Schedule

Geographies of Solitude immerses viewers in the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote Atlantic outpost, guided by naturalist Zoe Lucas, who has lived there for over forty years. Shot on 16mm, this playful yet reverent experimental documentary follows wild horses, seals, weather, and tides, while quietly recording a lifetime of care, observation and marine debris collection. Jacquelyn Mills: ‘I don’t know the solution to our environmental crisis, and I don’t necessarily consider myself a political filmmaker. But it breaks my heart to see the state of the world environmentally. If we can experience what is sacred in nature and the wonder of the natural world, I believe we would have “less taste for destruction”, as Rachel Carson said. That is why I made this film: to work with our present reality. Can we honour places? Can that inspire us to treat them with reverence?’

In the forests of the Eastern Himalayas, two curious observers explore a nocturnal world of moths, illuminating a fragile ecosystem on the India–Bhutan border. Immersive and contemplative, the film invites us to attend to hidden connections within the natural world. Anupama Srinivasan: ‘The film is in a way, at least in parts, of us observing them observing the moths. So it is about the precision and focus and attention we give to looking. That is also what we want — for the audience to look at the film with more attention than one would normally do. The other aspect was the repetition. The rigour of science, you know, where they have to put up the screen every night. So for us, we wanted to represent that rigour but in an interesting way so that it does not become boring for the audience. So, every moth-screen night has a little story around it, very gently told. One night, nothing happens, no moths come, and they just keep waiting and have to pack up and go.’ Anirban Dutta: ‘Our motivation was also to challenge the anthropocentric gaze, where human beings are seen as the most superior things. When we went to that place, we saw ourselves as very little. As you see in the film, the human knowledge and the great science we know of — when the scientists put up the moth-screen, many nights they fail. One of them says that we put up this screen thinking that the moths will come and that this place is humanised. It will take us decades to understand how the moths look. That contextualises how little we know. One also needs to understand that any science that happens is part of a process first. There is rigour, and our film is a love letter to this process of science.’ — Excerpted and adapted from Santanu Das, ‘Nocturnes Directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan Interview on the Only Indian Documentary at Sundance 2024’, Hindustan Times, 26 January 2024

Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, Cao Thi Hau now cares for her extended family in a village, dreaming of her dead mother calling her home. Through intimate moments, the film observes daily life, hardship and the fragile transmission of the Ruc language to younger generations. TRƯƠNG Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux: ‘Water trickles through dark caves, drop by drop. Drops of memory pass from Mrs. Hậu to her grandchildren, word by word. Frame by frame, water carries them, carries us, carries the film — homeward.’

A friendship born from a shared longing for freedom unfolds into a mirrored journey of self-reinvention between two women artists. As creation, care and constraint interweave across generations, the film reflects on desire and vulnerability, healing and resilience, asking whether freedom can coexist with love — and where its limits might lie. Wu Fan: ‘By weaving together XiXi’s video diaries and my voice-over contemplation, diving deeper into the memories and experiences that hinder me and XiXi from living our lives, the film is an effort to give a tender look at the vulnerability that one might experience in exercising agency. We make a sincere attempt to investigate and challenge inherited beliefs, creating a space for dialogue on the political questions of society’s acceptable values and how all these affect the innermost part of a person’s life. By creating this reflective distance, the film explores hopes and challenges of making one’s own path.’

Filmed over five years, this film follows three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan. Forced into marriage as a child, Hawa learns to read at 52 and starts a textile business, while her daughter Najiba and granddaughter Zahra seek independence. The Taliban’s return in 2021 shatters their fragile progress, forcing separation, exile and renewed struggle. Najiba Noori: ‘War, violence, forced marriage, and lack of access to education have plagued and victimised countless Afghan women for decades. My mother’s dreams were stolen. She spent years housekeeping and raising children, yet never lost her curiosity or her desire to learn and experience life. This film tells the story of my mother and our family in Afghanistan, where I have lived most of my life. It is a story of the struggle for independence and freedom for oppressed women and for the Hazara community in my homeland, and of those forced into migration and separation from home, country, culture and family. Through a family window, we witness a turning point in Afghanistan’s history. The fall of Kabul and the Taliban’s return shatter the dreams of three generations — Zahra, Hawa and myself — as we stand at a crossroads, starting life again. When Afghanistan falls into the hands of a group that erases women from society, the world turns a blind eye. With this film, I hope to create awareness, impact and change.’

