In New Directors/New Films Ideas Bubble from the Cultural Magma

New Directors/New Films presents a cross-section of ideas and styles bubbling from today’s cultural magma, and elements and themes resonate from film to film. It’s our zeitgeist, baby.

New Directors/New Films is one of the most venerable events in America’s film scene. Founded in 1972, the annual showcase at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a one-stop shop for fresh voices that have been making the rounds of the world’s film festivals. 

The 54th incarnation runs from 2 to 13 April 2025 and presents 24 features plus two programs of short films. Made within the last couple of years, the features are usually the first or second films by young filmmakers. They present a thermometer or barometer of the world’s cinematic temperature, or perhaps an EKG scribbling signs of life on the unrolling thermal paper, or heck, maybe a defibrillator giving a jump-start to cinema’s moribund corpse.

Let’s switch metaphors: New Directors/New Films present a cross-section of ideas and styles bubbling from today’s cultural magma, and that’s probably why elements and themes unwittingly resonate from film to film. It’s our zeitgeist, baby. PopMatters previews 13 of this year’s films. For more information, check MoMA’s website.

The Assistant / Człowiek do wszystkiego (2025) – Directors: Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal

Joseph Marti (Piotr Trojan) is a thin, young, haunted-looking man who accepts a position as assistant, secretary, and general factotum to a supposedly wealthy inventor, Karl Tobler (Andrzej Konopa), whose brilliant idea is to sell advertiser-sponsored clocks to railway carriages. Tobler is not exactly drumming up investors, and he’s no prize as a boss, but Marti has bed and board, even if no salary seems forthcoming. Marti also has a strained, bottled-up relationship with Mrs. Tobler (Agnieszka Zulewska).

Such is the situation presented in Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal’s Polish film The Assistant, based on the 1908 novel by Robert Walser that was inspired by his own experience as an inventor’s assistant. Walser is increasingly recognized as an important influence on such writers as Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, and Hermann Hesse. Walser now seems proto-Kafka-esque, which may be putting the cart before the horse, but tells how pervasive Kafka’s influence is. Without it, would we have rediscovered Walser? (We’ll mention Kafka again in CycleMahesh.)

Whether the character inspired Kafka or not, Joseph Marti’s hapless adventures as a bewildered everyman stuck in a vaguely threatening situation resonate across the century. He comes across as a kind of anti-Bartleby. Whereas Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) came to tyrannize his employer by preferring to do nothing, Marti resentfully does everything asked of him, which leads to a lovely irony when he starts dictating letters for his employer to take down. At one point, Marti even says he prefers not to do something, which is surely a wink.

The main characters dress and act as though it’s 1908, and Marti at one point declares with calm prescience that a world war is coming in 1914 and a later one in 1939, yet The Assistant really takes place in a zone of indeterminate anachronism. Absurdist and expressionist musical interludes include needle-drops by the likes of the Smiths. Indeed, our first hint at these anomalies is the Andy Warhol photo of Joe Dallesandro used as the cover of the Smiths’ eponymous 1984 debut, which seems out of place amid the paintings by Matisse and other modernists.

Some odd details are in the mise-en-scène, such as the postman played by a woman with a mustache, and some are stylistic tics, like flares of overexposure on the film. All these devices, plus glimpses of modern cars and trains, convey that The Assistant isn’t a period piece but a timeless commentary on capitalist dreams.

CycleMahesh (2024) – Director: Suhel Banerjee

Shot in widescreen video, Suhel Banerjee’s CycleMahesh is a one-hour documentary inspired by the fact that during the COVID shutdown in India, a young construction worker named Mahesh bicycled 1,700km to his family’s home because trains and buses were stopped. The filmmakers don’t have him reconstruct the trip but instead offer fanciful interpretations. Certain shots consist only of Mahesh (played by himself plus three other actors) traveling, as seen from behind or in front, lost in the exhausting serenity of widescreen travel through roads across forests and hills. Lots of landscape.

A few scenes reconstruct a play based on Franz Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” (1922), about a man starving in a boxlike space for public exhibition. (By coincidence or zeitgeist, we’ll see a man fold himself into a glass box in Holy Electricity, and Stranger will also be about people in boxes.) There’s a fanciful scene in which police (actors) ask the film crew about permits. There are lots of scenes of interaction with the crew.

