Directed by Zhang Lu | 144 mins | 2023
Rich in gently rhyming motifs, Zhang Lu’s 2023 Berlinale competition offering orbits a food and restaurant critic in Beijing. Middle-aged and listless in the aftermath of a divorce, Gu Wentong finds himself contemplating a reunion with the father he hasn’t s...

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,...

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 Ben Rivers | 46 mins | 2019
An elliptical travelogue buoyed by the poetry of W.S. Merwin. Fernando Pessoa, and Muriel Rukeyser, "Ghost Strata" is divided into 12 sections, one for each month of the year over which it was shot. As he roves, Rivers trains his camera on piquant details, ...

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 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 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...

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 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.

Directed by Ben Rivers | 21 mins | 2011
Founded in 1931 to provide employment for disabled ex-serviceman, Servex was a metal electroplating factory that sat on the outskirts of London. In 2010, after years of financial difficulty, the business went into liquidation. Rivers captures its final mont...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 45 mins | 2010
Set in a distant future in which rising seas have reduced the Earth to a scattering of isolated islands, "Slow Action" draws on narration written together with science-fiction author Mark von Schlegell to conjure fictional utopian societies from real, remot...

Directed by Emily Atef | 129 mins | 2023
The golden hot summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides the backdrop for Emily Atef’s fraught and steamy May-December romance, adapted from a 2011 novel by Daniela Krien. On a farm in former East Germany, 19-year-old Maria drifts apart fro...

Directed by Kim Torres | 21 mins | 2021
Go towards the light. Torres’s debut short follows Lila, a shy teenager, who is lured from her online world of K-Pop dances in pursuit of a mysterious gleam, culminating in a metaphysical cyborgian encounter.

Directed by Kim Torres | 18 mins | 2023
Shot on shimmering 16mm, this vivid and dreamy portrait of the youth in the Costa Rican coastal town of Manzanillo—first known to Torres as the place where her father lived out his final decades—is set on the cusp of catastrophe, but animated by the visions...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 19 mins | 2016
Written by the science-fiction author Mark von Schlegell and filmed on location at the Biosphere 2 complex in Arizona, site of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous utopian experiments, "Urth" unfolds according to the logbook of a grad student—the la...