New Directors/New Films 2024

The film centers, though, on Stan’s Edward, an actor with neurofibromatosis, a medical disorder that distorts his facial features. He has his eye set on his new neighbor (Renate Reinsve) and his hopes invested in an experimental treatment that turns out to actually work. Once he’s gone through a creepy peeling phase, his face is Sebastian Stan’s. Enter Oswald (Adam Pearson), a jovial Brit who looks like the man Edward was but lives the life Edward wants. Writing for Sight and Sound, Jessica Kiang calls A Different Man “a discomfiting but darkly hilarious story of a man with two faces, one soul, and zero game.”

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, ND/NF 2024 will roll out twenty-five features and ten shorts from today through April 14, when this year’s edition wraps with Theda Hammel’s debut feature, Stress Positions. While she’s set her comedy in Brooklyn in the summer of 2020, Hammel, cohost of the podcast Nymphowars, “isn’t striving to present a time capsule,” notes Natalia Keogan in the introduction to her interview for Filmmaker. “Instead, the filmmaker opts for a satirical take on how the pandemic shaped generational notions of social justice, artistry, and personal identity, particularly among New York’s well-to-do queer fringe.”

A glance at the films screening through the festival’s first weekend begins with India Donaldson, who will be on hand to discuss her debut feature, Good One, on Thursday. It’s one of ten features in the program that IndieWire recommends catching, with David Ehrlich calling it “a coming-of-age story that jettisons all of the genre’s most familiar trappings in favor of a long walk in the woods.” Seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias), her dad (James Le Gros), and one of his old friends (Danny McCarthy) go camping in upstate New York.

“Perhaps it’s accidental that Donaldson’s premise recalls Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 miniature Old Joy as if replayed two decades on—with a new, nearly adult interloper muddling the once-comfy dynamic between two middle-aged friends on a woodsy retreat,” writes Guy Lodge in Variety. “But there’s certainly some resemblance here to the quiet, subtext-led simmer of Reichardt’s filmmaking, in which throwaway lines and actions acquire unspoken weight as hours, and then days, and perhaps even years, go by.”

Hesitation Wound sticks close to a Turkish criminal lawyer for twenty-four hours as she works to save a murder suspect from the threat of a life sentence. “Unfolding at the intersection of regulatory procedure, moral urgency, and heartache,” writes Sheri Linden in the Hollywood Reporter, “Selman Nacar’s finely tuned second feature, after the workplace drama Between Two Dawns, packs a sustained wallop of tension and unraveling into its impressively concise running time. Tülin Özen, in the lead role, delivers a pitch-perfect, tightly contained performance as an astute professional who hasn’t time for own vulnerability.”

When A Good Place premiered last summer in Locarno, Katharina Huber won the award for Best Emerging Director, and a Best Performance Award went to Clara Schwinning for playing one of two friends going about their daily routines as British radio broadcasts track developments in a space program that just might save all of humanity. A Good Place is “a work of contradictions and paradoxes,” writes David Katz at Cineuropa. “The tone is solemn, but the finer points of the shrouded plot are, to use a Briticism, pretty crackers; the rhythm is patient, but story events stream forward before the audience can catch their breath and orientate themselves.”

In Omen, rapper Baloji’s first feature, Koffi (Marc Zinga) returns to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the homeland from which he was banished as a child because his mother believed he was a sorcerer. Reviewing Omen for IndieWire, Arjun Sajip finds that “even as it offers a deeply felt look at Congolese customs, sensibilities, and family dynamics, it foregrounds its own European perspective. What results is an intriguingly ambivalent reckoning with Baloji’s mother country, a genre-hopping, beautifully slippery exploration of Congolese belief systems and their relation to patriarchally inflicted traumas.”

Renowned painter Titus Kaphar’s debut feature, Exhibiting Forgiveness, stars André Holland as Tarrell Rodin, an artist setting up a new gallery show when his estranged father, an abusive addict when Tarrell was a child, shows up and takes a stab at reconciliation. “Working through one’s own strife as a form of autofiction can often lead to self-indulgence,” writes the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, “but Kaphar has crafted something that deserves to exist outside of his inner circle, an emotionally wrenching drama set to resonate with those who have also had to confront the complicated equation of radical forgiveness.”

Gábor Reisz’s Explanation for Everything is one of the fourteen ND/NF films that the Film Stage is recommending. “Filmed with little care for catering to audiences outside Hungary who may not grasp its political reference points—a welcome choice that lets viewers pick up on things as the film proceeds—Reisz gradually sets the scene for one small, key moment that snowballs into a national scandal,” writes C. J. Prince. “Starting out as an awkward comedy, the film builds itself up into one long, exasperated scream at the absurdity of how almost everything can be weaponized into political issues.”

Film Stage founding editor Jordan Raup calls André Novais Oliveira’s The Day I Met You a “Brazilian slacker dramedy with a pensive bent” and “an emotionally generous portrait of stasis.” Renato Novaes plays a school librarian who can’t seem to get his life together but finds relief in a few hours spent with a colleague (Grace Passô).

Lola Dueñas (Volver, Zama) and Ana Torrent (The Spirit of the Beehive, Close Your Eyes) play, respectively, Vera and Cora, the biological and adoptive mothers of Egoz (Manuel Egozkue) in Foremost by Night, the debut feature from artist and curator Víctor Iriarte. On a riverbank, mothers and son sort through the machinations of Spanish history that led to Vera and Egoz’s losing contact with each other. A “climactic reparative heist sees the bond shared by the three characters strengthened, at the same time offering a culminating display of Iriarte’s knack for rhythm,” writes Jesse Catherine Webber at In Review Online.

In Alberto Gracia’s The Rim, Alfonso Míguez plays a failed game-show contestant who returns to his hometown in northwestern Spain, where everyone seems to mistake him for Cosme, a tour guide who has offed himself in the film’s first scene. For Steve Erickson at the Film Stage, The Rim is “a piece of enigmatic surrealism that evokes both José Saramago’s novels and the Greek Weird Wave while never forgetting characters’ struggles with poverty and isolation.”

Erickson spotlights Katharina Lüdin’s Of Living Without Illusion in his ND/NF 2024 overview in Gay City News. While navigating a stormy relationship with Eva (Anna Bolk), Merit (Jenny Schily) is preparing to perform alongside her ex-husband in a play. “With a debt to Chantal Akerman, Of Living Without Illusion emphasizes small gestures, but they add up to a major mood of disquiet,” writes Erickson.

In Francisco Rodríguez Teare’s Otro sol, fiction and nonfiction “merge as a peculiar amoral X-ray of criminal life and a playful historical examination of a notorious robbery,” writes Guillermo Lopez Meza at Film-Forward. Did a Chilean thief steal precious artifacts from Cádiz Cathedral in southern Spain before he was tracked down and killed? “Teare seems to care little about investigating how the robbery was carried out, or the whereabouts of the stolen treasure, and more about exposing how seductive facts become legends that continue to be told,” writes Lopez Meza.