In November, the time change hits hard, not just in places that observe Daylight Saving Time. The darkness seems to creep in earlier and earlier every day, everywhere, as we barrel towards the end of the year. The city of Tallinn, Estonia, embraces this darkness as a virtue. Each year in November, they host the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, also known as PÖFF, which just wrapped up its 29th year. I was privileged to attend this year and see the festival’s dark charms in all their glory with my own eyes. 

Much of the festival’s action takes place at the Nordic Forum Hotel, a sleek modern hotel located on the edge of Old Town, a touristy area filled with quaint cobblestone streets that lead you to medieval fortresses and churches that trace back to the 14th century (and at least two really fantastic record shops). A large golden wolf statue by the front doors of the hotel, howling into the night, greets festival goers and guests alike.

It’s here that you not only pick up your badges and tickets for the festival, but also in the lobby and, especially, in the hotel’s breakfast room, where attendees, film critics, filmmakers, jury members, and festival staff alike mix and mingle, discussing all things cinema. If you are really brave, you can sign up for the winter swimming event, which takes festival attendees by bus to Tallinn Bay to dip their toes into the cold waters as a way of waking up and literally breaking the ice with their colleagues. Readers, I was not brave. 

This year, the festival ran from November 7–23, and I arrived halfway through the festivities. Thankfully, they offer a great screening platform for accredited guests, so I was able to watch a dozen or so films before arriving in Estonia. Once there, I fought through the jetlag and watched another couple of dozen before the awards ceremony on the 21st, mostly at the nearby Apollo Cinemas multiplex, where the festival held its black-carpet premieres (and also sold specialty kettle corn, like pumpkin spice and black, PÖFF-themed varieties).

Keeping with the wolf motif, the festival has what may well be the coolest video logo I have seen at any festival I have attended. It starts with an image of the literal black night; white stars fall to the snowy ground, becoming wolves running through the tree-covered snow before morphing back into the light of the stars, which bounces back up into the sky, to form the festival’s neon wolf logo. It goes hard. 

The festival is broken up into several competition categories—Official Selection, First Feature, Baltic Film, Rebels With A Cause, Critics’ Picks Competition, Doc@PÖFF International, Doc@PÖFF Baltic—along with two sub-festivals, Just Film and PÖFF Shorts. I watched a total of thirty-five films from thirty different countries. Although I tried to watch a few movies from each competition category, I only managed to watch a handful of the winners. I guess that is par for the course with a festival screening of over two hundred films! 

I found the festival’s mixture of films, especially its emphasis on the Baltic region (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Eastern European, and Central Asian cinema (including my first-ever Kyrgyzstani action-comedy, Backstage Madness), to be incredibly rich in both stylistic filmmaking and thematic heft.

The ongoing invasion of Ukraine loomed large in several of the films I watched, including Lithuanian filmmaker Gabrielė Urbonaitė’s “Renovation” (which had its world premiere earlier this year at Karlovy Vary), which took home the Best Director award in the Baltic Film competition. This film did not charm me as much as it did others. Often compared to Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person In The World,” (another film I am mixed on), it follows Ilona (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė), a woman on the verge of thirty, who has a change of heart about her boyfriend Matas (Šarūnas Zenkevičius), and all her plans for her life, really, after the apartment they have just moved into begins exterior renovations.

There, she befriends one of the Ukrainian construction workers, Oleg (Roman Lutskyi). Although the airy 16mm cinematography by Vytautas Katkus (whose own directorial debut, “The Visitor,” took home the Best Baltic Film award) is gorgeous, the film skirted far too close to cliché for my taste and never really delved as deeply into its political themes as I thought it would. 

There were two other films that I watched that tackled the melancholy of a world at war and the horrors of rising fascism, with a much more complex and poetic manner: Harald Hutter’s “Leleka” and Maryna Nikolcheva’s “One Day I Wish to See You Happy.” Playing in the Rebels With A Cause competition, Hutter’s film was made in collaboration with star Olga Kviatkovska, whose character is a composite of her own story, along with several other Ukrainian artists living in exile in Paris. 

She plays Sasha, a sculptor who is doing her best to continue working despite the constant trauma of war-related loss and displacement. When her grandmother, also named Sasha, passes away, she crafts a sculpture inspired by her strength and journeys from Paris to Kyiv with her Belgian friend Margaux (played by real-life artist and filmmaker Margaux Dauby) to bring the sculpture home. The journey of these two women, both physical and spiritual, becomes a slow cinema dreamscape rendered in gorgeous black-and-white 16mm, with flashes of luminous color, lulling you into its pace, while always keeping you a bit on edge as the dream veers towards the nightmarish reality of war. 

This same sense of dreams and nightmares permeates Nikolcheva’s documentary, which screened in the Doc@PÖFF International competition, as the filmmaker aims her lens at her husband, Max, also a filmmaker, who has begun to drift into a midlife crisis. Halfway through the making of the film, the invasion of Ukraine splits the couple apart, forcing them to stay connected only through video calls. At times, the sheer amount of footage Nikolcheva films of her husband becomes too much, until you realize that filmmaking is their shared love language, one that can hopefully overcome the melancholy of depression and the miseries of war. 

The Doc@PÖFF International competition was the only category in which I was able to watch every film, an accomplishment I found deeply rewarding and that also made the awards ceremony fun, because I actually had an opinion on the winners (all of which I agreed with). The Best Film award went to Karin Pennanen’s “Days of Wonder,” a heartfelt ode to her uncle Markku. This eccentric man dedicated his life to art for art’s sake, leaving behind a treasure trove of works ranging from paintings to collages to audio diaries. 

The Best Cinematography award went to Max Golomidov, who lensed Estonian director Vladimir Loginov’s nocturnal city symphony “Edge of the Night,” an insomniac’s love letter to Tallinn. The jury awarded a special prize to Raisa Răzmeriță’s “Electing Ms Santa,” which follows the years-long journey of Elena Cernei, a do-gooder in a remote Moldovan village, as she pursues her dream of becoming the village’s first female mayor. It’s a deeply political film, but not rooted in the game of politics; instead, in a good heart, doing what she can for her community out of a sense of shared destiny with her fellow humans. 

As a docs junkie, I really loved a few other films in this competition. In particular, I was impressed by Jadran Boban’s “The Feast of the Wolf,” which on its surface appears to be about conspiracy theories involving wolves being dropped onto their land by the government shared by the villagers living in the Croatian-Dalmatian hinterland, but is actually an angry anti-capitalist screed, where the real wolves are industrialists and capitalists who have put short-term monetary gain over the long-term well-being of their communities and the planet. 

I didn’t manage to see any of the winners of the Doc@PÖFF Baltic competition, but I did see Latvian director Laila Pakalnina’s playful doc “Scarecrows.” I love her melancholic doc “Dream Land” from 2004, which outlined how resilient animals created a new ecosystem inside man-made landfills, so I was excited to see her latest. Once again teaming up with Māris Maskalāns, who was the DP on “Dream Land,” the two capture amazing footage of wild animals as they follow the “scarecrows” at Riga International Airport—rangers who keep the runways clear from deer and foxes and rabbits and even flying geese, swans, and storks, and rescue small birds from inside terminals and caught on fences. It’s a warm and joyful film, filled with gentle humor as it contemplates this ridiculous balance between man and beast. 

Although I saw the three big winners of the Baltic Film competition (“The Visitor,” “Renovation,” and “Becoming“), my favorite film of the bunch was also from Latvia: Alise Zariņa’s mordant “Flesh, Blood, Even a Heart.” Anchored by a stunning performance from Ieva Segliņa, who carries the film in all its humor and melancholy with ease, and edited with sly humor by Armands Začs (who also cut “Renovation”), the film follows Liv (Segliņa) as she comes to terms with the fact that her estranged, alcoholic father is dying. Not only must she navigate her own sticky feelings about their relationship, but also the labyrinthine, often Kafkaesque medical system and her partner Marcis’s (Gatis Maliks) midlife crisis. 