One motif in CycleMahesh is the idea of India as a work in progress, due to the endless construction of buildings that employ workers like Mahesh and encourage their travel far from home. We gather there is plenty of work, but those like Mahesh probably aren’t getting paid much. He hadn’t even received his pay packet before he had to leave for home. Someone is investing in these buildings and will undoubtedly make their packet with this economic contribution, but the world’s working Maheshes are always with us and seem interchangeable, their village and farm lives dislocated as such projects push them out.

Grand Me (2024) – Director: Atiye Zare Arandi

If CycleMahesh is a work of fanciful and fictionalized reconstruction masquerading as a documentary at New Directors/New Films, Atiye Zare Arandi’s Grand Me is an almost equally hybridized portrait of the filmmaker’s young niece during a tense custody battle. At nine, Melina lives with her mother’s loving parents and prefers to stay there. The kicker isn’t that her parents want her living with either of them, but the opposite. Both parents have remarried other people with children, and those new partners’ problems complicate any custody.

Yet mom (whom we see) and dad (whom we don’t) not only don’t wish to relinquish claims (without having Melina move in with them) but use Melina in a tug of legal war over what she should tell the judge in charge of the custody decision. We see phone calls where elders prod her to say this or that while the person at the other end forestalls her. It’s easy to understand why Melina wants to wash her hands of everyone. The fact that she’s resilient and mischievous, and that toys surround her in her Garfield-themed bedroom, doesn’t conceal her anger at the constant hassle that she blames on her parents. She’s especially deaf to her pained mother’s attempts to explain her own boxed-in options.

Parts of Grand Me are the aunt’s videography, with characters occasionally addressing her camera in blunt discussions and opinions. Parts are Melina’s video diary recorded on her phone. Parts are more clinical, such as scenes of Melina and her mother arguing inside the car, with a camera on the dashboard. Iranian cinema is famous for such driving scenes, which acknowledge how much of our lives are lived inside our cars. It’s also famous for intimate family studies, natural depictions of children, and neo-realist reconstructions in which real-life non-actors play themselves. Grand Me checks all the marks.

The Height of the Coconut Trees (2024) – Director: Du Jie

Made by a Chinese filmmaker in Japan, Du Jie’s The Height of the Coconut Trees demands active attention as a non-linear study in unexpected connectedness amid life’s melancholy. The viewer must piece together that we’re following two different boyfriend-girlfriend couples in different timelines. The men are easier to tell apart thanks to contrasting hairstyles, but the women both have long black hair, and it’s probably a casting decision to make them resemble each other as doppelgangers. Hint: One of the women always wears a white backpack and a camera, while the other wears a black backpack and has no camera.

We’ll quickly learn that one of the women has died by suicide. An early scene drops in on an installation by a real-life artist who makes a presentation about the suicide of a young male friend and the effects on the man’s parents. His show has attracted one of our young men, who reveals that his girlfriend, the shutterbug with the white backpack, is already dead, and he wants to know whether he should develop her film rolls.

Will the young woman who’s still alive follow unconsciously in the footsteps of the dead woman? As the narrative slips back and forth in time to follow the current woman’s journey, we realize that she’ll cross paths with the mourning man. By the way, some scenes have ghosts, though it takes a while to figure that out. Ghosts are used, as they commonly are, as metaphors for mourning and the persistence of memory. (We’ll meet another ghost in Two Times João Liberada.)

One climax of The Height of the Coconut Trees is a lengthy conversation in which the living woman and the mourning man unburden themselves to each other as strangers. This is a chilling, uncanny moment of connection in an increasingly strange, uncanny film that’s also meditative, teasing, and lovingly shot. We haven’t even mentioned the narrative hook of a wedding ring found inside a fish.

Holy Electricity / Tsminda Electroenergia (2024) – Director: Tato Kotetishvili

Here’s an example from New Directors/New Films of how one film unwittingly talks to another. In The Height of the Coconut Trees, someone describes taking photos as a way of rendering the ordinary important, of giving it a soul. Tato Kotetishvili’s Georgian comedy Holy Electricity feels like it’s made to illustrate that thesis. Another curious resonance is that both films have women with birthmarks, and both have funerals.

