streaming this november

STREAMING PREMIERES

last things

In the artist and experimental film essayist Deborah Stratman’s scintillating latest work, life on earth-all the way through to its projected extinction-is envisioned from the perspective of rocks. Fusing hard science with speculative and poetic modes, this posthumanist piece is in conversation with the proto-science-fiction of the Boex brothers as well as works by Donna Haraway and Clarice Lispector, among others.

Streaming Premiere Friday, November 1

new titles

youth (spring)

Wang’s ongoing project of documenting the social and economic transformation of 21st-century China as reflected in the lives of those buffeted by the country’s emergence as an industrial powerhouse continues with Youth (Spring), a deeply empathetic account of the everyday routine of young migrant workers laboring in textile factories in the town of Zhili, outside Shanghai, and living together in their crowded dormitories. Shot over the course of five years, Youth (Spring) is an extraordinary portrait of the resilience and hope-often frustrated-of its subjects, most in their twenties, seeking to assert their humanity in these intense environments.

DRY GROUND BURNING

In the Bolsonaro-era Brasilia of this incendiary two-hander-the second collaboration between directors Queirós and Pimenta-political resistance takes the form of an all-women gang who steal and refine oil before selling it on to bikers. The melding of documentary style with elements of science-fiction and the Western yields an indelible vision of a gritty, present-day dystopia.

Joining Contemporary Cinema

A WOMAN, A PART

Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy-and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for which he was jailed-who’s kept cloistered in a meager apartment by her brother, who cares only for the government assistance she brings in. Without a place in a cruelly judgmental society, the couple increasingly take shelter in fantasy in Lee’s magical realism-inflected third feature, an enormously affecting work about love’s blossoming in the least promising of terrains.

Joining Women’s Work: Essential Films by Female Filmmakers

our nixon

Using an array of archival materials including television interviews, Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, and more than 500 reels of long-out-of-circulation Super 8 home movies by presidential aides Dwight Chapin, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman, Lane’s film offers an unusually intimate, candid look at the 37th President, found bidding a sentimental farewell to aides after firing them, ranting against homosexuality, nervously awaiting reviews of his “Silent Majority” speech, and enduring an unexpected antiwar protest from the supposedly square Ray Conniff singers. A portrait of the President as star in the movie of his life, blissfully unaware he’s been cast as the villain.

Joining Essential Documentaries

tatsumi

In the 1950s, a darker and more cinematic strain appeared in Japanese manga, dubbed “gekiga”-a name said to have been coined by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, an artist at the forefront of this edgy and distinctly adult tradition. In this prismatic biographical work, first unveiled as part of the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, animated episodes from Tatsumi’s life are interwoven with a selection of his stories.

Joining Animation for Adults

town hall

Getting at the political through the personal, this documentary set in the lead-up to the 2012 election is a portrait of two Tea Party agitators in the battleground state of Pennsylvania: Katy, new to politics, and John, who has previously held an elected office. Co-directors Sierra Pettengill and Jamila Wignot here refrain from editorializing, instead letting their subjects speak for themselves.

Joining Essential Documentaries

new series

three by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

A conjurer of works as spellbinding as they are somnolent, his oeuvre one without pretense or parallel, Weerasethakul is undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers to have emerged in the twenty-first century. This series brings together two of the independent Thai auteur’s most feted films: in both the Palme d’Or-anointed Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendour, earthly matters and desires commingle tantalizingly with mystical realms.

Series Includes:
Cemetery of Splendour, Tropical Malady, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

three films by alice diop

A Senegalese French child of the Paris suburbs that figure so prominently in her work, filmmaker Alice Diop has, in her documentaries-included in this series-and 2022 narrative fiction debut Saint Omer, striven to “oppose the dominant image of France that denies a part of the population.” An essential aspect of Diop’s creative mission is her “La Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde” (“the ideal cinematheque for the world’s suburbs”) project, founded in 2021 with the assistance of the Centre Pompidou and the Ateliers Médicis, its stated mission to “welcome, protect, and work on films that come from all the peripheries of the world.”

Series Includes:
Danton’s Death, Towards Tenderness, On Call

retro-futurism: films by lev kalman & Whitney horn

A duo since day dot, Kalman and Horn began making films together in 2003, when they were still in college. Dedicated to working with celluloid, together they have forged a singular, vibes-forward aesthetic-a fusion of pastiche and sincerity that is both playful and sharp, silly and analytical, maximalist and joyously, inventively lo-fi. So armed, they have taken cinematic trips to the 1890s and the 1990s alike, period film territory braved by few shoestring-budget practitioners.

Series Includes:
Blondes in the Jungle, Fun’s Over, Jazz Christmas
L for Leisure, Two Plains & a Fancy

short films by jérémy clapin

French animator Jérémy Clapin struck a chord with his unheimlich debut feature, the Cannes Critics Week-awarded, Oscar-nominated I Lost My Body (2019), before swerving into live-action with his follow-up, the intimate sci-fi Meanwhile on Earth (2024). This series brings together three of the shorts that first marked Clapin as one to watch, his warped and melancholic absurdism suffusing every image in these tales of misfits seeking solace.

Series Includes:
Backbone Tale, Skhizein, Palmipedarium