The more I’ve gotten into film writing, the more I’ve developed a certain entitlement to feeling like I should be shown whatever the best films are right now. As much as I love independent, DIY artists, on the scale of world cinema, there’s really no better place to go in North America than the New York Film Festival. Last year after leaving the week-and-a-half of press & industry screenings, I did a short day trip back up on the Amtrak to catch a double of Caught by the Tides and The Shrouds, which were the best two movies I saw in 2024. There was no easy double this year, but after watching two dozen films, there were three that stood very high above the rest, and will stand the test of time.
Dry Leaf is three hours long and shot on a Sony Ericsson. Its resolution is dismal, to the point where it has a new layer of expressiveness. As the shots linger, the pixels begin to breathe as they readjust. Alexandre Koberidze’s latest film follows Irakli (David Koberidze, the filmmaker’s father) as he traverses the Georgian countryside in search of his sports photographer daughter, who’s gone missing before an assignment documenting decrepit soccer fields across the rural parts of the nation. Irakli’s accompanied by Levan (Otar Nijaradze), who often stays in the car and is also invisible. Many of the characters in Koberidze’s bizarre, sleepy epic are invisible. Often upon arrival to a field that’s defined only by a couple of fence posts, Irakli will walk out of the car and up to a pair of people that we can’t see, showing them a photo of his daughter we’ve never seen, with both of the non-entity people saying they haven’t seen her either. In a material sense, there’s not much more to Dry Leaf—but Dry Leaf doesn’t concern itself with “the material” all that much in the first place.
The strangest space seen at NYFF, though, is the titular fence in Claire Denis’ The Fence. On either side are Matt Dillon and Isaach de Bankolé, and Vladimir and Estragon arguing through a perennial night at a failing West African construction site. De Bankolé’s character is trying to recover his brother’s body, while Dillon’s strangely blocking the request and telling his opposite that it’ll be taken care of tomorrow. The two, clad in the Saint Laurent which helps fund this oneira, stand at the fence out of time and practically out of the diegesis of the rest of the film. On their fringes are the guards in the towers, speaking in local language and song, and somewhere behind them are the violent memories of the past and an emerging new life introduced into the site. Dillon’s character has his new young wife, Leone (Mia McKenna-Bruce) arriving at the site simultaneously, brought by his right hand, Cal (Tom Blythe), in intercut sequences that would be more easily described as Denis-ian. But anytime the film nears slipping into a true rhythm, the fence comes back to trap the motion of the story and contain it within an aging filmmaker’s immovable nightmare.
Lav Diaz’s latest, despite being shot in color, starring an honest-to-god movie star, and running at two hours and 40 minutes, is still a real-deal Lav Diaz film. The story gets “going” with the famed explorer—the circumnavigator of the globe—the titular Magellan (Gael García Bernal) awaking on a beach of bodies in Malacca, the latest Portuguese conquest he’s helped take. The tired and wounded soldier eventually finds his way back to the remnants of his countryman’s military force, which is still ridiculously marauding around in a world only within their grasp by way of their words. The folly of their adventurism becomes more apparent upon Magellan’s return to Portugal, where all that’s waiting for him is widows and disrespect from his king, not to mention the acceptance that their journey’s way, way out east are merely to serve the Pope’s earthly greed. Still, Magellan returns to the brutal sea, only to impose his world’s harshness on faraway people, who are already suffering enough that they might trust him in the first place. Magellan isn’t just a formative genre picture like Batang, West Side or an experiment in the more mainstream with Norte, the End of History, but is a continuation of his mature cinema—a contemplative heist against whatever people thought they were funding period-piece star-vehicle for one of the most rebellious, politically stringent filmmakers in the world.