The New/Next Film Festival returns next week for its fourth year with a diverse and exciting slate of features, documentaries, and shorts. Mixing Baltimore-bred selections with more international fare, the slate once again feels vital, like getting spoilers for where cinema as a medium will go in years to come.
Before press time, I had the opportunity to watch a handful of titles that are must-see.
“Everytime”
In an increasingly disconnected world, where do we conceive of our loved ones going when we lose them? Do they live on, quipping and joking in the WhatsApp threads we’ve shared? Perhaps they’re forever frozen as babies in the videos taken of their first steps. Or they’re gazing at us from the other side of the camera in the pictures of us they took in life? Sandra Wollner’s latest film, which debuted in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, wrestles with grief and entangles its many harrowing facets into the dreamlike side of the digital worlds we spend so much of our days in.
Ella (Birgit Minichmayr) and her young daughter, Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), form a curious trio with Lux (Tristán López), a teenage boy who was once very close with their family. Wollner stages these discomfiting but relatable vignettes of their attempts to live life normally in the shadow of a great tragedy. No one around them can seem to understand why there’s still a link between them, but the more they try to move on, the more they’re pulled closer. Together, they embark on an impromptu vacation to Tenerife, Spain, where difficult emotions come to the fore and the fabric of reality bends around their pain. It’s one of the strangest and most moving films I have seen all year. The places it goes can’t truly be explained. They must be felt.
“Everytime” screens Friday, October 2, at 3:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 4, at 12:25 p.m.
“Zi”
Coming off of a critical and commercial flop in the form of the Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie film “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” Writer/Director Kogonada needed a win. But not a box office victory or plaudits from the same tastemakers whose love of his earlier work, like 2017’s “Columbus” and 2021’s “After Yang,” made a bigger budget project like “Journey” possible. He needed to make something smaller and more experimental to get back in touch with what he loved about making films in the first place. The result is “Zi,” an intimate and challenging gamble whose big swings prove endearing, touching, and hypnotic.
Michelle Mao stars as the titular Zi, a virtuoso violinist who begins experiencing confusing visions of the future and a version of herself who seems to be haunting her across the streets of Hong Kong. Following her across one day, the film sees Zi share a night out with strangers Elle (Haley Lu Richardson) and Min (Jin Ha), who alter the course of her life when they cross her path. In some ways, it feels more slight than either of Kogonada’s first two features, often resembling an early draft EP an artist might drop in between album eras. But it’s such a beautifully shot and elliptically edited little feature that even its weaknesses feel pretty charming.
“Zi” screens Sunday, October 4, at noon.
“The Lorraine”
Best known as the location of Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Lorraine Motel was once an indispensable Black cultural institution in Memphis. Documentarian Sam Pollard attempts to provide a thorough and varied history of its history, the ways the gains made during the Civil Rights era changed its place in the city, and the pall that loomed over it for decades before it became the cornerstone of the National Civil Rights Museum.
There’s so much delight on display during the film’s first third, telling the love story between the motel’s owners, Walter and Loree Bailey, and its standing as a vital destination in a segregated America for Black travelers passing through Tennessee. A Green Book stalwart, the Lorraine, with its proximity to Beale Street, was a safe haven for such famous guests as Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Harlem Globetrotters. Through insightful interviews and moving archival footage of King, the Lorraine becomes a kind of haven for the viewer as well, a safe harbor through which a difficult time in Black history can be traversed and better understood.
“The Lorraine” screens Saturday, October 3, at 2:20 p.m.
“A City in the Forest”
This documentary about the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, aka “Cop City,” chronicles the decentralized resistance movement that grew around trying to halt its construction. Jumping off from the killing of protestor Tortuguita, the doc illuminates the present state of police militarization, environmental justice, and the power of collective organizing.
The film traces a straight line from Rayshard Brooks’ slaying at the hands of the police in 2020 and the ensuing conversations around improvements in policing through to the plans to destroy hundreds of acres in Mvskoke land to build a hub that amounts to a “Star Wars” Death Star for cops. This forest was once a plantation and then a prison farm, and this group of activists are risking their lives to heal the land and prevent this monstrosity from being built.
Eschewing a traditional narrator, the film relies on remixing news footage, candid calls to local representatives, and first-person perspectives from the forest defenders occupying the land and disrupting construction. But rather than focusing solely on the more radical and risky work that must be done, the documentary shows the different levels of organizing it takes to combat a regime that is uninterested in the will of the people.
The film is equal parts an agonizing distillation of how long the odds are in this fight and an inspiring reminder of the beauty in loving one another enough to do our part in creating a better tomorrow.
“A City in the Forest” screens Friday, October 2, at 9:45 p.m.
Here are a few more titles I’m looking forward to seeing at the festival:
“Free Joan Little”
In 1975, Joan Little was the first woman in US history to ever be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault. Yoruba Richen’s documentary revisits this flash point in social and legal history, unpacking the story of Little’s trial and how it reverberated in the public consciousness at the time.
“Free Joan Little” screens Saturday, October 3, at 12:05 p.m.
“The Sight Unseen”
Shawn Antoine II’s film tells the story of Sharon Wilson, a woman who witnessed a glowing cross outside of her family’s Bronx apartment when she was six years old in 1971. A documentary with dramatic recreations of her recollections, this hybrid film seems like an engrossing look at a spiritual event and its after effects.
“The Sight Unseen” screens Saturday, October 3, at 12:05 p.m.
“There’ll Likely be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night”
This year, “Michael,” a crowd-pleasing hagiography, made more than a billion dollars at the box office in spite of the central figure’s thorny and unfortunate history. But ever since the day he died, for a lot of people, he ceased to be a real person who lived and transformed into being an unassailable icon whose artistic gifts outweighed any other nuance about his life. Revisiting the day of his passing, artist Marcus Batto has culled together a feature-length found footage collage, rearranging early internet video from the day Michael Jackson died into a prismatic portrait of the King of Pop.
“There’ll Likely be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night” screens Sunday, October 4, at 6:35 p.m.
“The Projectionist”
Sometimes you look at a festival slate and find a film that looks on paper as if it were made specifically for you. The only one of Alexandre Rockwell’s previous films I’ve ever seen was 1995’s “Four Rooms,” an anthology he directed one quarter of alongside Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Allison Anders. But his latest feature ticks too many boxes for me to ignore. It’s got a stacked cast, with Vondie Curtis-Hall in the lead and supporting turns from Karyn Parsons, Kasi Lemmons, and Kevin Corrigan.
And that tagline? “In a forgotten theater, a haunted man’s past flickers back to life — forcing a final reckoning.” An intimate character study that’s also a noir thriller and a rumination on the power of cinema? Sounds like the perfect closing night selection.
“The Projectionist” will screen Sunday, October 4, at 8:30 p.m. There will be a Q&A with Rockwell, Curtis-Hall, Parsons, and Lemmons after, followed by the closing night party across the street at Metro Gallery.
New/Next Film Festival runs Thursday, October 1, through Sunday, October 4, at The Charles. The full list of festival films and links to purchase tickets can be found at newnextfilmfest.com.