If Trees Could Talk

Silent Friend (2025) - Enyedi After delving into the contemplation on nature with 'all animals are sentient creatures' message in her film, On Body and Soul in 2017, Hungarian filmmaker, Ildikó Enyedi, presents Silent Friend, a loosely connected three narratives dealing with our connection with trees across time, observed by 200 year old ancient ginkgo biloba tree.

Tony Leung (making his first European production appearance) plays Dr. Wong, a renowned Hong Kong neurologist, who gets marooned in a medieval looking university campus in Marburg, Germany, due to Covid outbreak. He was conducting an experiment on how the human brain functions differently in babies from that of adults. In a lecture with a bouncing light ball in darkened room, he gives an example with spotlight consciousness (adult brains- concentrate on one thing at a time), and lantern-light consciousness (babies- open to surroundings more and their concentration differs as their attention shifts more freely like a floating ball). Now due to Covid, all the students and faculty are cleared out. Wong's research is on hold. His perky German-Chinese assistant is only communicable through zoom sessions, and he is the only one left in the whole empty campus with a cranky German custodian who serves him daily meals while keeping distance in accordance with the pandemic restrictions.

The second story starts in black and white with Grete (Luna Wadler), a bright student attending the same Marburg University studying botany. It's the turn of the century and she experiences blatant sexism from a sea of male students and faculty. In a cringe-inducing selection process in front of the all old male committee, Grete is interrogated mercilessly through the texts of Carl Linnaeus, whose classification of plants based on their sexual organs which was groundbreaking at the time. The societal prejudices and sexual insinuation against young learned women bleed into her life, Grete loses her lodging and finds solace in an old photographer's studio as an assistant, where she explores her artistic freedom and sexuality.

The third narrative thread concerns introverted Hannes (Enzo Brumm), who has a love/hate relationship with nature, due to his rural upbringing, falling for fellow university student Gundula (Marlene Burow) who has a lab experiment set up in her dorm room. The setting is in the 1970s - counterculture, drug use and free love. Gundula tries to record her geranium's reaction to humans, because she believes our silent friends- plants, trees, fungi, etc, want to communicate with us as much as we do with them.

While being stuck in isolation, Dr. Wong contacts a fellow scientist Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux) who specializes in communicating with plants, and decides to conduct an experiment on the ancient ginko tree right in front of his temporary residence at the university. But he has to deal with the German Gatekeeper, who is suspicious of his activities and is actively trying to sabotage his experiments.

With all these intersecting stories and through breathtakingly beautiful images (by Gergely Pálos, About Endlessness, Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, shooting in digital for 2020 section, 16mm film for 1970 and 35mm film for 1908), Enyedi tells our relationship with nature and by extension, among ourselves. Dr. Sauvage tells Dr. Wong via zoom that she sees lonely souls when she enters a garden. Male ginko trees separated from their female counterparts for landscaping reasons.

Tony Leung is aging like a fine wine. He carries the film with hefty philosophical implications with ease and elegance. His soulful, searching eyes and his wrinkles add to the wisdom and intelligence of his character, draping over simmering underlying sexual tensions in the film. He also does a tai-chi session in the garden completely naked.

Throughout these interconnecting stories, Enyedi makes us contemplate the fact that while a ginkgo tree can live up to a thousand years, observing us silently, as generations of us live and die in its time.

Silent Friend can be seen as narratively unsatisfying, by not tying up its threads neatly enough. But it reminds us that fleeting human existence and brief, yet meaningful connections that are what matters, in the eons of time.

Silent Friend opens on May 8, in conjunction with the Tony Leung retrospective at Lincoln Center - The Grandmaster: Tony Leung.

Two Competing Narratives

Nuestra Tierra/Our Land (2025) - Martel Known for her visually and aurally, densely layered films, taking on Argentina's society of haves and have nots, esteemed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel's foray into the documentary form culminates to Our Land, a long gestating project that started in 2011, when Martel started reading the materials surrounding the murder of Javier Chocobar, a leader of Chuschagasta indigenous community in Argentina's Tucumán Province.

