Sirāt

“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere on the south side of the Atlas Mountains, hopefully approaching Mauritania. Sirāt, Óliver Laxe’s latest, is effectively a road movie toward this feeling. Through the Galician director’s eyes, the world ends not with a whimper but with 115 bludgeoning minutes of skull-rattling techno and Fury Road engines.

Sirāt opens with its throbbing score — supplied by musique concrètiste turned techno producer Kangding Ray — just getting set up. The setting is a Moroccan canyon, where free partiers are assembling subwoofers for a guerilla rave. The BPM kicks up, and cinematographer Mauro Herce’s 16mm camera begins to pace around the dance circles forming and disintegrating on the dry sand. He focalizes five white ravers in particular, each portrayed by a non-professional actor and real life free partier of Laxe’s acquaintance: Tonin (Tonin Javier), Jade (Jade Oukid), Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), and Stef (Stefania Gadda). Their clothes are tattered, their faces are weathered, and they dance with abandon.

The film lingers in this space, the score pounding, establishing a point of pure immersion before the camera’s detached position is embodied in the affable shape of Sergi Lopez. Portrayed by this lone professional actor in the cast, Luis steps awkwardly between dancers, tails after his young son, Esteban (Bruno Nuñez), and taps shoulders. Transposing The Searchers to North Africa, our Ethan Edwards is on the trail of his daughter, who he believes may have joined the free partying movement. Without further ado, the military arrives, a general evacuation is ordered, and the five aforementioned ravers slip away from the emergency protocols, Luis and Esteban in tow, bound away from the gathering consensus that World War III has begun and toward the faintest rumor of another rave at the Mauritanian border.

Laxe’s film investigates the metaphysical stakes of the rave at the end of the world with an earnest spirit of inquiry undimmed by the embarrassments of the hippie movement, not to mention the more recent Cyber Truck-ification of Burning Man. He epigraphs the film with a description of the titular Sirāt bridge in Islam, as the path between hell and paradise that is, it bears emphasizing, more narrow than a hair. Refreshingly, Sirāt denies none of the metaphysical stakes of the molly trip, with a sincere belief in the power of sensorial immersion — at the cinema as at the rave — to deliver our woebegotten souls.

Riding along with the merry band of dreadlocked and, in some cases, peglegged outcasts, Sirāt initially dons the heartwarming form of the found family road movie. Esteban, enamored of these free spirits, prevails upon his father to share some of their provisions; later, he has them do his hair up in braids. “I start from the basis that all of us are broken,” Laxe told Film Comment at Cannes. “Ravers know this.” The apocalyptic backdrop is relegated, for the time being, to quickly muted radio broadcasts and the occasional sighting of a parallel line of tanks being transported cross-country.

First eyeing the circles traced by dancers’ shoes in the sand, and later noting the Hajj taking place via CRT monitor, Sirāt is fittingly attentive to the paths we take in life — those prescribed and those intuited; those that lead to death and those that lead to salvation. Indeed, the decisive moment finds Luis and Esteban veering their van out of the evacuation line to follow the ravers’ convoy. Sirāt’s second half, introduced by an extremely late title card, seeks to demonstrate the thinness of this new path, one certainly beginning in hell, though its destination is perhaps less certain. Laxe’s weapon of choice, as ever, is blunt: to show us the hair’s width of the sirāt, he restages The Wages of Fear (1953) truck scene, repeated in Sorcerer (1977), ad infinitum over the closing hour-plus. Through muddy swamps, over mountain passes, and even across minefields, the convoy teeters on. As life’s precarity is held in front of us between clenched fists over and again, Laxe’s film locates a deeper resolve by continuing to plunge ahead in spite of these mounting tragedies.

“I don’t know what it feels like, Bigui,” Josh responds, with regard to the apocalypse. “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.” The film’s image of hell is enunciated with the bold typeface of Gaspar Noé, but it’s Laxe’s faith in paradise that distinguishes Sirāt. All we have is the rumor of a rave, a few minutes of carefree dancing to sustain us, and that must be enough to cross continents. Bearing in mind Midnight Oil’s evergreen question — how can we dance while our beds are burning? — Laxe responds, unflinching: how can we not? — DYLAN ADAMSON

Orphan

His debut feature Son of Saul anointed László Nemes as the Béla Tarr heir apparent (challenged, briefly, by Hu Bo, until his death by suicide shortly before the release of his extraordinary An Elephant Sitting Still), but in recent years he’s spurned the title, instead establishing himself as a competent and reliable historical filmmaker. Nemes nevertheless continues to utilize his unblinking, albeit not entirely dispassionate, gaze, focusing it in Orphan on Andor Hirsch, a Jewish child navigating the streets of Budapest in 1957 following a failed uprising against the U.S.S.R. the year prior. Orphan has heavy shades of Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero, which similarly followed a young boy as he wandered through his war-torn home, but it’s not as lean or livewire as Rossellini’s movie, and it more comfortably resides in the well-worn grooves of the coming-of-age story.

