NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2025 (April 2-April 13)

[Chris Knipp]

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

THE NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS series at Lincoln Center April 2-13, 2025: LINKS TO REVIEWS

THE ASSISTANT (Wilhelm Sasnal, Anka Sasnal 2025) Polish
BLUE SUN PALACE (Constance Tsang 2024) Chinese
CACTUS PEARS (Rohan Parashuram Kanawade 2025) Marathi
CYCLEMAHESH (Suhel Banerjee 2024) Odia, Marathi, and Hindi
DROWNING DRY (Laurynas Bareiša 2024) Lithuanian
FAMILIAR TORCH (Sarah Friedland 2024) English
FIUME O MORTE! (Igor Bezinović 2025) Croatian and Italian
GRAND ME (Atiye Zare Arandi 2024) Farsi
THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES (Du Jie 2024) Japanese
HOLY ELECTRICITY (Tato Kotetishvili 2024) Georgian
INVENTION (Courtney Stephens 2024) English
KYUKA BEFORE SUMMER'S END (Kostis Charamountanis 2024) Greek
LESSON LEARNED Fekete pont (Bálint Szimler 2024) Hungarian
LISTEN TO THE VOICES (Maxime Jean-Baptiste 2024) French
LOST CHAPTERS (Lorena Alvarado 2024) Spanish
LURKERS (Alex Russell 2024) English
MAD BILLS TO PAY - OR DESTINY, DIRE QUE NO SOY MALO (Joel Alfonso Vargas 2024) Spanish
NO SLEEP TILL(Alexandra Simpson 2024) English
SAD JOKES (Fabian Stumm 2024) German
STRANGER (Zhengfan Yang 2024) Chinese
TWO TIMES JOÃO LIBERADA (Paula Marques 2025) Portuguese
THE VILLAGE NEXT TO PARADISE (Mo Harawe 2024) Somali
THE VIRGIN OF THE QUARRY LAKE (Laura Casabé 2025) Spanish

[Chris Knipp]

PIOTR TROJAN, ANDRZEJ KONOPA IN THE ASSISTANT

WILHELM AND ANIKA SASNAL: THE ASSISTANT (2025)

Surreal life with an early 20th-century inventor

This strange, slow-moving piece set in the very early twentieth century is adapted from the well-known 1908 novel by Swiss-German author Robert Walser Der Gehülfe that is a masterpiece of calculated unease and very dry humor. But does the film capture these qualities? I'm not so sure, though it tries hard. It is the work of a Polish married couple, Wilhelm a painter and visual artist who is the cinematographer and Anka who is an editor and writer. But the film's nominal editor was Aleksandra Gowin, and she could have used a stronger hand.

The novel, described as "breathtaking" by Good Reads, follows a man called Joseph Marti (Piotr Trojan), who quits his job at a bookbinding shop after being abused for a poorly glued volume, and gets hired by an inventor whose projects are doomed. Marti doesn't at first know this, but we're made uneasy in the best early segment of the film by the suspicoiusly odd pampering he receives, fine food, freedom to smoke on the job and come and go, a flirtatious wife (Agnieszka Żulewska), while a previous assistant is just in the process of being sent packing. Debts multiply.

Is this a great job or just a very weird and crazy-making one? A lot is expected of Joseph yet his duties are never clearly defined, and he's not paid. The actor is muscular and well-built and seen a lot shirtless at first, to show he might be ready for anything, though any potential affair with the wife is held in check.

Walser, who would up penniless and forgotten and institutionalized after a mental collapse, apparently experienced the same mix of jobs as his protagonist here.

An inheritance has led "Technical Engineer Karl Tobler" to set himself in a grand hilltop mansion and set up as an inventor and create a goofy project of "advertising clocks" to be used in public places and on trams all to tell the exact time. But when a potential investor comes, When Marti has to greet him since Walser is away, the sample clocks are all set at different, wrong times, and the investor leaves laughing. Good Reads summarizes the novel: "Joseph is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures?" No, and why does he get them?

There is no Pinteresque reversal of roles or Beckettian degeneration, just a gradual disorder and decline. The film does capture the surrealism of the situation: and though 1908 is before 1917 when the actual surrealist movement began, it seems to hover around Engineer Karl Tobler's posh but off-kilter world, an incidentally there are knockoffs of School of Paris modernism hanging on the walls of Tobler's villa. This is also a story of a victim, and has vague affinities with Kafka, especially The Trial and The Castle, and indeed Kafka is said to have admired Walser.

