Synopsis

1917. Edward, a skittish civil servant working for the British Empire, has been posted in Rangoon, Burma for years. When his fiancée Molly sends a letter announcing her imminent arrival, he experiences a sudden and debilitating case of cold feet, boards the first ship in sight, and flees the country. Learning of his escape, Molly is determined to track him down. So she embarks on an Asian grand tour, going from Bangkok to Shanghai in search of her reluctant lover. Equal parts 1930s Hollywood throwback and meditative travelog, director Miguel Gomes (The Tsugua Diaries, Chicago IFF 2020) imbues this globe-trotting love story with searching melancholy. The studio-set “colonial romance” is shot in black and white, and intercut with sumptuous color footage shot in the modern day. The result is an intoxicating mixture of fiction and documentary that ponders the past as it ruminates on our present.

Synopsis

Nana is a young girl living on a remote volcanic island that much of her family, including her mother, have long since fled. When Nana falls ill to a strange fever, she is sent to the foot of the island’s volcano for treatment by the local healer. There, she encounters a world steeped in magical realism, suspended between dream and reality.

Hanami is a stunning, surreal look at family and community in Cabo Verde, an island nation whose diaspora far outnumbers its residents. Exploring the necessity of migration and the void it leaves behind, filmmaker Denise Fernandes paints a sweeping portrait of the inherited echoes between daughters and mothers — all set against the otherworldly landscape of Ilha do Fogo, Cabo Verde and its volcano.

Synopsis

A panoramic portrait of a patriarchal society, Happy Holidays chronicles the lives of a Palestinian family living in Israel. While studying far away from her home in Haifa, Fifi’s newfound sense of freedom is threatened when she gets into a minor car accident. Injured, but hoping to avoid confrontation with her headstrong mother, she must decide just how much to reveal to her family. Her decision creates a cascade of ripple effects, and a complex web of deceits and half-truths begins to crack the family’s foundations.

Told in four chapters, each from the perspective of a different character, the film intricately balances a bevy of narrative threads to create a swirling, kaleidoscopic drama. Featuring pitch-perfect performances and a shifting structure that subverts expectations at every turn, the film elaborates the clashing demands of tradition and progress.

Synopsis

For his 23rd film, legendary British filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the stark domestic dramas he’s known for, like his 1971 feature debut Bleak Moments (a ChicagoIFF Gold Hugo winner) and his blistering, Cannes-winning 1993 breakthrough Naked. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since his 1996 multiple Oscar nominee Secrets and Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. In stark contrast, Pansy’s easygoing younger sister Michele is a single mother whose family life and hair salon are brimming with warmth.

Fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous, Hard Truths takes us into the intensities of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.

Synopsis

The earthy tones of untamed nature, shot with stunning vibrancy by filmmaker Sean Price Williams, color a nameless medieval village somewhere in England that seems to exist out of time. A tight-knit community of villagers is suspicious of outsiders, and spend their days laboring for the generally affable landowner Charles Kent. Things begin to change when Kent’s nefarious cousin claims ownership over the land and installs plans for massive change. A cartographer is hired, maps are drawn, and the architecture of profit-driven, capitalistic agriculture begins to manifest.

Rich, textured visuals and impeccable performances create a lived-in universe that feels uncannily adjacent to our own. Unfolding over the course of a single hallucinatory week, the English-language debut of “Greek Weird Wave” godmother Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg, 2010) is a breathtaking, atmospheric fable that satirizes modernity and its chaotic fallout.