Synopsis

In this tense, timely, and poignant drama, Yakup, a beloved music teacher and Turkish dissident, has fled his country for fear of political persecution and is seeking asylum in the U.S. While working in the kitchen of a New York City restaurant, he struggles desperately to find a way to bring his wife and daughter into the country to live with him. Finding legal immigration channels a dead end, he reluctantly engages with a dodgy smuggler, a decision that only intensifies his concern for his family’s safety, sending the kindly Yakup into a downward spiral.

First-time feature filmmakers Nadir Sarıbacak (known for his role in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep) and Samy Pioneer deftly capture the details of Turkish American and migrant life in the big city, while also expressively conveying their protagonist’s troubled state of mind. Gazelle isn’t just an urgent tale about our immigration crisis—it’s a touching story about displacement and its deep psychological and physical toll.

Synopsis

From writer/director Nia DaCosta comes a provocative, modern reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play. Hedda (Tessa Thompson) finds herself torn between the lingering ache of a past love and the quiet suffocation of her present life. Over the course of one charged night, long-repressed desires and hidden tensions erupt—pulling her and everyone around her into a spiral of manipulation, passion, and betrayal.

Synopsis

This powerful, poignant documentary follows the Beinin family, who find themselves ensnared in one of the defining political calamities of our times. On the morning of October 7, 2023, Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband Aviv were kidnapped from their kibbutz by Hamas militants, leaving Liat’s American-Israeli parents, Chaya and Yehuda, desperate to get their daughter back. Yehuda, who travels to Washington D.C. to advocate for his daughter’s release, is a die-hard leftist and long-time critic of Benjamin Netanyahu. But as the days turn into weeks and then months, tensions rise, leaving the family worried, angry, and divided.

Tense and affecting, the film chronicles the Beinin clan’s race against time to save their family members, while also rendering the conflicting ideologies of those caught in the quagmire with great nuance. Winner of the top documentary prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Holding Liat offers a profoundly moving story of a family in crisis and raises provocative questions about identity, faith, morality, and justice in a society thrown into turmoil by the war in Gaza.

Synopsis

With her life crashing down around her, Linda (Rose Byrne) attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist. With the whiplash pace of a thriller, writer-director Mary Bronstein takes audiences into a breathtakingly inventive, unexpectedly funny, yet startlingly relatable fever-dream of parental anxiety. Rose Byrne gives a one-of-a-kind cinematic portrait of ultra-pressurized motherhood.

Synopsis

As their marriage quietly unravels, Alex (Will Arnett) faces middle age and an impending divorce, seeking new purpose in the New York comedy scene while Tess (Laura Dern) confronts the sacrifices she made for their family—forcing them to navigate co-parenting, identity, and whether love can take a new form.