Synopsis

A deadbeat dad is trapped with his family waiting out a typhoon. There, the fractured clan reckons with their past as they look to an uncertain future.

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 light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut.

Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment.

Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

Synopsis

In the wake of his mother’s death, Rein moves from the Netherlands to a ski town in the Swiss Alps. There, he is immersed in nature, leading a quiet life teaching snowboarding and befriending visiting skiers. Then his father comes to visit for the first time, rupturing Rein’s tranquil bubble with his domineering presence and heavy baggage from their shared past. When the two embark on a day of backcountry skiing, their tense, competitive rapport reaches a breaking point — until nature threatens to put their petty power struggle into perspective.

With stunning cinematography that captures the intimidating and immense grandeur of the Swiss Alps in winter, Alpha deftly explores the age-old battle of man vs. man vs. mountain. A fight for dominance hangs over this simmering family drama that morphs into a gripping adventure thriller.

Synopsis

Where does a democracy end and a theocracy begin? Oscar-nominated filmmaker Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy) investigates the increasingly powerful grip that evangelicals hold over politics in Brazil, home to one of the largest and swiftest religious shifts in human history. As Costa tells us in her haunting and insightful voiceover, evangelicals have risen from some 5% to 30% of the Brazilian population in just 40 years.

With extraordinary access to the country’s top leaders, including President Lulu da Silva, former President Jair Bolsonaro, and Bolsonaro’s right-hand man, popular Pentecostal televangelist Silas Malafaia, Costa offers a lucid, poetic, and chilling look at the ways in which fear, poverty, and apocalyptic theology can be exploited to consolidate power. It’s a brilliant and gripping case study about the precarity of contemporary democracies with clear resonances in the U.S. today.