Inside out: this year’s edition was suffused with an uneasy mood, expressed by many of the standout selections, including Mickey 17, Kontinental ’25, Special Operation, and Friendship’s Death
Physical graffiti: the American filmmaker speaks about his latest, a travelogue and detective story offering insights into bureaucracy, xenophobia, and political polarization in modern-day Croatia
Look back in anger: the Polish filmmaker is perhaps best known for the proto-psychedelia of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript, but much of his formidable filmography consists of realist dramas that explore lost innocence and doomed love
Office culture: director Rodrigo Moreno discusses his NYFF61 standout, a matryoshka doll of a movie, crackling with dry humor, about the drudgery of office work
Animal magnetism: the New York–based artist discusses her latest, a hybrid work of pandemic-inspired autofiction that blurs the boundaries between the authorial “I” and the subjectivities of its fictional characters
Undercurrents: this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week focused on “sur-realism,” a mode of Latin American filmmaking that doesn’t imagine an escape from reality but instead is fully, vividly, nightmarishly of it.
Collective experience: TIFF’s experimental section remains vigorous 2021, with some films firmly rooted in rigorous visuality, and others more intensely personal
Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Brazilian epic Bacurau sets the world on fire with an invigorating and audacious story of resistance that feeds off of pulp and politics
The stories we tell: the Czech documentary filmmaker on creating narratives out of daily life, her recent Doomed Beauty, and how her work is (or is not) feminist.