Zariņa tackles this heavy subject matter with a wonderfully soft, often humorous touch. Not making light of the weight, but in a way that feels true to what death, dying, and estrangement are like, with the wisdom to know that the love is always there, even if it’s just in flashes of tender memories shared during the good times.

The Rebels With A Cause competition, which celebrates films that push the limits of cinema, awarded its top prize to the crowd-pleasing Belgian-Moroccan film “The Baronesses,” a co-directorial effort by Nabil Ben Yadir and his mother Mokhtaria Badaoui. Using humor and metatextual filmmaking elements, we follow the artistic reawakening of 65-year-old Fatima (Saadia Bentaïeb) after she discovers her husband has been living a double life in Morocco. Determined to live her life on her own terms, she decides to return to her teenage dream of playing Hamlet alongside her best friends, Mériem, Romaissa, and Inès. It’s joyful in its celebration of women of all ages, warm in its sense of community, and super funny to boot.

Although I saw quite a few films in the main competition, I did not see the big winner “The Good Daughter,” which took home the Grand Prix, the Audience Award, and the Best Actress award for star Kiara Arancibia. 

In fact, the only competition film I saw that won an award was Richard Hawkins’s bleak drama “Think of England,” a stark period piece set on a remote British isle that recreates the film unit rumored to have produced pornographic propaganda films to boost morale during WWII. It took home an award for its production design. The two films I loved the most from the main competition were Csaba Káel’s “Hungarian Wedding,” a vibrant, ’80s-set rom com that is as lively as the dances at its heart, and Pascal Schuh’s “Interior,” which deploys its unique premise—a burglar uses a couch with a secret compartment to break into people’s homes, secretly record their private moments, then watches them with his partner, a doctor, who uses them to study human emotions—as a way to both critique German stoicism and also to act as a melancholic examination of modern romance, queer or otherwise. 

Outside of the competition films, I also had to treat myself to a screening of Victor Sjöström’s silent masterpiece, “The Phantom Carriage.” I watched it with a new friend I made at the festival, Francine, who afterwards said she could still feel it in her bones, which is as apt a description of the film’s effect on the viewer as I’ve heard yet. It’s a film I’ve seen many times (and even programmed once at The Plaza in Atlanta), but one that deserves to be revisited as often as possible, especially in a place as cold and beautiful as Tallinn. 

I will miss this lovely town, with its picturesque mixture of medieval buildings and modern sensibilities, and its sense of hospitality and humor. I am grateful for the six days I spent there, filled with good friends, lively conversations, and, best of all, great cinema.

“His name is Nuppeppo. Japanese monster,” the man sitting next to us said, grimacing and holding up his fingers like claws. He was wearing a headband that made it look like an axe was buried in his skull. It was Halloween in Shinjuku, and I was holed up with a friend in a tiny bar up a steep flight of stairs underneath a stained-glass window modeled after one in Dario Argento’s “Suspiria.” Outside in the Times Square of Tokyo, it was raining, and we were amusing ourselves by opening up the little plastic balls we’d bought at a gachapon arcade. 

“Gacha” are ubiquitous in Japan, and we’d gone to one of the larger hubs, lined with brightly lit rows of coin-operated machines dispensing every type of plastic trinket you can imagine. (One offered a selection of tiny Dyson vacuums.) The one that drew me was filled with small vinyl Nuppeppos designed by an artist who called herself “Mysterious Lisa,” in colors like “Melon Green” and “Jellyfish Blue.” A flyer inside the shell offered vinyl molding workshops for aspiring toy designers, led by the artist herself. 

I’d seen Nuppeppo before, in an encyclopedia of Japanese folk monsters illustrated by the legendary manga artist Shigeru Mizuki. A faceless, foul-smelling lump of rotting flesh with arms, it could be spotted lumbering out of graveyards in Old Kyoto at night, startling anyone who dared to take shelter under the incense-scented wooden roof of a Buddhist temple. “Mysterious Lisa” had molded its folds to form an eyebrow ridge, a nose, and even what appeared to be a smile. It looked quite content, actually. 

Nuppeppo is an example of a Japanese yokai, part of a category of supernatural beings that can be quite broad—ghosts, demons, and urban legends can all be considered yokai under the right circumstances—but specifically refers to animistic creatures that inhabit ponds, mountains, forest paths, beaches, rivers, and even city streets—anywhere a traveler might be caught unawares after dark. They can be spritely and whimsical like faeries, or massive and terrifying like cryptids. Unlike kaiju, whose origins are in the postwar atomic era, they predate modern Japanese pop culture. But in recent decades, they’ve become a vital part of that culture. 

Mizuki, who died in 2015, was the key architect of that revival. Although he also published work for adults, Mizuki is best known for creating “Gegege no Kitaro,” which has been adapted into multiple long-running anime, video games, and live-action movies. The series revolves around Kitaro, the last living member of the yokai Ghost Tribe who, along with his deceased father—now reanimated as an eyeball with legs—acts as a go-between for the mundane world of humans and the supernatural world of the yokai. His adventures were first published in 1960, and first adapted for television in 1968; his most recent animated movie, “Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe,” opened in Japanese theaters in 2023.

The immense popularity of Mizuki’s work has led multiple Japanese towns to claim him as a tourist attraction; I opted for the more accessible option of Chōfu, the Tokyo suburb where Mizuki lived and worked for 50 of his 94 years. (His hometown of Sakaiminato has a more elaborate setup, but it’s five hours from Tokyo by train.) On the surface, Chōfu is a typical Japanese town, a collection of karaoke rooms and cram schools and chain stores clustered around a central transit hub. Look closer, however, and you’ll find small panels illustrated with images from Mizuki’s comics at regular intervals along the main road. These lead to a promenade lined with statues of Mizuki creations like “Telebi-kun,” a yokai boy who can climb into and out of televisions at will (an inspiration for “The Ring,” perhaps?).

At one end of Chōfu’s yokai promenade sits a playground, which was occupied by a handful of moms and kids bundled into matching puffer coats when I visited on an overcast weekday afternoon. A friendly-looking Kitaro statue guards the entrance, encouraging small visitors not to be afraid. And indeed, Kitaro’s morbid graveyard origins were totally lost on the toddlers bouncing on a sculpture of Ittan-momen—a haunted roll of cotton Kitaro and friends use like a flying carpet—and squealing while climbing into a yokai cottage whose long tongue stuck out to form a slide. Through them, I could see how yokai have been woven into Japanese childhoods since Mizuki revived interest in them back in the ‘60s, inspiring everything from “Pokémon” to “Spirited Away.” 

Not all yokai culture is for children, however—at least, not exclusively. On my first day in Tokyo, still a little delirious from the jet lag, I boarded an elevator on the ground floor of a massive, multi-level electronics store and rode up to the single-screen art theater on the top floor. We were there to see 1979’s “Demon Pond,” part of a Tokyo Film Festival retrospective in honor of director Masahiro Shinoda, who died this past March. Shinoda was a revered leader of the Japanese New Wave, although his style is harder to pin down than some of his contemporaries; for Shinoda, the freedom to shapeshift was perhaps the point, a through line from the jazzy youth films that made him famous to the stylized throwback of “Demon Pond.” 

The mythical past of “Demon Pond” is a far cry from the gritty, street-level Tokyo underworld Shinoda captured in his most famous film, “Pale Flower.” But it’s more typical of the director’s work, at least of this period. As the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, Shinoda embraced artificiality, and had already experimented with hybridizing traditional Japanese art forms with his films “Double Suicide” and “Himiko” — incorporating bunraku puppet theater and butoh dance, respectively—when he began adapting a 1913 Kabuki play into what would become “Demon Pond.” Isao Tomita’s futuristic synthesizer score aside, “Demon Pond” stays close to its Kabuki roots, as the highly theatrical setting (Shinoda even leaves the polished stage floor visible in some sequences) and stylized performances transport us to a heightened realm of crab men and lovesick dragon princesses.

