A world premiere I’m highly anticipating out of the upcoming 2021 edition of New Directors/New Films is the second feature from Iva Radivojević, Aleph.

From New Directors:

In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends from Argentina to Greenland to South Africa, with plenty of pit stops along the way. Ultimately, they are all part of the same expanse, a continuum containing the entire universe. Radivojević’s puzzle-like film is amusing rather than heavy-handed in its philosophical journeying, adding a few new wrinkles to the cinematic conventions of time and interconnectedness.

“For me, travel always equals wonder,” said Radivojević when I interviewed her in 2013 for our 25 New Faces list. With the filmmaker expanding her creative brief into drama following her Cyprus-shot doc, Evaporating Borders — and as we all dream about travel after a year of restrictions, both societal and personal — I’m looking forward to Radivojević’s always-exquisite images, her ideas around place, borders and divides, and the fusion of her sensibility with Borges. Check out the trailer above.