Desert of Namibia

At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after the growing yet too-belated canonization of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 classic. In these films, beautiful yet disaffected youths stumble through romantic hardships in a drug- and electronic music-fueled haze of East Asian metropoles. But as Desert of Namibia unfolds, it reveals something much more psychologically complex than simple urban alienation, building on Yamanaka’s promising 2017 debut Amiko (she’s made only short films and television since then) and raising the question of just how unlikeable a beautiful woman can be before her friends and lovers (and the audience) turn completely against her.

Yuumi Kawai plays Kana, a 21-year-old who works at a laser hair-removal place and lives with her boyfriend Honda (Kanichiro). He’s a Mr. Sensitive Ponytail Man, a genuinely nice guy who takes care of her when she comes home drunk from the club. She is, of course, also sleeping with another guy, Hayashi (Daichi Kaneko), and before too long, Kana manufactures a break-up with Honda (making him think it’s all his fault) and moves in with Hayashi. They fight, often, and Kana becomes increasingly abusive (there is pushing and wrestling, but he mostly just defends himself and tries to keep her from hurting either of them). As she becomes increasingly irrational, she sees a therapist (sort of), begins to disassociate and hallucinate, and meets (in her imagination, most likely) Hikari (Erika Karata, the Asako I & II star whose real-life career was derailed when it was discovered she had been having an affair with her married co-star Masahiro Higashide).

The question is: why does Kana behave the way she does? Yamanaka proposes a number of possible answers, none of which are quite satisfactory. Does she suffer from bipolar or borderline personality disorder? Is she so deeply guilty about her affair that it can only be expressed through self-destructive (and boyfriend-destructive) behavior? Are society’s depilatory expectations for women to blame? In the film’s striking opening scene, Kana meets an old friend from school at a coffee shop. As the two discuss the shocking suicide of a girl they used to know, Yamanaka pipes in the sound of a conversation of a table of young men sitting nearby. As Kana and her friend talk about their deceased acquaintance (how and why she may have done it) with all the detachment of youth, their conversation is repeatedly interrupted by the boys talking about a “no-panties hot pot restaurant,” a dining establishment where the waitresses go commando under their skirts and the floors are all mirrors (recalling Sion Sono’s Love Exposure, in which surreptitiously obtained upskirt photography is played as goofy and innocent fun, but which has come to be seen less as satire and more as self-revealingly sinister as multiple accusations of sexual abuse against Sono have become public). Irrational destruction may be the sanest course of action in such a world.

But even that’s too simple an explanation. While they’re camping (in Kana’s mind?), Hikari proposes to Kana that she’s actually happy on the inside, despite her destructive actions. She lists off for her a series of animals with contradictory names — a jellyfish is not a fish, etc. — the implication being that Kana too can’t be labeled, that maybe she’d be better off if she felt bad about her lying and cheating and fighting, or if she was given a medical diagnosis that explained away all her contradictions. They then proceed to jump over and through the campfire, a metaphor for growing up if ever there was one. Throughout the movie, Kana watches a livestream of a watering hole on her phone, presumably in the eponymous Namib, where animals congregate for a friendly drink (like a coffee shop, without obnoxious men). It’s a place of calm where the movie ends, and maybe Kana, seemingly accepting her contradictions in a final phrase of non-understanding, will do so too. — SEAN GILMAN

The Periphery of the Base

“Mixed media artist Zhou Tao’s new film, The Periphery of the Base, playing now at Cinéma du Réel and totalling just 53 minutes across a series of long takes, functions in phases. In the early going, the camera’s operation, which is credited to Zhou (as is the film’s editing), feels alternately mechanical and organic. Movement, zoom, and focus all shift, and whether with the broad actions of automation or the palpable twitch of human touch, there is an overwhelming precision. As this oscillation occurs, there is another one in subject. Sometimes, the camera’s aim seems attached to the people around the titular base, a nebulous infrastructure project, but at other times, it feels more attuned to the landscape, or even entirely aimless...” [Previously Published Full Review.] — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER

Zodiac Killer Project

Zodiac Killer Project is, put simply, a strange undertaking. Charlie Shackleton’s expansively stripped-down documentary emerged from a thwarted attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 memoir The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: AKA The Silenced Badge, the rights to which Lafferty’s estate suddenly withdrew during pre-production. The finished product is an equal parts doleful and playful gesture toward a project that never was. Shackleton cheekily tip-toes through loopholes of legality, and along fine lines between homage and parody, description, and enactment, relaying various facts of the case that were made available through copyright-free sources — and testing the limits of what he can pull directly from the book — as he vividly describes his original vision for a full-blown true-crime doc.