We meet Andor being taken out of an orphanage and into the arms of the mother he doesn’t remember, who abandoned him to survive in the Hungarian countryside during World War II. His father, so he’s told, was deported in 1944. Andor worships his absent father, and often pauses to pray to him for guidance and comfort. Because of this, Orphan feels at times like a spiritual sequel to Son of Saul, and it traverses similar thematic territory: the role of the father-son relationship in men’s lives, and how vociferously one might cling to the sanctity of that relationship, even when it’s fabricated, when it’s tested by the encroaching pressures of fascism. Yet where Son of Saul zeroes in monomaniacally on Saul, and lets actor Géza Röhrig communicate the point through bereft gazes and gestures, Orphan is more patient, more outgoing — not always to its benefit. It follows Andor through a series of vignettes to nowhere in particular, refusing to build momentum. We’ll see a sad Passover seder, an interaction with an underground freedom fighter, a mysterious man on a motorcycle, and a gun discovered under a tree — all pieces of an opaque puzzle that do end up fitting together, yet rarely in a satisfying way: there’s too much zigging and zagging.

But Nemes, going for the hattrick here with cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, pumps out a storm of quietly virtuoso camera moves to make up for the narrative shortcomings. He showers us with painterly compositions and tracking shots; it’s like he can’t help himself, he just has to make beautiful images. On one hand, the camera work can be overbearingly precious: more than one shot through a prismatic keyhole, frames within frames that show the world closing in on a boy with nothing to lose, zooms neatly timed to the quiver of an ambivalent fiddle. On the other hand, it’s mostly productive: the zooms deliver new information, and the tracking shots give us effective in-camera cuts. Nemes is great with limited, bewildered perspectives, and Orphan works when it immerses us in a Budapest seen through a child’s eyes, soaking everything up like a sponge.

About an hour in, Nemes shifts away from his sort-of picaresque structure. Andor’s mother Klára pulls the rug out from under him at the gravesite of his fantasy father: she wanted him to be her dead husband’s son because she never thought the man who sheltered her during the war — his real father, played with convincingly monstrous stepdad energy by Grégory Gadebois — would ever find her. Surprise! He has. From there, an interpersonal war between Andor and his newly discovered father, Berend, breaks out. It’s potentially very knotty stuff, and some real intrigue starts to develop against the painstakingly rendered backdrop of Communist Hungary. Will Andor continue to hate his new father for replacing the old one? Will they eventually warm up to each other? We never get a conclusive answer: Nemes loses the trees for the forest, serving Berend up not as a flesh-and-blood character, but instead as a stand-in for the crimes of Communism. It’s reasonable for filmmakers to have fascism on their minds in 2025 — perhaps even necessary — but it’s so widely portrayed that they have to do something unique with it, and Nemes can’t muster much beyond platitudes.

Throughout Orphan, the director drops hints at the suffocating influence of Communism. “Long Live May 1st“ posters are put up, Klára’s boss listens to Lenin on the radio, and Berend revels in the constraints of the system. “Hooray,” he shouts late in the film, “it’s May Day!” When Nemes lets the Communist workings unravel in the background, it stimulates curiosity, but when he nudges in his own takes on Communist Hungary, it’s hard not to detect some pretention. The film’s final image is so obviously, dully about fascism and its circular nature, that its arrival tastes like a cop-out for neglecting the prickly family dynamic, as Nemes unfortunately orphans the more trenchant story about the nature of fatherhood this could have been. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

Mare’s Nest

“If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of experimentation and fable in Ben Rivers’ latest feature, Mare’s Nest. Divided into chapters with names like, “Anarchy,” “The Word For Snow,” “Moon Meets a Community,” and “Ah, Liberty!”, the film follows a young girl, Moon (Moon Guo Barker), as she wanders the rocky outcrops of an unnamed island (the film was shot, in part, on the island of Menorca); converses with an ancient scholar and her translator (in an adaptation of the Don DeLillo play, The Word For Snow); and encounters other children who have formed an improvised but peaceful community, in a bid to find answers to what happened to the post-apocalyptic world around her…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — DANIEL GORMAN

