People are complicated and families are hard—two truisms that collide with tremendous force in Atiye Zare Arandi’s feature documentary debut, Grand Me. At 9 years old, Melina is of age to bring forth a legal case for her guardianship. The problem: neither of her divorced parents is especially interested in taking their daughter home. Melina might be cinema’s most independently minded youth this side of Antoine Doinel, but in looking closely at the circumstances, Zare Arandi—Melina’s aunt—discovers the hurt only…

Just how far would you go to reach home? When the COVID-19 lockdowns left him stranded on the other side of India, construction worker Mahesh became a national sensation by peddling 1,700 kilometers in seven days. It’s a story good enough for a movie, one that director Suhel Banerjee has broken apart and rendered a trancelike travelogue that combines fiction and nonfiction. CycleMahesh (winner of IDFA’s Best First Feature) guides us through breathtaking terrain—wheat fields, river valleys, and raging fires…

Set in 1990s Chicago, Rose Troche’s Go Fish, produced on a shoestring budget during the height of the New Queer Cinema movement, is pure 16mm, guerilla-style filmmaking gold. Cowritten by star Guinevere Turner, Go Fish is about queer love—or, rather, the search for love. Max (Turner) is a college student who has been going through quite the dry spell. After pontificating about relationships and sex with her roommate Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), she meets Ely (V.S. Brodie), and while the…

A marvelously inventive throwback to underground comix of Kim Deitch and the antic handdrawn animation of Sally Cruikshank and Suzan Pitt, Endless Cookie takes us on a wild ride with the half-brothers Scriver—Peter is the Indigenous kid, Seth the white one—as they journey back to 1980s Toronto and the icily remote regions of Shamattawa, a First Nations community in northern Manitoba, in search of family ties and divides. The hilarious tales, many of them involving chaotic menageries of caribou, dogs,…

Johnnie To’s incisive exploration of power dynamics within Hong Kong’s triad societies marked a new political dimension in his career. As two rival gang leaders (Simon Yam and Tony Leung Ka-fai) vie for control of the Wo Shing Society, To strips away the glamor often associated with gangster films to reveal a world of shifting alliances and ruthless ambition. The director’s restrained approach, favoring tense conversations and sudden bursts of violence over elaborate action sequences, creates a palpable atmosphere of…

Who said time heals all wounds? Shot in her hometown of El Prat de Llobregat (located in the southwestern periphery of Barcelona) with an impressive cast of nonprofessional actors, Catalan writer-director Laura Ferrés’s alternately tender, clever, and mysterious debut feature mixes realism with melodrama in the story of a fiftysomething casting director who—while on an assignment to find “normal-looking people” for a left-leaning political party’s campaign video—unwittingly befriends the woman who gave birth to and abandoned her as a teenager…

Journalist Shiori Itō turns the camera on herself in a breathtakingly courageous investigation of her own sexual assault, which resulted in a landmark case for the Me Too movement in Japan. From courtrooms to video diary entries, the film follows Itō’s 2017 court battle in real time, which is made all the more gripping by its palpable mix of journalistic acumen and harrowing trauma. Along the journey to bring Itō’s high-powered attacker to justice, Black Box Diaries also becomes an…

In September 2022, Mediateca Onshore was inaugurated in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, marking a half-century of Guinean cinema production. Resonance Spiral documents the construction of this community screening space—but what’s being built is so much more. Part of a decade-long project instigated by filmmakers and artists Filipa César, Sana na N’Hada, and Marinho de Pina, among others, the building is a site for preserving Guinean militant cinema histories, a portal for making audiovisual archives from of the country’s revolutionary…