Synopsis

An eccentric documentary crew treks across the vast roadways of Alberta, Canada to document monuments, museums, and other roadside curios. Armed with only a loose idea of the project’s final form, the wayward director struggles to manage a slew of messy personal entanglements and rivalries embroiling her collaborators. They look for meaning in the landscape, but their search turns inward as they’re inspired to reckon with their own lives.

Directed with a light touch, this charming cross-country odyssey is part revisionist Western and part road movie. Punctuated by moments of extraordinary tenderness and unexpected violence, it invokes poetry, magic, and prayer to imagine a radical, caring form of wildness on the Canadian frontier.

Synopsis

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is an evocative exploration of a remarkable woman whose influence remains largely unacknowledged. Filmed on lush 16mm, the movie immerses viewers in the atmospheric Caribbean landscape, where a film crew gathers to delve into the life and work of Suzanne Césaire — writer, educator, feminist, and co-founder of the Négritude movement. The narrative unfolds through a blend of imagined reenactments and archival inspirations, capturing Aime Césaire’s political engagements and interactions with surrealist André Breton. This approach dissolves conventional timelines, mixing the real and the fictive to create a layered portrait of a woman who defies easy categorization. Director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich steers away from a straightforward biography, instead crafting a contemplative piece that probes into the enduring mystery of Césaire’s artistic contributions and the challenges of managing motherhood with a career.

Synopsis

Born in South Korea, but adopted by Dutch parents and raised in the Netherlands, Mieke lives happily as a queer woman with her partner in the city of Utrecht. But when her guilt-ridden birth parents reach out to her after years of separation, Mieke’s life is upended. She  must come to grips with who she is, and also who she might have been — made all the more complex by the entrenched homophobia that still exists in South Korean society.

Filmmaker Jota Mun — themself a Korean adoptee — traces Mieke’s story, recounting the events leading up to her reunion and observing her ongoing internal conflicts about her birth parents and where she belongs. Equally affecting is the film’s sympathetic focus on Mieke’s vulnerable mother Okgyun, who desperately seeks forgiveness for giving her daughter up for adoption. Beautifully conceived and profoundly multilayered, Between Goodbyes is a heartbreaking and uplifting story of family, identity, and acceptance.

Synopsis

Day after day, 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) projects on her bedroom walls the moments of easy-to-miss beauty she’s forever filming on her phone. Bailey is a born artist, but to find that path, she’ll need to scale some obstacles: a young, unsteady father (Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan), marrying yet again and full of get-rich-quick schemes. A peer group flirting with petty crime. A housing project designed to curb imagination. Life is hardening Bailey by the hour, so it’s a surprise when a soft-spoken, gender-bending stranger named Bird (Franz Rogowski, Passages) alights in her ‘hood, offering friendship while investigating his own painful past. Could this childlike free spirit be Bailey’s guide into a happier life? Or is Bird more complicated than that?

Director Andrea Arnold, a past award winner at the Chicago International Film Festival and at Cannes, returns to the world of hardscrabble adolescence she so vividly explored in Fish Tank and American Honey, both modern classics. But Bird also sees Arnold fly in new directions, blending fiery first-timers with famous faces in her cast, probing further into fluid identities, and scouring the dead ends and concrete jungles of Bailey’s world for new possibilities of grace and redemption.

Synopsis

Sir Steve McQueen’s Blitz follows the epic journey of George (Elliott Heffernan), a 9-year-old boy in World War II-era England whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to his mom and his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) in East London, embarks on an adventure, only to find himself in immense peril. Meanwhile, a distraught Rita searches for her missing son.

Featuring impressive attention to period detail and empathetic performances from its all-star cast, Blitz is an inspiring, heartfelt tale of bravery and perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds, as McQueen’s signature visual style conjures up an immersive vision of wartime London.