Combing through old archives, old video footage, testimonies and interviews and oral history, aided by new technology, Martel creates another complex and nuanced continuation of her investigation into the country's colonial history and injustices perpetrated on its indigenous population, mirroring in spirit, her epic masterpiece, Zama which came out 8 years ago.

Our Land starts with the satellite image of earth, then we zoom in to the topography of Argentina's northwest legion, revealing lush forest, then to the young girls playing soccer in the soccerfield, as the drone glides over the landscape. Uncharistically, Martel seems to be incorporating technology into her documentary, in stark contrast with her subjects - the people who worked the land for generations and their adversaries- founding fathers of Argentina; the colonizers who exploit the natives and went on the land theft, ever since the 15th century. The dissonance of her bird's eye view/big-brothers-watching-you method, and the rugged landscape and its inhabitants, is the point of Our Land.

Case in point, Martel leaves the footage of a drone getting hit by a bird in mid-air - as jarring and humorous as it looks, she is not interested in perfect gliding shots of drone footage over nature, like some David Attenborough style nature documentary. She is using the technology to make a point.

In 2009, the defendants, the landowner Dario Luis Amin and his two former police officer friends who went into the territory, armed with guns to intimidate and forcefully evict the Chuschagasta community, their best evidence of their innocence (in their minds) is their own videotaping of the confrontation and murder. The shaky video tape is played over and over again throughout the film.

As the trial finally takes place 9 years after the murder in 2018, the defendants' thin justification was that they were threatened and outnumbered. On paper, Amin, a former government official, is the land owner and according to the government records, indigenous people in that region went extinct in the 1800s.

Martel provides a wealth of interviews and ephemera - photographs, family histories and artifacts, years of court documents from the legal battles the community waged on for decades, long before Chocobar's death. It's also in the faces of the region's inhabitants- distinct from Argentina's general population with mainly their European ancestry. Antonia Hortensia Mamani, the widow of Chocobar, displays hundreds of old fading photographs, many taken by her late husband who was an analog photography enthusiast, and laments the legacy of their history being lost.

It becomes clear as the trial goes on, that what we are witnessing are two competing narratives - One the Argentine state's account and the other, people's account. At one point, the defendants explain in their own words, why they shoved approaching Chocobar, "the Argentine State taught us to do that," effectively making the government the defendant as a whole.

Our Land's story resonates because we see it happening everywhere in the world now - from Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine to a local level- here in New York, it's deed theft - coaxing longtime black and brown residents out of their homes, by greedy landowners and corporations, aided by NYPD.

The arrogance displayed in Amin's video becomes the defendants' downfall. Technology can be a double edged sword. The recordings are there for everyone to see and judge. But with deepfakes and A.I., the future of truth is unknown. Amin's 22 year sentence was appealed and he served only two years in jail, only to die of Covid. Two other dependants' 15 year sentence was appealed but then upheld later.

As with her narrative films which show satiric lives of the Argentine upper-class and the state's ugly colonial history, Martel shines a light on the daily struggles of her country's indigenous population with Our Land. The film is a meticulously researched and tactfully shot and presented, comfortably fitting in her impressive filmography.

Our Land opens in New York and San Fransisco May 1, followed by Los Angeles May 8. National rollout to follow. The Headless Woman 4K restoration opens at Metrograph in NYC on May 8.

Getting Lost in Strangers' Company

Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) - Miyake Hokkaido born writer/director Miyake Sho has been steadily making films about people living in the margins of contemporary Japanese society and their delicate human connections since the 2010s. His shorts and television work garnered him praises as one of the most promising filmmakers, yet his independent filmmaking status didn’t quite make him a breakout star in Japanese cinema landscape, even though his astute and intimate observations in films, like, And Your Bird Can Sing and All the Long Nights are just as beautiful and resonant as the works of Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Kore-eda Hirokazu.

In his forties and working with like-minded young producers, Miyake signals the emergence of a new generation of Japanese filmmakers, working away from the traditional studio system, who are not afraid of being different and more daring, both in themes and structure in their work. And his new film, Two Seasons, Two Strangers shows just that.

