Synopsis

A vacuum factory is under pressure when a string of fatal workplace accidents leads to an unlikely phenomenon: deceased workers possessing machines and wreaking havoc on their operations. One particular soul—Nat, the young wife of the factory’s heir, killed by dust poisoning—is able to reunite with her grieving husband as a vacuum, reigniting their love stronger than ever. But faced with the fierce disapproval of her husband’s powerful family, Nat strives to be a polite and useful ghost, agreeing to help her in-laws exorcise the vacuum factory of its pesky lost souls. Her compassion for her fellow ghosts, however, illuminates the dark side of her work and the implications of forgetting those who are lost too soon.

A dazzling visual design, a penchant for deadpan whimsy, and an incisive focus on society’s marginalized are just a few of the colorful threads that form this genre-defying cinematic tapestry. An earnest exploration of loss and memory, this delightfully absurd phantasmagoric fable is equal parts witty, poignant, and heartbreaking.

Synopsis

On January 29, 2024, Red Crescent volunteers in Gaza field a call from a family trapped inside a car that is under Israeli military fire. Moments later, six-year-old Hind Rajab remains alone on the line, terrified and pleading for rescue. As the emergency volunteers keep her talking, dispatchers must determine if they will be able to send a rescue team across the embattled terrain to save her life.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (Four Daughters) recreates the unimaginably fraught situation in vivid detail for her groundbreaking feature The Voice of Hind Rajab, merging documentary and feature filmmaking techniques to tell the heartbreaking story of the emergency workers who tried to mount a rescue effort to save the girl’s life. Brilliantly marrying real-life recordings and scripted re-enactments pulled from transcripts and first-hand accounts—and casting actors who closely resemble the actual dispatchers—Ben Hania creates an unsettling verisimilitude.

Tense, urgent, and imminently compelling, The Voice of Hind Rajab embeds with the emergency workers as they attempt to comfort Hind, slowly realizing the impossible position they face. The film is a memorial to the courage of those first responders and a tribute to the life of a little girl whose name will not be forgotten.

Synopsis

World-renowned detective Benoit Blanc returns for his most dangerous case yet.

Synopsis

In the early 1990s, Saturday Night Live’s Julia Sweeney created one of the show’s most popular characters of the time in the recurring sketch “It’s Pat!” Awkward, androgynous, and often wearing a light-blue pearl-snap Western-style shirt with tan slacks, Pat was an enigma—and their gender, and questions around it, was the punchline of many a joke. Now, 35 years later, the gags feel out of date and even insulting, but queer filmmaker Rowan Haber presents a whimsical and complex interrogation of “Pat,” a figure to which Haber had always found themselves inextricably drawn.

Collaborating with queer and trans comedians as well as a game Julia Sweeney ready to revisit her creation, We Are Pat looks at the way Pat embodied trans and nonbinary identities at a moment when popular culture had yet to understand them. Through their own hilarious observations and funny recreations of the Pat sketches, Haber and their crew are able to find in Pat an unlikely hero, one that might be worth reclaiming as a symbol of empowerment.

Synopsis

Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), a thirty-something poet, is committed to living a life of beauty and simplicity. One afternoon, he drives his girlfriend Junee (Kang Soyi) to her parents’ home just outside of Seoul. There, he meets her father (played by Hong Sangsoo mainstay Kwon Haehyo) for the first time—a generally affable goofball who develops a strange fixation for Donghwa’s car. A quick spin around the block leads to an invitation to dinner and a chance to meet the rest of the family. A lazy afternoon slips into a drunken evening, and everything starts to unravel as Donghwa’s idealistic confidence begins to fray.

A bitterly comic fable about life, art, and the desire to live simply, What Does That Nature Say to You is a rich and revealing character portrait. Festival mainstay Hong Sangsoo (By the Stream) deploys his trademark long takes and keen narrative intuition to chart the comeuppance of his quixotic protagonist.