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.