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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS (April 8-19, 2026)
GENERAL FILM FORUM COVERAGE
LINKS TO REVIEWS
- Brand New Landscape dir. Yuiga Danzuka
- Cold Metal dir. Clemente Castor
- Fantasy dir. Isabel Pagliai
- If on a Winter’s Night dir. Sanju Surendran
- Memory dir. Vladlena Sandu
- Next Life dir. Tenzin Phuntsog
- The Prophet dir. Ique Langa
- Two Seasons, Two Strangers dir. Sho Miyake
- Variations on a Theme dirs. Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar
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KODAI KUROSAKI IN BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE
YUIGA DANZUKA: BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE (2025)
Urban anomie enacted in family collapse
A blurb for this film says, "In bustling Tokyo, Ren delivers delicate orchids across the city, carrying the weight of his mother's absence and years of silence between him and his father, until one delivery changes everything." This is a delicate film, bursting with urban anomie and the suffering caused when family bonds have frayed early on. With its slow burns and handsome urban cinematography this is a striking debut film.
Perhaps not such a new landscape, since family dysfunction is the oldest of subjects, but a precocious work, since the director was reportedly only twenty-six. The cause of the dysfunction is the ambition of the husband and father, who goes overseas (Singapore) for work and never returns, or when he finally does return, the daughter reports to her brother, she has forgotten what his voice sounds like: he has become a stranger. Or perhaps he always was one. What is new here are the parallels between family and city, suggestions and contrasts that veteran Japan Times critic Mark Schilling says "add suggestive metaphorical layers." Schilling notes this film is set in "the more futuristic parts of Tokyo — Shibuya rather than Asakusa," and eschews "Neon jungle" clichés, where the new city can be alienating, but also a place of shimmering beauty.
Focus is on the son, and there are evidently autobiographical elements. While the father is the designer of urban complexes, the director's was a landscaper. The image of the complexes is a powerful one, a metaphor almost for megalomania, the intoxication of control, manipulating lives, a role that mere fatherhood pales with by comparison. The mother Yumiko (Haruka Igawa) dies early on by suicide, at least partly due to her husband's abandonment for career.
It begins with two children (12 and 18), mother, and father just arrived at a very nice beachside summer house. This soon ends when the father, an ambitious architect, gets a phone call, he's getting a big important job, he must leave, and the togetherness and the vacation are over. When the action resumes, ten years later, the mother is long gone, the father is long estranged, the son is working delivering orchids, and his sister is considering marriage.
There is a recurrent image provided through an in-car TV comedy show of a light that always breaks and falls shattering on the ground, as if to suggest life goes perpetually wrong. There is a calculated unease here.
There is some estrangement even, in a way, between sister Emi (Mai Kiryû) and brother Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) because Yumiko refuses to acknowledge caring about the father's abandonment, while it deeply troubles and angers Ren, who craves an apology.
Eventually son Ren, the younger sibling, goes to his father's ("Hajime's" - veteran actor and director Kenichi Endō) headquarters in the city in the course of his job delivering huge orchid plant arrangements. Hajime knows who it is, but lacks understanding of what is needed. His offering of money only angers the young man, who throws the orchids at his father. He has to deliver them again, but is fired. There is a comical outburst when his supervisor screams "You're fired" and Ren says that looks silly. This virtuoso single-take sequence, showing the whole factory-like workplace and ending with a young female employee (Misaki Hattori) declaring that she quits, is one of those demonstrations that Japanese repression has its costs because when it fails it fails big.
In the present time, we learn Hajime has decided to take on a big, soulless project, and the staff are upset. He says yes, it's a chore, but he had to take it on to pay the bills, to pay them. Hajime's human failure with his family is being reenacted with his professional "family." In his IndieWire review Josh Slater-Williams suggests there is an implied parallel to the question whether a fractured family can be restored (evidently not) of whether the damage caused by restructuring a city (disgruntled staff; displaced homeless people) may not be worse than its positive aspects. But the film is dedicated by Danzuka to the city (Tokyo) and his mother...
The last part of the film is taken up with Ren's attempt to stage a confrontation of his sister and himself with his father. In surreal or magic realist sequences, their mother reappears. The three sit down in the restaurant where the four last sat. The estranged Yumiko won't eat but talks, but Ren can only noisily eat and can't talk. In her ghostly magic realist scenes, the sweet, distant Yumiko needs neither eat nor talk, but provides reassurance and consolation. The structure of Danzuka's film is complex, but neat. There is a balance between cool urban imagery and intense emotional scenes. The film shows a lot of thought, but is tactile and cinematic. The sought resolution arrives for Ren after all when he comes across his father helplessly weeping after a visit from the thost of his wife. Ren squats down to watch the weeping from a short distance, laughing, all smiles. But neither the siblings nor the father will stop regretting the past.