“Demon Pond” unfolds in the style of a folk tale, following a modern man—botany professor Gakuen (Tsutomu Yamazaki)—as he travels into a realm where science and logic no longer apply. The film takes place in an enchanted pocket of rural Japan, unfolding in a lonely house above a fairytale village so ravaged by drought that the villagers are considering breaking their compact with the White Dragon Princess who reigns over the titular pond. If they fail to ring a sacred bell three times a day, as their ancestors have for centuries, then the Princess will abandon them, and the village will be washed away in a flood. But after two years with no rain, the villagers are getting desperate. What unfolds is not only a tragic romance but an enchanted parable about humanity’s shortsightedness and the madness of crowds.

Kabuki legend Tamasaburo Bando, who specializes in female roles, plays both the White Dragon Princess and Yuri, the village beauty and the key to harmony between the human and supernatural realms. It’s not what we in the West would call a “drag performance;” Bando’s style is affected, but not in a campy way. It’s something more elusive, odder, unnatural, but also intuitively correct. And his otherworldliness is most spellbinding when he’s surrounded by the Princess’s yokai companions, which include a messenger carp, a goat-headed attendant, mud monsters, and the Princess’s coterie of a cat-witch nurse, gray-faced handmaidens, and a girl who is also a camelia flower. 

Its Kabuki origins and style give “Demon Pond” a cultural weight that’s not seen in some of the more kid-focused yokai films, including Daiei Films’ Krofft-inflected “Yokai Monsters” trilogy from the late ‘60s and 2005’s “The Great Yokai War,” a remake of Daiei’s 1968 film helmed by Takashi Miike in one of his more family-friendly modes. But one thing that unites all yokai movies is their artistry. The best part of any yokai movie is the obligatory scene where large numbers of supernatural creatures gather, either in celebration or in battle, allowing the audience to appreciate not only the imagination behind the monsters’ conception but also the craftsmanship behind bringing them to the screen. 

One of the most impressive of these scenes unfolds at the end of “Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters,” when the yokai come together to punish a group of greedy landlords plotting to evict their poor, but noble-hearted tenants. The spirits then take to the streets for the “Night Parade of 100 Demons,” a mythical event with thousand-year-old roots that now takes place twice daily on weekends and holidays at the Toei Eigamura theme park in Kyoto. There, for the second year in a row, a team of artists and performers from the Ashita no Horror (Tomorrow’s Horror) and Hyaku-yo-bako (100 Monsters) collectives have come together to bring a Yokai Festival in the park. 

Although a movie studio also owns it, Toei Eigamura is much smaller than parks like Universal Studios; it’s built around a backlot in the style of a 19th-century Japanese village, and is small enough that you could easily see the whole thing in an afternoon. This was fine by me, as I only had a few hours before I had to head back to Tokyo for my flight home the next day. The crowd early on a Saturday was mainly Japanese families with young children and foreign tourists of all ages, all drawn by Toei Eigamura’s three main attractions: Samurai movies, “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” and, from September to November, yokai. 

The Yokai Festival was a classic theme-park experience, with themed snacks — including a green matcha churro made to resemble Mikoshi-nyudo, a monk whose neck can grow to abnormally long proportions — costumed characters posing for pictures with visitors, and, of course, merch. The day I was there, there was a single “night parade” at 2:30 PM (again, this park is aimed mostly at young children), followed by a stage show where costumed yokai taught kids how to do a “Yokai Dance,” “Monster Mash”-style. It was kitschy but very charming, and the crowd’s enthusiasm was infectious. I took a picture with Yagyo-Douji, a three-eyed child who, like Kitaro, serves as an ambassador between humans and yokai at the festival.

Here, that also means bridging the gap between artist and audience. For an adult visitor, the most compelling thing about the Yokai Festival was the visibility of its creators’ fingerprints—literally, on the hand-sculpted masks worn by the yokai characters roaming the park, and figuratively, in the “Yokai Exhibition” that was installed upstairs from the walkable village. Here, visitors could see the thesis projects of two local art students, one of whom sculpted elaborate yokai out of cardboard and the other of whom created fanciful “fossils” of “extinct yokai” embedded into “burial sites” made of lacquer and foam. 

These were displayed alongside masks created by Hyako-yo-bako founder Junya Kono, who revived Kyoto’s fabled “Night Parade of 100 Demons” along its mythical route on the city’s northern edge as a graduate student in the mid-’00s. Now in his early forties, he’s a lecturer at a private arts university and the epicenter of yokai artistry in the region. Down in the gift shop, prints of his work were sold alongside books by Matthew Meyer, an American illustrator who, in the tradition of “Kwaidan” author Lafcadio Hearn, moved to Japan and now tends to an online database of Japanese legends and folklore full-time. 

Meyer, Kono, Mysterious Lisa, and their fellow yokai enthusiasts are part of a resurgent yokai culture that began in Japan and is now spreading worldwide. Yokai culture seeks to bring enchantment back to everyday life and make friends with the things that scare us. It respects craft, and the artists who paint, sculpt, and draw these creatures are as crucial to the culture as the yokai themselves. Much like the ancient people who turned their fears into monsters, modern yokai culture uses these folk beliefs as a conduit for creative expression, bringing 21st-century anxieties to electrifying, anthropomorphic life. 

This was never clearer than in a quiet corner of the ‘Yokai Museum” at Toei Eigamura, where a series of colorful woodblock prints hung on a plain black wall. Produced by Ashita no Horror director Ogaki Gaku, these “Modern Mononoke” personified internet-age anxieties: A genderless creature with a cracked, featureless mask and pink hair covered in eyes represented the pathological need for affirmation from strangers online, while the God of Disinformation took the form of a three-faced monk with a chaotic jumble of metal sprouting from its head. 

These are real fears, ones that are just as relevant today as the empty pit in your stomach when walking alone down a dark mountain road. So, what do the things that keep you awake at night look like? Could you draw them, describe them, give them a name? If you did, they might become less fearsome in the process—maybe even cute little mascots you could put in your pocket and take home.

We are proud to be a part of a network of sites that has awarded Julia Loktev’s stunning “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” with the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award. Other films cited as essential ones of 2025 include “Cutting Through Rocks,” “Familiar Touch,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” and “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” Please see the official press release below:

Indie Film Site Network (IFSN) has announced Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow as the recipient of the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award. The award was established in 2022 to highlight independent films each year that illuminate a humanitarian issue with a singular artistic vision. The top prize is awarded one million (1M) media impressions across the Indie Film Site Network, which represents The Film Stage, Hammer to Nail, IONCINEMA.com, Next Best Picture, RogerEbert.com, and Slant Magazine. Letterboxd is also contributing to the award.

Finalists for the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award are Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni’s ​​Cutting Through Rocks, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which will each be awarded 100K media impressions across IFSN. 

Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, Day Night Day Night) came to Moscow in 2021 to make a film about independent journalists being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime—as it turns out, just four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host at TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev brings us into a community of sharp, warm, and funny young women speaking truth to power as they face increasing threats. Loktev filmed in Moscow during the first week of the full-scale invasion, as the journalists tried to counter Russian propaganda and report the truth on the war, until all independent media were shut down and they were forced to flee the country. Structured in five chapters, feeling like a cross between a Russian novel and a reality show about frighteningly real reality, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary historical record of a country on the verge of fascism and an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.

“This is such an honor. The way audiences are experiencing this film has changed so much over the past months,” said Julia Loktev. “It’s gone from being a film about journalists fighting an authoritarian regime in a far away place, to hitting very close to home in the U.S. People keep telling me the film has helped them process the current moment, which is also a form of advocacy—a reminder not to ignore the warning signs and, hopefully, an inspiration to keep fighting even when the fight sometimes feel lost.”

“As the vital right of the freedom of press continues to be eroded across the world, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow intimately and exhaustively captures the Putin regime’s calculated dismantling of what should be a universal certainty,” said Jordan Raup, co-founder of IFSN and editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Film Stage. “In presenting the IFSN Advocate Award to Loktev, we also want to commend the courage of the film’s subjects––Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, Olga Churakova, Irina Dolinina––for steadfastly reporting amidst the threat of immediate danger. We sincerely hope a U.S. distributor comes aboard to introduce this essential documentary to a wider audience.”

