News

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Lee Chang-dong, Terence Davies, Shōhei Imamura, Bi Gan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villleneuve, Céline Sciamma, Guillermo del Toro, Kelly Reichardt, and RaMell Ross––those are just a few of the filmmakers introduced to New York audiences at New Directors/New Films over the last half-century.

Now returning for its 54th edition at Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art from April 2-13, this year’s lineup features 33 new films, presenting acclaimed titles from Berlinale, Cannes, Locarno, Sundance, Rotterdam, and more. Ahead of the festival kicking off next week, we’ve gathered our recommended films to see, and one can explore the full lineup and schedule here.

Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang)

Shot largely on location in Queens, Blue Sun Palace explores a hidden culture and milieu.

International sales agency Lightdox has acquired Amalie Atkins’ debut feature documentary “Agatha’s Almanac,” ahead of its world premiere at Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as Cph:dox.

The film, which plays in the main competition section, called Dox:Award, will have its debut on Sunday, followed by a Q&a with Atkins.

“Agatha’s Almanac” follows the fiercely independent 90-year-old Agatha Bock as she tends to her ancestral farm, preserving heirloom seeds and maintaining a way of life that predates modern conveniences. Without a car, cell phone, running water, or a functioning landline, Agatha’s daily rituals serve as a living archive of a vanishing era, offering insight into a nearly lost generation.

Shot over six years on 16mm film by an all-female crew, including cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, the film “captures the handmade materiality inherent in both the medium of film and Agatha’s tactile world,” according to a statement.

The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center has announced the full lineup for the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, unspooling at MoMA on April 2–13.

The event, presenting 24 features and nine short films — including 20 North American or U.S. premieres — will open with Sarah Friedland’s Venice award-winner Familiar Touch and close with Alex Russell’s Lurker from Sundance and Berlin. Both are New York premieres.

Familiar Touch, Friedland’s debut, won three top prizes in the 2024 Venice Film Festival Orizzonti Competition and showcases an astonishing performance by Kathleen Chalfant.

Russell’s feature debut Lurker, is a tense thriller about the darker side of pop-star worship.

Films in the Nd/Nf program probe a diverse array of themes, including community and co-existence, family histories, the lives of artists, global political issues, and the complexities of youth and coming of age. A number of works experiment with hybrid forms,...

Learning about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 16-month occupation of Fiume, a tale vividly retold in Igor Bezinović’s new, Tiger Award-winning documentary Fiume o Morte!, I spared a thought for Yukio Mishima. D’Annunzio’s life didn’t end so theatrically, but the two men––celebrated writers and hyper-nationalists with hubristic military dreams and similarly contested legacies––certainly shared a taste for the quixotic and chaotic. Was D’Annunzio a fascist colonizer, as those who still remember him in Fiume claim, or was he the admirable dreamer as romantic as his poems? A century later, the jury’s still out.

Digging into all those contradictions with the help of 300 locals (a few of whom gamely play the man himself) Bezinović has made a historical film of remarkable wit and energy. Given the participation of so many from the region (not to mention the current climate in Europe), it is also surprisingly...

Newen Connect has added a trio of French comediesto its EFM slate:Cycle Of Time, No Signal!andThe Family Road.

Vinciane Millereau’s Cycle Of Time stars Elsa Zylberstein, Didier Bourdon, Aurore Clément and Dider Flamand and is about a 1950s French family catapulted into 2025 due to a freak accident with their washing machine, forcing them to face a new world dominated by technology and adapt to a new reality.

Olivier Kahn produces for Ugc which is releasing the film in France in October.

Edouard Pluvieux’s No Signal! is about two young step-siblings spending the weekend with their parents in...

The many challenges disabled delegates can face at festivals and events prompted the British Film Institute (BFI) to four UK-based disabled filmmakers to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) industry offering IFFR Pro last week.

Ella Glendining, Anna Keeley, Sarah Leigh and Cristián Saavedra attended as part of a joint initative between theBFI Inclusion team and IFFR, supported by the BFI International Fund.

IFFR was chosen for what is one of the first delegations of its kind because Rotterdam was regarded as “quite accessible” as a city and could be reached from London by the high-speed Eurostar rail link.

The many challenges disabled delegates can face at festivals and events prompted the British Film Institute (BFI) to four UK-based disabled filmmakers to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) industry offering IFFR Pro last week.

Ella Glendining, Anna Keeley, Sarah Leigh and Cristián Saavedra attended as part of a joint initative between theBFI Inclusion team and IFFR, supported by the BFI International Fund.

“Festivals are inherently inaccessible,” said BFI director of inclusion Melanie Hoyes, who devised the initiative. “It’s [about] trying to figure out the website, how to book a ticket, where they are, what the weather is like,...

The many challenges disabled delegates can face at festivals and events prompted the British Film Institute (BFI) to take a delegation of four UK-based disabled filmmakers to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) industry offering IFFR Pro last week.

