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Five Favorites from the 2025 New Directors/New Films Festival
Blue Sun Palace The 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, runs from April 2 to April 13. This year’s program includes 24 features and 9 shorts. As always, the slate is admirably international in scope, spotlighting work from 22 different countries, with many films making their U.S. premieres after screening at festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, and Venice. Although I’ve attended ND/NF for more than two decades, and reported on it for this website and others for almost half that time, I still get excited when the slate is announced each year — the chance to discover emerging new talent is a way of keeping faith with the future of cinema. I’ve written below about five films that amply justify that faith. Go here for scheduling and ticketing information.
The 2025 Opening Night film is Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, starring Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth Goldman, a retired cookbook author and widow facing dementia. In the first shot, Ruth is seen from behind as she rummages through her closet, then pauses, as if unable to find whatever she’s looking for. In the next shot, she’s in her light-filled kitchen, seemingly moving with practiced ease, but we see she’s put a slice of toast on the dish-drying rack. A middle-aged man comes to visit her. Ruth is polite but keeps her distance as she struggles to remember his name. The man, Steve, is her son, and he’s come to move her into an assisted-living facility, where she’ll spend the rest of the movie. Friedland has called Familiar Touch a “coming-of-old-age film,” and it does indeed feel like a journey of growth and discovery of a new phase in life: Ruth makes friends and joins group activities and, with halting steps, accepts her place in the community of residents. But loss and decline lurk behind every corner.
Friedland’s background in dance choreography was the launching point for her previously best-known work, the Movement Exercises trilogy of short films, and it remains central to her feature debut. This is a movie of gestures, of bodies craving connection and sometimes finding it. Ruth raises her hand, waiting for Steve to take it in his. A shirtless older man on a balcony bends toward the sun like a flower. A roomful of residents trying out VR headsets grasp for invisible objects in the air. Ruth, daydreaming of an impossible romance with a much younger care worker, exults in the touch of a swim-therapy instructor. Friedland’s conception of Ruth, and Chalfant’s sensitive embodiment of her, breathe life into the cliché about old age containing all the other ages: Ruth behaves at various times like an elderly woman, a child, an ardent young lover, and a wise matriarch. The body crumbles, on the way to its final breakdown, but Friedland and Chalfant movingly convey both the faltering vessel and the animating spirit within.
The director’s bio for the Croatian/Italian/Slovenian co-production Fiume o morte! says: “Igor Bezinović is a filmmaker born in Rijeka, which is now part of Croatia, but at that time belonged to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, before that partly the Kingdom of Italy and partly the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and before that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), before that the Free State of Fiume, before that the Italian Regency of Carnaro, before that Austria-Hungary…” At first glance, this might seem like windy self-indulgence, but it captures both the substance of Fiume o morte!, which is about Rijeka’s history being rewritten and its borders redrawn, and the style, which is breathless, dizzying, and densely packed with information. Bezinović’s film is a hybrid documentary that recounts an astonishing 16-month period between 1919 and 1921 when the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, dreaming of military and political glory, occupied the city of Fiume, as Rijeka was then called. Fiume had been part of the recently dismantled Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now belonged to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, but D’Annunzio was determined to claim it for Italy. Eventually, the Kingdom of Italy tired of his antics, and signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Yugoslavia, making Fiume a free state. D’Annunzio then declared war on Italy. Five days and a few dozen casualties later, he fled Fiume, never to return.
It’s an absurd story, especially with a century’s distance from the actual events, and Bezinović treats it as such. He casts present-day residents of Rijeka to re-enact D’Annunzio’s folly, and the ironic juxtaposition between then and now provides ample opportunities for comedy. In one typical moment, an actor playing D’Annunzio gives a rabble-rousing speech from a balcony; cut to an archival photo from the real-life speech, with a crowd of several hundred gathered to listen; then cut back to the present to show the street empty except for the actor’s real-life wife and son, smiling and clapping. The tone is light and the pacing breezy throughout, but there are serious themes being explored here — war, nationalism, xenophobia, the rise of fascism — and the post-modern play-acting, far from being a gimmicky add-on, point toward how much of “real” politics is a matter of posing, posturing, and performance. The hybrid documentary, once such a rare and exotic bird, has by now become a fixture of contemporary art-house filmmaking, but Fiume o morte! is a lively demonstration that in the right hands, the genre can still surprise and delight and inform.