Brand New Landscape 見はらし世代 (Miwarashi sedai "The View Generation"), 115 mins., premiered at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 15, 2025, showing also at Shanghai, Melbourne, Haifa, São Paulo, Chicago, and, it was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (April 8–19, 2026). ND/NF showtimes:
Wednesday, April 15
6:00pmat MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Yuiga Danzuka
Thursday, April 16
8:45pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Yuiga Danzuka
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TENEBROUS SCENE FROM FRIO METAL
CLEMENTE CASTOR: FRÍO METAL (COLD METAL) (2025)
TEASER
Spectral bodies and landscapes from Mexico
A detailed discussion of the film can be found on the Spanish-language "Cine Blog" "Los Experimentos" entry penned by Jhonny Carvajal Orozco. There is no review online at the moment. There is tremendous use here, partly through the collaborative skill of French sound designer Thomas Becka, of disjunctive image and sound to create a strangeness worthy of David Lynch, though due to the intense locality of the imagery and indigenous non-actor cast, comparisons might logically be better drawn with the more bizarre current Latin American directors such as Carlos Reygadas (also Mexican) or Lisandro Alonso (from Argentina. Rather than following a conventional narrative Castor adopts a "drifting, nonlinear structure" linked with "flow cinema" that weaves in and out of themes. But at the same time there is an obsessive implied plotline focus involving two brothers, Óscar (Óscar Hernández), who has escaped from rehab, and Mario (Mario Banderas), who is troubled by images that "don’t belong" to him.
After the opening scene of a woman hawking a carnival roulette wheel, Mario consults with a card reader about this problem of his who forsees prison and other dire outcomes. There is a memorable session of dancing and almost erotically interlacing hands where one Lázaro (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, the only professional actor in the film) teaches Mario how to use magical gestures to enter other people's bodies. The bodies Mario enters, explains Carvajal Orozco, are "simulated by subterranean landscapes." I sense here some of the inspired insanity one finds in the Salvador Dalì of his Secret Life, for the landscapes here, sometimes dark, sometimes craggy, sometimes linked with mines, have similarities with the lunar, craggy landscape surrounding Dalì's beloved Portlligat, Cadaqués, Spain (Catalonia). There are also beautiful drone views from above in the film of mountainous overland landscapes covered with shrubbery.
The extended New Directors blurb says that after the spooky Lynchian introductory passage of Frio Metal "the narrative emerges, like a soul from limbo, into low-key neorealist vignettes depicting adolescent languor in the cramped interiors and sprawling streetscape of the working-class Mexico City suburb of Iztapalapa." Well, maybe. We remain rather lost, and there is a sense of poverty and unhealthiness that is distracting and sad; but Clemente is interested in marginalized people. I like the scenes of the more in-form, strikingly profiled, bleached-blond brother Mario early on with nude torso where he twists and flexes and does little stretches that make him look like a ballet dancer and are pleasing and you could also call them languorous, I suppose - or sensuous, or show-offy.
When the ND/NF blurb says "Like Rivette, Castor rewrites his own rules and redraws his own map anew with every scene," it's a sign that this kind of cinematic experience can be profoundly disorienting. The trouble with this sort of cinema that makes so much rich surprising use of what's at hand is it's difficult to tell sometimes what the director's real intentions are - though in the "Practical Criticism" I was taught as a youth, caring about the artist's "intention" is a fallacy anyway, so maybe we should let go and not care about all that. Frio is one of those true New Directors/New Films offerings that acts as a powerful palate cleanser, ridding the mind of conventional movie images and making us ready for new aural and visual experiences.
What of the theme of tattoos, and of board games? What of the neighborhood children rehearsing a play about the post-revolutionary period? The exploration of mines with blurry monochrome 16 mm. images? There is a strong documentary aspect to Clemente's filmmaking. His actors playing Mario ad Oscar, moreover, are friends of his. In an interview with Carvajal Orozco he said, "They were playing someone who wasn't themselves, but there was also a lot of themselves in it." He added, though, "But I'm also interested in that other thing that doesn't exist, that isn't real or isn't so explicit, that is more supernatural, to a certain extent." There are other motifs as well, but how they fit in with the theme of the brothers is uncertain.
Still, Clemente Castor is onto something. We can tell from that interview that his concerns, though many, are serious and consistent. This guy is the real thing, an auteur. He spins a heady mixture, and at times the exotic contrasts weave cinematic magic of a kind rarely encountered in conventional movies. Attendees of New Directors/New Films who crave the series' edgier qualities are in for a special frisson from Frio.