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow premiered at the 2024 New York Film Festival, and subsequently played at Berlin International Film Festival, IDFA Best of Fests, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Visions du Réel Film Festival, and Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, among others. It received a U.S. qualifying run in August at Film Forum and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

The IFSN Advocate Award, created by the network as part of its mission to celebrate and support indie film, is selected by a jury of writers and editors from IFSN sites, with each site nominating a finalist and deliberating to award a winner. Previous IFSN Advocate Award winners include Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land, D. Smith’s Kokomo City, and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes.

About Indie Film Site Network

Indie Film Site Network (IFSN) is a collaboration between well-respected media outlets covering the most essential developments in independent and international cinema. IFSN, which represents The Film Stage, Hammer to Nail, IONCINEMA.com, Next Best Picture, RogerEbert.com, and Slant Magazine, was created with a mission to support film criticism and foster an ever-growing community of indie film lovers. For more information, visit indiefilmsitenetwork.com. For sales and partnership inquiries, contact sales@3rdimpression.com.

Before I sat down to watch the documentary about him, I had only heard the name Sato Tadao once. It was in an article by Roger Ebert, a piece about Yasujiro Ozu’s rise in popularity in the West, in which Ebert referred to Tadao as a “veteran Japanese critic” whom he had met while on a trip to Tokyo. Both Tadao and Ebert were great admirers of Ozu’s, and in the article, Ebert lays out a series of the director’s stylistic signatures, crediting them to his Japanese counterpart’s writings on the subject. 

Directed by Terasaki Mizuho, “Journey into Sato Tadao” is a biographical portrait that makes the case for Tadao as one of Japan’s most important film critics. The film is loosely structured around Terasaki’s journey to the state of Kerala in southern India, where she seeks out the people behind Sato’s “actual” favorite film, “Kumatty” (1979), by director G. Aravindan. The quotation marks originate from a sequence early on in the doc, in which Sato—who died in 2022, but appears in footage Terasaki shot before his passing—says that he has two answers ready for when someone asks him his favorite film: A respectable one, and a real one. (Ironically, the Roger Ebert piece that led me to Sato also opens with an anecdote about recommendations.) 

Later in the film. Terasaki and her crew also travel to South Korea to interview Sato’s friends and colleagues there, part of a larger discussion about film critics as cultural ambassadors who can make real, material changes in filmmakers’ lives by advocating for them abroad. (I’d argue that it’s one of the nobler functions of film criticism as a profession, and something I’d ideally hope to accomplish by writing about the films I see here in Tokyo.) For Sato, this relationship went two ways: not only did he write about Japanese films for foreign readers like Roger Ebert, but he also played a big role in popularizing Indian and South Korean cinema in Japan.

Sato speaks warmly of his friends across Asia in “Journey into Sato Tadao.” Terasaki believes that these relationships must have been a relief to the writer, who, despite his working-class background, rose to become a member of Japan’s social elite. But he was never comfortable there, and maintained throughout his life that cinema should be for the people. “Everybody looked up to him. He was a scholar. People used honorifics to talk to him” in Japan, Terasaki says. “But I got the impression that the people in Korea and India did not have that kind of a distance between themselves and him. I think that made him happy,” she says. 

Although Sato’s international impact serves as a framing device for the documentary, its heart is in his relationship with his wife, Hisako. “Journey into Sato Tadao” paints Tadao and Hisako’s relationship as a partnership of true equals, in which Hisako, who was already successful in her own right when she met her future husband, was a strong advocate for (and presence in) his work. In 1973, they cofounded the film journal “Eigashi Kenkyu,” which is still active today. “Their love affair was very colorful,” Terasaki says.

Here was another parallel. Since Roger’s passing in 2013, Chaz Ebert—who also had a successful law career before meeting Roger—has been the steward of his legacy, and is the publisher of the website you’re reading right now. And the similarities didn’t stop there: Sato also published books on film and film history, many of which are seminal texts to young Japanese film lovers. (He was more prolific than Ebert, however, publishing more than 150 books on various subjects in his lifetime.) And, like Ebert, Sato taught film as well as writing about it. 

Back in the ‘00s, Terasaki was a student in one of Sato’s film classes at the Japan Academy of Moving Images, where her initial impression was that “he [knew] anything and everything about Japanese films. And whenever he talked about a film, his face lit up like a little boy’s. It showed how much he loved movies. But otherwise, he was not easy to approach.” Years later, Terasaki was working as a documentary producer when she got an offer to direct a doc about her former teacher, the one she found so intimidating back in film school. 

“At the beginning, I couldn’t really figure out his character,” she says. “But then Sato’s niece “gave me a diary that he wrote when he was around 25. And in that diary, he mentioned his anxiety about the future, and his dreams for what he wanted to do [with his life]. Reading that, I realized that this young Mr. Sato was very accessible, and so the psychological gap between him and I became smaller and I was able to relate to him more.” 

Passages from Sato’s diaries, as well as his books, are quoted throughout “Journey Into Sato Tadao.” In choosing these passages, Terasaki says she prioritized writings in which Sato was processing his experiences in the moment, whether his feelings about the devastation of WWII or his reflections after seeing a new favorite film for the first time. The passage that resonated with me the most is about writing: “When I write it down, that’s when I start to see what I’m thinking. When I’m not writing, I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Terasaki quotes Sato as saying. 

Although she’s not a critic herself—in typically modest Japanese fashion, she says she keeps a diary of films she’s watched, but doesn’t share it with anyone—the more we talked, the more  I realized Terasaki and I had in common.  Not only are we women from the same generation working on projects about famous older male critics who inspired us early in our careers, but we’re also both devoted cinephiles. Her favorite film is “Pigs and Battleships” by Imamura Shohei (incidentally, also the founder of the school where Sato eventually taught), and he hopes to film something as good as its ending someday. She’s been attending the Tokyo International Film Festival for years, although this is the first time she has a film in the festival. 

Cinephile culture in Japan is strong, but insular, Terasaki says. “We have a wonderful library at the National Film Archive. And so these films are being preserved, but we’re not very good at using the archive to its fullest and showing them to public audiences. They do have screenings, but only film fans attend, not the general public. So I hope that there will be chances where “ordinary people” will have the chance to see these old Japanese films and become more interested in Japanese film history, because it is a fascinating subject.”

When I explain to her Roger Ebert’s famous quote about film as an “empathy machine,” she brings up another quote from her former film professor in response. In his book “Can You Love the World Through Movies?,” Sato “left the words that film is like a greeting, meaning that you can show the world what kind of a country you are, or what kind of person, or culture, through films. Then you’re able to learn about that country, or learn to like that country, through its films,” she says.

At the end of our interview, the translator told me that Terasaki had a question for me as well: Was there a documentary about Roger Ebert? I said, yes, it’s called “Life Itself.” “Ah! I watched that as research for my film,” Terasaki replied. Turns out she’s a Steve James fan, too.

In its 29th year of programming, Chicago International Film Festival’s Black Perspectives category continues to exhibit and uplift stories across the diaspora, adding evidence to the archives that Black folk are far from monolithic. Now, more than ever, taking the time to experience stories outside of our own will conserve our ability to be compassionate neighbors. With 10 feature films and a shorts program included in CIFF’s 61st lineup, Black Perspectives, like the other categories, can serve as a strong source for curating one’s own festival experience.

An archival snippet of activist and organizer Rosie Douglas telling us to “learn [your] history” sets the tone for the story that “True North” seeks to tell. The black and white documentary from director Michèle Stephenson, weaves together soundbites, interviews, and a plethora of historical documentation to recount key events and people of the Civil Rights Era in Canada, and, more specifically, Montreal. Not only does “True North” bring our attention to the historical and present day Black-Canadian experience, but the film also directly confronts how anti-Blackness is built and perpetuated by institutions. 