After losing mental and physical balance at 34, the filmmaker trains at a Zen temple. Through Zen, she reconsiders eating, sleeping and breathing, seeing body and mind as a ‘bag of flesh’. Inspired by Noguchi Taiso, she imagines the body as fluid — organs and bones floating, expanding and contracting freely. Yoshigai Nao: ‘The title Masayume is a Japanese word meaning that what we see in a dream happens in real life. In Zen, there is no narrative promising salvation through belief; instead, true power arises from the tangible reality felt by the mind and body through practice. One vital lesson I learned was to value direct experience rather than depending on stories. Yet in filmmaking — even documentaries — we cannot fully avoid shaping a narrative from the creator’s perspective. By editing and reconstructing past footage as a story, I realised clearly that film is a kind of dream. At the same time, within that dream, I was able to observe what had happened to me exactly as it was, free from judgement. Living and making this film, together with that year’s weather, converged in an unexpected way — like “masayume”. I hope this film offers healing to someone beyond myself, and that in the end it might heal the earth, even just a little.’

Four years after cycling two thousand kilometres home during the first Covid lockdown, construction worker Mahesh becomes the subject of a film about his journey. Yet as shooting ends and he returns to the labyrinth of his job site, a quieter portrait emerges. Blending fact and fiction, this film-within-a-film reflects on migrant labour and the ethics of looking. Suhel Banerjee: ‘This has been a difficult film to make, because it tells a difficult story. At its centre is the ordinary Indian, within whom exists a multitude of stories, shaped by years of struggle against poverty and illuminated by the aura of mythology, music, and art. It is this inherited wisdom that I most want reflected in my work.’

People in my hometown call those who are shy and untalkative touxiuzi. Within this courtyard, the touxiuzi gene is embodied in the members of three generations. As a touxiuzi in our family, I try to uncover and open up the real heart beating under our touxiuzi exterior, yet in the end I only open up myself. The touxiuzi in the family continue to circle in the air above the village and grow in the village's soil.

In the town where the filmmaker was born, he and his family are following an age-old tradition by building a tomb for his grandparents. This carefully composed portrait of a village, interspersed with scenes of people at work, personal memories, and philosophical reflections, gradually unveils the spiritual world of the hometown and offers a meditation on existence itself.

One night, kept awake by highway construction outside his window, the filmmaker realises that a road will soon cut through his hometown, Xiangzidian Village. He sets up a camera to document the process, as the building site becomes a modern stage where his family’s joys and sorrows, partings and reunions play out. Hu Sanshou: ‘I have made two films about the highway construction in my hometown. The first, Resurrection, documents how the relocation of graves for the highway “resurrected” the deceased, bringing them back into the world of Xiangzidian. The second, Xiangzidian Village: The Stage, frames the construction as a process of setting up a stage, where the villagers of Xiangzidian appear successively as sojourners, onlookers, builders and witnesses. As a native of Xiangzidian, I recorded the village’s transformation during the highway’s construction from 2020 to 2024. The longer I filmed, the more a metaphorical stage emerged — one that sheds light on my relationship with my hometown, along with the emotions and sense of destiny attached to it.’

In Osaka’s Nishinari Ward, Kamagasaki remains a historic enclave of day labourers, though its name no longer appears on official maps. As public spaces disappear, the director and his friend wander its streets, listening to residents’ voices. Their stories reveal lives shaped by hardship, solidarity, and a neighbourhood that continues to shelter society’s most marginalised. Itakura Yoshiyuki: ‘“The people of the town are disappearing. Soon, I won’t be able to film them any more.” Driven by this sense of anxiety, I began walking through Kamagasaki with Sato Leo, director of The Kamagasaki Cauldron War (2017). It took some courage to ask the people we met if we could film them. I thought they would hate being filmed, as they had long been subjected to discriminatory gazes. However, many accepted, and they spoke ceaselessly in front of the camera. They had so much they wanted to describe and express. Since then, we have been showered with the words of the people we encountered. Those people — despite being buffeted by economic and political forces in their daily lives — never gave up their honesty with themselves. Before I knew it, my anxiety and tension began to ease, and I often found myself laughing with them. As I watched the footage we filmed, the fundamental principle for editing became clear: to preserve the power of their words and presence, which were about to be forced to change due to redevelopment. Instead of cutting and pasting their words and images to fit a theme, it was about discovering and carving the film out of their voices and existence. The kind of people we met during filming existed in the past, exist in the present, and will likely continue to exist in the future. They have no choice but to.’

Amid Hong Kong’s 2019 upheaval, a message from his father suspends a filmmaker in emotional stasis. During the subsequent pandemic lockdown, separated across borders, father and son connect through prolonged video calls. Between silences and fragmented memories, the film traces two men struggling to reach one another through trauma and unspoken grief. Ray Kam-hei Chan: ‘I lived most of my youth in pain, so much that I wished every farewell could be eternal, and I protected myself through detachment.As an adult, I began learning how to live, only to realize pain does not disappear, but simply takes another form. I suspect love may be the same. Pain pushed me back into my own emotions and memories, asking: How did I end up here? How do I go on?This film is a survivor’s journal of a family, and tenderness might not comfort all wounds. I hope to create a space to breathe for those who have spent years closing themselves off to avoid pain. If you see yourself here, perhaps we are not alone.’

