Synopsis

Eight-year-old Katya is spending the summer with her grandparents in the Russian countryside. She and her friends play soccer, hide and seek, and roam the nearby fields, their lives adopting the languid rhythms of the season. Amid the rolling hills and serene landscapes, time seems to stand still. Yet all the while, a war is raging on the periphery, intruding on daily life in ways both large and small.

Drawing on real-life memories from her upbringing in the early 2000s during Russia’s Second Chechen War, director Nastia Korkia carefully crafts a picture of a childhood coexisting with chaos and conflict in which violence seems to lurk around every corner. Featuring some of the year’s most stirring, thought-provoking images and a textured, earth-toned visual palette, Short Summer is an unforgettable, atmospheric vision of growing up in the inescapable shadow of war.

Synopsis

Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor preparing to open a new show, is trying to hold things together. Her hot water heater is busted, her brother might be going off the rails, her divorced parents are exasperating, and her neighbor and landlord Jo (Hong Chau) is frustratingly aloof. When she suddenly becomes the caregiver of an injured pigeon, her nerves begin to fray. As her show looms, Lizzy wonders whether she can show up for others while also showing up for herself.

Out of pressurized moments of absurdity and inspiration emerges the beautiful, wondrously jagged shape of a person’s life. Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt masterfully wields a quietly rising tension to carve a profound, comedic, gorgeously layered picture of a life spent art-making. Bolstered by an understated, masterful performance by Williams and Reichardt’s keen eye for detail, Showing Up is a quiet tour-de-force.

Synopsis

Nestled in the heart of a university campus in Germany, a majestic gingko tree stands tall. Bearing silent witness to the school’s history and the lives of the people that have passed through its halls, the stately plant serves as a kind of nexus that connects three characters across time: in 1908, the college’s first female student observes hidden patterns in plant life through photography; in 1972, a young student is profoundly changed by observing and cataloging the behavior of a geranium; in 2020, a neuroscientist (Tony Leung) in Covid lockdown begins a series of unexpected botanical experiments. Could the trees be watching us?

Seamlessly toggling between time periods, Silent Friend is a century-spanning exploration of humanity’s fascination with nature’s greatest mysteries. Featuring a stellar ensemble cast and a winsome sense of wonder, the film is a thoughtful meditation on longing, belonging, and what it means to be human.

Synopsis

After a young woman goes missing at a rave deep in the mountains of southern Morocco, her father and brother traverse the forbidden desert landscape searching for her. Their journey takes them from one dance party to another, but none of the itinerant revelers can point to her whereabouts. Hearing rumors of an event near the border of Mauritania, the pair take up with a band of outsiders, together embarking on one last dangerous journey beneath the scorching sun.

The pounding pulse of electronica provides the soundtrack to a gripping existential journey to ends of the earth—the film’s title refers to the bridge separating Heaven and Hell in Islamic tradition. Unfolding amid an apocalyptic landscape in which reports of conflict and other crises issue from the radio, director Oliver Laxe’s metaphysical road movie, produced by Spanish cinema icon Pedro Almodóvar, is simultaneously meditative and harrowing in its potent exploration of loss, grief, and violence.

Synopsis

Returning to the house where his family was brutally murdered during the war, “the man who refuses to die” (Jorma Tommila) dismantles it, loads it on a truck, and is determined to rebuild it somewhere safe in their honor. When the Red Army commander who killed his family (Stephen Lang) comes back hellbent on finishing the job, a relentless, eye-popping cross-country chase ensues—a fight to the death, full of clever, unbelievable action set pieces.