New Directors/New Films 2025, Week Two
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Paula Tomás Marques’s debut feature, Two Times João Liberada, is one of Nelson Kim’s five favorite films screening at this year’s New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase of emerging filmmakers copresented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Cowritten with June João, Two Times sets up a movie within the movie, featuring João as Liberada, a fictional, gender-nonconforming nun who faced persecution in eighteenth-century Portugal. The director, Diogo, aims to depict the “violence and pain” of Liberada’s life, but João “finds Diogo’s approach reductive, seeking instead to find ways to express the ‘tenderness, pleasure, self-discovery’ that she discerns between the lines of the historical record,” writes Kim for Filmmaker. “Only seventy minutes long, the film is a rich and heady experience, pulsing with ideas and intelligence.”
Fabien Stumm’s Sad Jokes, which sees its U.S. premiere on Friday, is another film about the making of a film. Joseph (Stumm) says he hopes to have his second feature “move in a more absurdist direction,” and to Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, it’s Stumm who has succeeded, demonstrating “his adeptness for bringing comedy back to the arthouse, where it’s mostly sorely missed.”
Tuesday
As we noted when Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Cactus Pears won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance, Siddhant Adlakha, writing for Variety, called the Indian director’s first feature “a gentle slow-burn that occasionally becomes electric. A rural gay story that begins in a state of mourning and melancholy, it eventually takes on radiant form, with emotional complexities born out of characters walking around the truth, if only because euphemisms are the only language they have.”
Cinematographer Du Jie has shot, edited, and overseen the production design of his directorial debut, The Height of the Coconut Trees, an interweaving of two love stories that begins in Tokyo before moving to the forests on Shikoku Island. ND/NF programmers call Coconut Trees “a miniature travelogue and existential road picture—come for the beautiful locales, stay for a conversation about fate, faith, and regret worthy of Rohmer—with faint wisps of a ghost tale.”
Wednesday
Blending fiction and nonfiction, Suhel Banerjee tracks a construction worker’s five-day, 1,700-kilometer bicycle journey across India during the COVID-19 lockdown in CycleMahesh. Presenting the IDFA Award for Best First Feature to CycleMahesh last fall, jurors Heidi Hassan, Mohamed Jabaly, and Nicole Vögele called Banerjee’s film “breathtakingly beautiful and upsettingly honest.”
From Omnes Films, the collective behind Carson Lund’s Eephus and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, comes Alexandra Simpson’s first feature, No Sleep Till. As a ferocious hurricane heads toward the coast of Florida, Simpson “trades a univocal point of view for a collage of distinct voices and storylines,” wrote Leonardo Goi in a dispatch to Notebook from Venice last fall. “Shot by Sylvain Marco Froidevaux, No Sleep Till offsets its funereal premise with a whimsical, neon-soaked palette, leaving motels, pools, and diners aglow with lush reds and blues . . . Instead of well-rounded characters or ‘complete’ storylines, No Sleep Till traffics in intimations and clues—and it is all the more eloquent for it.”
Thursday
In Bálint Szimler’s Lessons Learned, ten-year-old Palkó is the new kid at school, having just moved to Hungary from Berlin. One of his teachers, Juci, is also a new arrival, and she finds her idealism butting up against hardened convention. Lesson Learned “exposes an environment where difference and initiative are punished, conformity is fostered, and students are encouraged to tell on one another,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia in his Viennale program note. “Aided by the impressive cast of children, Szimler expertly balances the film’s narrative and critical dimensions.”
The Weekend
Grand Me is Atiye Zare Arandi’s portrait of her nine-year-old niece, Melina, a child of divorce living with her grandparents in Esfahan, Iran. Neither of her newly remarried parents seem to have much time for Melina. “Observing becomes participating,” writes Savina Petkova at Cineuropa, “but in an uncompromising, respectful way, capturing the ease with which Melina expresses herself, or refuses to do so. Tensions brew and bubble, but never because of the camera.” Grand Me “doesn’t need to underscore any of the context that is specific to Iran—such as gender roles or child custody law—and vests all its power in its child protagonist.”
Two cousins, Bart and Gonga, discover a bag of rusty crosses and decide to turn them into neon crosses to sell door to door in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. Cinematographer Tato Kotetishvili’s directorial debut, Holy Electricity, “part city symphony, part docudrama, offers plenty of style and finds substance in unusual places,” finds Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage.
Lurker, the first feature from Alex Russell, a writer and producer on The Bear and Beef, is “a tight, nifty, and unsettling little parable of the pathology of fame in our time,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. Théodore Pellerin plays Matthew, a clerk at a Los Angeles boutique who worms his way into the inner circle of Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a pop star on the up-and-up. “Matthew becomes Oliver’s bro, his hanger-on, his social-media camera buddy,” writes Gleiberman. “And Matthew is grateful for the attention—so grateful, in fact, that he’ll do anything, and stop at nothing, to keep it coming.”
In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis recommends Timestamp, a “Ukrainian heartbreaker.” As Vladimir Putin carries on pounding his neighbor, Kateryna Gornostai (Stop-Zemlia) has taken her cameras into the schools. “Violence is ever-present—in safety precautions, ruined buildings, worried adults,” writes Dargis. “In the northeast city of Kharkiv near the Russian border, cherubs attend a school in an underground subway station while in the central city of Cherkasy, high schoolers prepare for graduation, a rite of passage that becomes progressively melancholic. Not all these children will reach adulthood.”
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