Frio Metal (Cold Metal), 102 mins., premiered at Marseille Jul. 10, 2025 where it won the Georges de Beauregard prize;, showing also at Lumen in Brazil Nov. 11. Screened for this review as part of 2026 New Directors/New Films at FLC and MoMA. ND/NF showtimes:
Wednesday, April 15
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Clemente Castor
Thursday, April 16
8:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Clemente Castor
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POSTER
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"LOUISE" IN FANTASY
ISABEL PAGLIAI: FANTASY (2025)
The musings of a young woman, young man in the background
This quiet, artisanal French effort exhibits the French taste for voiceovers. Most of it is a portrait of a young woman. She is plain, unadorned, but voluble and open about herself, and apparently a budding writer or diarist. There are images of a notebook held open, full of handwriting, presumably hers. A smaller notebook appears later containing her pensées. Toward the end, she recalls an unpleasant coupling, possibly her first sexual experience, consisting of anal intercourse after she is invited into a man's room when she is quite drunk. Before that, she has described at some length how she masturbates.
Louise, the girl's name, is seen first soaking in a bathtub and musing. There's a witty shot of the bidet in which her calico cat reposes, seemingly putting on different expressions to go with the thoughts of her talkative mistress.
Once dressed, with her plain black hair and crew neck outfit Louise resembles an eastern college girl of the fifties. The intense color of the cinematography makes her skin look a bit blotchy, but she has big white perfect teeth, seen several times when she smiles, and when she laughs uproariously toward the end of the film at the humorous, melodramatic musings - offscreen again - of Thomas.
Now who is Thomas? At first we don't know, but it's his voice that alternates, voice-off, with that of Louise, partly also reading from her diary. The director teases us with Thomas, making him only a voice for half the film, then keeping him often in the shadows, and never letting him revel in his own personal musings as Louise gets to do.
In notes about the film on Facebook, we learn that Thomas has found Louise's notebook on a train and been entranced by her as " a young woman caught between ghosts and fantasies." Somehow thereafter he sought her out. Or perhaps she was right there on the train?
Thomas, anyway, provides somewhat sexless male backup and contrast. He is a dark young man with sharp, angular, somewhat poetic features. The word "Corsican" is mentioned. When Louise talks about a "philosophical friend" who gave her advice about her poetry-writing, he is very curious and finally when he asks "Is he Corsican?" she laughs and says yes. So maybe he is too.
Louise's color is blue. Thomas' color is red. She wears jeans and a b blue pullover; her wears a scarlet red shirt, dramatic against his dark skin. Midway in the film a third color appears in a multitude of shadows: the deep greens of a woods full of rich plants and tall dark trees where Louise and Thomas gambol about, amorous friends or sexless lovers. There is a stream, and another good shot is one of big smooth dark rocks: two lean handsome dogs leap up on them, and one dog remains, at attention as the shot is held.
The atmosphere this film creates is a nice one: generally peaceful. The ND/NF blurb describes Louise as "a young French girl whom director Isabel Pagliai met by chance," and describes the woods as "a symbolically fraught setting of play and contested innocence." Some viewers may be entranced by Louise, the woods, and Thomas. Thomas seems a little under-used, though, and you may feel that the relationship lacks elements, whether aesthetic, romantic, sexual, poetic, or philosophical, necessary to provide the intensity or the beauty that the images and monologues tantalizingly hint at. And all this is in the absence of the "normal" thoughts, background, and plot elements of, say, an Éric Rohmer film. Rohmer has famously been referred as like "watching paint dry," but his oeuvre winds up providing an immense amount of material to chew on.
But this is all about Louise. Toward the end, she takes over again with her recollection of being anally penetrated at the end of a drunken night. This time her words again are voice-off, because we don't see her. But instead we see a cascade of stills of people in odd costumes and odd poses, with lots of lipstick on their faces and pale skin. The images flash by at brain-numbing speed. It's an unusual sequence. But it leaves one somewhat cold. The Guardian review by Phuong Le ("A modern Ophelia Swamped by Audiovisual Overwhelm") suggests that this assault may be made up by Louise, and that the cascade of images may be created by AI. If so, then a climactic moment is only Papier-mâché, though Lee takes an underwater moment as linking Louise with Ophelia.
Fantasy is a playfully eclectic mix of minimalist docu-fiction, monologue, and teasing fairytale. It also wants to hint at myth; and when one thinks of myth-making with a Mediterranean girl and boy, one of them dark, roaming a beautiful woods, Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie Baie des Anges springs to mind with its real local girl and boy and its weaving of classic American and Nouvelle Vague elements into a doomed, lush, gorgeous erotic fairytale. Fantasy has its own mix of elements but seems relatively slim fare, promising and tactile in its images though it undoubtedly is.