There is a lot going on in this film. There is the economic and class element, but Marti is exploited in other ways, sometimes as a factotum or front man, often as an amenuensis, sometimes given the lead, treated like a member of the family, or a live-in butler. He doesn't know what he is or where he stands, and he sticks by Tobler in hopes the latter will succeed and thus pay him. Beside the clocks, midway Tobler begins to tinker with a can opener, which Marti, in a moment of foreseeing the two world wars when millions of soldiers woult be issued can openers, predicts this is a good idea. Tobler also makes giant ugly objects that look like bad soap sculptures. These are displayed backed up by fireworks at a big party when the central cast all gets drunk and naked, Marti and his past and present bosses and the women, and they all dance nude in a drawn-out sequence. A man who has played beautiful Bach on the keyboard now, at the party, turns to cacophonous modernistic banging. Is this the trimph of modernism, a harbinger of World War I? Or just another inexplicable digression?

Olivia Popp, in her Rotterdam CIneuropa review, says the best part of the film is its anachdronisms, in some of the costumes and sets (and zooms?) but especially the use of contemporary rock music, and wishes that had been done more. But she also acknowledges the film runs on too long. It might have been better if it was tightened up and unified, and instead of rock with period-appropriate modernist music, like early Stravinsky. A [URL="https://thefilmverdict.com/the-assistant/[/URL]by Carmen Gray is also admiring of the film's "eccentric flashes of avant-garde dance and performance" for infusing "wild energy" and the mood of "risk-taking." The whole trouble is that this film, better at mood than narrative, goes haywire, then fizzles out, as uncertain of shape as its giant soap sculptures. But The Assistant's premonition of how crazy the twentieth century was going to become so very early is a haunting one.

The Assistant/Czlowiek do wszystkiego (Polish: "A Man for Everything"), 129 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Jan. 31, 2025. Included in New Directors/New Films, for which it was screened for this review. ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 5
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

Sunday, April 6
6:15pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2

[Chris Knipp]

CYCLEMAHESH (Suhel Banerjee 2024)

During Covid a young man became stranded far from home so he rode a bike across the country

Cyclemahesh won the Best First Feature award at IDFA, the world's largest documentary film festival and one can see why. This is a charming film. It's almost about nothing. Most of the time we're just watching a young man (three young men play the role, including the one who originally performed the feat) just riding along a dirt road in the middle of nowehre. yet it leaves you with a feeling of happiness and peace, secured by sublime classic Indian music. In the end what starts as a simple effort to set a record in getting from here to there takes on almost the air of a spiritual quest, and the film about it is playful and original.

It's not all dirt roads. There are some pretty patches of greenery, some strking sights. There is a spooky spirit guide, man with a large mask strapped ovder his back who speaks in a stentorian voice. He is the mask-wearing, poetry-reciting Khanderao, a mythical sprite, who describes their existence as part of a continuous gyre. "In the beginning there was only water," he tells Mahesh. "then came the forests. Then you came, and me! Then came fire, then again, water. Then you, then me, the king of this wilderness."

THe film is in Hindi as well as Odia and Marathi. Mahesh was a construction worker - sometmes they call him a plumber, but when he returns to the pllumbing at the end you see it's part of a construction project. They say he became "a national sensation" by managing to cover 1700 kilometers in seven days to cross the country to arrive at his home. The film is docu-fiction. It recreates Mahesh's exploit, though it's depiction, not reenactment. How far anybody actually cycled in making the film we don't know.

There is a breaking down of the fourth wall several times. Once, the filmmakers simply stop shooting and walk into the frame. Another time, we see a policeman try to stop the filming, saying it can't be done without a permit. They beg and plead and apparently talk him down from this position. Or is this itself a ficton, as is the case in Quentin Dupieux's The Second Act, included in the current FLC series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema?

The film takes us through, the blurb says, "wheat fields, river valleys, and raging fires complemented by gorgeous sunrises and sunsets" and compresses into scarcely over an hour formal invention and original ideas "worthy of a film three times as long." So watch this instead of The Brutalist!

What the blurb doesn't mention is the use of three different young men to play the role of Mahesh, with Mahesh himself coming in at the end, playing the game of Todd Haynes' filma about Bob Dylan using six different actors, [] I'm Not There[/I] (NYFF 2007)

THe film isn't a dogged depiction of the ride. It shows two flat tires, and the very mumble, artisanal solutions found. It mentions that after yoyu ride a bike all day, your butt feels like hell. But it never shows Mahesh eating, or sleeping, or going to the bathroom, or goes further into the physical issues of the ride. It's indeed more a meditation on a long bike ride more tha a depiction of it. This in cinematic terms becomes much more interesting.