The sprawling, paranoid book chronicles a Highway Patrol cop-turned-vigilante-detective’s decades-long investigation of a single suspect (given the pseudonym George Russell Tucker) with whom he shared an unnerving encounter in a rest stop parking lot. In a passage that Shackleton quotes directly, Lafferty describes a gaze of incomparable evil beaming through Tucker’s car window, and a tensely prolonged moment of eye contact that sent the former careening away in his vehicle with the latter’s license plate number scrawled on a notepad. Once Tucker’s photo was held up next to the official police sketch of the infamous killer, the idea of his guilt was firmly rooted in Lafferty’s mind. Thus began the man’s all-consuming mission to prove the veracity of this notion, which Shackleton assures us he would have presented in a way that closely aligned the audience with the author’s self-confirming investigative techniques.

The project Shackleton describes is diametrically opposed to the one unfolding before us; roving, glacial pans escort the viewer through evocative locations in the American Southwest, which would have served as a backdrop for various fragmented reenactments. Shackleton’s extended and exacting account of what could have transpired in these spaces is underscored by creeping, ominous zooms toward patches of scenery that threaten to swallow the frame whole. The movements are punctuated with insert shots that bring his words to life, both illustrating and embodying the intended effects of the scenes he’s describing. In the opening scene, Shackleton references the true-crime documentary’s inexorable tendency toward the “rhythm of drama,” and spends the rest of Zodiac Killer Project’s runtime dissecting the artifice and fakery inherent to that genre while also deploying some of its stagiest tropes in order to imbue his film with a dramatic tempo.

It’s an engrossing and provocative case of having cake and eating it too, since Shackleton derives just as much evident pleasure from suggesting, and fabricating, suspense as he does from puncturing it; many sequences reach a droning climax and are immediately undercut by the filmmaker’s laughter. His breathy giggles are wielded for a wide range of effects, sometimes taunting, sometimes endearing, and sometimes outright unsettling. Shackleton’s omnipresence puts him front and center as both mediator and subject, but his film handily sidesteps the navel-gazing that this formal gambit might initially suggest. Zodiac Killer Project refuses to settle comfortably into tidy categories, tones, or perspectives. At first blush, it’s a lively conversation between an artist and a set of aesthetic principles, but the modes and methods of delivery are constantly revealing knottier substrates below the surface. It suggests just as much as it describes, and leaves an imaginative viewer to run wild with those ideas while also giving them the tools to examine the darker places those impulses come from. It’s a love letter written with a poisoned pen. — ALEX MOONEY

Israel Palestine on Swedish TV

“Göran Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is a remarkable documentary, if not purely for its access to decades worth of newsreels, interviews, and documentaries concerning Palestine. The three-and-a-half-hour film is composed entirely of archival film from SVT — Sveriges Television — which was the country’s primary public broadcasting service for much of the time period indicated in the film’s title. But Olsson never presupposes that this footage is capable of telling the entire story, opening the work by observing: “Archive material doesn’t necessarily tell us what really happened…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — JOSHUA PEINADO