Fantasy/Fantasie, 79 mins., premiered at FID Marseille, winning the First Film award. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, which has previously featured the director's shorts. ND/NF Showtimes:
Thursday April 9
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Isabel Pagliai
Saturday, April 11
3:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Isabel Pagliai
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BHANU PRIYAMVADA AND ROSHAN ABDUL RAHOOF IN IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT
SANJU SURENDRAN: IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT (2025)
Poverty and displacement in modern India
If on a Winter's Night is, Indian festival programmer and critic Aditya Shrikrishna says on Letterboxd, a "wondrous" work, "a cinema of displacement, of a certain weariness creeping into love, affection, empathy and all the good things due to the loss of a home and the inability to find a new one (physical and metaphorical), the inability to find reinforcing companionship and the precarious nature of a life without privilege." He sums up very well the feelings and implications of this film if not quite the intricacies of its plot. Vadim Rizov says, also on Letterboxd: "As an economic vise tightens around the couple, the film made me cover my eyes in horror—'underpaid creative class' is something I know all about. There’s a current surplus of movies-about-making-movies, but few about the laborers keeping the festival economy moving which showcases all of these, and I suspect that’s part of why the movie got to me." Two glimpses at the wide-ranging appeal of this vivid, sad film.
The young couple at the center of the story is so beautiful and sweet, and yet so doomed. They have come from southern Malayalam-speaking Kerala to live in the big, cold, far-off northern Indian capital city of Delhi, where people speak Hindi, "far away from home" Shrikrishna writes "and grappling with a foreign people and foreign language in one's own country." Their world is sliding away under their feet. Every minute someone is asking them for money, landlord, relatives, beggar children on the street, and they are asking each other for it and their insecurity, suspicion and need are undermining their relationship by the hour.
What a beautiful man is Sarah's ostensible boyfriend Abhi (Roshan Abdul Rahoof, who may be some sort of heartthrob, since he has 147,000 fans on Facebook), but how useless. He wants to be an artist and does pencil sketches of people on the street, but drifts into playing with a street band. As for Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada), also young and attractive, she has a small gig that she loves but pays poorly - a "thankless" job as seasonal support staff at an international film festival - but her aspiration is to be a "researcher." With this insufficient salary she must support herself and Abhi, but she also gets constant calls to send money from her mother in Kerala. They have come to Delhi not only to pursue their futures but to escape from their cloying families. With modern communications, such escape is hard to achieve.
After a while this tale of devolution, poverty and decreasing prospects begins to seem over-deterministic, but such a story must be like that to serve its Darwinian, Dickensian purpose. What may seem preposterous, and in terms of human rights and the American Constitution certainly is, is that after things are already going very badly, the couple returns to their small house one day to find they have been literally thrown out of it by a noisy crowd of mourners of a recently dead man who originally lived here. "It is our custom," a woman tells them. And they cannot even gather up their valuables which are thrown together in a corner and must wait a day or two to collect them.
Out they go wandering nowhere, making feeble phone calls to people who all say they're not in town, though they should be suspicious because we know how their friend Simon has used his cell phone to lie about having a house and then, when someone comes to Delhi, lying that he's away. (Simon eventually had to admit to Sarah and Abhi that he was homeless and they took him in.) Wandering in the winter cold, the couple gets caught in a chilly rainstorm, for it is Christmastime (Sarah is Christian, and so an outsider in yet another way).
Now they begin to be no longer so much like whingeing, manipulative Indians but wailing Italians, à la Rossellini-De sica, seated wet, shivering and pathetic at a long sad bus stop with a big billboard behind them bearing a poster about living a happy life. They are rescued through somebody Abhi knows. The two man who get out of the car to help are wearing overcoats: Abhi has been making do with several layers of T shirts and we see how helpless they are.
In a sequel, we see Abhi and Sarah, whose alienation from each other was healed by their shared misery, moving into a nice new little house together. But then a sequel to the sequel brings a hard, threatening knocking on their door: they've been saved, but they're still going down.
I thought of Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light (Kapadia produced this film) and how that seemed like just a soap opera at first, till it emerged how good the actors were and what depth and sweep the film had. But this one is different. It couldn't be a soap opera because it's too narrow and specific, and it moves rather swiftly. Aditya Shitkrisna says it "unravels slowly," but acknowledges it does so in "short, breathable scenes." However you analyze the film, it's very much like a short story and not a novel, but it is pungent. It's just a little hard to connect with a tale that seems so predictable, so deterministic. We have to focus on its effort to depict a plight in India both universal and contemporary: migrants from the south to the north, from a simpler, easier world, the world of Apu, to a harder, northern, urban one, a town without pity.
Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light, India's first Cannes Competition film in thirty years, was covered here as part of the 2024 New York Film Festival. Its Metacritic rating is 93%.
If on a Winter's Night/Khidki Gaav, 100 mins., in Malayalam and Hindi, premiered at Busan Sept. 20, 2025. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films 2026. Showtimes:
Tue, April 14 Walter Reade Theater
6:00 PM
Wed, April 15 MoMA
9:00 PM
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AMINA TAISUMOVA IN MEMORY
VLADLENA SANDU: MEMORY (2025)
Phantasmagoric grimness of a girl's life in 1990s Chechnya transformed into therapeutic art
"Memory" means nothing less than the filmmaker's own memory, of a very hard growing up following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s in Ukraine and Chechnya, with a cruel grandfather, Mikhail Alexandrovich, and an absent father Oleg who turns out to have been an opium addict and is rarely seen, because he is a criminal in flight from the law. The filmmaker, whose colorful portmanteau name (a girl's name made by combining "Vladimir" and "Lenin") Mikhail Alexandrovich calls stupid, narrates her own story, but with the on-screen detachment and dazzlement of the filmmaker's intense, colorful collage of often found images to illustrate her early life and turn it into a funny-grim fairy tale that grows right out of a child's storybooks and a girls's large chalk drawings on the wall.
Born in the ’Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine, USSR’, Vladlena is transferred to Grozny in the Chechen Republic after her parents' divorce and raised by her grandparents and lived in independent Chechnya during Russia's decade-long war on its own citizens. She is forced to use her right hand though she is left-handed, and frequently physically punished by teacher and grandfather. She has braided hair and looks a proper, upright girl (played in reenactments by Amina Taisumova). She falls in love with theater and especially King Kong. A man in a guerilla suit becomes a protector and imaginary friend.
Trauma shows up in how Vladlena draws nothing but monstrous creatures and plays with dolls only to cut them up into pieces. The little girl (herself) whose experience she recounts lives through the war in Chechnya and hears first-hand about murders and rapes, sees bodies lying on the streets, food is rationed and they have to walk five km. for water.
Here we see a sequence of stills, images that stay in the mind, of dead bodies lying akimbo on the street. She recounts an uncle being beaten to death while his wife lives but with head swollen and eyes filled with blood. Meanwhile there are lots of stagings in small theaters, scenes staged with dolls and puppets. The background music is a jaunty, eclectic mix, alternating with the sound of shells popping and explosions going off, or Strauss' "Blue Danube."
Sometimes she thinks of fields of poppies and running on the beach (red is a recurrent color).
It all works. The energy never fades and the rhythm is consistent in this, which the filmmaker says will be the first of four segments of a film history of her own life.
In his Screen Daily Venice review, Allan Hunter calls Memory a "lyrical hybrid documentary" which he says allows Vladlena "to revisit key experiences from her childhood and family history" whose "therapeutic value" comes through "recognising how trauma becomes a never-ending cycle as it passes from generation to generation." One is at once horrified, visually dazzled, engaged, and curiously detached.
Memory, 97 mins., debuted at Venice Aug . 17, 2025 as the opening presentation of its "Giornate degli Autori" strand, also showing at Athens, Vienna, and half a dozen other festials. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:
Thu, April 16 6:00 PM MoMA Titus 2 Q&A Vladlena Sandu
Fri, April 17 6:00 PMBWalter Reade Theater Q&A Vladlena Sandu
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TENZEN PHUNTSOG: NEXT LIFE (2025)
Travelling light: death in another country
The estrangement of diaspora is felt strongly in this film by Tibetan-born director Tenzen Phuntsog about an older man, known simply as Pala, father (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar), his wife, known as Amala, mother (Tseyki Dolma), and their strapping young son Rigzin (Rigzin Phurpatsang), the main character really, because it is he who suffers the most visibly at the loss of his father but also at the privations of Tibetans whose desire to return home is frustrated by Chinese bureaucrats as the father takes ill and dies in California.
The other important player is that suburban California, for the little family lives in a generic suburban California house, with the director shooting in stripped-down form the house where his own parents live. Director Phuntsog is into landscape, as seen in his shorts, particularly "Pure Land," where Tibetans photograph the sparse terrains of the ancestral Blackfeet Tribe in Montana in an effort to evoke their Tibetan homeland. Here also the son, freshly grieving, takes refuge in the hills of California, but he falls down there weeping. In the film's most painful moment, someone close calls him when he is driving back and he has to tell her his father has died and she weeps while he suffers inwardly.