“Festivals are inherently inaccessible,” said BFI director of inclusion Melanie Hoyes, who came up with the initiative. “It’s [about] trying to figure out the website, how to book a ticket, where they are, what the weather is like, if they’re busy, there are always networking drinks [which aren’t great] if you don’t drink, stay out late or aren’t good at talking to lots of people.

Croatian director Igor Bezinović’s documentary Fiume o Morte! exploring the complex figure of Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio has won the top Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film also won the Fipresci Award for standout film in the main Tiger Competition.

Mixing dramatic reconstruction and documentary, the feature explores D’Annunzio’s attempts to annex the city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) to Italy in the aftermath of the First World War, as a result of his outrage at the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference, which proposed handing the city to Yugoslavia.

Rotterdam 2025 winners

The Tiger Competition Jury consisted of Yuki Aditya, Winnie Lau, Peter Strickland, and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. The Jury also initially included Soheila Golestani (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), but she was prevented from leaving Iran due to a travel ban.

“This is a film where people...

Igor Bezinović’s Croatian docu-dramaFiume O Morte!has won the Tiger award of the 2025International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

IFFR’s Tiger competition celebrates up-and-coming filmmakers, with a €40,000 prize. Fiume O Morte! also won the Fipresci award.

Bezinović’s Croatia-Italy-Slovenia co-production is set in his home city once known as Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia. The area has been laid claim to by a variety of nations since the First World War. It fuses documentary with dramatic reconstructions, from the help of locals, to interrogate the city’s past and present.

The jury said: “While it is a playful and mischievous film,...

Igor Bezinović’s hybrid documentary “Fiume o morte!” was awarded the Tiger Award, the top prize of the International Film Festival Rotterdam worth €40,000, on Friday evening. Bezinović’s film captures the spirit of Italian poet, playwright, journalist, aristocrat and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio — who in 1919 occupied the city of Fiume — through dramatic reconstruction and documentary interludes.

In their statement, the Tiger jury said: “At times of the rise of ultra-nationalism within a contemporary European context, the film playfully grapples with the past not as a closed chapter, but as a living reality. Unless we engage the past as a living present it will insist in ways that are not only a warning for the future, but threaten the very possibility of equitable co-existence and a life livable for not only those that have recourse to assert power.”

“Recourse to ultra nationalism, and even fascism, resides in the core of national identity,...

Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o morte!, a hybrid documentary revisiting the peculiar occupation of Rijeka by Italian nationalists led by poet, aristocrat, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio after World War I, won the coveted Tiger Award for best competition film at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), headed up by managing director Clare Stewart and program director Vanja Kaludjercic.

Jon Blåhed’s Raptures, which explores a 1930s apocalyptic cult in Sweden, was honored with Rotterdam’s Big Screen Award during the fest’s awards ceremony on Friday. The film is the first-ever feature shot in Meänkieli, a minority language in Sweden.

Tiger Special Jury Awards went to Sammy Baloji’s The Tree of Authenticity, a cinematic essay about Congo’s colonial past and ecological significance, and Tim Ellrich’s Im Haus meiner Eltern, a drama about an alternative therapist who must balance the demands of her professional life with the...

Igor Bezinović’s “Fiume O Morte!” takes a sweeping, witty look at a nugget-shaped chapter in his hometown Rijeka’s history. The Croatian city changed a whole array of rulers in the twentieth century, its intricacies too shapeshifting to be clearly defined in the memories or awareness of its current citizens. The film delivers a jolt of reckoning through this haze of not being fully tuned into one’s past.

Bezinović revisits the years in the wake of the First World War when the city was known as Fiume. Specifically, he fixates on the roughly eighteen-month-long fascist occupation of the city by the Italian poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who took over it between the end of 1919 and the start of 1921. How do you summon history without collapsing to pedantic impulses? “Fiume O Morte!” offers a rich, playful proposition, its interweaving of facts and speculation never dull or ponderously didactic. Crucially, Bezinović...

Sales company Lightdox has boarded Igor Bezinović’s hybrid documentary “Fiume o morte!,” which premieres in the Tiger Competition section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The Croatian-Italian-Slovenian coproduction takes the audience back to 1919, when the Italian nationalist poet, dandy and preacher of war Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the city of Fiume.

“Today, the citizens of Fiume, now called Rijeka, retell and reinterpret the bizarre story about the 16-month occupation of their city in a brutally factual yet defiantly punk cinematic journey,” a statement explains.

“‘Fiume o morte!’ is a film on poetry, dynamite, cocaine, machine guns, football, airplanes, furniture flying out of windows, concerts, prisons, sunbathing, thousands of soldiers, millions of bullets, endless speeches, a platypus and on the power of political performativity. D’Annunzio might as well be considered its trailblazer heralding some of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of our age.”

The film is Bezinović’s third feature,...