Contested versions of history are also at the heart of another standout film, Two Times João Liberada, by the Portuguese director Paula Tomás Marques. João, a trans actress, is cast to play her namesake, the (fictional) 18th-century shepherdess and nun João Liberada, in a biopic. The director, Diogo, wants to depict the “violence and pain” of João Liberada’s life — her rape by a former lover, her persecution at the hands of the Portuguese Inquisition, her death by suicide — the better to present her as a trans martyr, a tragic victim of ignorance and intolerance. But the actress finds Diogo’s approach reductive, seeking instead to find ways to express the “tenderness, pleasure, self-discovery” that she discerns between the lines of the historical record. Scenes from Diogo’s movie are intercut with scenes from its production, as actress and director argue, negotiate, advance, retreat. When Diogo is mysteriously incapacitated, João gets the chance to reshape the footage into something different from what the director intended — and, it’s implied, the movie we’re watching is the end result. (Both Joãos are played by the actress June João, who co-wrote the screenplay with Marques.) Two Times João Liberada looks to have been made on the skimpiest of budgets, but Marques energizes the proceedings with camera and editing effects, eerie soundscapes, and other forms of cinematic wizardry. Only 70 minutes long, the film is a rich and heady experience, pulsing with ideas and intelligence.
Zhengfan Yang, the writer and director of Stranger, was born in China, attended film school in Hong Kong, and has been based in Chicago for several years. Stranger is a film about migration, dislocation, and the slippery question of what it means to call somewhere home. The movie consists of seven vignettes mostly set in hotel rooms in China, but there’s a surreal quality to the stories that makes them feel like they’re taking place in an imaginary location — perhaps even in the minds of their protagonists. Two men — possibly a gay couple? — are interrogated by the police; when one of the men insists he has “the right to remain silent,” he’s reminded that the right to remain silent is “a foreign law, not a Chinese law.” A married couple spend their last night together in a luxury hotel while the heavily pregnant wife prepares to leave for the U.S., where she will give birth; the husband role-plays as an American customs official interrogating the wife about the reasons for her visit. A young woman is forced into Covid quarantine upon returning to China from abroad; she livestreams about her time in isolation, which keeps being extended week after week, but it’s hinted toward the end that the pandemic was over long ago. A middle-aged street performer gets ready for another day at work in Times Square dressed as the Monkey King from the classic novel Journey to the West; as he dons his costume, we hear a monologue (read by the director) lamenting the immigrant’s perpetual feeling of belonging and not-belonging. Each story is filmed in a single take, although no two are alike: Yang finds a wide range of expressive possibilities, from a locked-down camera to a highly mobile one, from geometrically precise tracking shots to raggedy handheld work. With its IV-drip pacing and nearly claustrophobic sense of entrapment inside the various rooms, Stranger isn’t an easy sit, and online reactions to earlier festival screenings have been mixed, but I found it thoroughly absorbing and illuminating, a report on the contemporary world filtered through a poet’s eye.
As it happens, my other favorite film from this year’s ND/NF also employs a one-shot-equals-one-scene style to tell a story about Chinese-speaking immigrants in cramped spaces. But in every other way, Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace differs from Yang’s cerebral, formalist approach. Tsang’s first feature is a quiet, character-driven melodrama suffused with melancholy and longing. Didi (Haipeng Xu) and Amy (Ke-xi Wu) are best friends and co-workers at a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens. Didi is seeing a construction worker named Cheung (Lee Kang-sheng), even though she knows he still has a wife and child back in Taiwan to whom he sends money every month. When tragedy suddenly befalls Didi, Amy and Cheung find themselves drawing closer to each other.
Tsang and her DP, Norm Li, restrict their locations to the massage parlor and a handful of small apartments and restaurants — the tale could be taking place in any one of dozens of Chinatowns around the world. The film’s wide frames, its patient and restrained camera gaze, and its emotional turbulence overlaid with calm surfaces, evoke luminaries of modern Taiwanese cinema such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang and, above all, Tsai Ming-liang. Lee Kang-sheng is, of course, Tsai’s longtime muse, and the actor’s presence here gives Blue Sun Palace a special thrill for admirers of the director’s work: Cheung could be a cousin to one of the lost and lonely men Lee has played for Tsai over the years, now even farther from home, in every sense. Explaining to Amy why he can’t return to Taiwan, Cheung says, “If I went back, I’d have to start over again… I wouldn’t know who I could be.” She asks him in reply, “But do you know who you are now?” This is a gorgeous, aching wound of a film.
