Leaving August 1

Directed by Rungano Nyoni | 93 mins | 2017
A young Zambian girl is accused of being a witch and then pressed into soothsaying service by a slick government official in this strikingly shot deadpan satire. Skewering superstition and corruption, it’s a feminist exposé of exploitat...

Directed by Kim Torres | 13 mins | 2025
The limpid second short made by Torres in Manzanillo, after 2023’s "The Moon Will Contain Us", centers on Chunyan, proprietor of a local minimart: salt-scented images of her life in the small Costa Rican village are paired with memories of her hometown of E...

Directed by Klára Tasovská | 90 mins | 2024
Oft referred to as the Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia, Libuše Jarcovjáková chronicled after-dark Prague in the 1970s and ’80s, her photographs of let-it-all-hang-out gay clubs, factory hands working the third shift, and clandestine parties giving a pictu...

Leaving August 1

Directed by India Donaldson | 8 mins | 2021
Set in an off-season beach town emptied out for the winter, Donaldson’s by turns unsettling and comic short is a deft character study done in small, precise strokes, following a troubled, lonesome, dog-obsessed woman who decides to tak...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 7 mins | 2022
On a quest for a mythical city, a young woman finds only a vast toxic swamp of sulphurous flames and chemical smoke. With Herbert Read’s poem “The Autumn of the World” drifting across this devastated landscape, Rivers creates a bleak, beautiful experience th...

Directed by Nadia Shihab | 88 mins | 2018
“I don’t make art to make pretty things,” Lahib Jaddo tells her daughter, filmmaker Nadia Shihab. “I make it because it helps me understand my life.” In "Jaddoland," Shihab searches for deeper understanding of the diasporic experience of home through the...

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 14 mins | 2007
Anticipating the questions around the limits of representation posed in "By the Time It Gets Dark" (2016), in "Jai", documentary elements bleed into the making of a fiction film about the landmark 1975 seizure and occupation of the Hara Factory...

Directed by Sierra Urich | 100 mins | 2023
Sierra Urich has never been to Iran, nor can she speak Farsi. Her mother Mitra fled her native country in 1979, on the cusp of the revolution, eventually settling in rural Vermont. Mitra’s own mother followed 16 years later; still, she speaks very littl...

Directed by Ira Sachs | 102 mins | 2012
A phone sex hotline encounter between a documentary filmmaker and a closeted literary agent gives rise to a decade-long relationship riven by addiction in this closely observed, semi-autobiographical work by Ira Sachs. While his latest film, Cannes competit...

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers | 93 mins | 2019
Thai history and pre-history bubble to the surface and get packaged up for sale in this playful, surrealism-tinged venture from Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers. An unnamed woman arrives in the popular tourist destination of Krabi,...

Directed by Claire Denis | 130 mins | 2004
One of Claire Denis’s most ambitious, complicated, and exhilaratingly daring films charts an itinerary traveling from the snowy Alps to Korea to Tahiti, following an old mercenary (Michel Subor, from "Le Petit Soldat" and "Beau Travail") in search of bot...

Directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson | 72 mins | 2020
Two billion years in the future, humanity finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that remains are lone, surreal monuments—the futuristic, solemn, Brutalist stone slabs erected during the communist era in the former Yugoslav republics, a...

Directed by Hong Khaou | 86 mins | 2014
Subtle but charged performances from both Ben Whishaw and Hong Kong icon Cheng Pei-Pei ("Come Drink with Me") anchor Hong Khaou’s haunting directorial debut, in which the death of a young, gay, Cambodian-Chinese man brings together his grieving mother and t...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 22 mins | 2019
The final installment of a hypnagogic trilogy created with sci-fi author Mark von Schlegel, following "Slow Action" (2010) and "Urth" (2016), "Look Then Below" is structured as a future explorer’s diary, its strange and haunting subterranean landscapes capt...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the ...

Directed by Fruit Chan | 109 mins | 1997
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The resu...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 90 mins | 1986
Menkes took home the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s “Best Independent Film” prize with her hypnotic but disturbing debut feature, in which her sister Tinka plays Ida, a sex worker accused of killing her pimp. Moving between a string of seedy, East ...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 5 mins | 2013
An unsettling portrait of domestic anomie, in which communication between family members has broken down. What remains is the persistent whistling of a pot, an iron thumped against the wall, and the matriarch’s wordless, ...

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | 107 mins | 2001
A seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel follows an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards a suave, sensitive gangster. A transfixing trance-out of a mo...

Directed by Emily Atef | 123 mins | 2022
Starring a luminous Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in one of his final screen appearances, the heartrending "More Than Ever" relates a life, and a marriage, rerouted by the diagnosis of a rare lung disease. Though Hélène loves her husband Mathieu dearly, ...

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 82 mins | 2009
Suwichakornpong’s transfixing, Rotterdam-awarded feature debut begins as a chamber drama, with Pun (Arkaney Cherkam), a male nurse from Thailand’s rural northeast, starting a new job as the caretaker of the paraplegic son of a well-off Bangkok ...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 267 mins | 2010
It is a rare thing for one of a filmmaker’s final works to rank among their greatest, and their most classically sumptuous—but such is the case with Ruiz’s sweeping, four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel of...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 113 mins | 2012
The last completed film by Chilean master Ruiz is a melancholic memoir film, a playful puzzle box of a movie in which an office worker approaching retirement reflects back on his life—including events that may not necessarily have happened. A sublime swan ...

Directed by Kim Torres | 14 mins | 2022
In this impressionistic, Cannes-selected short, set in rural Costa Rica and tinged with melancholy, 17-year-old Ale strives to sustain the playful innocence of her two younger siblings after they’re abandoned by their mother.