Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason faces an unthinkable task: composing the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier declared dead due to climate change. In Sara Dosa’s (Fire of Love, Festival 2022) luminous documentary, Magnason confronts the disappearance of his country’s ice while preserving the stories of his grandparents, intertwining personal history with vanishing landscapes. Drawing […]
Cao Thị Hậu and her family live in Vietnam surrounded by rolling green hills enveloped in mist. Here, she sits with her grandchildren tending to their pains and spinning stories of the cave in Quảng Bình where she was born. Folk tales, bees, tigers, and home remedies all braid themselves into her fables and the […]
Boisterous, mischievous, and seemingly unassailable, Lee Joo-in is the master of her world. Whether dancing with classmates, sparring with her charismatic brother and devoted mother (Parasite’s Jang Hye-jin), or sharing tender moments with her boyfriend, Joo-in’s life appears in harmony. That balance shatters after a public confrontation and a series of unsettling anonymous messages compel […]
An abandoned telephone booth calls out to 10-year-old Risa. After a tragic fire devastates their small town, residents take to calling the dead on an out-of-order telephone high atop a hill. But only Risa can hear the voices from the other side. Hoping to finally contact her mysterious father somewhere in this crowd of impatient […]
An extraordinary man deserves an extraordinary documentary, and director Rachael J. Morrison delivers exactly that with this lively portrait of Josef Carl Engressia, also known as Joybubbles. In the era of analog telephones, when long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive, Engressia—born blind and gifted with perfect pitch—discovered he could whistle the precise tones that unlocked the […]
A masterful debut, this depiction of a young girl whose family is contending with a challenging older sibling weaves autobiographical and documentary elements seamlessly into a singularly poignant package. Sasha’s family emigrated from Hungary to Vancouver Island in the 1990s. Life there is pretty bucolic—outdoor swims, watching cartoons—but there are outbursts of increasingly odd, antisocial […]
Walter Thompson-Hernández’s stunning feature debut is a coming-of-age story set in South Los Angeles, blending social and magical realism, Greek mythology, and vérité observation into a poetic reflection on family, […]
Ara, Shannon Elizabeth, Nikki, and Olive live by the mantra, “Sell! Sell! Sell!” Each Girl Scout in this diverse group has her own sales goal to reach or maybe even […]
For many kids, the idea of never having to go to school again may seem like a dream come true, but 10-year-old Rabia (Nazualiya Arsalan) loves learning. Despite growing up […]
The lawlessness afoot in Venezuela’s capital city is vibrantly captured in this gripping adaptation of Karina Sainz Borgo’s novel by the filmmaking team behind Bad Hair (Festival 2014). It’s 2017, […]
Severance’s Britt Lower stars as Julia, a young woman whose online shopping habit takes an alarming turn in this quirky thriller. Fired three weeks ago and now three weeks sober, […]
Billie Jean King changed the game of tennis — on the court and across sports culture. Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff’s documentary presents the legend in full, combining rare archival […]