Adapting from short manga stories (A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo) by cult cartoonist Tsuge Yoshiharu, who passed away this year, Two Seasons, Two Strangers is a strange and wonderful diptych about a screenwriter (played by Korean actress Shim Eunkyung, who starred in several Japanese films previously - The Journalist, which she won the best actress, a first for non-Japanese actor to do so, Blue Hour and others) and her stories, as she travels through Japan. As she writes in her note book in Korean, we get to see the film about two shy young people (Kawai Yumi of Desert of Namibia and Takada Mansaku) on their summer vacation, meeting on the beach and their brief friendship. The young man does most of the talking and reveals his background, while the pensive young woman just listens. She is traveling with a group of other disaffected young people whom she doesn’t seem to connect with, but comes down to hang out with a chatty young stranger on the beach. Their youthful intimacy and connections in their loneliness are palpable in the sub-tropical setting. It culminates in them swimming in the rough ocean together on a rainy day.

Then the story pivots to the writer taking the train to a snowy countryside on a whim. She can't find lodging since she didn't book anything. Over the mountain, she finds an isolated quaint inn, run by a grunt who doesn't reveal anything about his private life, such as, why he is alone running the inn, which is traditionally done as a family business. On his part, after hearing that she is a screenwriter for movies and TV shows, he suggests she write about his inn, hoping for more business. Sleeping in the same room with the host with an irori (traditional Japanese square sunken hearth in the middle of the room for heat and cooking), this strange yet intimate arrangement brings out unexpected friendship.

Getting bored at being snowed in, The innkeeper suggests checking out a large ornamental carp pond his neighbor owns (turns out it belongs to his ex-wife’s new family) in the middle of the night. Then he proceeds to steal a carp despite the protest from the writer. But in fact, this is the most fun she has had in a long time. The cops are called, but the charges are waived after the sympathetic cops who know the family history overlooks the misdemeanor.

The contrast in character ages, the setting, and asymmetry of it all are all the charms of Two Seasons, Two Strangers. Miyake goes on sketching out the human connections among strangers in a gentle, playful, abstract way, blurring both fiction and real life/creator and its creations. Certainly one of the highlights of the early 2026 releases. Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens at New York's Metrograph 4/24. Limited nationwide expansion to follow.

Liminal Space Horror

Exit 8 (2025) - Kawamura Based on a video game of the same name, Genki Kawamura's Exit 8 could have been a primer 90s-early 2000s for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It's got everything that resonated at the time - everyday salaryman liminal space horror - taking place mainly in fluorescent lit subway station corridors where a character can't find an exit. The repetition, a metaphor for a rat race trapped in the moebius strip - purgatory or hell of modern existence, is very well realized in the creepy, antiseptic, impersonal setting that permeates dread.

There are rules to follow - you will need to reach Exit 8 by going through a series of identical corridors and when you notice something is different than previous time, you must turn back, otherwise you are fated to repeat from the beginning. That means, counting every billboard on the wall, every locked utility door, vents, etc.

It begins with an unnamed man (Kazunari Ninomiya) is seen talking to his ex who might be pregnant with his child, in a crowded subway during rush hour. He also witnesses a salaryman screaming at a young woman who has a crying baby. No one does anything including him. After he gets out of the subway car, he finds Exit 8 sign, but the empty corridors don't lead you to the exit. It is endless, identical corridors with white tiles.

He sees a 'walking man' (Yamato Kochi) with a briefcase passing him by at every turn. The walking man sometimes stops to look at his phone and is completely unresponsive. Then strange things start to happen. The ads on the wall change, the walking man's creepy smile, a lost boy, the ceiling dripping blood...

Exit 8 has a potential to have millions of ways to explore the existential dread and be the creepiest, most effective modern horror film. But instead, Kawamura settles on the Spielbergian narrative. There are some effective creepy moments in the film. But I miss the late 90s, early 2000 J-horror haydays.