CycleMahesh, 61 mins., debuted at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), Nov., 2024, winning the Best First Feature award. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Wednesday, April 9
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2

Thursday, April 10
9:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

[Chris Knipp]

ATIYE ZARE ARANDI: GRAND ME (2024)

A child of divorced parents decides who she wants to live with

We who have watched Iranian films, maybe known some Iranians, know they're complicated people, that their greatest skill is in making life difficult for each other. This short documentary by Atiye Zare Arandi about her neice and focused on her famnily and their tense discussions of her custody is, therefore, excruciating. But it is curiously satisfying, because there is something like a resolution, even a happy ending. The question is answered. No cusody court: the child, nine-year-old Melina, does not want to reject her father's claims on her and opt for living with her motner. She wants to continue living with her maternal grandparents in Isfahan. She certrainly does not want to go and live with her father (Ramin) in Tehran. But she finds her mother (Atefeh) "irritating sometimes" and doesn' want to live with her either. But with her grandparents after all she is happy, and in the final footage of a trip to the country and playing in the snow, happy she seems to remain. What was all the fuss about? Well, they are Iranians: how can you even ask?

In the possibily Kiarostami-inspired car scene, segments of which are intereperced through the film, Mama is driving and Melina is sitting beside her and they dialogue. Melina delivers a fiery, devastating critique of her mother. She aays neither her father nor her mother should have divorced. At the end she says in any case they are all alone. Everyone in the world, the "dunya," is always alone. This from a nine-year-old! Itt's astonishing, both the maturity but also the fire and energy of delivery from this skinny tyke. When they come back to her grandparents Melina says from the car, smirking, "I taught her a lesson," and adds, "I slaughtered her." And she did.

But of course: Melina is almost frighteningly precocious and smart. We learn that she has gotten excellent grades in all her subjects. Her grandmother teases her about this at first, saying it was bad news and holding the report away from her. Also, we see a set of drawings of big-eyed creatures the girl has made, which show variety and rich color and show an impressive ability, at nine, to work in series and even mount the seies neatly on her bedroom wall. We may also note that though she is dissatisfied and fearful about her father, she never gives in to emotion or breaks into tears. In these difficult, tense days she remains a tough cookie.

But despite Melina's apparent right to decide in court who she wants to live with, she can't travel to Turkey with her mother because her father controls her right to a passport and won't let her have one.

In the car we stare at the beautiful but sad face of Atefeh, her mother, which has something helpless about it. She despairs of ever winning back her daughter's love and trust.

All this footage the aunt has shot also shows well off, roomy apartments - glimpses of comfortable middle class Iranian life. A litlte music has been judiciously added by Naïma Joris. The editing has been done by Katarina Türler in a way that provides order and economy and a measure of pacing to the film.

The biggest shocker is a conservative muslim coming-of-age ceremony in which Melina, at her ninth birthday, is filmed in identical nun-like costume with two dozen other just-turned-nine girls, who are charmed and lectured by a slim, handsome young imam in gray who charms them while coaxing them always to wear hijab with their hair covered and never appear before men with "thin tights." At home, we notice women continue to wear hijab (except when as young as Melina) while the men are fat and badly dressed and one even goes shirtless in the kitchen with a repulsive hairy back on view.

The father is never seen, and Melina avoids answering when he calls. Sometimes she doesn't answer when her mother calls either, which she lies to cover up. Once her father comes for her and there is fear that he may not bring her back. He keeps her for four days instead of one, and when she returns she runs into her grandmother's arms looking stricken but doesn't speak. Ominously, we have learned that her father has thought twice about having her live with her because he has an adult son. . . and she is not bad looking. (In fact one of the best scenes staged into the camera by Melina is one in which, posing as a pretty person, she gives a mock lesson, using herself as the model, on how to do makekup for a party. ("The next time I will show makeup for mourning.") This is a film that comes to seem more than it does at first as the complexity of the people and especially of this precocious girl emerges.