Below the Clouds

For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome as circumscribed by the city’s major beltway. Fire at Sea (2016) considered the refugee crisis by focusing on life on the island of Lampedusa, a nexus of Italian and indeed European asylum immigration. Rosi left Italy to make Notturno (2020), a film about life along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, and Syria, an area plagued with the presence of Daesh terrorists. And now, with Below the Clouds, Rosi has made his most complex, most poetic film, based in and around Naples, a city that exists in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. The film, shot in crisp, precise black-and-white, opens with smoke billowing from the active volcano, and Rosi has made a documentary that is in its own way like that smoke. Rather than adopting the firm architecture of argumentation, Below the Clouds moves out in all directions, like a sort of essayistic vapor.

This is a film that insinuates. While there are certain major conceptual throughlines in Below the Clouds, they intersect and metaphorize each other in wholly unexpected ways. Given the proximity of Vesuvius, Rosi shows how contemporary life in Naples is literally built on the ashes of Pompeii. He shows us major archaeological digs, along with subterranean storehouses of museum artifacts, some of which include the casts made of the victims of the eruption in 79 A.D. But the film also shows the darker underbelly of this historicity by taking us through secret tunnels dug by tomb robbers and looters of antiquities. We watch as police explore these spaces looking to assess the damage, while a senior inspector speaks mournfully of the sheer level of destruction caused by black-market greed. Rosi seems to share his attitude, as it is not about the loss of the priceless objects themselves, but of Italian and Western civilization, the erasure of patrimony.

This is also a film of comparisons. The police researching the plunder of the tombs are juxtaposed with members of Naples’ fire department, as they field various emergency calls and work to preserve the artifacts of contemporary life. We see that they are first responders to the area’s constant panic regarding earthquakes and eruptions. Various frightened citizens call the department, sometimes because they need actual, real-time assistance, but other times just to have someone tell them with some authority that a 3.5 earthquake, while serious, is not the Big One. Rosi shows Naples as a city gripped by the inevitability of another Pompeii, the sense that the earth has spoken and they are all living on borrowed time.

But other relationships Rosi draws are even more oblique. He cuts between the traversing of the robbed tunnels and the movement of the city’s train system. He focuses on the texture of rock and ash in the dig sites, then likens it to the hull of a ship transporting grain from Odessa, and the Syrian sailors charged with brushing this wheat dust off the sides of the hold. Even the Roman statuary is poised against the rougher ruins of Pompeii, as if to demonstrate the difference in human representation when it involves artistic human thought, as opposed to the literal remains of a body captured at the moment of death. The curator who oversees the statuary speaks philosophically, making a bit too explicit what Below the Clouds conveys so perfectly through sound and image. “In this room, time is overlapped, mixed, abandoned… time destroys everything, and preserves everything.”

And sometimes Below the Clouds emphasizes the extent to which it can be difficult to tell the difference. In one of the film’s only overtly staged elements, Rosi shows us clips from documentaries about Pompeii, along with scenes from Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and Leone’s The Last Days of Pompeii. But he “projects” them in a condemned movie theater, with torn, wet seats, fallen pillars, and a dusty, disused projection booth. By way of contrast, we also drop in on a small bookstore run by an old man called Titti. He appears to run a volunteer afterschool study hall program, where he helps kids with their homework. If we truly are in the twilight of physical media, Rosi shows that the old temples of culture will persist, provided they can adapt for newer, different needs. And, taken as a whole, Below the Clouds is a timely meditation on a city that lives on the remains of one civilization, and may itself be facing extinction from any number of directions: volcanic eruption, climate change, political turmoil. If Pompeii and Naples have anything to show us, it’s that even if our days are numbered, something new will take our place. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Powwow People

Only his second feature-length film after maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2021), Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People is the director’s least tangibly experimental project to date — at least in visual terms. And given the clear formal designs of his short film catalog, it’s hard not to read this as an intentional shift. There is little pronounced abstraction to the compositions here, which aren’t nearly so explicitly painterly as the director has conditioned viewers to expect, and there is even less avant-garde manipulation of the images. And for a filmmaker who has so long proven unique in his treatment of landscapes — no small feat given that landscape film is one of the longest standing subjects in the sphere of experimental cinema — those too are conspicuously absent in Powwow People. Indeed, for those fluent in Hopinka’s work, upon first glance there appears to be a curious lack of any familiar directorial hand here at all. But stick with the film and its vision clarifies, in largely productive and sometimes thrilling ways.

