Ela Bittencourt

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

Collective memory: Mohanad Yaqubi archival collage of emphasizes cinema’s capacity to provoke viewers’ empathic imagination and spark solidarity

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.

Evasive truths: the eighth edition of the festival traces the various ways in which contemporary cinema challenges the foundations of ethnography

Collective experience: TIFF’s experimental section remains vigorous 2021, with some films firmly rooted in rigorous visuality, and others more intensely personal

Colombian class warrior Luis Ospina blazed a revolutionary trail through Latin American cinema with subversive genre and documentary works

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

In the dark: The Cave tells the story of an extraordinary woman doctor caring for a besieged community in southwestern Syria

Lean times: the director of Beanpole on the use of color and the influence of literature on his NYFF standout

Country life: The directors of Bacurau on how the film‘s setting in Brazil’s wild backcountry informed their blistering portrait of resistance

Edge of the city: the director and lead actor of Long Way Home on the difficulties facing black filmmakers in Brazil

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.

(Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland, Amazon Studios, Opening December 21)

Self-reflections: the award-winning Japanese filmmaker talks about her intimate autobiographical documentary work

The center holds: the annual documentary film festival in Portugal presented experimental works that engaged directly with our real world

Slow recovery: the Romanian director of Scarred Hearts and Aferim! talks about the lasting wounds of history

(Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, Music Box Films, January 12)

Figments of a nation: the Brazilian director’s delirious (and dangerous) allegories pulse with the enduring energies of Cinema Novo

Colonial hangover: Brazilian directors Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra and Algerian director Narimane Mari probe their countries’ respective historical traumas

(Andrzej Zulawski, France, Rialto Pictures, Opens July 14)