Elemental Desires

The Love That Remains (2025) - Pálmason With his last feature Godland, Icelandic director Hylnur Pálmason showed the insignificance of human existence against grand, awe inspiring landscapes of the volcanic island nation. The Love That Remains follows the same vein, albeit less grandiose, but just as beautiful landscapes. The gentle comedy of a modern family follows a family of 4 where parents Magnus and Anna have recently separated. There is a teen daughter, Ida and younger twin boys. Magnus is a fisherman working in a commercial fishing vessel and Anna is a struggling artist. They live in a rural farm where they engage in foraging, tending farm animals while Anna practices a large scale art made out of rusting geometrically cut iron sheets- she just lays out these iron pieces on a white canvas outside the elements until they rust and leave patterns on the sheets.

Magnus is still carrying the torch for Anna and wants to be included in the family. He lingers and makes advances at Anna, but she won't budge. The kids notice their predicaments and are generally sympathetic to the situation. It is important to note that three children playing the parts are Pálmason's own kids, pretty much playing themselves.

What differentiates The Love That Remains from other sad sack, middle-aged loser dad pity party movies is the contrast of the surroundings which the family lives on: the nature is consistent, solid, fluid, omnipresent, and forever beautiful- whereas humans are lustful, violent and idiotic at times. The plane goes down, hit by a flock of birds, kids shoot each other with arrows by accident, a man dreams of making out with Joan of Arc. If Godland contrasted nature's indifference to human existence, The Love That Remains emphasizes that we live with nature and all our incongruities are part of the elements, not separate entities, nothing more. Pálmason humbles you in different ways in the presence of nature.

Preview: New Directors/New Films 2026

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films takes place from April 8 through April 19, 2026, with filmmakers scheduled to attend in person. With a focus on innovative cinema that sets the stage for the future of film, the festival champions filmmakers with distinctive visions and bold new ideas that push the art form into new terrain.

This year’s selection will introduce 24 features and 10 shorts, including festival winners and favorites from Cannes, Sundance, Locarno, Venice, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Toronto, San Sebastián, and more. Screenings take place at FLC’s Walter Reade Theater and MoMA’s Titus theaters.

Below are some of the films I had a privilege to preview:

Strange River (2025) - Claret Muxart We get a first glimpse of 16 year old Dídac (Jan Monter), resembling a St. Sebastian in some Renaissance painting, bicycling along the forest with his family as he looks straight at the camera. Dad, mom, and his two younger brothers Biel and Guiu, are on a bicycle trip along the Danube river, camping along the way. Mom and Dad are fully aware that it will be the last trip with Dídac, who is growing up fast. There's an obvious tension between him and Biel, who is a couple of years younger, who needs to share a tent with him. As with any family trips, there is some usual annoying family stuff they deal with - arguments on the directions and following the map, sibling rivalries, sleeping arrangements, etc.

Dídac's parents are very supportive in acknowledging Dídac's homosexuality, but they are not perfect. They argue about small things and engage in extramarital affairs. As they take a break and swim in the river Dídac witnesses a naked man swimming by them. Is it his imagination or real person?

Spanish director Jaume Claret Muxart's feature debut, Strange River, is both a coming of age story told like a fairytale and an astute observation of family dynamics. With its clear-eyed gay protagonist, it gracefully skirts around the graphic nature of teen desires and instead concentrates on purity of longing for someone and possibilities of finding love anywhere, real or imagined.

The theme of rivers, connecting all the tributaries into one stream, as a metaphor for human relationships is beautifully and tenderly realized in Strange River.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers - Miyake Sho Director Miyake Sho has been steadily making films about delicate human connections over the years. Adapting from short manga stories (A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo) by cult cartoonist Tsuge Yoshiharu, who passed away this year, Two Seasons, Two Stranger is a strange and wonderful diptych about a screenwriter (played by Korean actress Shim Eunkyung) and her stories as she travels Japan. As she writes, we get to see the film about two shy young people (Kawai Yuumi and Takada Mansaku) on their summer vacation, meeting on the beach and their brief friendship. The young man does most of the talking and reveals his background, while the pensive young woman listens. It culminates in them swimming in the ocean together on a rainy day.