Windless

There’s an opaque yet stern quality to Kaloyan (Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov), a heavily tattooed young man returning to his small Bulgarian hometown after many years abroad. He has been tasked with selling the apartment of his deceased father, a simple enough transaction that gradually comes to encompass a surfeit of overwhelming emotions. Kaloyan is quiet and reserved, and in his various encounters with old friends and various townsfolk he typically plays the role of passive listener. He’s immediately regaled with tales of his late father’s masculinity, loyalty, honor, impeccable war time record, and even his humanitarian efforts. Yet Kaloyan remains unmoved, setting about his task with unflinching rigor and seemingly zero sentimentality. It’s revealed early on that Kaloyan did not attend his father’s funeral, and the nature of the son’s rejection of the father becomes the structural linchpin of the film’s narrative. But Windless is also about the ever-shifting tides of history; here, the personal and the political are inextricably tied together — the decaying village is being razed and rebuilt one chunk at a time, homes replaced with golf courses, shopping centers, and a casino. “They’re turning us into Las Vegas,” intones one of Kaloyan’s old pals, chuckling and shaking his head at the inescapable march of neoliberal “progress.”

It’s all very weighty stuff, and writer/director Pavel G. Vesnakov and cinematographer Orlin Ruevski shoot Windless in the very odd 1:1 aspect ratio, creating a frame that is a stark square. The camera almost never moves, instead framing every conversation as a series of isolated portraits where we only see one person at a time. The extremely confining aspect ratio dictates that most of the compositions are shoulder-up medium shots, but Vesnakov also shoots through various architectural obstructions that make even less of the image visible. The occasional glimpse of a landscape or horizon line offers brief respite, but the film quickly returns to its claustrophobic visual schema. It’s something of a miracle, then, that the film never becomes overwhelmed by metaphor or symbolism, despite the presence of both. Instead, it emphasizes the material reality of this town stuck in a liminal state between world-historical forces. It might seem a bit on the nose to highlight huge concrete busts of Stalin, Lenin, and Putin, but Vesnakov lingers not on the symbolic quality of these felled statues, but instead on the labor required to clear them away. The past is all just debris.

There is no grand catharsis to be found in Windless — Kaloyan does not have an epiphany or a tearful reunification with estranged family members. But there is a gradual softening of his demeanor, tentative steps toward recognizing that the hero beloved by the townspeople and the distant, angry man he knew were the same person, and that everyone contains multitudes. At one point, Kaloyan goes through some of his father’s belongings while on a Zoom call with his mother. He asks her about various items and if he should save them; she tells him to throw everything into a dumpster, lingering for a moment over old black-and-white photos from WWII, before nonchalantly telling him to toss those, too. But later, Vesnakov disrupts his own carefully considered mise en scène and introduces brief home video camcorder footage of young Kaloyan with his a father and extended family having a dinner party. It’s a thrilling rupture, the low-res video footage in stark contrast to the precisely calibrated framings that have come before. Here, then, is finally a messy, necessary sentimentality: the assertion that some things from the past, despite it all, are worth hanging on to. — DANIEL GORMAN

Measures for a Funeral

“The decade-long collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell has produced a fascinating cycle of films, including features and shorts, that goes some way in shaping a quasi-personal archive of Bohdanowicz’s life and family history. Most of the films stage encounters between Campbell’s recurring character, Audrey Benac, a Bohdanowicz alter-ego, with art, history, and archives in order to trace emotionally resonant links between the past and the present. Sometimes Bohdanowicz’s own family members appear in the films, extending her self-reflexive tendencies even further. Sometimes these family members are only memories, traces of lives on pages, in images or sounds...” [Previously Published Full Review.]— CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Sanctuary Station

Brigid McCaffrey’s debut feature plays very much like a pleasant walk in the woods. One is surrounded by the hazy glint of sunlight on foliage, and although you would be hard-pressed to say exactly what it means, you emerge with a notable sense of well-being, what some might call a spiritual cleanse. Sanctuary Station is a free-form documentary about various women who have made their homes in the redwood forests and other natural spaces in northern California, and although the subject matter is diffuse, with various people appearing in the film only to subtly fade out of sight, the major throughline of Sanctuary Station is the life and work of Mary Norbert Körte (1934-2022), an ex-nun who built a home on the periphery of what had been a logging railroad. She was a poet, and her free verse on the environment, and her place within it, serves as a kind of musical refrain throughout the film.