Amid the U.S. housing crisis, twelve-year-old Mikal lives with his parents and their cat in a dilapidated flophouse room. Marked by precarity and alcohol abuse yet sustained by love, his coming of age unfolds over three years, revealing the wounds of childhood and the fragile hope of family life. Monica Strømdahl: ‘In 2005, as a photography student in need of cheap accommodation, I checked into a run-down hotel in New York. There, I met a community of people who relied on affordable housing but were shut out of the traditional housing market. In 2017, in a hotel lobby, I met Mikal, an 11-year-old boy raised in the hotel in the crossfire between poverty and addiction. Meeting Mikal and his family made me realise photography wasn’t enough to capture their story. I wanted to give them space to speak, to move, to show the complexities of their lives beyond still images. And so the 15-year photography project transitioned into film. Through making this film, my relationship with Mikal and his family evolved into something personal and meaningful. The trust between us allowed Mikal to set clear boundaries in the shoots. Some days, he was eager to be filmed and wear a mic; on others, he made it clear he wanted space. Between shoots, when I was in Norway, we would keep each other updated on everyday life. Flophouse America might be triggering to watch. At its core, [... it] is a film about fractured childhoods, inequality and social inheritance, but also hope and the dream of a better future.’

In the shadow of the New York Mets' stadium, Willets Point is an industrial enclave marked for demolition. Amid scrapyards and auto salvage shops, Foreign Parts reveals a tight-knit community sustained by wrecks, recycling and precarious lives, observing a neighbourhood facing erasure under New York's urban redevelopment. Véréna Paravel: 'As I started talking with people, I realised that many of their lives were as damaged as the rusting cars themselves, and I began to get a sense of the hardscrabble, resilient community that had grown up there over many years. From the outset I knew I wanted to make a film that would try to reflect the fragility and violence of the place, the beauty and squalor that reigned, its chaotic ordering. The tiny, bounded urban locality also encapsulated much larger narratives in the history of the country — such as post-industrialisation, immigration, political violence, environmental decay, and the breakdown of democracy.' J. P. Sniadecki: 'With the absence of commentary, textual explanation, or voiceover, the film allows the viewer more freedom to experience and explore the images and sounds on-screen and more license to interpret for themselves the social dynamics and cultural diversity of the junkyard. […] the viewer has the space and time to develop their own relationship to the place, the people, and the film itself.' — Excerpted from Patricia Alvarez Astacio, 'An Interview with Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki', 17 December 2012.

High above Nepal's mountainous landscape, a cable car carries pilgrims, villagers and tourists to the ancient Hindu temple of the goddess Manakamana. Once a multi-day pilgrimage, the journey now takes minutes. Filmed entirely inside the cars, Manakamana captures intimate conversations, revealing a society suspended between ritual tradition and technological change. Pacho Velez: 'When I was a student at CalArts, I directed quite a bit of theatre, and I was intrigued by the "doubleness" of acting — actors' studied non-attention to their audience. This interest carries over for me into Manakamana — I'm watching the subjects' awareness of their world, and how it shifts to acknowledge the passing landscape, other passengers, and private thoughts, before occasionally, obliquely returning to the camera, which is so clearly staring at them, yet is never explicitly addressed. These switches between different sorts of focus are crucial because they create the pace of the individual shots, which in turn creates the rhythm of the entire film. To make edits in the shots would have imposed another sort of rhythm on top of the material, obscuring these internal cadences. Our pace of editing was glacial. The final film has only eleven shots, but it took us eighteen months of editing to arrive at it, which works out to our deciding on one shot every forty days or so.’ Stephanie Spray: 'Contrary to what many assume, Pacho and I were both inside the 5'×5' cable car along with our riders; we didn't simply send them off alone; this would have been technically almost impossible and wouldn't have created the same tensions — between avowal or disavowal of the camera, and the different degrees of complicity, indifference, and discomfiture it engenders. […] The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is frequently murky, and the documentary engagement with the real is found across genres, but extremely hard to get on film, since most film subjects slip into becoming someone other than themselves, self-conscious representations, even if they are not purportedly acting. In Manakamana, the trip itself is surreal; passengers are propelled above a jungle in Nepal, en route to a temple inhabited by a goddess who demands blood sacrifice. Most passengers have never been in aeroplanes, and the time aloft can be frightening and exhilarating. This detachment it bestows upon the journey for the passengers heightens the sense that this world is fictional, for it is indeed a manufactured and unnatural experience for most of them.’