Grand Me, 80 mins., debuted Mar. 18, 2024 at CPH:DOX (Copenhagen) and won the Next Wave Award there., also showing at Taipei (Golden Horse), DMZ (South Korea), and DocPoint (Helsinki). Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:

Saturday, April 12
2:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2

Sunday, April 13
1:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

[Chris Knipp]

SOICHIRO TANAKA AND MINAMI OHBA IN THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES

THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES (Du Jie 2024)

Love and suicide and ghosts in Japan from a Chinese cinematographer turned director

Du Jie is a cinematographer from China. He has chosen to set his directorial debut in Japan, and its festival debut was at Busan, in Korea. It reminded me initially, with its use of voiceover and still photos, of Chris Marker's haunting classic French 1962 sci-fi time loop story short, La Jetée. This time the words and stills feature a discussion of suicide. But the body of the film is more a piece of overlapping storytelling, with two couples who slightly connect, a lost ring that is threaded through, and the ideas of the artist Kenji Chiga, all in service of the themes of suicide and ghosts. The effect is unconventional and enigmatic and can really be quite confusing. At this point there are only two reviews, neither of which summarizes the plot thoroughly. Even a 37- minute interview with Du Jie clarifies little.

People are interested in how Du Jie wound up directing (and filming and editing) his own feature in Japan and not China. Evidently he found more artistic freedom in his adopted country, but still goes back to China for work as a cinematographer to support himself. This film vry much shows the lack of constraint he may have wanted: it's quite experimental.

Du Jie wants to draw a connected line between elements of his film that are disjointed. Partly this hinges on a lost ring. It seems a man with a bowler hat (whom we enounter at the ene) loses his wedding wing, which falls off while he is playing with a child by the sea. The ring is swallowed by a fish. The main couple are a pet shop worker Aoki (Minami Ohba) and her fish factory worker boyfriend Sugamoto (Seita Shibuya). Shibuya, with his height and stylish hair, looks like a Japanese movie star, and Miami Ohba is very pretty and has beautiful long hair, making for an unlikely working class couple, if that's what they are meant to be. Anyway, cleaning a fish, Sugamoto finds a ring, which he gives to Aoki. They both get tattoos, she a tiny one of Mount Fuji on her neck. They plan to marry, and, apparently, arrange a honeymoon, ending at a resort spot, the southernmost part of Shikoku island.

But after a ride on a roller coaster filmed with unusual thoroughness, though showing the ride, not the couple, Sugamoto tells Aoki that maybe the tattoos were ot a good idea. He has changed his mind and is not ready to marry, and they're over. She gets the tattoo removed, then decides to go on the honeymoon trip by herself, without her boyfrriend. A lot of the second half of the film is this trip. You sort of suspect she might intend to commit suicide, especially when, on preparing to leave, Aoki takes her big suitcase on wheels and leaves it with the building trash, taking only a backpack. Later we are shown that the trash collectors leave the suitcase. Of course, it's not packaged properly. BUt the truly Japanese touch is that the trash men leave a little neatly printed note explaining why the suitcase was not collected.

Aoki apparently isn't going to kill herself, and sheis going to run into some ghosts, or thunder at the resort that is ghost voices she does not yet recognize. This town is known to be a suicide hotspot, a place where the spirits of those who took their own lives roam around without finding a way to the afterlife. The guy who checks Aoki in at the hotel is played by Soichiro Tanaka, who has appeared inn earlier scenes, only now he is without a mustache. He seems to be everywhere. But Du Jie has said his starting point was a woman who went on a trip that made people think she was going to commit suicide, as appears to be the case with Aoki.

There are scenes early in the film involving the other couple. A young man with chisled fatures and striking hair (Soichiro Tanaka) who has lost his keen photographer girlfriend (Mado Karasumori) to suicide. But on the trip to Shikoku island, Minami Ohba's character also seems to be using a similar-looking camera. It is Sichiro Tanaka who checks her into the hotel.

Regrettably, I've so far found it impossible to pin down what happens in the film any better than this. (Amber Wilkinson of Screen Daily understands it better.) Du Jie is trying to do is interesting, as the early segment's reminding one of Chris Marker shows. Certainly the images are very nice here, as everygody has noted. Perhaps another time the dp-turned-director will find ways make his basic narrative elements more readable without losing his thoughtful, suggestive approach.

The Height of the Coconut Trees 椰子の高さ, 100 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 5, 2024, also showing at Tokyo FILMeX. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:

Tuesday, April 8
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Du Jie

Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Du Jie

[Chris Knipp]

NIKOLO GHVINIASHVILI, NIKA GONGADZE, CENTER, IN HOLY ELECTRICITY

TATO KOTETISHVILI: HOLY ELECTRICITY (2024)

Gems from junk

TRAILER

This film from Georgia makes such good use of documentary elements and authentic locales it's tempting to think what's going on is simnply real. Sometimes the documentary elements take over, and sometimes a scene is extravagant and unexpected. All through there is humor and warmth and a sympathy for the eccentric and humble, like a cute kitten, or an old lady who has a bunch of cats and dogs.

