In a place where nothing makes sense anymore, where whispers are tender, but barely audible, a resistance takes root, following the inspiration of the trees. A hand touches another already embedded in stone, raising questions about beginnings and butterfly effects: what connects the wave to the fall? To the stream and its rippling?

Tiohtià:ke. Montreal. A nightmarish land, always worse than it seems. At the edge of the forest bordering one of its imaginary frontiers, a shaman lies hidden, waiting for someone in need to come looking for him. Lucie, 38, a PhD student seeking to break free from the grip of her thesis and its supervisor, sets out to meet him, pleading for physical and psychological liberation. Dark, expressionistic dreams torment her. Walks, sometimes nocturnal, sometimes diurnal, become part of a game she gradually creates for herself, the rules of which she learns to play in order to pull herself from the abyss. This second feature film by Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk (The Dream and the Radio) unfolds like this, a masterful sleight of hand.

The exuberant Whammy Alcazaren (Bold Eagle) offers an offbeat vision of tomorrow’s Philippines, a country devastated by climate change and institutional corruption. Against this speculative backdrop, students Jelson and Ipe train their bodies and minds to embrace eternity and to better withstand the aridity of both hearts and rivers.

In the 14th century, Julian experiences extraordinary visions, following which she decides to live in seclusion and utmost passion, determined to record her experiences. Inspired by the life of blessed anchoress Julian of Norwich, a mystic nun known as the first female author in the English language, this second feature film from critic and filmmaker Caroline Golum (A Feast of Man) is a surprising exercise in historical reconstruction and dialogue, re-situating the epistemology of radical thought within a resourcefully DIY, psychedelic Middle Ages, far removed from obscurantist clichés.

A barbarian (Jean Marc Dalpé) believes he only has five erections left before dying. Condemned to live in a thrift store and haunted by a family tragedy, he sets his sights on Marie (Kayo Yasuhara), an alcoholic special education teacher. If he has to go, he might as well do it in good company. In the latest film by our most exceptional fabulist Olivier Godin (Il n’y a pas de faux métier, Les arts de la parole), a slightly bawdy romantic comedy rubs shoulders with everyday myths, through which our lives make sense—whether it is theatre or poetry, science fiction or kung fu fisticuffs. An ever more sophisticated, ever more vibrant amalgamation of genres, registers and sensibilities, culminating here in the director’s most tender work, a countdown to ecstasy, a love letter.

Through doctored images of sports competitions, Charles-André Coderre addresses issues of obsession, competitiveness and the agony of loss, all things related to mental toughness. He reappropriates the body as art material, a vector of pure motion, understated eroticism and transcendent beauty through experimental abstraction.

A group of young men travel on foot to visit the ruins of an ancient Roman fort in Galicia and its adjoining thermal baths. They banter, as boys often do, and talk about streamers and all sorts of online activity, particularly a war game that they have been obsessing about. Indeed they have crossed the border from Portugal to come here and relax after their “battle.” Daylight wanes, they quiet down. Two of them get into the bath and begin an intimate conversation. Eventually, other men also step into the thermal baths and speak in hushed tones, questioning the wages of war and being away from their families, as though they have been transported to a scene from 2,000 years ago. Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature is a spellbinding look at male camaraderie, where cinematic time breaks loose from historical time, and at the centre of which is a site that bore witness to many men’s deepest fears and affections.

Art student Adnan spends a summer in New York City, cat-sitting at his uncle’s cozy apartment and starting an internship at a nearby gallery. In a city bristling with possibilities, he avails of its quickest pleasures, hooking up and ordering takeaway, and opens himself up to sensuous, earthly delights that often come with youth and beauty. Moving across time and between intimate encounters, Adnan is taken by the poetry of a food delivery rider, the homoerotic embroidery of an artist, the magical presence of a satyr, and the intricate emotions of a lover. Similar to his 2019 debut End of the Century, writer and director Lucio Castro captures the latitudes of queerness in the most quietly arresting and thrilling way possible.

Using 3D design software SketchUp and in-video picture, director Julia Mellen captures the hyperbolic maximalism of confessional storytime content as she recounts the time she had an abortion party at age 20. Self-consciously topical, the story is recounted with extraneous details and self-deprecating asides. Mellen’s film becomes a hilarious send-up of self-cannibalizing the personal for content, challenging high-brow criticism in favour of parody and camp.

Amanda Kramer creates a perverse send-up of objectification, aging and the beige-ification of our world in a dark, but hilarious film about a woman who swaps bodies with a chair, then becomes the very literal embodiment of objectification. Her body fixed into chair-form inspires obsession and possessiveness; her humanity, it seems, was nothing more than an obstacle in a world that values smooth, frictionless surfaces. Kramer’s hyperstylized and alienating form captures the joys and pitfalls of this condition, particularly as it ties with the identity and invisibility women face as they age.

Mexico City, Christmas 1997. Seen through the grainy lens of a home camcorder, the warm nostalgia of family video slowly unravels in Racornelia’s portrait of collapsing domestic bliss. Intimate, uncomfortable, and confessional, MACDO peels back the layers of an outwardly idealized household to expose the embedded violence of the social, cultural, and economic roles each family member is expected to inhabit. The camera itself becomes both passive witness and active participant, adding another layer of performance to an already tense, politically fraught environment by shaping the atmosphere as much as it records it.

A prolific encounter between producer Albert Serra’s historical cinema and the political realism of director Lav Diaz, Magellan offers a radical retelling of Europe’s colonial narrative by framing the destructive encounter between the famous Portuguese explorer and the Indigenous people of the Philippines. The epic breadth of the production clashes with the close-mindedness of the settlers, who impose Christian dogmas on the unwilling locals, but also on their own countrymen in this meticulously crafted period piece that combines satirical jabs at the imperialist enterprise with a heartfelt exploration of seafarers’ hardships.