Stephenson strings together a narrative that was once stuck out of sight, a persistent yet unsurprising struggle of the Black experience and Black history. Similar to the foundation of the United States, a majority of the Black population in Canada is due to the transatlantic slave trade and immigration. Anchored in one of the more angsty (and, therefore, inactive) age groups, Stephenson narrows in on college students at Sir George University who are standing up for equal classroom treatment and academic opportunity. As hundreds of students of all races and creed take over the precious college computer lab, the monochromatic scanned photos, peppered with interviews and archival audio illustrate the unnecessary, one-sided violence that quickly gets out of hand and is later taken advantage of within legal context.

All these years later, Brenda Dash, one of the women who was a prevalent player in such protests, states that in some ways her “soul is still colonized.” To no fault of her own, there is so much power in hearing an elder speak truth to the imperfections of combatting and overcoming generational, systemic suffering. In its final moments, “Reach the Sunshine,” a futuristic, psychedelic punk song by rapper Lil Yachty awakens our souls with sounds that fuel us with optimism for our ability to continue correcting such cruel, longstanding corruptions through collective action.

“Pasa Faho,” slang for, or play on, the phrase “parts of a whole,” takes the pieces of our broken hearts and puts them together again. In director and writer Kalu Oji’s feature debut, there is undeniable warmth and understanding of whose story he is trying to tell. Oji, who is Igbo Australian, tells the story of Nigerian shoe-store owner, Azubuike (Okey Bakassi), who slowly endures unexpected hardships right as his tween son Obinna (Tyson Palmer) starts to live with him. The family-drama is also a story of immigrant communities finding their footing in new places, how spirituality can be reshaped amidst such shifts, and how one’s sense of purpose can come into question but persevering through parenthood.

Despite the limited large-scale and landscape shots, each character has a grand presence, framed intimately in close ups that influence the overall perception of what audiences are able to connect to in this story. With exceptional chemistry between the father-son duo, Bakassi and Palmer bring contemplative, complexity to their characters. Even in moments of few words, much is said with their eyes and their physicality.

Over and over the film conveys some iteration of “true love must move along and evolve;” a lesson Azubuike not only reiterates to his son, but one that he, too, is learning and accepting. As the score oscillates between high-vibration afrobeats to more melancholic, classically orchestrated music, each scene is both visually and sonically saturated with emotional queues. “Pasa Faho” is layered and lovely on every level.

At last, the art of Sun Ra, the enigma, the intergalactic sonic savant, is brought to the silver screen. In Christine Turner’s newest documentary, “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible,” we’re flung into his orbit, entranced by his audacious mindset and outlook on life.

The film skims through Sun Ra’s early years and establishes him as a self-proclaimed divine figure from a young age. His beliefs were bigger than the human body can hold; a confidence so courageous and mighty, it was best channeled through making music. Turner transports us to Birmingham, AL in the 1940s, then we’re along for a journey to Chicago, New York, Europe, Africa, and beyond.

Despite the film’s diverse and well stacked line up of sources and interviewees, there is not an explicit, detailed display of Sun Ra’s lasting impact and legacy. Journalists and scholars unanimously agree that Sun Ra and his nature of making was otherworldly. Notably, he’s named “the godfather of Afrofuturism” as the film flashes several artists who embody an offshoot of the aesthetic Sun Ra and his Arkestra brought to the stage. Yet the only musicians included in the documentary are his former bandmates and fellow followers of afro-mythology. Some even admit the almost cult-like mentality the musical troupe underwent to remain in line with Sun Ra’s vision and aspirations.

Although this is a seemingly weak point of the overall film, “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” has a central thesis of placing its subject within the archive as someone who is larger than life. With deep care and patience, Turner sifts through mountains of archival anecdotes (from letters to albums to found footage) to present just one iota of all Sun Ra was. As the film dances through time, the entirety of the score is composed of sounds created by Sun Ra; before the synthy ’70s, we boogie to the big band of the ’40s. The evidence is in the air while the psychedelic editing enhances our ability to have faith and make believe.

“Atmospheric” and “measured” are the two words that describe the three films composing this latest Chicago International Film Festival dispatch. All three works, hailing from the festival’s New Director’s Competition, are films that consider loss and isolation in an unhurried manner. These sensorial works are also ambitious and assured, trusting the audience to accompany their stories on narrative paths whose emotional ends aren’t readily given; they’re earned.   

A quietly moving film about grief, writer/director Stefan Djordjevic’s “Wind, Talk To Me” is an unassuming hybrid work that effortlessly blends documentary with fiction. It follows a mournful  Djordjevic, who, while driving to visit his grandmother for her 80th birthday, accidentally hits a dog with his car. Eventually, Djordjevic will adopt this dog and name her Lija. That fictional element of this docudrama, however, is only a sliver of the overall film. Djordjevic is arriving at his grandparent’s home with a heavy heart: His mother Negrica recently passed away, and he hopes to complete the real film he was making about her. 

Without warning, Djordjevic’s film navigates into the past, becoming several films within a film. The first involves the documentary footage Djordjevic is presently shooting of his family climbing trees, luxuriating in their rural spaces, and completing a lake house. The second film is composed of previously shot footage of Djordjevic’s mother, such as the holistic treatment she undertook and her many musings about how humans can control the wind. The majority of “Wind, Talk To Me,” therefore, is Djordjevic using these two elements, including his therapeutic relationship with Lija, to process his loss. 

In his meditations, nature becomes its own character. A close-up captures Djordjevic’s rubbing hand over tree bark, creating a sound akin to crumbling charred tissue paper. In other moments, the wind and leaves whisper with soulful intensity. The film’s DP Marko Brdar is especially attuned to the sensorial environment, enveloping us in its majesty and solemnity with soft precision. And while “Wind, Talk To Me” can be knowingly distant, juxtaposing Djordjevic’s lonely heart to the intimacy of family life, the docudrama is never too cute nor too vague. By the end, we fully perceive the necessity of holding and cherishing every moment with a loved one, grasping at opportunities to simply commune with them.      

While I wouldn’t necessarily call “Brand New Landscape,” writer/director Yuiga Danzuka’s melancholic debut feature, slow cinema. It’s certainly an unhurried rumination. It starts with a family of four who’ve arrived at a vacation home for the weekend when their selfish architect father Hajime (Kenichi Endo) asks his wife if he can immediately depart to take on a job. The brazenness Tanakao displays as he slowly dismisses his wife’s many counterarguments, to the point of wearing her down into a fetal position, permanently changes his observant son. Fast forward ten years: His son Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) delivers flowers and his daughter Emi (Mai Kiryû) is preparing to be married. 

Danzuka’s film doesn’t readily turn to melodrama. Ren is such a quiet spectator, when Emi tells him about her impending marriage, he can barely mumble “congratulations.” It’s not until he discovers a floral arrangement addressed for his dad—who’s just returned to the country after working overseas for three years—that he becomes emotionally shaken. Emi, on other hand, declares that she doesn’t really care about their dad anymore. But as she advances closer and closer into her move on date with her fiance, we see how much her father’s abandonment has affected her too. This tricky dynamic between these three characters holds much of “Brand New Landscape” together, especially as the film shifts into phantasmagorical territory. 

“Brand New Landscape” becomes shakier, however, when Danzuka moves away from the narrative’s family drama to critique the soulless new structures dotting Tokyo. While he tries to parallel his aesthetic disgust with the film’s condemnation of Hajime—the character’s most famous project is a vapid megamall that required the government to clear the houseless from the land to build—his interrogation remains too far on the edges of the film to fully succeed. That failing, thankfully, can easily be chalked up to first-time filmmaker issues. The character-based components of “Brand New Landscape” are so strong, it’s easy to ignore the faults in its foundation. 