Presented as a series of shots from a nailed-down camera in standard ratio with blurry corners, sometimes with Kubrickian balance, sometimes framed for eccentric details, sometimes just visually gorgeous, Holy Electricity is a series of living snapshots of human behavior. The parade of moments includes several examples of singing and other types of performance.

A dumpy middle-aged uncle and his tall young nephew in a black Misfits T-shirt, who come across like characters created by Samuel Beckett, enact myriad deadpan encounters as they try to make a living gleaning cast-off detritus from junkyards. They invent the idea of crosses that glow brightly in various colors when plugged in, and they sell these door to door in more or less dilapidated apartment buildings.

As in The Assistant, these entrepreneurs pin their hopes on dubious inventions. By the end of Holy Electricity, we’ve learned a lot about their hapless lives, uncertain pursuit of love, and optimism in the face of decay in a world where everyone wants money from everybody else.

Holy Electricity falls squarely into Georgian cinema’s reputation for eccentric, deadpan, realistically absurdist comedy, as epitomized by the late Otar Iosseliani, while remaining its own thing. There’s a subtle transsexual plot thread (see also Two Times João Liberada), a thread about the presence of the Roma minority, and the whole understated yet persistent theme of faith as exemplified by the crosses.

Kyuka Before Summer’s End / Κιούκα Πριν το τέλος του καλοκαιριού (2024) – Director: Kostis Charamountanis

Here’s a third film screening at New Directors/New Films involving a young woman with a birthmark, although it’s not a plot point. Kyuka Before Summer’s End is a summer vacation story and very nearly a “nothing happens” movie with all the delicacy that implies, save for a whisper of unnecessary melodrama at the film’s end.

A bearded dad and his two grown-ish kids, a brother and sister who communicate by bickering, spend the summer on his boat in a blue lagoon at a Greek island. They meet a stylish woman on the dock in a beaded flapper dress. The siblings don’t know what we quickly learn, that she’s their mother. Later, they meet other folks at the resort and spend many lazy days in the sun and water in what feel like improvised scenes. As we learn about all these people, their relations grow more complex, or perhaps simpler.

Writer-director Kostis Charamountanis loads Kyuka Before Summer’s End with a battery of simple, self-conscious, film-affirming gestures reminiscent of the French New Wave, except in Greece. If I had to compare it with the work of another filmmaker, perhaps it resembles the seemingly improvised French vacation movies of Jacques Rozier. The soundtrack is laced with needle drops, from Greek songs to Renaissance music to Tchaikovsky and Leoncavallo. Charamountanis made his debut feature as a kind of sequel to his short Kioku Before Summer Comes (2018), and he incorporates some footage from it.

Lesson Learned / Fekete pont (2024) – Director: Bálint Szimler

A Hungarian film of handheld naturalism in 16mm, Bálint Szimler’s Lesson Learned depicts a frustrating initiation for two newbies in a public school. Palkó (Paul Matis) is the new kid who has just arrived from Berlin and finds the school’s power system senseless and unhelpful. He identifies with a stray cat. Miss Juci (Anna Mészöly) is the new young literature teacher who learns the same things; she has no support and is expected to drill with discipline rather than engage minds.

Implicitly, this situation is the decades-old hangover from the old communist system, still stuck in its old ways of petty bureaucracy and incompetence. Still, surely anyone will recognize this systemic behavior everywhere.

As the camera eavesdrops on one closely observed scene after another, like a Frederick Wiseman documentary condensed into two hours with an artful eye, one of the slyly comic strands concerns an art teacher’s attempts to replace a window that’s fallen out of its frame. Another scene of a parents’ meeting is a small masterpiece of conflicting human behavior. Then, in the middle of all this, we have a brilliant and thrilling school play adapted from a work by Miguel de Cervantes. The production is too good for the school, but let’s rethink that. It’s what the rest of the school should be and isn’t.

Listen to the Voices / Kouté vwa (2024) – Director: Maxime Jean-Baptiste

A Belgian production shot in French Guiana, Listen to the Voices is a documentary that begins with decade-old news footage of the funeral of a young DJ killed at a party. He went by the name DJ Turbulence. We gather that he was one example of a string of deaths attributed to ongoing issues of violence, and he’s especially remembered and memorialized as a musical celebrity. The victim’s nephew, young Melrick, is visiting from France to stay with his grandmother (the victim’s mother), and their warm relationship and honest dialogues are among the best things in the film.