Two Tibetan monks have come to the suburban house to perform a ritual in their loud guttural chant. It is surprising, even impressive, that young Rigzin, who must be assimilated to American life in many ways, feels such a deep commitment to Tibetan culture and religion and practices the Tibetan Buddhist rituals along with his mother.
Before he dies, the father is seen by a traditional Tibetan doctor, who informs him that the pain he feels in his heart and through his body goes back to some experience in the homeland and is very bad. The doctor listens to the father's heartbeat, but hears more than a western doctor would, roots of earlier trauma. The director makes use of expressive sound here, so that the blood rushing through the ill father's veins "rumbles like a river running beneath the earth, the sound filling the empty room," as is described in a Filmmaker Magazine article and interview with the filmaker, who did most of the work in shooting, editing, and producing this film. The result is a cinema of minimalism, of ritual, slow cinema, and a cry of the displaced in an America that has everything but what the soul craves.
Phuntsog was born in India but studied in the US including at Columbia, describes working extensively in film preservation seeking to salvage the films of his native country, then deciding he must make his own films, and loving to work with film rather than digital and even 35mm. This film however was shot in a very spare manner, both to the content and lack of external context, and the way the house, his own parent's house (and the mother played by his own mother), is stripped down to be generic, which he felt would make it communicate to viewers in a more universal manner. He does not consider the fact of all fiction, that specificity adds relatability because of the way that details draw us in. However "super lean," the phrase he uses in the interview, is his style and there may be a link between austerity, Buddhist ritual,, and grief that he is discovering in his work and will reveal themselves more vividly in the future. The sponsorship of Carlos Reygadas as a producer is a testament to his authenticity and commitment. The New Directors/New Films series often presents us with filmmakers on the edge, in the process of just about to come into full being, as here.
Next Life, 73 mins., was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:
Mon, April 13 - 8:15 PM Walter Reade Theater
Q&A with Tenzen Phuntsog
Tue, April 14 - 6:00 PM MoMA
Q&A with Tenzen Phuntsog
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IQUE LANGA: THE PROPHET (2026)
A Christian pastor in the heart of Africa struggles with spiritual doubt
A slow mover who connects with the transcendental, Mozambican writer director Ique Langa sees Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Carl Dreyer as his cinematic ancestors. But The Prophet is an African film, imbued with raw African energy and in a mixture of local languages and the official ("colonial") language and lingua franca, Portuguese.
Impressionistically, Langa sketches in a picture of a spiritual struggle with bold strokes. His protagonist is a minister, Pastor Hélder (the solid, somewhat rotund Admiro De Laura Munguambe)i. The film was a nine-year journey for Langa with a non-professional cast in Manjacaze, a small town in southern Mozambique where he spent much of his childhood and where his father was born. The town, he has reported, has experienced a boom of pastors and churches. The film's theme, or one of them, the filmmaker said, is "Be careful with the doors you open."
Pastor Hélder is tempted to turn to witchcraft and sacrifice to energize his waning Christian faith, or perhaps the fading of his congregation among the local competition. The film is impressionistic, or expressionistic, and occasionally surreal. Helder's wife (Nora Matevel), with whom he communicates in Portuguese, while in church he prays to God in an African language, is pregnant, and will give birth pretty soon. However, she is still cooking the evening meal for him and herself, and enjoying it. She is fearful about giving birth and says so to him. But it is he who turns up toward the end of the film wet and weeping and repentant for a host of sins he can't bear to name to her, while she remains calm and reassuring, the strong one.
Helder approaches a dark sheep whose luminous eyes glow out at him. In the film's most memorable image, he approaches, twice, a large hut with a midget dressed in suit and bow tie sweeping the dirt in front with a whisk who seems to be the purveyor of witchcraft he seeks. An older man leads the pastor into the woods and says "Go alone, you will find what you want. But do not forget the maringuate plant."
Among his confessed failings Helder lists to his wife never learning how to swim. So at the height of his spiritual crisis he walks into the water and submerges himself, fully dressed, up to the neck. Does he swim? Or is he baptized? It is from this experience that he comes to his wife wet and weeping.
While The Prophet may be said to be "exploring the clash between postcolonial Christianity and traditional spirituality" (or traditional ritual), the details are never specifically worked out. The strength of the film is that it draws us into the pastor's intense, inchoate state of spiritual self-doubt in all its inarticulate suffering. His dabbling in witchcraft, if such it is, isn't specified but hinted at, and the reasons for it, like his sins, of which it may be one, cannot be spoken.
Other elements are strong in this vivid, intense film, whose use of black and white seems a good choice both for asserting the filmmaker's links with his idols Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer but also for intensifying its focus on moral and spiritual issues, whose imbalance is further expressed through changing aspect ratios.
