In the spectacular mountains of southwest Georgia sits the Abastumani sanatorium, a treatment hospital for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis, which becomes a site of fantasies and nightmares, a home of the living and the dead, in this reflection of a place and moment.

The same year that Alain Resnais’s masterpiece Hiroshima mon amour was released, science fiction writer and theorist Stanisław Lem began writing his influential novel Solaris, an artistic confluence that inspires this wholly original and emotionally resonant found footage film.

Over the past thirteen years, Zhang has documented her father’s village in Hubei, China, as a repository of ancestral memory; for the tenth of these films, Zhang installed herself permanently in the village upon the outbreak of COVID-19. The result is an immense accomplishment, vividly depicting a year in the life of a stoic rural community, far removed from an urban-centered pandemic.

This poignant, warts-and-all portrait of a family separated by space but still profoundly connected in each other’s hearts, minds, and dreams is composed almost entirely of webcam footage between the Berlin-based, Iranian émigré filmmaker, his parents, and his friend.

In Farhad Delaram’s seductive, shape-shifting debut feature, former filmmaker Farid works nights at a Tehran hospital—and sleeps there most days too. Estranged from his partner and hopeless about the future, he starts to awaken after meeting a patient in the psychiatric ward whose supposed fits of madness he innately understands.

Documenting her family’s attempts at locating her brother after he goes missing in a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Shoghakat Vardanyan films things we don’t often see: the struggles, emotions, and Kafkaesque runarounds when missing soldiers and their families are reduced to a statistic. Screens 3/16 as part of First Look 2024.

In 1968, Brazil’s military dictatorship enacted Institutional Act No. 5, which suspended the constitution, silenced citizens, and opted overtly into totalitarianism. This astonishing and ingenious film features archival audio document of the meeting that decided this act, combined with blithe moving image propaganda perpetuated by the government.

The filmmakers drop into the fictional landscape of the videogame DayZ as journalistic avatars and must battle a zombie apocalypse while endeavoring to stay alive long enough to film their interactions with the surprising community of people who spend their time in this VR world.

In Kim Taeyang’s richly cryptic debut feature, a young man and woman, unnamed former acquaintances, meet by chance in the historic Jongno district at the heart of Seoul, then walk and talk, visiting and revisiting Jongno’s landmarks and byways over the years, much of the city and them changing beyond recognition.

In Yangon, Myanmar, a couple, Aung Min and San San Oo, operate a neighborhood clinic, providing low-cost treatments and therapies for a range of physical and psychological maladies. They also make art—paintings and films—as revealed in this shapeshifting film that starts as direct cinema then blossoms into a self-reflexive examination of the Burmese soul.

In this form-blending, refreshing work of autofiction, siblings Arthur and Diana are on a meandering road trip through France, Germany, and Italy that brings out deep-seated family dynamics that will feel familiar to older sisters and younger brothers.

Georgian filmmakers Elene Asatiani and Soso Dumbadze construct an archival horror film about 1991’s bloody military coup d'état against the government of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first democratically elected president, forgoing contextual titles, narration, or interviews.