We begin with a scrapyard, and this is a fast introduction to director Kotetishvili's point of view, because it's looked at with wide open and sympathetic eyes. There are groups of people too, and some Tblisi street scenes. Sometimes orange seems to be the dominant color.

The scrapyard, in an old car, is where Gonga (Nikolo Ghviniashvili) and Bart (Nika Gongadze) live and sleep, the odd couple who will dominate the narrative. Gonga is a tall, lanky, long-haired boy. His father has recently died, and he has joined his cousin, the short, chubby, debt-ridden Bart, who in a later conversation we learn is trans. Going through a pile of metal, Gonga finds a big box of rusted crosses that they clean and paint and equip with multi-colored LED lighting and sell successfully from door to door, making money to pay off Bart's debts.

This part ends when Gonga leaves Bart in disgust after he gambles away all their money after a drunken party. Gonga winds up with a Roma girl for a while. We witness a string of dialogues where he struggles with expressing an interest. Either he's too shy or he's just not sure what he feels, and eventually she disappears. Along the way they go selling crosses, and when we constantly gliimpse bigger lighted crosses along the road, we reealize the Gonga-Bart ones are part of something bigger and glamorous, halfway between religous kitsch and the art of Dan Flavin. They are elegant objects. But a goldmine? Not quite.

While Gonga is endlessly questioning the Roma girl about her family and her preferences, Bart's debtors are getting tough, and one of the most memorable scenes, handsomely framed and centered, shows two of the latter questioning an upside down Bart hanging by his feet, begging to be let down, while one of them is scrutniizing the contents of his wallet and finding that he's listed as Gender: Female.

There's a hanging scene a bit earlier with Gonga,who's long and physical,and has hair that never loses its long sleek dangle. He's seen on hanging from a giant crame at the scrapyard. The next time you see him he's wearing a light cast on one arm, and it's not cosmetic. He fell off the hook of that giant crane and lightly fractured, he tells the gypsy girl, his radius.

This is a meandering tale that takes detours like that, and dips on the wild side mildly enough. It makes me think back, for no reaason, perhaps, to two gypsy movies. First is Frank Pierson's glamorous 1978 Hollywood saga,King of the Gypsies, Eric Roberts' impressive screen debut, with Susan Sarandon and Brooke Shields. Maybe it was corny but it drew me in and I can remember where I was sitting and who with, a sign it was a memorable impression. Ten years later there was a bigger, more authentic-seeming saga, [I]Time of the Gypsies, which absorbed me, almost wore me down, at home. At Cannes, it won Kusturica the Best Director award.

Holy Electricity isn't like these. Apart from only being glancingly about gypsies, it's a scrapyard production, made of bits and pieces found here and there. The filmmaker shows both humor and sympathy in unusual measure in choosing his scraps. But this strength is also a weakness because at several points the narrative seems to dissolve, and with it our patience may fray and our attention wander. But it's a promising beginning, and it won an award at Locarno to prove that. His work here is notable for the combination of catholicity of taste and the careful composition of every shot.

Holy Electricity/Tsminda Electroenergia, 95 mins. debuted at Locarno Aug. 11, 2024, winning the Golden Leopard in its Filmmakers of the Present section. Later it showed at Thessoloniki,T allinn Black Nights, Mannheim-Heidelberg, and Montreal International Documentary Festival. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:

Saturday, April 12
5:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

Sunday, April 13
3:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2

[Chris Knipp]

BALINT SZIMLER: LESSON LEARNED/FEKETE PONT (2024)

Lesson Learned / Fekete pont
Bálint Szimler, 2024, Hungary, 119m
Hungarian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Palkó has been transferred to a new school, and finding new friends and battling tough teachers are making his adolescent life all the more complicated. Meanwhile, Juci (Anna Mészöly) is a young teacher staring down the other end of the barrel at myopic superiors, bullying parents who can’t fathom why their child is struggling, and fellow teachers whose cruelty crosses boundaries. From these intersecting strands Bálint Szimler, in just his second feature, captures all the intricacy and pleasure of a campus novel—from the shame-tinged tedium of detention lessons to a dazzling school-play sequence. Photographed on deeply textured 16mm, Lesson Learned is refreshingly frank about how kids act amongst themselves, the way teachers wield power (emotional and physical) to mask their insecurities, and what happens when clueless parents are brought into the fold. It’s hard to imagine a viewer who won’t recognize much of their own schooling experience moment by moment, or find themselves moved by Szimler’s roundly empathetic worldview. Winner of a Best Performance prize and Special Mention in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente.

Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

Friday, April 11
5:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2