There is no sense that Helder's congregation is fading or disloyal. Their singing at service is rousing and they stand up and speak testimonials to how the church has given them strength to go forward in their lives when they had doubt. There is an obsessive young man, perhaps hyperactive, with his father who he says has had an "accident" and incessantly seeks help, first at the doctor's office, then at Pastor Helder's home, finally right during the service at his church.
Finally at the end of the film and with the congregation gathered around him the pastor acquiesces and blesses the old man, hands-on, almost as if performing a healing ritual. Shortly after the father falls down dead and his son yells to the pastor, "You have killed my father." But tis is followed by a burial service for the man, with a beautiful, soaring vocal, and Helder and the bereaved son standing beside each other, apparently at peace. The film ends here, with the coda of a final gesture toward non-Christian beliefs in the attitude toward the dead and their understood progression from dead to spirit to ancestor. It's a strange ending, perhaps. But Langa follows his own rules and he has crafted an impressive and memorable film.
In his cast Langa used mostly non actors, including local talents such as Admiro De Laura Munguambe, Nora Matavel, and Alexandre Masnado Coana, who contribute their identity and experience to their performances, as do others who play members of the congregation. Langa's dp is Denilson Pombo and editor Sara Carneiro working on a minimalist vision with boxy ratio going through slight aspect changes, working together with the monochromatic images to direct, forceful effect throughout.
The Prophet/O profeta, 94 mins.,premiered at Rotterdam Jan. 29, 2026. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 8-19, 2026). Showtimes:
Walter Reade Theater
Thu, April 9 8:30 PM
Q&A with Ique Langa
MoMA Titus 2
Fri, April 10 6:00 PM
Q&A ith Ique Langa
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MANSAKU TAKADA, YUUMI KAWAI IN TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS
SHO MIYAKE: TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS (2025)
TRAILER
Intimacy of loners
That the Japanese cinematic personality is about as subtle as it can get is illustrated by Sho Miyake's low-keyed but sophisticated diptych, which cunningly links two short 1960s manga stories, "A View of the Seaside" and "Mr. Ben and His Igloo" by revered manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge. The linking figure is a film and TV writer called Li (Eun-kyung Shim), a Korean expat who lives and works in Japan where and speaks fluent Japanese but whose interior monologue and the MS we see her writing is in Korean.
We see her writing, stumbling for a start on a screenplay with the line, "Summer, seaside. A car at a dead end." It develops into a kind of idyl of a lonely (or loner) young man and woman (Mansko Takada and Yuumi Kawai). Then as she imagines it we turn out to be watching the finished film, in which the pair seem strongly attracted on this island where he lives and she visits. As throughout, the action is low key but the atmosphere is intense. It's summertime and the sea is turbulent, windy, and a storm threatens (this is where Takamitsu Kawai’s intricate sound design first becomes evident). And then we turn out to be watching the film with a group of film students. Though Li is full of self doubt, replying to a question that seeing the film this way makes her feel she doesn't have much talent, an elder in the aud Somewhat later, however, we learn this helpful gentleman and mentor has passed away.
A trip to recover from that loss and from a for-hire effort leads to the second half of the film, which focuses on Li's own actual experiences, though she is still in the role of screenwriter, with pad and pen at hand. It's wintertime now, and the location is near mountains and gloriously, picturesquely snow-covered ones; this is where, if not before, the important contribution of DP Yuta Tsukinaga becomes much in evidence, for the way he renders velvety snow in the nighttime has never been more inviting, dark, and rich. Li is searching for location material, or story ideas, or just experience, and she finds all that when lack of a reservation leads her to go up higher above the little tourist town to an old inn where there turns out to be nobody else but her and the gruff innkeeper, Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi).
While the film as a whole may be seen as about loners, Li the writer being loner-in-chief, this is also a look at the Japanese personality that's both in-depth and fresh, seen at one remove through the semi-assimilated Korean Li. Her young couple on the island are notable for their lack of what we think of as the usual Japanese reserve, their asking very personal questions of each other straight off. The students at the screening Q&A are similarly direct. And the dialogue between Li and Benzo doesn't beat around the bush. He doesn't hesitate to ask her plenty of questions. She asks him the most cutting one of all: She understands inns like this are usually family affairs, she says. so why is he running it alone? She will learn, and in so doing will quickly be drawn into his sphere, almost become an accomplice.
When Li isn't trying futilely to sleep with Benzo's loud snoring in the same big room, a lot of the focus is on stealing valuable carp from a nearby tank that turns out to belong to the family of the innkeeper's estranged wife.
