Hernandez won a Best Performance Prize in Locarno for her turn as Carrie, who has inherited the patent for an electromagnetic healing contraption created by her late father in Courtney Stephens’s Invention. “This Super 16 mm–shot feature furthers Stephens’s longstanding interest in cultural memory, female mythology, and the slippery notion of authorship,” writes Jordan Cronk for Filmmaker. “As the film shifts between archival material and loosely scripted scenes of Carrie’s encounters with a variety of her father’s friends and former associates—including an estate lawyer played by filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins (directors Joe Swanberg and Caveh Zahedi also appear in small roles)—a slipstream of fictions and fantasies emerge from the fabric of multiple intersecting realities, a meta-cinematic conceit Stephens reinforces through use of on-set audio of the cast and crew recorded during production.”

The Assistant is “a caustic, deliriously inventive adaptation (or, as they call it, a ‘repainting’) by Polish directing duo Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal of Swiss-German Robert Walser’s 1908 novel of the same name,” writes Carmen Gray at the Film Verdict. “It is no mean feat to capture the spirit of cult modernist writer Walser, who was admired by Franz Kafka and is often compared to him in his peculiar torments and talents, but the Sasnals do his unnerving work justice by bringing a punk edge of anarchic surrealism, absurdist humor and experimentation to the period drama.”

Seven stories set in hotel rooms are told in Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger, the winner of the Grand Prix in the Proxima competition in Karlovy Vary. Stranger is “an absorbing, though at times, uneven omnibus whose interest in liminal spaces explains much about how we define home and identity,” writes Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com.

Taking his college-age twins Konstantinos and Elsa (Konstantinos Georgopoulos and Elsa Lekakou) on a Greek island-hopping sailing trip, single dad Babis (Simeon Tsakiris) is harboring a secret plan to introduce his kids to the mother who abandoned them in Kostis Charamountanis’s Kyuka Before Summer’s End. “The legacy of the whole Greek Weird Wave has been difficult to shake, and it shows here as well,” writes Marta Bałaga for Cineuropa. “Charamountanis tells a simple story but makes it odd, exaggerating many scenes—and that soundtrack—to the point of absurdity.”

At Eye for Film, Sergiu Inizian finds that this debut feature “unfolds restlessly, driven by a hectic montage of nostalgic home videos, slapstick sketches, and curious meditative scenes. Between fragments of formal experimentation, the relationship between the two siblings and their father's struggle with melancholia deliver a muddled but tender summer chronicle.”