One morning, Jessica Holland, a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Bogotá, is woken by a loud ‘bang’. This haunting sound dispels her sleep for days, calling into question her identity and guiding her from recording studios to secluded jungle villages in an attempt to find its source.
Take a tumble down the rabbit holes of internet culture with this uncanny coming-of-age tale from director Jane Schoenbrun (Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma). Skirting the boundaries of horror, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a nerve-shredding fever dream of collective psychosis from the dark heart of the online zeitgeist.
Brazil opens with a bureaucratic error. A fly gets stuck in a typewriter, changing the surname of Archibald Tuttle to Archibald Buttle, a misprint on a form that dictates the government forcibly detain a suspected terrorist (Tuttle) but instead leads to the arrest of an entirely innocent man (Buttle). [...]
A perfectly cast Jonathan Pryce inhabits Sam Lowry, a mid-level bureaucrat. He lives in a small apartment, complete with dysfunctional Rube Goldberg gadgetry that ends up pouring coffee on his toast. [...]
The deflection of responsibility, the ludicrous reasoning, the deferential loyalty to the state — these are the things Terry Gilliam satirized in Brazil. Most science fiction films emphasize the dangers of technology; Gilliam saw the sinister machinations of bureaucracy. Watching Brazil 40 years later, it's even clearer what we were being warned about.
— Kevin Nguyen, The Verge
Based on a brutal murder that shocked 1950s New Zealand, Heavenly Creatures tells the story of two teenagers who develop an intense bond and inhabit a shared fantasy world. When their parents try to break them up, the girls go to extremes to defend themselves and their kingdom.
Inspired by the Sirāt Bridge, which in Islamic tradition separates hell from heaven where the soul is confronted with its true nature, the film tells the story of Luis, a committed father who embarks on a journey with his son to search for his eldest daughter, Marina, after she disappears at a rave in Morocco. When the duo crosses paths with a group of misfits, their trip over the Atlas Mountains gradually becomes a coming-of-age odyssey.
The themes of physical wandering, borders, and introspection punctuate the work of Tarkovski’s heir, a fan of minimalist storytelling who captures landscapes, elements, and physical matter as wild, uncontrollable forces. For this particular feature film, which is both more political and radical than his previous pictures and is shot on location in Spain and Morocco, Oliver Laxe follows the path of a lonely character in internal exile, crossing both a literal and metaphorical desert.
Inspired by the Sirāt Bridge, which in Islamic tradition separates hell from heaven where the soul is confronted with its true nature, the film tells the story of Luis, a committed father who embarks on a journey with his son to search for his eldest daughter, Marina, after she disappears at a rave in Morocco. When the duo crosses paths with a group of misfits, their trip over the Atlas Mountains gradually becomes a coming-of-age odyssey.
The themes of physical wandering, borders, and introspection punctuate the work of Tarkovski’s heir, a fan of minimalist storytelling who captures landscapes, elements, and physical matter as wild, uncontrollable forces. For this particular feature film, which is both more political and radical than his previous pictures and is shot on location in Spain and Morocco, Oliver Laxe follows the path of a lonely character in internal exile, crossing both a literal and metaphorical desert.
Kelly Reichardt's triptych, adapted from three Maile Meloy stories, unfolds across the American West in interlocking episodes: a lawyer (Laura Dern) facing a troubled client, a wife (Michelle Williams) whose dream home exposes cracks in her marriage, and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who bonds with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone). With unassuming craft, Certain Women captures the rhythms of small-town Montana and the women confined by its wide-open spaces.
Borrowing an aphorism from the Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec for its title, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Radu Jude’s touches on labour, exploitation, death, and the new gig economy. Part comedy, part road movie, part montage, it centres around Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a bombastic production assistant working 16-hour days while, on her own time, honing a quippy online brand featuring her alter ego, a self-pronounced friend of misogynistic media personality Andrew Tate, currently facing human trafficking and other charges in Romania.
Hitting speed bumps that reveal the current state of modern Romanian roads, not to mention apathy to civics and sprawling corruption, Angela drives around the city casting a workplace safety video commissioned by a company for whom Doris (Nina Hoss), a descendant of Goethe, is the head of marketing. Driving us, Jude — always on the vanguard — brings a larger focus to the question of image production, bringing another of Lec’s aphorisms to mind: those who are ahead of their time often have to wait for it in uncomfortable quarters.
DOROTA LECH (Programmer at Toronto International film festival)
A midwestern teacher questions his sexuality after a former student makes a comment about him at the Academy Awards.
Lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) have been together for almost 20 years and have two teenage offspring named Joni and Laser, who were conceived via artificial insemination. Unbeknown to their mothers, Joni and Laser seek out their biological father, a restaurateur named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Complications arise when the teens bond with Paul and invite him into their lives.
PorYes is an initiative of sex-positive feminists that advocates for feminist criteria in pornography and honors outstanding depictions of sexuality. Since 2009, the PorYes Award has been held every two years as a feminist European porn film prize in Berlin. The PorYes awards were created as a feminist counter-action to the Venus Awards, a Berlin-based mainstream porn festival.
For more information visit their website.