This is definitely short story, not novel, material, and even seems somehow familiar. But the key is the righteous, finely crafted filmmaking, which endows everything with layers of meaning and a richnness of cinematic style that make watching Two Seasons, Two Strangers an experience you may want to linger over and repeat, appreciating the tactile sense of the actual while savoring abstract parallelisms and contrasts as well. Miyake makes everything count double here in a film where clearly less is more, an esthetic once again native to Japanese culture at which this filmmaker excells.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers 旅と日々, 89 mins., premiered at Locarno, winning the top prize Golden Leopard. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 8-19, 2026). Showtimes:
Friday, April 17,
8:45 PM Walter Reade Theater
Q&A with DIRECTOR Sho Miyake
Sun, April 19 3:00 PM MoMA Tutus Theater
Q&A with DIRECTOR Sho Miyake
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DEVON DELMAR, JASON JACOBS: VARIATIONS ON A THEME - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026
TRAILER
MEET THE FILMMAKERS
Bright sadness
The northern part of Black South Africa, where they speak Afrikaans, is the setting for this, Delmar and Jacobs' second feature of the type. Their first, the 2024 Carissa, focused on a young "Coloured" (mixed-race) woman deciding where she wants to work. This one revolves mainly around Hettie (the gnarly, venerable Hettie Farmer), a goatherd and widow approaching her eightieth birthday. Long having lived alone, she likes it, and her inner monologue enlarged by the soft voice of Jason Jacobs, Farmer's real-life grandson leads us to wonder how it will be to give this up and have to live with some of her many noisy offspring, who come to visit for a while for that birthday and invade her home in great numbers. This is about Hettie, but also very much an ensemble piece, a collection of linked short stories about village life.
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language spoken also in other parts of Africa and even Argentina, evolved from the Dutch settlers and enslaved population in the 17th and 18th centuries. We don't get to hear it very often and its lilt at first reminded me of the Middle English of Chaucer.
The other special thing about this film other than the people themselves, the majority of whom are actual locals, is the high-pitched painterly look of the images using wide screen lenses that actually make what's on screen to look like paintings sometimes. The dp working with Delmar and Jacobs for the second time here is South African local Gray Kotzé, who has an eye for the South African landscape and community life, which the Variety review described as "vivid" and "scruffy" - the scruffy part probably due to the humble tin houses the people live in and the ugly accoutrements of their impoverished surroundings.
Then there is the sadness. Sure, there's a lot of community and life here, but this is an elegy and leave-taking and also a lament and quiet outcry against generations of wrong. The first wrong in the air is to the generation of Hettie's father, who like others was part of a company of Black South Africans sent to fight in World War II between 1940 and 1944. He came back traumatized and silent: he never spoke of the War. He and his comrades' reward for service consisted of a bicycle and a pair of boots. As neighbors say inn the frequent group chats, their white colleagues tended to receive land and livestock with which they could set up a working farm.
Well, Hettie has her two sturdy donkeys and her herd of sheep she takes to the kraal each day, and sits pondering whether they think of her and if so if she is a mother to them or perhaps a god. She has come to relish the peacefulness and solitude of her life.
But now a cruel new depredation is afoot that the locals are unaware of. There is a company carrying out a scam against them, promising to arrange government reparations for the local families of Black WWII veterans. First, they must fill out elaborate "blue" forms, and then pay a fee. The thought does arise that this is unlikely, after so long, and the question about why you'd have to pay money to receive money. Nonetheless Hettie and her neighbors believe in this scam. They have never had money and they want to dream of having it.
One has his eye on traveling to Las Vegas and gambling, a place, another says, inhabited by zombies. A hairdresser is so enthusiastic and convinced he buys a whole array of new equipment on credit, planning to pay it off when the government reparation is distributed. Meanwhile, among the variations on a theme is the man who is excavating the land under his house's living room in search of diamonds, using an incongruously loud, raucous cranked-up recording of the Choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to cover the sound of the digging. The "Ode to Joy" to hide the noise of foolish greed.
Even if it's not a little funny, it's hard not to see all this as very sad despite the rich, bright hues of Gray Kotzé's handsome on screen images. It's hard to know otherwise what to make of this film, but there is an assurance about it and a special vision that explain the top prize it won at Rotterdam this year. As often happens with New Directors/New Films series, Delmar and Jacobs' Variations is actually something strange and new.
Variations on a Theme/Variasies op 'n tema, 65 mins., premiered at Rotterdam Feb. 1, 2026. It will show at Hong Kong in April. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:
Sat, April 18 - 8:00 PM MoMA Titus 2
Q&A with Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs
Sun, April 19 - 1:30 PM Walter Reade Theater
Q&A with Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs
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