McCaffrey is clearly not interested in offering the viewer a documentary in the conventional sense. She is an experimental filmmaker with a particular focus on environmental and naturalist themes. Her 2017 short film Bad Mama, Who Cares is a profile of a geologist, Ren Lallatin, who lives on the physical margins of society. McCaffrrey has also made films in collaboration with experimental ethnographer Ben Russell. Sanctuary Station is, as they now say, a vibe more than a delivery system for concrete information. What emerges quite clearly, however, is a collective portrait of women who have gone their own way, sometimes forming new communities and sometimes happily living on their own. They have not so much rejected consumer society as they behave as if it is an intrusive species that, once introduced into the biome, must be contended with. Sanctuary Station provides a warm cinematic respite from clear directionality, allowing the viewer to likewise find their own path. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Bonjour Trsitesse

“A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel of the same name. In this sun-soaked yet moodily cavernous adaptation, summertime sadness is a formative, virginal strain of sorrow, “a strange melancholy,” or “a silken web, enervating and soft,” as Sagan once penned in her opening chapter. Set in the moneyed and secluded French seaside, Chew-Bose’s cadent debut feature illustrates with sensory attention the entanglements of inertia, the restlessness of white escapade, the secret wounds of adolescence, and the lingering minutiae of visitation, hospitality, and grief...” [Previously Published Full Review.]  — AADITYA AGGARWAL

Illuminations (Avant-Garde Shorts)

The best of the experimental film programming at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 is actually found outside the program specifically dedicated to experimental short films. Zhou Tao’s The Periphery of the Base and Ewelina Rosinska’s Unstable Rocks are major works with their own inventive rhythms: the former sets you afloat in a trance, while the latter keeps you grounded via a construction of mathematical rhythms and droll visuals. They’d also be ill-suited to being paired with the 10 films in the program entitled Illuminations, a group that is entirely shot on 16mm or Super-8 and is aiming for smaller discoveries and more intimate pleasures. It’s also a group with too many titles proving you can work outside the mainstream and still be conventional.

The experimental film “tradition of quality” tends to involve shooting and editing on celluloid, presumably to ensure a certain visual baseline. This tends to be combined with pastiche on the subject matters of filmmakers who mastered analog and never deviated from using it: Robert Beavers and his hands working at art, Nathaniel Dorsky and his plants, and the admittedly unavoidable blurry visions of Stan Brakhage. On paper, the commitment to a harder job is certainly a more commendable approach than some of the lurching attempts at digital (or, unfortunately, A.I.) that have made their way into certain festivals. It’s still frequently hard to get excited about watered-down derivatives, it raises potentially unflattering questions about money and reactionary aestheticism, and it ultimately looks even more like a safe tack in the wake of recent New York City retrospectives for Beavers and Dorsky. Whether projecting the actual prints justifies the inclusion for experiential purposes is left as an exercise for the reader who goes to see them.

Blanca Garcia’s How to Make Magic could have been entitled How to Make an Experimental Film. It’s all in-camera edits and plant footage, and the effect is that of a daily walk: it probably won’t hurt you, but you probably won’t remember most of it. No digital equivalent would be taken as seriously. Maximilien Luc Proctor’s Aotearoa is similarly a little too content to be a succession of pretty pictures for its first half, but its subsequent use of superimpositions during a trip to the beach does manage to evoke the way both people and impressions in sand will disappear. Kevin Jerome Everson is usually a sure bet for coming up with an interesting new way to look at African Americans going about their daily lives, but Chelsea Drive is a rare minor entry that’s mostly just content to watch students lounge on campus and dance at a house party for a few minutes. And elsewhere, though it’s ultimately a bit of a technical exercise, Helena Wittmann’s continued commitment to incorporating narrative into her experiments in A Thousand Waves Away does make the shift from a solemn ritual to an odd light show register more than most of its company, and it has an enticing score from Nika Son.