Then the story pivots to the writer taking the train to a snowy countryside on a whim. She can't find lodging since she didn't book anything. Over the mountain, she finds an isolated quaint inn, run by a grunt who doesn't reveal anything about his private life, such as, why he is alone running the inn, which is traditionally done as a family business. On his part, after hearing that she is a screenwriter for movies and TV shows, he suggests she write about his inn, hoping for more business.

Getting bored being snowed in, The inn keeper suggests checking out a large ornamental carp pond his neighbor owns in the middle of the night. Then he proceeds to steal a carp despite the protest from the writer. But in fact, this is the most fun she has had in a long time.

Miyake goes on sketching out the human connections among strangers in a gentle, playful, abstract way, blurring both fiction and real life/creator and its creations.

Next Life - Tenjin Phuntsog Tenjin Phuntsog's feature debut, Next Life, is a quiet contemplation on death, statelessness and rebirth. It starts with the elderly father of the family being examined by a traditional Tibetan doctor. The western medicine couldn't figure out what's wrong with him. Living in California, far away from home, has got to do with his condition, the doctor tells him - a deep wound in his heart that will kill him. Resigned to his fate, the family prepares for the impending passing.

Shot minimalistically with a handful of characters and setting, Phuntsog somberly goes about contemplating the impermanence of human life and the rituals we keep for the dead and remembrance. As a family, they cope with living in an exile in California with family karaoke sessions and walk in nature. They indulge themselves with a VR setup, walking in the tranquil field that resembles their homeland.

As the son is trying to arrange his ailing father's wish to visit Tibet, he encounters Chinese bureaucracy issuing him a visa - because Tibet is still under Chinese rule. On the father's deathbed, they are told by Tibetan monks that he will be reborn in Tibet as a bird. A consolation for the remaining family in their moaning.

All is unhurriedly and quietly observed like a documentary in Next Life. The human pulse sounds like a river running. The repeated prayers have their own rhythm. Watching the film, far apart from western storytelling tradition, is a quite unique experience.

Fantasy - Isabel Pagliai Prompted by a chance encounter, director Isabel Pagliai and her teen subject Louise Morel decided to make a film, a documentary on Morel's daily lives from her diary entries. But as the film goes along, it becomes, well, a fantasy of sorts, delving deeply and intimately into the inner life of a teenage girl. Armed with a handycam, Louis documents the dark interior of her house, singing, taking baths, scrolling on her phone, playing with her calico cat and pining for someone named Antoine. Louise has a ferocity of young Sandrine Bonnaire in A Nous Amours, as she delves guilessly into her sexuality and pours out her inner thoughts.

We only find out her name later in the film, just because a stranger, Thomas (Thomas Ducasse), who is reading off of her diary in the beginning of the film, manifests himself at night in the forest, to be with Louise. Is this a fantasy of Louise or Thomas? Or is it a mutual one? Nights in the forest go by as they engage in conversations by the stream. Fantasy is a shapeless, formless exploration of the inner life of a teenager. And Pagliai makes it into a uniquely enthralling cinematic experience.

Memory - Vladlena Sandu Vladlena Sandu's searing war time memoir, dedicated to the children of war, is filled with vivid and unforgettable images. The vibrant colors, mise-en-scene and poetic images remind you of the work of Parajanov and Tarkovsky. Sandu makes a point of the effects of growing up in war and violence and condemns the culture of child soldiers and cycle of violence.

It tells the story of young Vladlena (played by (Selima Agamirzaeva, then Amina Taisumova, and later by director herself) moving to Grozny, Chechenia, from Cremia, Ukraine, her birth place, after her artist parents divorce. There she endures a tyrannical grandfather who was a WWII vet and strict Lenin devotee. But it's the 80s and the USSR dissolves, there are changes and the decade long Russo-Chechen war is coming. Being Russian/Ukrainian, Vladlena's family find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Then the tanks roll in, bombardment of Grozny begins. And she witnesses unspeakable violence and death. Memory is all told in a mix of symbolic imagery, newsreel footage, home videos and photo collages. As Sandu struggles with her grandfather's legacy, her father's drug addiction and her mother's sacrifice, she paints a truly human experience in the sweeping current of not so distant history. Memory is a remarkable debut feature and crowning cinematic achievement.