Synopsis

In a small village in southern Egypt, a group of girls form a street theater troupe as both a creative outlet and a fearless act of defiance. Challenging the patriarchal norms of their conservative Coptic Christian community, the girls dream of becoming actresses, dancers, and singers. They take to the dusty roads of their town to enact short plays that offer provocative challenges to passersby, asking questions like why a girl cannot marry the boy she loves.

Shot over four years with extraordinary access to its subjects, Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir’s film follows these brave girls from adolescence to adulthood, charting the complex and myriad ways in which each must navigate growing up as they form romantic partnerships and  face the social demands of womanhood. As feminist empowerment and aspirational dreams collide with the sobering realities of life, The Brink of Dreams offers a poignant and absorbing coming-of-age story of female solidarity and youthful rebellion. Winner of the top documentary prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

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

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

Defamed actress Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) is abruptly called into a parent-teacher meeting at school. There, she is presented with scathing allegations about the behavior of her six-year-old son Armand. A tangled web of accusations between parents and faculty ensues, but who can say with certainty what really happened? As it becomes increasingly clear that much more is at stake, Elisabeth struggles to uncover the truth, and she is drawn into a chaotic fight for redemption where desire, madness, and obsession prevail.

Writer-director Halfdan Ullmann-Tøndel’s striking debut feature shrewdly unfurls with a keen observation of the quirks, pettiness, and rivalries inherent in human nature. Surrealist moments are dotted throughout, alternately providing flashpoints of comedy and consternation in this tension-filled, angst-fueled drama.

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.