Maxime Jean-Baptiste isn’t making a documentary specifically about the events that overshadow the memories of those who remain. His topic is the nature of that memory for traumatized people, like the DJ’s best friend, who witnessed his death. We also see performances of a troupe of dancers and drummers to which the man belonged, and which continues to recruit the current generation into discipline and celebration.

Listen to the Voices is among the several documentaries at New Directors/New Films that feel like hybrids with personal drama and artistic reflection, such as the blue-tinted scenes of the family friend who wanders in the beautiful forest alone with his soul. Like Lesson Learned and Lost Chapters, it focuses on a young person who returns to the country of his family after having spent years away.

These displaced persons are actually going toward something called home. Although the context to which Melrick returns has its melancholy memories, it’s ultimately a welcoming and healthful experience for him.

Lost Chapters / Los Capítulos Perdidos (2024) – Director: Lorena Alvarado

The shortest of the previewed selections at New Directors/New Films is perhaps the most impeccably civilized and spiritually elevating. Lost Chapters is a family project for Lorena Alvarado. A 24-year-old Ena (Ena Alvarado, the filmmaker’s sister) visits the fabulous Venezuelan home of her father (Ignacio Alvarado), a used bookseller, and her grandmother with some form of dementia (Adela Alvarado). You would wish to stay there. On the most literal level, Grandma’s vanishing memory explains the film’s title.

Finding an old postcard in a book, Ena embarks on a wild goose chase for a possibly fictitious novel that may or may not be the work of a Venezuelan author named Rafael Bolivar Coronado, who wrote under many pseudonyms. She and her father haunt all the bookstores in Caracas, making Lost Chapters catnip for booklovers. As they visit museums, we’re graced with art and architecture. That’s it: no crisis, no melodrama, just a refined sense of what elevates everyday life and the relationships that make it precious, even if we no longer remember them.

In one scene, Ena lies across a bed with her family and hears a TV report on an impending tropical storm, but her ears tune it out from the soundtrack as she’s lost in thought. Her father has referred elliptically to “the situation in the country”. If she continues living in the present moment with her loved ones, albeit a present constructed from research into the past, Ena must learn to pick and choose what deserves her attention. For her, the babbling of the transitory news isn’t as important as evidence of what mustn’t be forgotten but probably will be. As icing on the coffee, Lost Chapters is dotted with exquisite musical choices.

No Sleep Till (2024) – Director: Alexandra Simpson

View No Sleep Till trailer at MUBI.

Remember the storm warning in New Directors/New Films’ Lost Chapters? All of Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is under the shadow of a hurricane approaching Florida. The pending storm could be read as a historical allegory in both cases, but that’s hardly necessary.

The handful of characters include two friends (Jordan Coley, Xavier Brown Sanders) pursuing stand-up comedy dreams and a storm chaser (Taylor Benton) who heads toward the storm while reviewing memories of chasing with his dad. Two raccoons make a special appearance as themselves in a film with many swimming pools.

Surprisingly, what sounds like a foreboding premise becomes an adventure in optimism and beauty in America’s urban landscape. Special kudos belong not only to the photography but also to the color grading, as many vibrant shots resemble photos by William Eggleston or some other revealer and reveler of American mundane lyricism. The early shots of a young woman floating upside down (relative to us) in a pool echo Stranger and Two Times João Liberada. It’s as if all these filmmakers at New Directors/New Films are looking over each other’s shoulders.

Sad Jokes (2024) – Director: Fabian Stumm

Fabian Stumm wrote, directed, and stars as a filmmaker named Joseph who plans to make a comedy. It’s a German comedy, which means it won’t be funny, and that’s a point raised in the dialogue of Sad Jokes, which begins with people telling corny jokes while a laugh track giggles. Then, the story begins with a scene in which a mother comes home with her child and proceeds to make dinner in the kitchen.

She greets the father, whom we assume incorrectly is her husband. As the scene progresses, shot in one long take from a camera nailed down impassively in the next room, we gradually learn that she’s ducked out of the hospital where she’s being treated for depression, and this increasingly tense scene could go in any direction.