The settings unfold, seemingly devoid of human presence. Dialogues emerge, conveyed through a type of humour resonating with a certain memetic culture that influences the text/image relationship. Despite the emptiness, life persists.

A thief, suddenly distracted by the sight of a papier-mâché statue with an enigmatic face, is caught in a trap and kidnapped by the owner of the place he was attempting to rob—the sprinkled sprinkler. This premise may be as old as cinema itself, yet it feels anything but outdated in Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc's unusual vision. The astonishment continues when the host makes a very peculiar request of his captive: he wants to join his wife—whose mummified body is hidden inside the strange statue. Absurdly tender, Bury Us in a Lone Desert begins like this, a playful and colourful version of Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997).

Adapting Beckett requires submission to a rejection of narratives, making the impasse one's own. It also draws from a fertile ground that inspires freedom and tragedy alike. Adapted from the play Endgame (1957), which features four characters with varying physical disabilities, the latest film from the El Pampero Cine collective (La flor, Trenque Lauquen) plays on the idea of ​​Beckettian stupor and repetition, reflecting with melancholy on our sterile world. Before the immensity of Lake Geneva, a blind man and his servant ramble on and persist in their musings. A pair of actors discover each other romantically as they learn their lines. An elderly woman awaits her son, playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on the piano. A couple lives in a dumpster near the hub where political decisions are plotted. And finally, two daring filmmakers film trains, moons, because… when the horizon is absurd, creation takes on its full meaning.

Somewhere along the coastal waters of Masinloc, Zambales, young Sita talks to her mother about her experience of nearly drowning. As the town’s fisherfolk speak up against the encroachment of Chinese fishing vessels, director Maria Estela Paiso fills the screen with mesmerizing shapes of resistance, gestures of solidarity, and textures of rage.

Dadong, a retired policeman, finds it hard to accept that his pregnant daughter Mila is getting married to her coworker Noel. He insists that, after the wedding, the couple must stay in his home, to which Mila and Noel reluctantly agree. Tensions arise as Dadong terrorizes the household with his demands, and every attempt to resist is met with a threat. Widely considered one of the finest Filipino films of all time, Mike De Leon’s adaptation of Nick Joaquin’s true crime story “The House on Zapote Street” renders a chilling depiction of an authoritarian figure whose desire for power knows no bounds, echoing the terrors of the Marcos regime in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Home” is an ambiguous reality for Marcus, whose lifelines are slowly corroding, caught between the fleeting memories of his native Hong Kong and the harsh reality of his Canadian foothold. A recent film school graduate, he struggles to find work in the city, paralyzed by the forthcoming expiration of his student visa and the painful longing for his London-bound girlfriend. Alex Lo’s autobiographical first feature frames its protagonist’s journey as a bittersweet chronicle laced with deadpan humour, shot in melancholy black and white. An ingenious foray into the meanders and vagaries of expectation.

Hanna is a real estate photographer from Mississauga who commutes daily to Toronto to snap pictures of luxury apartments for a network of shady, elusive corporations. With his debut feature, director Christopher Beaulieu provides an illuminating insight into the notion of liminality and the economic dispossession of younger generations. Favouring a detached approach, where the warmth of his celluloid images clashes with the cold functionality of Hanna’s digital photographs, where the nostalgia of past prosperity seamlessly seeps into the film material, Otium shows a rare kind of lucidity. Probing the spacious depths of empty dwellings, it tells of the contemporary Tantaluses of Hanna’s generation, for whom the gig economy provides dreams of wealth that it will make sure to keep unfulfilled.

As night falls, Stevy begins his rounds. This ghostly portrait from filmmakers Ariane Falardeau St-Amour and Paul Chotel juxtaposes the uncanny quality of tomorrow’s world with the hidden, evanescent universe of rural Québec and its fading men.

Commissioned by the Cinémathèque québécoise, made from 35mm images of Alexander Sokurov’s first incomplete film, this found footage short attests to the incantatory potential of Ralitsa Doncheva’s cinema, drawing on the filmmaker’s recollections of the Bulgarian communist regime to question the traces of history in both body and image.

A century has passed since the factory shut down in Val-Jalbert, a ghost town reconverted into a tourist attraction. Samuel Terry Pitre’s D’époques paints a fragmented portrait of a group of actors tasked with re-enacting an imagined yesteryear.

Mike Hoolboom offers up memories of his mother, who died in March 2020. Through a mix of analog snapshots and video diaries, along with archival material from a life that traversed World War II, from Indonesia to Canada, the artist brushes the intimate portrait of an activist and feminist, community volunteer and family maven.

A young boy finds himself alone in Nathan Donovan’s brief tonal poem, as thundering as it is succinct, shot in Mexico as part of a program supervised by Pedro Costa.

Documentary director Nicolas Wadimoff follows a group of Palestinian exiles from Gaza to South Africa, where they plan a play based on their experience of genocide, silently observing their preparatory workshops. This becomes a prime stage to tell their stories through lengthy interviews, providing a patient and direct account that aims to restore the unity, integrity and breadth of their testimonies. An essential film, addressing the issue of remembrance and examining the economy of survival in an occupied land and a world in denial.

Robert Morin's camera roams through Rome, a phantom crossing borders, observing six individuals who migrated to the city from Africa. At night, television screens play Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves; by day, news broadcasts, comedians, and onlookers watch with an almost Orwellian detachment as human life struggles forward in its quest for dignity. Morin continues his numerology of the world in a film that draws on the history of cinema to confront a reality riddled with meaningless screens. A finale that shatters the mirror. And stitches it back together.