Louise Hémon’s hypnotic and sumptuous “The Girl in the Snow” uses the arrival of French teacher Aimée Lazare (Galatéa Bellugi) in 1899 to critique the customs, homophobia, and female sexual repression of a small snowbound Hautes-Alpes village. A lowlander, Aimée has arrived in this mountainous setting with nary any knowledge about their local beliefs. When she attempts to teach the children what a cow sounds like, they correct her by telling her a cow makes a “broo broo” call rather than a “moo” sound. When she attempts to give two of her students a bath, the elderly women scold her: in their minds the kids need crust on their heads to protect their brains. Worst yet for this very horny protagonist, she becomes attracted to the local men—Pépin (Samuel Kircher) and Enoch (Matthieu Lucci)—while ignoring the infatuation displayed by the quiet stableboy Daniel (Oscar Pons). 

With a prickly folkloric score, “The Girl in the Snow” becomes a supernatural tale that proposes a woman’s sensuality as a kind of malevolent spirit. Homosexuality is similarly pitched as a desire that must be hidden away, often in caves, lest they upset the “natural” balance of the village. The more these appetites are hidden, of course, the greater angst and trouble they inspire within this tiny hamlet that believes the mountain gives gifts and takes away people. Despite that tension, it would be a mistake to think Hémon’s film considers these modest folks smallminded. When Aimée writes down one of their oral stories, in French no less—the locals speak Occitan—the elders are incensed. Not only does Aimée not see how she’s erasing their language, thereby, locking this amorphous tradition in a kind of colonized state. She also laments that all she wants to do is bring enlightenment to them. 

With that want in mind, Hémon displays an enrapturing visual eye. The snowy, hilly landscape allows the director and her DP Marine Atlan to rely on negative space to visualize how separated Aimée is from the spirit of the land she resides on and the ideas of the people who inhabit it. While the director and DP’s chiaroscuro shadows often recall the Dutch masters, their hallucinatory staging, which combines airy lighting with a kind of rural claustrophobia, deepens the haunting residue the film leaves. The effect is a startling directorial debut whose sense of place and mood become as timeless as a folktale.    

Documentary is a filmmaking approach inherently designed for remembrance. In fact, it’s the approach that most closely can be aligned with photography and the desire to capture a moment, a person, or a thing before the forces of time overcome and erase its existence. So, you know, usually with these films, you’re going to get a topic of some import. The three films in this Chicago International Film Festival dispatch take the form’s ability to heart in a bid to preserve the memories of a Kosovo village, the legacy of a disgraced Ghanaian president, and an area of Italy previously wiped out by a volcano. These films, to varying degrees of success, stand as a testament to the importance of remembrance, even when the memories hurt.   

For the last year or so, cinema has been inundated with films about unmoored individuals and shaken communities grappling with the loss of their homelands. Swiss-Albanian director Dea Gjinovci’s elegiac documentary “The Beauty of the Donkey” is a fine addition to that trend. It concerns the filmmaker’s father, who, with his daughter, returns to their small village in Kosovo for the first time in nearly 60 years. While there, her father, Asllan, shares memories that Gjinovci decides to stage as abstract theatrical productions, bringing the past back to modernity with potency.

This is also a film that mixes politics with loss. In 1968, a 19-year-old Asllan was a political activist when he was exiled. Upon leaving the country, he lost contact with his family, particularly his mother, whose death has always lived in family lore. Asllan shares the oppression his family suffered under Serbian authorities and the risks taken to combat their rule with stunning clarity; he also investigates his mother’s death with equal fervor. These family stories, of course, impact Gjinovci as well. Because she grew up in Switzerland, she’s never seen her father’s homeland. In the opening sequence, when Asllan emerges from the woods, walking toward the field where his stone home once stood, in the assuredness of her lens you can feel the haunting reverence Gjinovci has for this moment.

Despite the film’s fanciful title, however, there aren’t many donkeys in this picture. Two scenes featuring donkeys bookend the work, and while you can certainly sense how the animal traces back to a moment of innocence in Asllan’s life and serves as a reminder of his own endurance, the moments don’t cohere enough to be the film’s throughline. Instead the film is strongest when it doesn’t give way to twee metaphorical scenes, but focuses on the cathartic reclamation of one’s history.   

I really wish director Ben Proudfoot’s messy historical documentary “The Eyes of Ghana,” a partial product of executive producers Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, was better. It’s one of those films whose desire to tell a little-known story grants it some slack, but whose unsteady execution quickly evaporates much of the goodwill you came into it with. The film concerns legendary Ghanaian cinematographer and director Chris Hesse’s desire to reclaim over a thousand cans of footage from London that he shot of the country’s first president Kwame Nkrumah before the leader’s downfall from a military coup in 1966. While that story alone would make for an incredible documentary, Proudfoot overpacks “The Eyes of Ghana” with far too many other threads for it all to hold together. 

Proudfoot is a two-time winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film (“The Last Repair,” “The Queen of Basketball”), a background you can unfortunately feel when “The Eyes of Ghana” begins with the three cold opens. The first opener introduces Hesse; the second produces his protege, director Anita Afonu; the third brings in the steadfast projectionist of Ghana’s Rex Cinema, Addo, who often dreams of hosting film at the disused movie house again. With that set-up you can pretty much guess where this film will end up. Nevertheless, Proudfoot doesn’t neatly interweave these threads. He continues shifting subjects, giving us the early history of Ghanaian moviemaking, Nkrumah’s troubled story, and how America disrupted the Pan-Africa movement via destabilizing newly independent governments. Rather than making a coherent feature out of these varied topics, unfortunately, Proudfoot has produced several shorts whose total composition lacks focus as a feature. 

His film is further hobbled when he begins including the digitized and restored pieces that Hesse shot (in a sense “The Eyes of Ghana” is a well-meaning advertising for further funds to restore the rest of Hesse’s stored footage). Not because the images aren’t exceptional, because Hesse’s films are so much better than the movie we’re watching, which relies on a garish Disney-esque score by Kris Bowers and an on-the-nose desire to capture Hesse at such an angle that we’re always staring deeply into his eyes. Though Proudfoot clearly has an appreciation for the material—“Rwanda and Juliet,” his only other feature, considered the post-genocide lives of that African country—this film is too slick and too broad for such a sensitive story.    

The history of Vesuvius, whose eruption led to the decimation of Pompeii, has served as a shot that continues to be heard round the world. So when Gianfranco Rosi’s gorgeous, black and white shot documentary “Below the Clouds” fixes its lens on the mountain, you immediately expect his film will hyper focus on that looming threat. But Rosi, whose previous films include overtly political works like “Fire at Sea” and “Notturno,” rarely takes notice of the life inside the volcano. He instead weaves through the ordinary life bustling around Naples and the recording of lives long past gone by the archeologists excavating local historical sites. 

“Below the Clouds” isn’t a talky documentary, per se. It’s totally observational. Even so, Rosi’s meditative lens takes notice of the chatter emanating from its many locations. There’s the emergency call center where people phone for assistance following every tremor. While you’d think these would be intense communications, their inherent franticness is cut down by the humor and sweetness of the officials taking these calls. Greater chatter is found via Syrian boatmen looking for entry into the port for their Ukrainian grain. And even more talk occurs whenever we jump into the work performed by archaeologists, who are navigating, at times, vast tunnels and excavated caverns holding the frozen, calcified victims of Pompeii.   

When combined, all of these scenes entail a documentary fascinated by the fragility and suspension of life. The rhythmic editing, for instance, creates a circular pattern, returning to and remixing images whose continual convergence imbues these mundane images with great meaning. Rosi also ventures into a movie house, where he plays films like “Last Days of Pompeii” (1913) and “Voyage to Italy” (1954), which speak to the long-held cultural fascination with an event that continues to fascinate outsiders and remains ever prevalent in the minds of those living near the famed volcano. In a sense, by locking his contemporary documentary in this rich black and white photography, Rosi has also put his film along those. Thereby, preserving the artifacts of memory that make this place home.  

Both in life and in the movies, things are not always what they seem. The award-winning career woman may look successful, but after the celebratory crowd goes home, she’s left alone with dark thoughts and anxiety. The set of a prestigious film may sound like an exciting prospect, but behind the scenes, chaos and hurt feelings threaten to take over the spotlight. The comedian looking to charm the crowd might be a lot less funny off-stage as he fumbles through his new life away from his wife and kids. 