The whole narrative of Sad Jokes is like that: a series of discreet, barely connected boxcars delivering moments in the life of Joseph, who deals with his young son and the boy’s depressed mother while attempting to write a comedy and get back in the swing of dating since his boyfriend dumped him. Most scenes are shot from a stable, unblinking, impassive camera, although a few motions will come into play. A few scenes are standard back-and-forth dialogue.

It becomes impossible to predict what the next scene of Sad Jokes will be like. Sometimes a scene’s effect is derived from the fact that we have no idea what the current scene will be like, which gives queasy suspense to innocuous situations. A few scenes have uncomfortable humor in social situations, and one is kind of slapstick. Ultimately, we receive a hopeful, if wry, glimpse of Joseph’s life, and it’s helped considerably by his handsome charm.

What are Sad Jokes‘ connections to other films at New Directors/New Films? Well, a character in Kyuka Before Summer’s End is gay, though it’s less of a plot point. Like Joseph, someone in The Height of the Coconut Trees injures a middle finger, although I didn’t grasp the significance of that detail.

Stranger / Ju Wai Ren (2024) – Director: Zhengfan Yang

The opening 12-minute shot of Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger is what I call a Middle Distance movie. From a static camera at a physical and emotional remove, we see a woman sitting on a bed making uncertain gestures of yearning or distress. Then we hear a voice on a walkie-talkie and realize she’s No. 7, a maid cleaning a hotel room.

We see her enact a real-time process amid dazzling panes and reflections as orders come over the gadget, for this is also an example of what critics call Slow Cinema. As a punchline, she changes out of the dress she’s wearing and puts on her uniform, and we realize she’s been illicitly trying on a guest’s clothes.

The next static 12-minute shot, also in a hotel room, finds two middle-aged men visited by two cops, one male and one female, who have shown up on a vague errand. At this point, Stranger resembles a recent Iranian film, Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami’s Terrestrial Verses (2023), another masterpiece in long takes that presents disconnected scenes of frustration and official oppression.

Stranger‘s third shot presents a wedding party posing for a photographer while we hear Shostakovich’s Jazz Waltz No. 2, a piece many viewers will associate with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). This time, Yang’s camera glides in a circular motion around the room, pausing behind the posing people to reveal a sly erotic gesture that possibly comments on the two men in the previous hotel room.

Stranger consists of seven self-contained virtuoso shots with thematic connections. All seven segments are set in hotels (or seem to be) with an implicit connection to prisons, and the countries beyond are also prisons by extension. One appears to be a Los Angeles room and refers to the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, or Monkey.

Three of the segments comment on such journeys. Three are about public performance and presentation. Two are about how clothes or uniforms define us. Stranger‘s final segment is a literal example of structural cinema as we gaze at the outer wall of a hotel and perceive the people in their boxes, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Of all the films at New Directors/New Films previewed by PopMatters, Stranger is the most formally exhilarating.

Two Times João Liberada / Duas Vezes João Liberada (2025) – Director: Paula Tomás Marques

The most visually textured of these previewed titles at New Directors/New Films is Paula Tomás Marques’ Portuguese Two Times João Liberada. This film is several things: a biographical essay on a real 18th-century Portuguese nun of uncertain gender identification, a “meta” movie about making a movie complete with scenes rehearsed and interrupted, a meditation on conflicts and confusions of transsexual identities, and a ghost story.

The narrator is June João as a version of herself, a trans actress recruited to play a historical figure in a biopic. Her voiceover informs us that the film was suddenly shut down when the director came down with a sleep paralysis, and we see him doubled and quivering upon himself in superimposition, as though his spirit is about to elevate out of his body.

The idea is that, since any biopic or story about a real person is basically obliged to make stuff up and impose someone’s coherent interpretation upon a life never lived for such a purpose, perhaps the person’s ghost will haunt the production or otherwise register displeasure. These ideas, too, get incorporated into the film, so everything from historical lives to plastic mediums can be repurposed into a new interpretation.

Like The Assistant, Two Times João Liberada is a historical film that pretends not to be. Like The Height of the Coconut Trees, it suspects ghosts lurk everywhere. Like CycleMahesh, it problematizes the idea of reproducing someone’s life on film truthfully. Like Holy Electricity, Listen to the Voices, and Lost Chapters, it nevertheless suggests that creating art can be healthy and cathartic if done in the proper spirit. By all means, then, let’s keep making films.