Miniature essay films are another major trend in experimental filmmaking right now, and the practitioners are sometimes as interconnected as the subject matters. Ben Balcom’s The Phalanx attempts to use writing from a 19th-century agrarian commune as a voiceover to link images shot at its former site and various archival materials related to its construction, but the images are more accompaniment to the audio than striking in their own right, and the film becomes a piece of music with visual accompaniment as a result. One of his performers, Sam Drake, actually has HER own film in the lineup, entitled Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air, and Balcom is credited with providing additional cinematography. (The Phalanx closes with shaky cam applied to neon, Suspicions opens with it; did the lineup functionally feature two films by the same director?) It’s another essay film that feels largely audio-first, this time about the United States Cold War radiation tests on citizens. It’s a bit more accessible than The Phalanx, but that makes it clearer that this subject demanded more passionate fire than smoky wisps of cinematic incense.

Sarah Ballard’s Full Out is another essay film that feels too built around its soundtrack (a text describing 19th-century female hospital patients being hypnotized into hysteria as a sort of performance), but despite stretches of imagery that simply aren’t very interesting, it does somewhat reward the viewer’s patience via its finale of cheerleaders turned into a tangle of flapping limbs. Eva Giolo’s Memory is an Animal, It Barks With Many Mouths is more successful at paying tribute to the lives, fables, and language (Ladin) of the people who live in the Dolomites. It’s unusual for being a highly regimented film that isn’t quite structuralist: whenever you hear certain sounds, there will always be a certain type of image associated with that sound. The parts never quite converging and remaining variations on a theme is consistently interesting, even if the film doesn’t seem to ever quite develop beyond being a general tribute to the region as a result.

The two real successes of the lineup, fittingly enough, are proof that even the familiar templates of celluloid poem-portraits, or essay films built around sound cues, really can strike at something fresh and new. Luke Fowler’s essay film Being Blue generally keeps its focus on the subject of Derek Jarman, although it poignantly borrows its title and a brief snatch of voiceover from William Gass’ On Being Blue — perhaps a droll joke on the impossibility of Fowler being Jarman. Much like Fowler’s great film Cezanne (2019), the primary subject is about how the world of a great artist doesn’t look the same after he’s left it. As we hear a Jarman-esque soundscape about the man himself that potentially conjures up memories of Jarman’s own audioscape for his final masterwork Blue, we explore the Prospect Cottage where he lived his life, thought about and worked on his art, and tended his beloved gardens. Some portions have been carefully preserved down to the smallest details, but the vistas he once glanced upon aren’t quite the same. It’s an homage with some real thought behind its construction.

 Still, the best film in the bunch is also the program’s opener: James Edmonds’ Songs Overheard in the Shadows. A filmmaker whose ability to find recurring visual patterns has resulted in films that flow as effortlessly as the memories he shoots, it also results in works that don’t lend themselves nicely to written summaries. Edmonds summarizes the film with “recurring details point towards a centre,” which is precisely what helps keep its collection of microgestures sufficiently varied without being incoherent. The film’s saturated colors that frequently appear as pure bursts of light leaks are plenty enticing on their own, but the recurring images of people (usually Edmonds’ partner Petra Graf) standing in front of tunnels and windows that look like they’ll swallow them up in light or shadow practically suction the viewer in. Most of the images in Songs flash by quickly enough so that they don’t become too familiar, but it seems to be a film oriented around similar themes to Edmonds’ most famous work to date, A Return (2018), which was about finding a way to make the commonalities and differences between separate locations into something harder to parse. It’s the most mysterious film in the lineup, but that might just be what makes it the most illuminating. — ANDREW REICHEL

100,000,000,000,000

“Only a few minutes into his 100,000,000,000,000, 48-year-old French filmmaker Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) presents to viewers a gang of four young escorts who, bathed in something of a Warholian atmosphere (mostly reminiscent of Chelsea Girls), are gathered in a small room, laid or sat on a bed, chit-chatting about their sexual experiences — stories concerning some of their clients, and the different challenges they’ve faced in their profession. The next morning, three of the friends head for their holiday vacations abroad, leaving Afine (Zakaria Bouti) behind in the Christmas-y quietude of a phantasmagoric Monaco...” [Previously Published Full Review.] — AYEEN FOROOTAN