Bradley Cooper’s straightforward NYFF closer “Is This Thing On?” opens with Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess Novak (Laura Dern) finally agreeing to end their marriage. As they start to uncouple their lives, Alex finds comfort in New York City’s stand-up comedy scene, while Tess returns to her love of volleyball as a coach. Although their lives seem to be moving in different directions, there’s still the lingering chance of “what if?” and a second shot at finding happiness together. 

Although the writing of “Is This Thing On?” is not as funny as a tight ten-minute set of one’s favorite comedian (it’s much more somber than the premise lets on), Arnett and Dern are phenomenal, immediately tapping into the complicated and conflicted feelings their characters have for each other. As each partner digs their problems deeper and deeper, undoing the progress they’ve made, they capture something believable about the experience of hurtling towards making mistakes in the heat of an argument and not quite saying what needs to be said. They’re each naturally funny, yet unafraid to get serious and vulnerable. With a supporting cast that includes Cooper, Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning, and Amy Sedaris for a brief “BoJack Horseman” reunion, the pair have plenty of different comedic foils to commiserate with their characters’ problems.

Cooper’s comedy of remarriage feels a bit more unpolished than his previous movies, such as the adaptation of the showbiz cautionary tale “A Star is Born” and the Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro.” Here, the heightened emotions threaten to overtake the movie. While the handheld camera work intensifies the whirlwind experience of a situation spiraling out of control, it ends up feeling like a double exclamation point at the end of a sentence. The stand-up scenes are almost too uncomfortable to endure, but the powerhouse team of Arnett and Dern make the best out of some rocky scenes to share the last laugh.

In Milagros Mumenthaler’s “The Currents,” Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) is a celebrated fashion designer who seems to have it all: a thriving career and a loving, picture-perfect family. But after accepting an award in Switzerland, Lina throws herself off a bridge, leaving herself in a state of shock after escaping the water. The lingering, uneasy feelings follow her back from the icy lake to Buenos Aires. Unhappy with her life, she struggles to acclimate to her roles as mother and wife, and her creative process also seems to have been affected. Work is no longer the escape it once was. Undergoing a rebirth of sorts out of this time of crisis, Lina must decide what her new life will look like going forward. 

“The Currents” is a complicated portrait of a woman on the edge of a breakdown—or is it a breakthrough? As Lina figures out her new reality, Mumenthaler and cinematographer Gabriel Sandru follow her highs and lows in numerous close-ups, punctuated with pops of color like Lina’s bright red lipstick and a sky blue coat in the Switzerland scenes to draw the audience’s eye in to see what her lead actress is doing with the subtle movements of her face. 

González Sola plays Lina with a sense of sympathy, slowly unpacking how a successful, confident woman becomes unable to speak about her darkest thoughts. She’s subtle in her movements, like when Lina carefully applies coats of bright lipstick to act as if everything is fine, but her increasingly unkempt hair is the physical manifestation of her tangled state of mind.  

Mumenthaler channels the work of Lucrecia Martel, bottling up the suffocating isolation of middle-class life in Argentina, into a psychological study of one woman trapped by the pressures to “have it all.” As with Martel’s “The Headless Woman,” the jarring brush with death unmoors Lina from the rhythm of her daily life. The perfect husband seems less stellar in the face of a crisis. She’s increasingly exhausted from the demands of motherhood and her career, with no relief in sight. 

Her annoyance with her mother-in-law intensifies as she senses the other woman’s disapproval of her behavior. She throws herself into her work because that’s her easiest coping mechanism, but her mind is elsewhere, and she can no longer hide behind her crumbling facade. Eventually, she visits her mother, which unlocks another piece of Lina’s life and her mental health struggles. 

In the case of Ulrich Köhler’s “Gavagai,” a reimagining of a classic Greek text becomes the launch pad for a larger conversation on race, gender, and equality. Written and directed by Köhler, “Gavagai” uses a restrained narrative of a movie within a movie as a meta commentary to illustrate a variety of thorny issues, especially the power dynamics of a European film shooting on location in Africa. There are also race and gender imbalances to sort through in the relationship between the two lead actors, who, for various reasons, can’t or won’t be able to move forward in their steamy romance. 

Emotions are high on the set of a new adaptation of “Medea.” Fashioned in a fictional world blending futuristic clothes and modern-day items like a modestly tricked-out boat, the scene where Medea played by Maja (Maren Eggert) shows her murderous brutality to her husband Jason as played by French Senegalese actor Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) isn’t going to plan, and a diminutive tyrant, the film’s director Caroline Lescot (Nathalie Richard), enters the frame screaming. The shot must be reset, and as her lead actress walks out, extras are wandering off, and Medea’s supposedly dead children have taken the boat for a joy ride. 

But these are hardly the worst issues. As Maja and Nourou embark on a passionate on-set affair, it soon becomes apparent they’re not getting equal treatment. When the film jumps forward to the movie’s imminent European premiere, Nourou is left out in the cold, almost quite literally, when a hotel guard tries to kick him out of the property for smoking, something that would have happened to a white member of the film team. A silent air of discontent hangs over “Gavagai” as these microaggressions add up. 

The Medea movie within a movie looks comically misguided, but that’s hardly the issue. The film’s primary focus is on how the industry treats its workers with minimal power, as it explores issues of representation and gatekeepers. There are many uncomfortable moments of yelling and disrespect towards the African cast and crew, especially from Lescot, who appears to be modeled after Claire Denis. Later, at a buzzing press conference, it becomes apparent that Lescot is clueless about how her film is perceived and relies on the Black members of the cast to defend choices they didn’t make. Meanwhile, both Maja and Nourou are coping with their own feelings of inequality, whether that’s to be seen as more than a commodity or to be accepted into the world they’ve staked their careers in. 

About midway through Kent Jones’ “Late Fame,” I heard the last thing I ever expected to hear at the New York Film Festival: the voice of Ezra Pound. The aged speaker is not identified, nor is the poem he’s reciting; if you don’t know one or both, it won’t register. The film’s protagonist, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), is a New York poet who quit writing verse decades before but still listens to the greatest hits of yesteryear. That’s how he happens to put on a recording of Pound reading his Canto LXXXI: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross/What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.

In Jones’ extraordinary comedy-drama, Ed, now a longtime employee of the post office, is accosted one night in front of his downtown apartment building by a young man (Edmund Donovan) who professes not only to know the one book of the older man’s verse that was published in 1979, but to revere it. More than that, he is part of a group of young New Yorkers, the self-styled Enthusiasm Society, who likewise cherish his work. Once he’s persuaded to visit the group, Ed finds a collective of earnest twentysomethings from various creative disciplines who look to the past for orientation and inspiration.

“Late Fame” was scripted by Samy Burch from a fiction by Arthur Schnitzler, which sharply satirized the bohemianism of early 20^th century Vienna. But satiric skewering isn’t what Burch and Jones are up to here. They ask us to take their 21^st century bohos with a measure of seriousness, albeit with a smile and perhaps a raised eyebrow. They stand purposefully against a culture of “influencers” and internet drivel. Who wouldn’t agree with that?

Their choice of cultural avatars is interesting. They know Ginsberg and Burroughs, but little or nothing beyond the Beat era, it seems. Although it’s never said, it could be that Ed’s 1979 verse represents the end of the long, noble tradition they worship, after which came the deluge of mass media rubbish. Also interesting is that most of their literary heroes belong to New York culture. Which is why it’s curious that the pinnacle of their literary pantheon at one point is summarized as “Whitman, Pound, Williams.” The middle name in that trinity not only wasn’t a New Yorker but was arguably American literature’s most notorious antisemite.

In the film’s press notes, Jones says, “It was very important to me to deal with real poetry in the movie … Pound is obviously a problematic figure from a political standpoint, but his greatest poetry and his effect on the world of poetry is something else again—that’s why Ginsberg and Pasolini paid homage to him.” Jones’ choice of how to represent “real poetry” was a bold one, and in my view, it connects his film with two others I saw in the initial NYFF press screenings. All three are by independent directors based (formerly in one case) in New York, and their films suggest interesting, if very different, relationships between film and poetry–and our current cultural moment and the past.

