Leaving October 1

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 77 mins | 2020
Hong mines wisdom and wit out of a deftly presented and deceptively simple scenario: a young woman’s visits to three of her friends while her husband’s away. In insightful, unpredictable conversations with people at different points in ...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, including credited co-direc...

Directed by Alan Zhang | 91 mins | 2023
Feminist activist and multihyphenate artist Zhang’s directorial debut is a raw, often revelatory docufiction experiment that follows Beibei (Li Hehe), a recently unemployed 35-year-old woman who, in the early months of the pandemic, finds solace from an unf...

Directed by Adina Pintilie | 123 mins | 2018
A Golden Bear-winner at the Berlin Film Festival, Pintilie’s controversial debut is a documentary-fiction hybrid essay film that takes physical intimacy, inhibition, and desire as its central themes, combining nonfiction interviews with a narrative cen...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Shinji Sômai | 115 mins | 1985
Emotionally raw, enormously tender and, finally, tentatively hopeful, Sômai’s breakthrough film—winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival—observes a group of provincial junior high students who find themse...

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 113 mins | 2010
Winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film follows its fatally ill title character (Thanapat Saisaymar) on a final pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the countryside of Thailand’s rural northeast where he encounter...

Directed by Sebastian Schipper | 138 mins | 2015
Eschewing the digitally composited “single take” of "Birdman" for the real-deal, in-camera approach seen in "Russian Ark," this electric German thriller follows the titular Victoria (Laia Costa), a young Spanish woman who stumbles out of an early-h...

Directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll | 98 mins | 2004
When Jacopo (Andrés Pazos), sullen, punctilious loner and owner of a decrepit sock factory in Montevideo, learns of an impending visit by his estranged brother, Herman (Jorge Bolani), returning to Uruguay from Brazil for the annivers...

Directed by Cristian Mungiu | 127 mins | 2016
Nine years after his Palme d’Or-winning breakout—the abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"—"Graduation" landed Cristian Mungiu his third major award at Cannes, this time for best director. He returns to the murky backwaters of institutional co...

Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu | 89 mins | 2006
On the 16th anniversary of the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive regime just before Christmas, 1989, a TV station in the provincial town of Vaslui, Romania, plans to produce a program on those events, but can only find two “revolutionaries”...

Directed by Cristi Puiu | 147 mins | 2005
Responsible more than any other film for establishing Romanian film as an international force, Puiu’s second feature is a scabrous satire of broken institutions that begins with the ailing elderly Mr. Lazarescu calling an ambulance, then follows him on an...

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 109 mins | 2019
Hlynur Pálmason’s second film opens with the Icelandic proverb that gives "A White, White Day" its title: “On such days when everything is white, and there is no longer any difference between the earth and the sky, then the dead can talk to us who are...

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 93 min | 2017
Winner of four awards at its Locarno premiere, Hlynur Pálmason’s debut feature introduces the traits that would come to define his future work (notably, the 2022 western "Godland")—fertile interrogations of masculinity and its entailing savagery unfoldi...

Directed by Maren Ade | 81 mins | 2003
Like her 2016 magnum opus "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade’s devilish debut subjects its anti-heroine to a borderline sadistic ritual of ignominy. Melanie Pröschle (a fantastically game Eva Löbau), a 27-year-old schoolteacher moves to a new town, only to be assaile...