STREAMING PREMIERES
THE DAMNED
Roberto Minervini followed his staggering Deep South missive What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire? (2018) with this heady time capsule from the American Civil War’s Western front, for which he took home Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize at Cannes 2024. Though The Damned is Minervini’s so-called first feature narrative venture, it shares in the immediacy of his non-fiction work: a work of rough-hewn and probing poetry, shot sequentially and without a script.
Streaming premiere Monday, December 1
IN THEATER CROSSOVER
Films by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Awarded Best Director at Cannes 2025 for The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho grew up religiously attending the cinemas that then dotted the old center of Recife, Brazil’s northernmost metropolis. His body of work displays a deep affection for the codes of popular genre cinema alongside a winning willingness to subvert them, an acute understanding of the complex political and social history of both his hometown and his country, and a capacity to coax extraordinary performances from stars and relative unknowns alike. Alongside his 2023 memoir-documentary Pictures of Ghosts and his debut feature, Neighboring Sounds—declared “one of the best films made recently in the world” by no less a personage than legendary musician Caetano Veloso—this program spotlights several little-screened shorts from Mendonça Filho’s early days as a backyard filmmaker and critic.
Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
Coined in 1970 by the Polish critic Janusz Gazda, the term “Ukrainian poetic cinema” was used to group the work of several burgeoning Ukrainian filmmakers who had shaken off the long-dominant mandates of “socialist realism”—as outlined by cultural commissars dictating terms from Moscow—to instead follow in the footsteps of Oleksandr Dovzhenko and his lyrical masterwork Earth (1930). Taking a freewheeling, experimental approach, bending the contours of time and space, the filmmakers featured in this series produced a cinema that explored a people’s relationship to their land, being the fertile ground from which their material culture and folkloric traditions sprang. Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema is a celebration of these artists and their questing after the ineffable spirit of Ukraine, a force far more profound and resilient than the existential threat at its doorstep.
Filmmaker Magazine Presents: 25 New Faces 2025
“Since its debut in 1998, Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces list has annually curated a cross-section of emerging and impressive new independent film talent. Directors, writers, actors, below-the-line—these are filmmakers who have made indelible work in the past year and will go on to shape tomorrow’s film culture. With the magazine’s 29th edition of the list in its current edition, the editors have curated from their work an excitingly diverse selection of shorts spanning horror, drama, comedy and experimental work.” —Filmmaker Editor-In-Chief Scott Macaulay
new streaming series and titles
HOLIDAY SHORTS FROM THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA
Though variegated in style—from paper cut-out reveries to vérité documentary—the shorts in this selection are united beyond just their Christmastime setting: each one is artfully constructed and inventive in its execution, and exudes a joyful warmth befitting of the season. Among the films’ makers are key National Film Board talents, including the groundbreaking animator Norman McLaren (Christmas Cracker), Alanis Obamsawin, early champion of Indigenous voices in documentary (Christmas at Moose Factory), and cinema vérité pioneers Stanley Jackson and Wolf Koenig (The Days Before Christmas).
FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE
Art and life become inextricably entwined in Chen’s gorgeously arrayed triumph of costume and production design, an epic spanning 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history in the life of a troupe of Peking opera actors based on the 1985 Lilian Lee novel, and a landmark of Fifth Generation Mainland cinema, notable for being the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Cheung stars as the orphaned Dieyi, trained to play dan (female roles), his unrequited adoration of frequent male co-star Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) remaining a constant through the disruptions of war and political turmoil, up until the film’s startling, cathartic climax.
Joining International Arthouse
THE ANGELS’ SHARE
Hewing closer to the spunky, good-hearted comedy of The Full Monty (1997) than one might expect from the director of Kes (1967), The Angels’ Share is a quaffable blend of Ken Loach’s trademark social critique and an offbeat crime caper. Together with the reforming criminals in his community service group, twentysomething Robbie (Paul Brannigan), a new father very nearly imprisoned for recent misdeeds, concocts a kilt-clad swindle involving top-shelf whisky.
Joining Contemporary Cinema