Directed by Augusto Sandino | 77 mins | 2021
For Colombia’s Indigenous Muisca people, Sumapaz Páramo, a tropical plateau located high up in the Andes, was a sacred realm. It is here that Augusto Sandino sets his haunting, mystical debut—the first film to have ever been shot in this now-endangered...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Elisabeth Subrin | 98 mins | 2016
Sick of L.A. and sitcom success, actress and woman on the verge Anna Baskin (Maggie Siff) looks to reconnect with her roots in the New York theater scene. But the city offers no respite in this smart and restrained drama, the sole...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 19 mins | 2008
"Ah, Liberty!" is rooted in Rivers’s own childhood memories of the derelict buildings that served as a playground for him and his friends. This freedom, which feels feral and unstable, is captured here in grainy, hand-processed 16mm black and white, playing...

Directed by Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated...

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve | 98 mins | 2007
Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-five when she directed one of the most striking and auspicious first features in 21st century French cinema, which finds the brisk economy of expression, nuanced characterization, and formal daring of her future films (...

Directed by Levan Akin | 113 mins | 2020
Met with high praise at 2019’s Cannes Film Festival and violent homophobic protests in Georgia, where the film takes place, Levan Akin’s breakout is a finely wrought tale of a forbidden love between two male dancers, Merab and Irakli, who are both competin...

Directed by Travis Fine | 98 mins | 2012
A stellar Alan Cumming is the linchpin of this late ’70s-set weepie: he plays Rudy, a struggling musician and drag queen in West Hollywood. When he meets closeted district attorney Paul at the nightclub where he works, a romance is kindled—one partially fu...

Directed by Lea Glob | 116 mins | 2022
With her intense gaze and assured manner, the artist who gives Lea Glob’s documentary its title, a French painter born into the Parisian counterculture, is a figure of considerable magnetism. Filmed over the course of 13 years, from Apolonia’s early twentie...

Directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili | 134 mins | 2024
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Venice, Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut feature "Beginning" is anchored by Ia Sukhitashvili’s powerhouse performance as Nina, an obstetrician in rural Georgia whose history of discreetly provi...

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Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 3 mins | 2008
A haunting guitar track by Koichi Shimizu and Zai Kuning underscores this multi-textured, kaleidoscopic series of glimpses of modern-day Thailand, which was produced under the auspices of Electric Eel Films, the production ho...

Directed by Éric Rohmer | 103 mins | 1987
Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an ...

Directed by Emin Alper | 131 mins | 2022
The long shadow of Polanski’s "Chinatown" (1974) looms over this stylish, sun-bleached noir about corruption in a backwoods Turkish province, hailed as a standout of the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes in 2022. Newly posted to this far-flung community,...

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Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 106 mins | 2016
Suwichakornpong’s second feature presents itself as a straightforward arthouse film about a young director, Ann (Visra Vichit-Vadakan), preparing a project about the 1976 massacre of student activists at Thammasat Universit...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 90 mins | 1983
The fleet, dryly funny fourth feature from independent cinema stalwart Henry Jaglom stars a riveting Karen Black—who also composed music for the film—as Zee, a middle-aged Upper West Sider, who, reeling after being abandoned by her husband, pursues an am...

Directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo | 84 mins | 2023
Can you scam your way into sainthood? This question underpins the first section of Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s wry but warming debut feature, wherein Rita, a devout Catholic with a competitive streak, contrives to convince the residents of her Argentin...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 106 mins | 2013
Panahi’s follow-up to 2011’s "This Is Not a Film", also a meta-cinematic chamber piece made in defiance of the filmmaking ban imposed on him in 2010, finds the ever resourceful auteur, typically indefatigable, in a melancholic funk. "Closed Curtain" beg...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 68 mins | 2021
The construction of the so-called “Death Railway” connecting Thailand and Myanmar, a Japanese initiative during World War II, was marked by perilous, inhumane conditions and an extraordinary casualty rate. Following four you...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 97 mins | 2003
This early film by the Iranian master—a thriller in reverse, opening with the climactic jewelry store heist before flashing back to its inciting events—is lesser-known but among his best. In the central role, Hossein Emadeddin: like his character, a ment...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 127 mins | 2020
The parallel narratives of a middle-aged man seeking treatment for a chronic illness in Hong Kong (Lee Kang-sheng) and a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy) eventually, finally, meet in a moment of ecstatic release.

Directed by Julian Castronovo | 77 mins | 2025
In this irreverent, deliciously vertiginous docufiction caper—the beguiling, Rotterdam and Doc Fortnight-selected debut of Julian Castronovo—the writer-director plays a version of himself who becomes entangled in an "F for Fake"-indebted mystery. On...

Directed by Travis Wilkerson | 90 mins | 2017
A particularly lacerating take on the “home movie,” Wilkerson’s film excavates the buried story of his own great-grandfather’s murder of a Black man in c. 1946 Dothan, Alabama, an inquest that puts him in conflict with contemporary residents of the t...

Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an a...

Directed by Derek Jarman | 90 mins | 1991
Jarman’s lusciously Brechtian adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play, its regal production design furnished by his biggest budget yet, leans all the way into the queer subtext of its source material. Tilda Swinton radiates as Queen Isabella, resentful...

Directed by Lynne Sachs | 74 mins | 2020
One man, Ira Sachs Sr., refracted through a host of familial voices and a variety of film formats, the technology evolving over the course of 25 years of shooting. As one of the numerous children he sired with different women—with not all of his progeny k...