The three films appear in the context of the New York Film Festival’s 63rd edition, which runs Sept. 26-Oct. 13 at Lincoln Center. This year’s schedule is varied and promising. Among the highlights: Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner “It Was Just an Accident” by Iranian master Jafar Panahi; Venice’s Golden Lion winner “Father Mother Sister Brother” by Jim Jarmusch; two by Richard Linklater, “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon,” the latter with Ethan Hawke in an acclaimed performance as Lorenz Hart; two by Romanian provocateur Radu Jude, “Dracula” and “Kontinental ’25”; the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s comedy “Is This Thing On?”; biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” with Jeremy Allen White as the Boss; “Anemone,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis in a film directed by his son; “The Secret Agent” by Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho; Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” starring George Clooney as – what else – a movie star; Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Cannes prize winner “Sentimental Value“; and Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite“. And that’s just a partial list.

To return to “Late Fame”: The members of the Enthusiasm Society that Ed Saxberger encounters are believable as contemporary New Yorkers even if their interests belong to bygone times. They are not all poets–there’s a playwright, a critic (oops, make that an essayist), and so on–and they sport the affectation of identifying each other only by their last names. Their apparent leader, the one who first met Saxberger, is Meyers, and he appears a bit older than the others. All are male, with one very notable exception: Gloria (Greta Lee), an actress who plays the roles of mother figure, temptress, shape-shifter, romantic ideal, betrayer, etc.

Saxberger is initially surprised and baffled by the hero worship visited on him, but he quickly softens as he sees the admiration is genuine. An early turning point in their relationship comes one day when he’s invited to Meyers’ home. He finds a large, impeccably decorated apartment adorned with blown-up covers of books by William Carlos Williams and others. This revelation leads Ed, who grew up working-class, to the realization that not just Meyers but other (or all?) members of the group are the products of wealthy families. Does this invalidate their cultural enthusiasms? Or merely invite us to understand them in the context of today’s burgeoning class differences?

In the film’s first act, we witness both the attraction and the growing tension between Saxberger and his disciples. They are planning an event and are insistent that he read a poem at it. He refuses to read anything new as he stopped writing years before, but he reluctantly agrees to let Gloria read one of his old poems. The tale’s second act showcases two remarkable performances, though not the ones we earlier expected. One is Gloria’s extraordinary rendition of the Kurt Weill/Bertold Brecht song “Surabaya Johnny.” The other, which happens after Gloria fails to appear to read Saxberger’s poem, features Ed himself rising to the occasion and reciting a poem that not only seems to fit the lineage of “Whitman, Pound, Williams,” but also suggests how he may have reached the stage of burnout years before.

I found the film the film to this point incredibly captivating due to the very subtle and ingenious writing and the three terrific performances at its center. As Saxberger, Willem Dafoe, one of our greatest actors, gives a career-best performance that captures the poet’s mix of intelligence, exhaustion and lingering aspiration. As Gloria, Greta Lee adds to her outstanding work in “Past Lives” with a brilliant turn that creates a woman of complex talents, ambitions and fears. And Edmund Donovan’s Meyers is a revelation, a portrait of a man intoxicated by the past but unsure of how to handle the group he’s formed to worship it.

Although full admiration for “Late Fame,” I must admit that I found its third act less than fully satisfying. Partly that may be because the questions it poses are difficult, or well-nigh impossible, to answer persuasively. But the film chooses to ask such cogent and fascinating questions, and does so with wit and imagination, that it emerges as one of the year’s best.

Exemplifying a rather different idea of poetry, Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day” had an unusual beginning. In 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz had the idea of asking various artist friends to sit with her over a tape recorder and narrate what was they did the previous day. These talks were supposed to result in a nonfiction book, but that never materialized. And the tapes she made in her apartment with photographer Peter Hujar were lost. What survived were transcripts of the tapes, which resurfaced a few years ago.

Sachs’ film restages that conversation with two Brit actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, playing Hujar and Rosenkrantz. Hujar thinks the day before was boring, and it may have been somewhat typical, but his unfolding recollections make clear that it was also full of incident and, perhaps more importantly, endless thoughts about what these things meant to him.

Some of his interactions involve famous folk. He recounts a conversation with friend Susan Sontag, who’s about to fly off to Paris. The longest anecdote describes his New York Times assignment to photograph Allen Ginsberg, whose dingy E. 10^th St. digs Hujar seems to regard as hipper than his own E. 12^th St. pad. He tells about the minor hassles he encountered in reaching Ginsberg and getting him to pose (the poet doesn’t want a standard portrait) and then his thoughts turn to how much he’s getting paid. (He’s doing work for Vogue and other top publications, so he seems to be earning a decent living.)

Sachs’ film clearly can’t be described as a drama. It certainly has elements of documentary, as some of his previous films, especially his striking debut, The Delta, have. In terms of documenting urban areas, his two great subjects have been Memphis, where he grew up, and New York, his home as an adult. In this outing, he obviously wants to offer an accurate evocation not just of a place but also of a time (roughly the same as that referred to in Late Fame: the 1970s) and a cultural milieu. And for Sachs, that milieu conjures not only a certain chapter in downtown art history but also of “queer history”: Hujar, whose work has grown in reputation in recent years, died of AIDS related causes in 1987 at the 53.

Those personal and cultural resonances, as well as the film’s documentary-like precision in evoking them, are reasons why I would submit “Peter Hujar’s Day” as an example of poetic cinema. And there’s another: the beauty and understated elegance to Sachs’ photographic approach to the film. One decision he made I think was absolutely right: he doesn’t show us any of Hujar’s photographs, or photos of him, even in the closing credits. Instead, he uses various techniques–shifting focus, zooms, changing lighting patterns, and an intent gaze at Whishaw (who is brilliantly low-key)—to give us a cinematographic document that again and again testifies to the poetic nature of the medium, something that’s present in every film but is strikingly crucial in this one.

The poetic aspect of Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” is different from those of the two films discussed above, and for well over half of this sly, droll film, you might not even suspect it. Reichardt’s story begins in 1970 Framingham, Massachusetts, and tells of a guy named Mooney (Josh O’Connor), who lives an unremarkable suburban life with his wife and two young sons, but craves more. So he conceives of heisting four modernist paintings from a local museum, and enlists three lowlifes as accomplices. Rather haphazardly, the bandits succeed in making their way out of the museum with paintings in tow.

But Mooney’s life doesn’t get any simpler. His problems were probably inevitable given that he’s an amateur criminal, prone to mistakes that professionals surely wouldn’t make. How to hide the paintings? One indelible scene has him hauling them, with no small difficulty, into the loft of a barn, with grunting pigs his only company.

Soon enough, his family and dim accomplices left behind, he’s on his own, a would-be mastermind on the lam. At first, he hopes to take refuge at the home of an old pal (John Mangaro) but the man’s wife (Gaby Hoffmann) seems to smell trouble on him and gives him the boot.

Once the hapless Mooney is alone, what I call the film’s poetic aspect emerges. That happens, in effect, as the story’s background moves into the foreground. Earlier, we have seen brief glimpses of newspaper headlines and TV reports about the Vietnam War. But as we approach the story’s end these grow more frequent and detailed, and in the final scene, Mooney finds himself engulfed in a parade of antiwar demonstrators who are besieged by police. In a sense, this isn’t a satisfying as a dramatic or narrative conclusion to the story of a man who has staged an art theft. Rather, it’s a poetic transposition that makes the film’s real story the era when the story takes place, an era of political division much like our own.

Kelly Reichardt is one of the American independent cinema’s real treasures, one whose films are always touched with cinematic poetry. “The Mastermind” benefits from the excellent work of many of her collaborators, but of special note are cinematographer Chistian Blauvelt, whose images help conjure the mood and look for the 70s, and Rob Mazurek, whose jazzy score radiates infectious energy.