Through his work, Hopinka has demonstrated a concern with the ways that Indigeneity persists in the present, how the historicity of Native culture meets and melds with the contemporary moment. Whether that is evoked in his landscape work, where both the material reality of the land and the artist’s effort to preserve and interrogate that are at the fore, or in a study of the infrastructural and social means to support Indigenous contemporaneity (as in maɬni), the filmmaker’s overarching project feels compelled by an interest in the singular ways that past and present sit atop each other. Though taking new formal shape in Powwow People — which immediately asserts its switch-up from the usual Hopinka film in foregoing any typical poetic obliqueness in its name — that preoccupation remains very much in place. Following suit from its more straightforward title is a direct verité invitation into a powwow held on the grounds of Seattle’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, where participants flock from all over North America to take part. Early on in the proceedings, Ruben Littlehead — emcee of the powwow — exclaims: “Put that in the documentary, Sky!” It’s a minor, amiable moment that nonetheless speaks volumes to Hopinka’s approach here, as the director seeks to smudge the seams of any intentional construction, leaving only observation and immersion as entry points to the semblance of thesis.

The downside to this, of course, is that Hopinka is such an expert facilitator of images that the emphasis on close-ups and crowded frames here — as the camera roves the powwow grounds — can begin to feel less like an intentional aesthetic design than an absence of any governing formalism — or at least as an invigorating a formalism. But Powwow People is also concerned with duration — structured as a morning-to-night “narrative,” but actually shot over three days — and as it dances forward through its “day,” we become increasingly aware of Littlehead’s omnipresence, seemingly filling every silence with small talk and call-outs when there isn’t other business at hand to attend to. His voice functions as throughline across the film’s cuts and establishing shots, cohering its structure while also underlining Powwow People’s sonic texture as Hopinka’s primary formal concern. The director has long embedded an emphasis on language in his cinema, but it here takes aesthetic precedence like never before, conjuring the feeling of a community and a people through Littlehead’s nexus, enveloping the viewer in surprisingly experiential ways.

But just as we’ve settled into this aural atmosphere, which fosters intimacy in acclimating us to the various names we hear repeated, the inside jokes we can only glean bare suggestion from, and Littlehead’s silence-defeating announcements for powwow t-shirts and hoodies (which he has to confirm pricing on from the crowd), Hopinka shifts things again, and brings us to his bravura climax: a nearly 30-minute unbroken shot of the finals of the dance competitions. (Eagle-eared viewers will note that Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director of 2024’s Sugarcane, is among the eight finalists, though he fails to make the top three.) But rather than overstylizing this section or employing any of this more experimental tendencies, Hopinka surprises again in allowing the dancing itself to dictate the documentary form, as we follow and jump between the dancers, their mesmeric movement alternately ramping up and slowing down, leading them further from and in closer proximity to the camera. The sequence, as well as the film, is as open-hearted an invitation to his way of seeing as anything the director has given us before, and it’s in this section that the intense use of close-up clarifies. This is the portrait of a people from the inside, and Hopinka refuses to offer the illusion that any of that beauty or vastness or history can be contained within a film’s frame. — LUKE GORHAM

The Little Sister

“Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under her belt — clearly plays in a different league. In the literal sense, too, as the Dickinson-Johannsson-Stewart trio has been given lovely and encouraging spots in the Un Certain Regard section by Frémaux’s team. But for those unfamiliar with the festival’s inner workings, The Little Sister is one of those films that make you wonder how it made it into the Official Competition…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — BY ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU

Erupcja

Excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons. Pete Ohs’ sixth narrative feature has, on the surface, all the ingredients ripe for distilling the contemporary formula for earth-shaking passion. It stars Charli XCX, centers those of a sapphic persuasion, and offers the definitive statement of summer in a brisk but brash mumblecore that sort of elevates the city of Warsaw to stardom. It’s an uber-modern symphony of #YOLO reverberated through the pernicious one-takes of the Letterboxd crowd. Yet there is something irresistible in it to the gaze of those more measured, or at least with a lower threshold of tolerance for infantilized roleplay. As a cultural document, Erupcja is invaluably noteworthy; as a conventional narrative on the pleasures of emotion, it offers bountiful ones of its own.

British couple Bethany (Charli) and Rob (Will Madden) take to the Polish capital on holiday, checking into a nifty four-day stay for the routine, mostly relaxed tourist activities: museum trips, massages, sushi dates — nothing evoking the mental image of the backpacker’s travail. Because Warsaw, familiar to the European sight but exotic in its speech and sounds, evokes that gentle feeling of quaint intermediacy, it becomes the unwitting reflection of a relationship experienced in separate worlds. Rob wants to propose to Bethany, and having agonized over the ideal time and spot to create that perfect spark, ends up postponing the moment indefinitely. Bethany, it seems, couldn’t be more unfazed by Rob’s doting presence, and when they chance upon another anglophone, it’s almost scriptural wisdom that Rob will play some version of the cuck.

How and why that scenario unfolds is eminently captivating, and just as cringeworthy, to behold. Though not wilfully implicated in the happy romance’s undoing, expat Claude (Jeremy O. Harris) impugns Bethany’s inhibitions and Rob’s sense of security when he invites them to his studio for one of his regular hippie hangouts, where Bethany’s soul sister and old flame, Nel (Lena Góra), also appears. Nel runs a flower shop; she and Bethany met many years prior, during one of the latter’s student exchanges; Bethany has, unbeknownst to Rob, spotted Nel before the party, and may even have suggested Warsaw as a travel destination because of her. In what follows, around the film’s halfway mark, the girls predictably reconnect, leaving a morose and increasingly weary Rob to piece together his self-worth in the dust.

Like many a manic pixie dream, Erupcja teems with vertiginous irreverence, its breezy and minimalist images grasping at certain poetry. “Vestiges of our youth,” chimes in the American dilettante in a bid to explain Bethany’s sudden taking off and eventual ghosting of her boyfriend. Without the forces of therapy or religion to make sense of the world, Claude further opines, pseudo-spirituality would have to do: the lore behind Bethany and Nel’s simmering on-off tension stems from the fact that each time they met, a volcano somewhere erupted. Of course, Ohs doesn’t believe this, and nor do his characters. But accountability is anathema to the irony-inured, and like Janicza Bravo’s trenchant and vicious Zola, Erupcja calibrates the volatile register of its cynics with a serene, sincere meta-narrator (Jacek Zubiel) whose presence here ascribes a light, if wistful, air to the proceedings. 

Amid morally jaded actors and bratty situationships, Bethany and Rob alike quote from Lord Byron, paramour par excellence: one in somber requiem, the other as callous epiphany. If this risks a revisionist reading of the film, it must be said that Byron’s “Darkness,” whence Erupcja takes its titular inspiration, enjoys a certain ambivalence within it. With Rob, Bethany confesses to Nel, “the earth doesn’t shake and volcanoes don’t erupt,” offering the possibility that Nel’s wild side may have put her off, before dashing it with an offscreen tryst. It’s entirely possible that they aren’t both lesbians, and that no carnal exchange between them took place. But the outcome is sufficient. Byron’s poem, where “the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air,” speaks of limitless cataclysm, the sort that enchants the Romantic imagination but comes full circle to its hapless sinners only the morning after.

Is Erupcja, then, about the perils of postmodernity, of Gen Z unreasonably valorizing their own experiences, or does it slyly yassify, instead, the old fiction of sublimity? Ohs is not so inclined to know, much less tell, but his miniature work entertains the stark notion that, faithful lovers or otherwise, we overestimate faith’s reach in the present day. Mount Etna’s eruptions bookend the start and end of his narrative, illustrated through snappy moodboard filters; the wobble bass cues that precipitate its plot developments, likewise, viscerally convey a mechanical nonchalance toward all things sacred. Brusque in its non-committal strains but beautifully measured in its rhythm, Erupcja paints a portrait not of blunt tumescence, but of woefully decaying idealism. Like volcanoes, it’s spectacular, but not always in a pretty way, and its weakly liberating spectacle foregrounds a terrible but necessary beauty. — MORRIS YANG

100 Sunset

In Kunsang Kyirong’s feature 100 Sunset, the camera roots itself deep within a tight-knit community of Tibetan immigrants in Toronto, the film taking place during the dead of winter in the titular (albeit fictional) housing complex in the Parkdale neighborhood. The CN Tower looms somewhere in the distance, but this tourist attraction is out of sight and out of mind for the film’s residents. Kyirong instead plants her film within local community centers, Tibetan restaurants, and apartments with balconies and Dharma displays. With a fly-on-the-wall touch that is as intimate as it is elusive, 100 Sunset works both as a nuanced character study of its protagonist Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) and as a portrait of a community too often overlooked.

Kunsel emerges early on as a disgruntled teen. Like Michel in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, she is marked by her silence and her inclination toward petty theft. First, she snatches a DV minicamera from Gyatso (Tsering Gyatso), then she steals a sacred nine-eyed Dzi stone from another resident during a party. Rather than dramatizing crime with suspense or spectacle, Kyirong focuses on the disciplined nature of Kunsel’s pickpocketing, leaving her intentions deliberately ambiguous, if not somewhat unprovoked. One theory is that she favors personal items: Gyatso’s camera, for instance, contains footage of his ex-wife. Another connection seems to lie in objects bought after securing a Dukuti payout — the informal, trust-based rotating credit system that her Uncle Geysar (Tsering Bawa) helps organize. Perhaps Kunsel wants to retaliate against her family. At school and at home, she comes across as sullen and introverted. She rarely speaks, and her struggle to learn English renders her voluntarily mute in two languages. Despite these deft touches, her compulsions remain unexplained, yet her thefts register less as survival tactics than as small acts of defiance against her community.

The arrival of Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a 25-year-old recent immigrant married to an older man, exacerbates the tension. The two young women become friends and slowly differentiate themselves against the residents of 100 Sunset. Unlike others in their hive mind community, which seems intent on staying indoors, Kunsel and Passang travel all over the city. There are long passages set on Toronto’s subway system, and it’s here that Kunsel is struck by cinephilia. She’s not wasting her time making TikToks, but instead shoots everything on her stolen camera and, for the first time, opens up. The images she records are woven into the narrative like chapters: inky and impressionistic. They initially resemble forgotten home videos, before subtly transforming into quasi-surveillance studies. She shoots her friend up close and in person with permission, but soon Kunsel blurs these boundaries by secretly shooting Passang from the opposite side of the apartment block. Through the camcorder’s lens, Kunsel renegotiates her place in the world. She turns observation into a form of agency and quiet rebellion, but her recordings are invasive. It’s only a matter of time before her artistic obsession brings about her comeuppance.

DOP Nikolay Michaylov mirrors Kunsel’s movement like a dance, his lens quietly observing every detail of the world, emphasizing both intimacy and emotional nuance. Michaylov is perhaps best known for his collaboration with Kazik Radwanski on Anne at 13,000 Feet and Matt and Mara, and in those films, he captures Deragh Campbell — known for playing introverted characters — from every angle. Fleeting gestures, subtle glances, and the quiet rhythms of daily life similarly evoke the character of Kunsel. Michaylov’s lens delicately highlights the protagonist’s growing fascination with Passang, using racked-focus shot/reverse-shot sequences to subtly signal that Passang is always the object of Kunsel’s attention. It remains unclear whether Kunsel’s relationship with Passang is explicitly queer, but the lingering attention and small gestures she directs toward her suggest a quiet, unspoken desire that emerges as part of her coming of age.

Eventually, after much consideration and waning trust, Kunsel and Passang decide to steal the Dukuti money. In most films, a heist would constitute the central spectacle, especially when the plan goes awry, but in Kyirong’s quiet, understated film, the event quickly recedes into the background. Passang replaces Kunsel as the film’s greatest mystery. That being said, Kunsel’s place in the world is still somewhat unresolved. Her camcorder, however, poses a compelling question: can the camera actually capture a person and reveal their hidden desires? For most people, the answer is no, but for Kunsel, the answer is yes. Rendered ostensibly mute by society, the camera becomes both her voice and her instrument of revelation, exposing her frustrations and desires when words cannot suffice. This astute observation of not only the human condition but also the immigrant experience casts 100 Sunset as a promising debut from a filmmaker with a distinctly minimalist yet confident vision. — CLARA CUCCARO

Sentimental Value

“In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp, how his mother hanged herself using the very same stool being used. Poor Rachel is overwhelmed by the extreme intimacy with which Borg confides in her about his past. This seemingly trauma-laden relic is later revealed to be a random IKEA stool, when Borg’s young daughter Agnes mentions to him this exchange. One of the many gags that lightens the dramatic flow of Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix–winning film…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — BY ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU