In a 2006 interview with The Believer, multi-talented artist and activist Marjane Satrapi said, “nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.” Satrapi built a career using imagery and dark humour to explore the nuances of modern life, often from the lens of the Iranian diaspora. 

Born to an upper-middle class family in Rasht, Iran a decade before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Satrapi’s most well-known work is the graphic novel series “Persepolis,” a semi-autobiographical tale of a girl also named Marjane, aka Marji, who was born to an upper-middle class a decade before the 1979 Islamic revolution. Released in the early 2000s, Satrapi adapted the novel into a feature film with her friend and fellow artist Vincent Paronnaud. 

Traditionally hand-animated and filmed mostly in black-and-white to mirror the pen-and-ink style of the novel, the film follows Marji as she comes of age—and gets into heavy metal and rock music—during the revolution and the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, eventually finding herself alone in Vienna at the age of 14, where she gets strung out and has visions of God. Returning home, she discovers that she was homesick for a place that no longer exists, and must now find a new place for herself in the world. 

The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it tied for the Jury Prize. In her acceptance speech, Satrapi said, “Although this film is universal, I wish to dedicate the prize to all Iranians.” The film went on to be nominated for the Best Animated Feature at the 80th Academy Awards, making Satrapi the first woman nominated in that category since its inception in 2001. 

It’s no wonder Satrapi found her voice in both graphic novels and later cinema. Speaking to The Believer about the popularity of her novel around the globe, Satrapi addressed the universality of images, saying:

“Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there’s a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there’s more efficiency…I always thought the image and the text, writing and imaging, that there is no separation between them.”

Along with the “Persepolis” series, Satrapi wrote a handful of graphic novels, including 2004’s “Chicken With Plums,” about her distant relative Nasser Ali Khan, a musician living in 1950s Tehran who decides one day to stay in bed until he dies. The dramedy, which features a stand-out performance of melancholic brilliance by Mathieu Amalric, is both a personal story about a man whose heart is broken beyond repair, but also an elegy for the lost world of a pre-revolution Iran, one that Satrapi had a taste of as child, though she mostly knew from family lore and photographs. The film debuted at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, opening in the United States the following year.

This was actually my first introduction to the work of Satrapi, whose “Persepolis” I would discover afterward. I was covering my very first film festival—the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, where “Chicken With Plums” was set to screen with an introduction by Satrapi.

I remember very distinctly seeing her in the window-filled, sun-dappled lobby of the Sundance Kabuki, a group of fans eagerly surrounding her. She was puffing away at a cigarette, looking almost too stereotypically French with a chic black outfit and eyeliner. Someone from the festival was desperately trying to get her to put out the cigarette.

It was an indelible image of confidence and defiance, one that would stick with me every time I thought of Satrapi and her work for years to come.

Over the next fifteen years, Satrapi directed several more films, including “The Voices,” a black comedy psychological horror starring Ryan Reynolds, “Radioactive,” a biopic of Marie Curie starring Rosamund Pike and Anya Taylor-Joy, and “Dear Paris,” a dark comedy starring Monica Bellucci and Rossy de Palma. 

Although she only lived eighteen of her fifty-six years in Iran, Satrapi always considered the country her home. In a 2009 essay for The New York Times she wrote, “I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran.”

One of her last creative projects, the collective work “Woman, Life, Freedom” takes its name from the Kurdish slogan which became a rallying call for feminist activists in Iran after the September 13th 2022 arrest and murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian student whose only crime was not wearing a headscarf. Calling herself the director of the work, Satrapi brought together seventeen Iranian and international comic artists, along with Iranian academics, to craft a work that honored Amini, while also exploring this new generation of protests.

Discussing the work with The Guardian in 2024, Satrapi said of the new youth movement, “I call it a revolution. It’s not a revolt, it’s not a movement, it’s a proper revolution. I’ve said it many times and nobody says the contrary: I think it’s the first really feminist revolution…and it is supported by men.”

Last April, her longtime husband and creative partner Mattias Ripa passed away. This morning news broke that Satrapi had joined him. A statement released from her close friends reads: “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” President Emmanuel Macron of France added that Satrapi’s passing “marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and a freedom-loving artist whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim.”

In her 2024 interview with The Guardian, Satrapi left readers with one last thought, one that I would like to leave with you as well. She said “human nature is made for freedom. With this youth, we might have better days.” 

If you are someone you know is in a crisis, you can reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival drew to a close this past May 24th. In this video dispatch, Chaz Ebert reflects on this year’s fest and shares interviews Sonia Evans conducted at Cannes, including World Woman Foundation CEO/founder Rupa Dash, Take2Film’s Julie Sisk, media psychologist Dr. Katherine Woods, and more. Watch the video below.

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is in the rear-view mirror, but we’re still reflecting on the great experience we had, the wonderful films we saw, and the fantastic people we met. 

Personally, I always enjoy the Cannes Immersive Competition, which showcases new virtual-reality projects from around the world. This year, the top prize was awarded to the French-produced project, Katabasis.

Prior to the festival, American studio Neon had acquired a large number of competition films, slowing the pace of acquisitions early in the festival. But sales picked up later in the festival with Netflix acquiring the animated film “In Waves.” “Gentle Monster” with Lea Seydoux, and the Spanish breakout film, which shared the best director prize, “The Black Ball.”

Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics was busy acquiring the animated film “Iron Boy” along with “Rehearsals for a Revolution,” the Iranian film that won the “Golden Eye” prize for best documentary in the festival.

Also, “La Gradiva,” winner of the grand prize in the Critics’ Week section, was acquired by distributor 1-2 Special, who are reportedly planning a theatrical release.

More and more, I find that Cannes is about connecting with people, long-time friends and new ones. 

Of course, Cannes attracts filmmakers from all over the world. We met with Nancy Paton, a Polish-Australian producer and founder of Desert Rose Films in the United Arab Emirates. Her production company strives to give underrepresented females a voice in front of and behind the camera.

It finally happened. “Interview with the Vampire” has become “The Vampire Lestat.” Season three of the AMC series goes wild with a full transformation into the long-awaited, much-anticipated adaptation of the second book in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Books 1 and 2 have seen feature film renditions, but no one knew how to make the wholly villainous Lestat’s heel turn work. It took creator, writer, and showrunner Rolin Jones to envision a storyline that requires the Vampire Himself (Sam Reid) to narrate the events of his pseudo-punk, alternative rock-god era. He’s on tour and on the road to a collision with the Vampire Queen, Akasha (Sheila Atim), but first, he has some emotional baggage to unpack. To paraphrase our complicated protagonist: This is the story of how Lestat woke the Queen of the Damned and unleashed her wrath upon the world.

Wait a moment. Before I attempt to explain the blood-fueled, sensually sardonic madness you’re about to witness, there’s something you must understand. With “The Vampire Chronicles,” Rice has written a series about a toxic, romantically incestuous, overpowered group of immortal “friends” who snipe at each other throughout the centuries while falling desperately in and out of love. And yes, that is the franchise’s charm. Whether on the page or the screen.

Secondly, Jacob Anderson’s Louis is still very much a major player in Lestat’s story, but he has a B-plot (literally called Side B) of his own. Anderson is gravitational, making Reid’s supernova brighter. Thus, more time with Louis is for the better. Now let me tell you how it all goes down. 

Lestat and Louis have formed a lovers-to-friends camaraderie until the former learns that Louis confessed their secrets to Daniel (Eric Bogosian), who turned their story into a book. A best-seller that reads more like creative non-fiction than a balanced perspective. It turns out that Louis, but also Daniel, might be unreliable narrators. Friends, Lestat is not the character we met in the first two seasons. That was Louis’ interpretation—both villainized and idealized. From the start of S3, we realize we’re meeting the Vampire Lestat for the first time. While his biographers didn’t lie, they never knew the entire story. Lestat feels attacked, and that’s never good, but he vents his rage by taking over a rock band.

Daniel is making a documentary, following Lestat and his band on a cross-country tour. The first three episodes are as campy as you’d expect from the musings of a self-deprecating narcissist, but the added humor of the mock-rockumentary styling gives an allure that’s “This Is Spinal Tap” mixed with “What if Billy Idol was a vampire?” 

Yet the new POV and campiness aren’t the only reasons “The Vampire Lestat” is a departure from “Interview With the Vampire.” Do not doubt it’s just as depraved, soaked in unceasing obsession, violence, and emotional overkill as before. However, when you reach Ep 4, something deeper emerges from the thrills and the winkingly self-aware humor. The loneliness of being a vampire and the centuries of shameful secrets begin to burn brightly.

That’s when this re-envisioned series really starts to cook. The music takes a turn (for the better), mirroring Lestat’s changing awareness of who he is and what the past has cost him. The confessions and reveals are as rattling as they are gleeful. Most of all, the truth about these vampires emerges to a finer degree. They want desperately to be loved, but love is only meant to last a hundred years or so, and then to persist in absence. That truth is their torture, and it’s what makes “The Vampire Lestat”—the man and show—such a perverse delight.

Throughout the first two seasons, we are meant to believe these vampires are monsters divorced from their humanity. Yet, during the first six episodes of the 7-episode season, we learn that they may be more purely human than we are. Humane? No, but they are overwhelmingly human; every emotion and foible is ratcheted up into overflow. Until everything they feel pours out in unfiltered and frightening forms. It’s not that they’ve lost the sense of what it means to be mortal; it’s that the absence of mortality intensifies every emotion. That’s why they’re uncontrollable beings of lust, love, lechery, cruelty, compassion, and yearning. The funhouse mirrors the series holds up to our humanity, which is what makes “The Vampire Lestat” so compelling, even as it taunts us with our taboos.

It’s both wicked and charming while remaining unrepentantly dangerous. That’s hard to look away from. As a gothic alt-rock opera caught somewhere between an ’80s that never was and a ’90s that will never be, “The Vampire Lestat” outdoes season 2. The actors seem to have more fun, spinning their characters in new directions. For example, the resentful Daniel or Armand (Assad Zaman). What are we going to do with Armand?

Of course, the history of Louis and Lestat can’t be relitigated without their guilt towards Claudia (Delainey Hayles). We also meet the Vampire Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), who has twists in store for us. This season seethes in its savagery and a spiraling understanding of everything that made Lestat who he is—setting us up for who he will become when the Queen of the Damned rises. Can he evolve into more than “a three-century train wreck”? We’ll see. 

Season three of “Interview with the Vampire” is reborn as “The Vampire Lestat,” an eternal playground for the malicious gods of rock and ruin. Get ready for another ride on their mood swings. Big swings, big feels: a bloody good time.

Six episodes screened for review. Premieres June 7th on AMC and AMC+.

Marcia Lucas died of cancer last week at 80. She’s best known to the general public as the first wife of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who walked away with about $50 million in their 1983 divorce settlement. That’s too bad, because she was a great editor in her own right. She worked not only with her husband on the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but on his 1972 debut “THX-1138” and its follow-up, 1973’s “American Graffiti” (her first Oscar nomination for editing, along with her mentor Verna Fields, who won another Oscar for solo-editing “Jaws” one year later). 

She was the editor on Scorsese’s fourth feature, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and he was so pleased with the work that he promoted her to supervising the editing teams on “Taxi Driver” and “New York, New York.” She was assistant editor and a location scout on “The Rain People”—the first feature by Francis Ford Coppola, who’d been friends with the Lucases ever since he met George on the set of his 1969 film “Finian’s Rainbow.” She was also an assistant editor on 1969’s “Medium Cool,” the directorial debut of the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler. 

Winning an Oscar for cutting the original “Star Wars,” alongside Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, is often marked as her career peak, but personally, I’d put “Taxi Driver” alongside it. It mixes multiple film genres together—vigilante thriller, character study, screwball comedy, film noir, and ‘70s style sleaze-pit exploitation, plus a bit of French New Wave playfulness, particularly in the driving sequences and in the “You talkin’ to me?” scene, which was made of behavioral bits invented on the spot by star Robert De Niro.

Some have made the case that throughout their relationship, which began in 1967 when they met at the University of Southern California film school, Marcia was the secret heart of Lucas’ productions as well as his domestic life, and that after they split up, his movies never recovered the magic they’d once had. There’s a lot of truth to that. Lucas is a legendary figure in movie history, perhaps more so in filmmaking technology, but he was never considered a “people person.” But his wife was. She was famed for her ability to add warmth and recognizable humanity to material that might otherwise seem too mechanical or theoretical, as well as for figuring out which pieces of the story were guaranteed to make the audience happy.  

Mark Hamill told  Film Freak Central, “I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little ‘kiss for luck’ before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in [“Star Wars”].” He said, “‘Oh, I don’t like it—people laugh in the previews,’ and she said, ‘George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected.” She also convinced him to keep the brief bit inside the Death Star when Chewbacca roars at a mouse droid and makes it skitter away in terror, a foolproof laugh-getter that the director had initially deleted because he worried it was too silly.

But Marcia wasn’t just good at the stereotypical “girl stuff.” She had an unerring sense of when to cut out of one storyline and into another, which came in handy on all three of the original “Star Wars” movies. The first cross-cuts between Leia and Luke’s individual stories before they meet at the Death Star, the second spends a full hour cross-cutting between the Millennium Falcon fleeing from Darth Vader and Luke traveling to Dagobah to train with Yoda, and the third has a much-imitated ending that jumps between three storylines: Luke confronting Vader and the Emperor in the second Death Star’s throne room; Luke and Leia trying to disable the Death Star’s shield down on Endor; and Lando Calrissian leading the rebel’s fleet’s attack from space. 

Marcia Lucas’ majestic architecture in that last act has a symphonic heft and goes a long way towards convincing viewers that they aren’t just seeing a puffed-up retread of the first movie’s ending. She was the perfect person to supervise that complex sequence, having partnered with her mentor Verna Fields on“American Graffiti,” a nostalgic teen epic that cuts between multiple storylines happening in the same town on the same night; New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun wrote, “American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place.” 

She told George that the Death Star battle at the end of the movie lacked tension and said he needed a “ticking clock.” So she created one: the Death Star wasn’t traveling to Yavin to destroy the rebel base in the original script, but Marcia made it seem as if it was, by pulling alternate takes from the destruction of Alderaan earlier in the movie, adding a disembodied “official” voiceover narrating the Death Star’s progress, reusing the shot of Peter Cushing’s bad guy stating, “You may fire when ready,” and timing Luke’s one-in-a-million shot so that it entered the exhaust port just as the space station’s planet-pulverizing laser cannon was about blast Yavin to pieces. If you watch the sequence closely, you’ll see that at no point do any of the major characters talk about the Death Star advancing on Yavin. But you feel as if they did, because of the editor’s cleverness.

According to Brian Jay Jones’ book George Lucas: A Life, Marcia told George she wanted to split up in 1982. The third film in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, “Return of the Jedi,” was still in production and racing to meet its Memorial Day weekend 1983 release deadline. George asked if she could wait to announce their divorce until after “Jedi” came out, so bad news about their personal lives wouldn’t detract from the movie’s publicity campaign. She agreed. But even though the Lucases knew that their marriage was functionally over as early as the summer of 1982, they continued to work together on “Jedi.” A 1983 Time Magazine cover story about Lucas, dated three days before the film’s theatrical release, states that the filmmaker has “an apparently blissful marriage [to] a charming, attractive wife,” which ought to tell you how good the couple was at keeping secrets. 

By that point, the legal papers were already signed, and although the Time writer announces that George is about to start a two-and-a-half-year sabbatical “to spend time with his wife, play with his daughter, and go to movies,” the sabbatical never happened. George moved out of the family home weeks before the Time story hit newsstands and went back to the workaholic lifestyle that ruined his marriage. Over the next seven years, he developed and produced ”Howard the Duck,” “Willow,” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and helped finance his hero Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” and supervised postproduction on his penultimate film “Dreams,” among a sampler of 1980s projects spread across film, TV, and video games. 

Marcia had good reason to want a slower-paced life with more personal time: she’d gotten pregnant before the start of post-production on “Star Wars” and was expected to give birth while cutting “Taxi Driver,” but miscarried, then went on to help finish “Star Wars” and “Taxi Driver,” then went straight into “New York, New York.” In an interview with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind, Marcia said that her inability to have children with George was a source of tension and unhappiness in the marriage, almost as much as his inability to stop working even for a moment. She had more miscarriages and gave up trying to conceive. 

In 1981, they adopted a daughter, Amanda, but rather than clear his schedule to get to know her, George threw himself into preproduction on “Return of the Jedi”; spun Industrial Light and Magic, a division of his company Lucasfilm, into its own company; and oversaw the creation of the sound quality assurance company THX, among other obsessions. She didn’t want to go down that road, so that was the beginning of the end of their union.

After leaving the entertainment industry, Marcia seemed content to be an editor in life. She produced just two projects in the ‘90s, one of them a short film, and consulted on other people’s movies, but that was it. She continued to go to theaters and watch films at home, always with a ruthless eye. (After seeing the first “Star Wars” prequel, “The Phantom Menace,” she cried, not because she was moved, but because she thought it was awful. Audiences were certainly poorer without her. But they were no longer her concern. She mainly wanted peace and happiness for herself and Amanda, who went on to become a professional MMA fighter. The same year she and George divorced, Marcia married Tom Rodrigues, a stained glass artist and painter who had formerly been a production manager at Skywalker Ranch from 1980 to, well, 1983. In 1985, she gave birth to their daughter, Amy. That union lasted ten years. Marcia never married again. 

In the book In the Blink of an Eye, legendary editor Walter Murch asserts that after watching a film, “What audiences finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.” Marcia Lucas had an innate understanding of how to accomplish this and proved it in multiple all-time classics.

A celebratory Karlovy Vary International Film Festival revealed its competition lineups on Tuesday. The 60th edition, which will commemorate the 80-year anniversary of the festival’s founding, features a dozen world premieres competing for the Crystal Globe and another dozen films bowing in Proxima–including cinema hailing from Colombia and Myanmar.   

The Czech fest, located in a picturesque spa town just outside of Prague, also unveiled competition juries, including Pulitzer Prize winner and The New Yorker film critic Justin Chang and two-time Oscar nominee Eskil Vogt (“The Worst Person in the World” and “Sentimental Value“). KVIFF runs July 3-11. 

Some of the major highlights of the Crystal Globe competition this year starts with Bulgarian filmmaker Petar Valchanov’s “Black Money for White.” The director’s newest film—he previously co-helmed the Maria Bakalova-starrer “Triumph”—concerns an elderly couple whose dreams of traveling to St. Petersburg to witness the White Nights are upended by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “3 Weeks After” by Serbian director Miroslav Terzić also has ties to Bulgaria: It follows a group of students traveling to the country whose adolescent angst floods to the surface when their bus breaks down. 

Colombia also makes an appearance at the festival with Esteban Hoyos García and Juan Miguel Gelacio Ramírez’s “Five Years, Four Months,” an aching work about a mother making one last bid to find the remains of her long missing son. Joining Colombia is Chile, with Valeria Sarmiento’s “Behind the Rain.” Sarmiento, the esteemed editor behind “City of Pirates” and “Mysteries of Lisbon,” arrives with a film about a psychology graduate coming home to Valdivia only to discover a young girl’s body. The unearthing shakes open traumatic childhood memories. 

Aung Phyoe’s “Fruit Gathering,” which comes from Myanmar, expands the fest’s reach. It concerns two young women employed at a textile factory in Yangon where they face exploitation, social repression, and economic disparity. A romance based in quiet rhythms, it may well be one of more festivals premiering in the resplendent Czech town.

The Proxima competition, a vertical of the festival that grants space to emerging auteurs, is led by an equally geographically eclectic array of films. Indian director Yashasvi Juyal arrives with the most evocatively titled film: “The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb.” The picture follows two men working in broken down toll booths in search of an increasingly rare kind of happiness. 

Alex Bertha’s “After Nature” is a Mexico-set story about a man returning to the countryside to be a stonemason. The plot summary to Bertha’s film describes it as, “An evocatively told story of a silent man whose enigmatic nature stems from the dark side of humanity and from his contact with the sacred, the film moves along the boundary between the physical and the spiritual.” Conversely, Japanese Shuntaro Uchida’s “Incinerator,” an adaptation of Kaori Ekuni’s short story, bills itself as a ruminative coming of age story about learning about mortality and family relationships.

Accompanying these competition movies are special screenings, including Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz’s defiant Tehran-set Sundance political stunner “The Friend’s House is Here” and “The Story of Documentary Film – 1980s” from former Crystal Globe winner Mark Cousins. His epic chronicling of the history of documentary is split into sixteen one-hour parts: the section, which focused on the 1970s, premiered at this most recent Cannes. The second part, about the 1980s, bows at KVIFF. 

Along with these films, are also eleven other works ranging in topics from a portrait of three-time Oscar winning cinematographer Robert Richardson called “Robert Richardson: The White Devil” to an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner named “Gregorius, the Chosen One.” It’s also worth noting again that KVIFF will feature a wealth of retrospectives: “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Kes,” Río Escondido,” and more. 

Below are the competition titles and juries. 

Crystal Globe Competition

3 nedelje posle / 3 Weeks After 

Director: Miroslav Terzić

Serbia, Bulgaria, 2026, 94 min, World premiere 

Cherni pari za beli noshti / Black Money for White 

Director: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov

Bulgaria, Greece, 2025, 94 min, World premiere 

Chica Checa 

Director: Šimon Holý

Czech Republic, France, Slovak Republic, 2026, 96 min, World premiere 

Cinco años, cuatro meses / Five Years, Four Months 

Director: Esteban Hoyos García, Juan Miguel Gelacio Ramírez

Colombia, USA, 2025, 83 min, World premiere 

Detrás de la lluvia / Behind the Rain 

Director: Valeria Sarmiento

Chile, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Gæsten / The Guest 

Director: Mads Mengel

Denmark, 2026, 99 min, World premiere 

A Happy Family 

Director: Jan-Eric Mack

Switzerland, 2026, 120 min, World premiere 

Hijamat 

Director: Nader Saeivar

Germany, 2026, 103 min, World premiere 

The Lion at My Back 

Director: Tonia Mishiali

Cyprus, Luxembourg, Greece, 2026, 106 min, World premiere 

Pipes

Director: Karim Kassem

Lebanon, 2025, 112 min, World premiere 

Prameň / Only Beautiful Things to Look At

Director: Ivan Ostrochovský

Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Hungary, 2026, 90 min, World premiere 

Thit-thee Khu / Fruit Gathering 

Director: Aung Phyoe

Myanmar, France, Czech Republic, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Proxima Competition

33 krokov / 33 Steps 

Director: Anna Domček, Šimon Domček

Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, 2026, 71 min, World premiere 

Camionero / Truck Driver 

Director: Francisco Marise

Spain, Argentina, 2026, 84 min, World premiere 

Contra la Naturaleza / Against Nature 

Director: Axel Bertha

Mexico, 2026, 86 min, World premiere 

Enas olokliros anthropos schedon / A Whole Person Almost 

Director: Efthimis Kosemund-Sanidis

Greece, Bulgaria, Germany, Cyprus, Romania, 2025, 111 min, World premiere 

Homo Sive Natura 

Director: Giovanni C. Lorusso

Italy, 2026, 115 min, World premiere 

The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb 

Director: Yashasvi Juyal

India, 2026, 120 min, World premiere 

Mein Freund der Pornostar / My Friend the Porn Star 

Director: Rosa Friedrich

Austria, 2026, 94 min, World premiere 

Milovník, nie bojovník / Lover, Not a Fighter

Director: Martina Buchelová

Slovak Republic, 2026, 108 min, World premiere 

Paris Paris 

Director: Isabelle Tollenaere

Belgium, 2026, 78 min, World premiere 

Rain Catcher 

Director: Michele Fiascaris

Italy, United Kingdom, 2026, 109 min, World premiere 

Shokyakuro / Incinerator 

Director: Shuntaro Uchida

Japan, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Sitni lopovi / Petty Thieves 

Director: Mate Ugrin

Croatia, Germany, France, 2026, 106 min, World premiere 

Special Screenings

Bára Basiková / Bára – Diary of a Rockstar  

Director: Helena Třeštíková

Czech Republic, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Dvě deci tuše / A Pint of Ink 

Director: Ester Geislerová

Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, 2026, 83 min, World premiere 

Kdyby se holubi proměnili ve zlato / If Pigeons Turned to Gold 

Director: Pepa Lubojacki

Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, 2026, 110 min 

Khaneh doost injast / The Friend’s House is Here 

Director: Maryam Ataei, Hossein Keshavarz

Iran, USA, 2025, 96 min, International premiere 

Learning To Breathe Underwater 

Director: Rebekah Fortune

United Kingdom, Netherlands, Ireland, 2026, 95 min, World premiere 

Město otců / City of Fathers  

Director: Zdeněk Tyc

Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, 2026, 100 min, World premiere 

Mistryně / Everything As It Should Be 

Director: Bohdan Karásek

Czech Republic, 2026, 101 min, World premiere 

Morten 

Director: Ivan Pavljutskov

Estonia, Lithuania, 2026, 101 min, World premiere 

Robert Richardson: The White Devil 

Director: Jana Hojdová

Czech Republic, USA, 2026, 105 min, World premiere 

The Story of Documentary Film – 1980s 

Director: Mark Cousins

United Kingdom, 2026, 120 min, World premiere 

To Die to Live 

Director: Yuliia Hontaruk

Ukraine, Latvia, Slovak Republic, 2026, 116 min, World premiere 

Vyvolený / Gregorius, the Chosen One 

Director: Tomasz Mielnik

Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, 2026, 90 min, World premiere 

Zpráva pro Minervu 2 / A Report for Minerva 2 

Director: Miroslav Krobot, Lubomír Smékal

Czech Republic, 2026, 69 min, World premiere 

Crystal Globe Jury

Justin Chang

Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker and NPR’s “Fresh Air”. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his writing at the Los Angeles Times, where he spent eight years as a critic. Previously, he was the chief film critic at Variety. Chang serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and is a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee. He teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Amanda Nell Eu

Amanda Nell Eu is a filmmaker based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her debut feature film Tiger Stripes was the Grand Prize winner of Semaine de la Critique in the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also the official Malaysian submission for the Academy Awards in 2023. Amanda graduated from the London Film School with an MA in Filmmaking and is an alumna of Berlinale Talents, Tokyo Talents and Locarno Filmmakers Academy. She has also served as a jury member at various film festivals and mentored film workshops internationally.

Pavel Rejholec

Pavel Rejholec is a Czech sound designer, producer, composer, and educator. He graduated from the Department of Sound Design at FAMU, where he has been head of the department since 2011. Throughout his career, he has worked as a sound designer on more than fifty Czech and international feature films. Since 2003, he has served as the managing director of the Soundsquare studio. He has won eight Czech Lion Awards for Best Sound, for instance, for the films Zátopek or The Painted Bird. As a dubbing supervisor, he collaborated with Lucasfilm on Star Wars: Episode II and Star Wars: Episode III. He is a member of the Motion Picture Sound Editors and serves on the board of the Czech Film and Television Academy.

Nadia Turincev

Nadia Turincev was born in Moscow, grew up in Paris and studied cultural anthropology. She started off in the movie industry aged 16, making sandwiches for Marcello Mastroianni. In 2007, she co-founded Rouge International, producing 25+ films (Fix ME, Mimosas, Raw, Oscar-nominated The Insult and Faces Places). In 2019 she left Rouge and created Easy Riders Films (Mariupolis 2, Crossing, Only Rebels Win) with Omar El Kadi. She recently opened her solo company Sento Films to produce “unrealizable” films.

Eskil Vogt

Eskil Vogt is a two-time Oscar-nominated Norwegian filmmaker. His directing debut Blind (2014) premiered at the Sundance FF where it won the Screenwriting Award. His sophomore effort, The Innocents (2021), premiered at the Cannes FF before going on to win more than 20 international awards. Eskil also collaborates closely with Joachim Trier, co-writing all of Trier’s features since Reprise (2006), including Oslo, August 31st (2011), The Worst Person in the World (2021) and Sentimental Value (2025). Vogt is a directing graduate from La Fémis, the French national film school.

Proxima Jury

Estrella Araiza

Estrella Araiza is the General Director of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) and Cineteca UDG, where she has focused on strengthening the presence of Mexican and Latin American cinema across both institutions. Her professional career includes experience as Director of Industry and Market at FICG, as well as work as a sales agent, academic, and film distributor in Mexico. She began her career in international film distribution in 2005, and in 2012 founded her own company, Vendo Cine. Since 2018, she has overseen FICG’s special projects, including the acclaimed exhibition Guillermo del Toro: At Home with My Monsters in Guadalajara.

Dirk Decker

Dirk Decker is a producer and co-founder of Hamburg-based Tamtam Film. Through Tamtam, he works with emerging talents and supports distinctive auteur cinema across fiction and documentary. His productions have premiered at major international festivals. Recent titles include Rain Fell on the Nothing New (Karlovy Vary 2025), Short Summer (Venice 2025, Lion of the Future) and Trial of Hein (Berlinale 2026, Teddy Jury Award).

Jakub Felcman

Jakub Felcman is a Czech screenwriter, festival organizer, film critic, creative producer, director, and qualified plumber. He studied film at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and FAMU, published interviews and film analyses (for Cinepur), programmed film festivals, and co-founded two of them (Ostrava Kamera Oko, Marienbad). As a script editor he collaborated on films by Jan Němec, Petr Václav, Radu Jude, and Corneliu Porumboiu. Cinemas have screened several films that he co-wrote or produced (such as A Night Too Young, A Certain Kind of Silence, and The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street).

Devika Girish

Devika Girish is editor at Film Comment magazine and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival. Her writing also appears in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Sight & Sound, The Criterion Collection, and others, and she has programmed series and festivals for the Criterion Channel, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Film at Lincoln Center, the Mumbai Film Festival, the Berlin Critics’ Week, and more. Devika has been invited to juries at CPH:DOX, the Locarno Film Festival, SEMINCI, and Visions du Réel.

Marija Kavtaradze

Marija Kavtaradze is a Lithuanian director and screenwriter. Graduating from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2014, she made her feature debut with Summer Survivors in 2018, which premiered at the Toronto IFF, followed by Slow (2023), which earned her a Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and had its European premiere at KVIFF in 2023. Marija works as a screenwriter on shorts and feature films, including The Visitor (dir. Vytautas Katkus, KVIFF 2025), Runner (dir. Andrius Blaževičius, KVIFF 2021), the animated TV series BFF for kids, and others. 

It’s been five years since Daniel Craig ended his run as 007 in “No Time to Die,” sending one of the most historic and beloved franchises in movie history into limbo. In February 2025, James Bond went to work for Amazon MGM, who will produce the next film; it has yet to be announced who will step into Bond’s perfectly tailored suits, meaning the world is likely still over a year away from more 007 action. In the meantime, IO Interactive has jumped in to fill the gap in 007 culture with the phenomenal “007 First Light,” an action game that deftly blends elements of the “Hitman” franchise with world-building that feels similar to “Uncharted.” It has a few rough edges, but it’s so consistently entertaining that they’re easy to overlook, especially when one considers this as a foundation being poured for a franchise that could surpass the recent movies when it comes to pure entertainment value.

Fans of films like “Goldeneye” and “Casino Royale” will love how much “First Light” plays like an interactive Bond movie, right down to an opening action sequence that leads into a lavish credits sequence, complete with a new theme song by Lana Del Rey. “First Light” unfolds like an extended Bond film (or what the inevitable Bond streaming series might look like) with varied, gorgeous locations, and even an unexpectedly fun supporting cast that includes Lennie James (“The Walking Dead”), Gemma Chan (“The Eternals”), and believe it or not, Lenny Kravitz.

Patrick Gibson (“Dexter: Original Sin”) plays a 26-year-old James Bond, introduced as a Navy aircrewman on a mission in Iceland when his team is attacked and killed. The only survivor, he collaborates with MI6 to rescue scientists who have been taken captive by a terrorist group seeking a new weapon of mass destruction. Impressing his superiors with his fearlessness, Bond is asked to join the “00” program, coming in a few months after, you guessed it, six other candidates. The tutorial for the gameplay of “First Light” is brilliantly embedded in what plays out like a training montage from an actual James Bond film.

The opening action scene and even the tutorial are fun, but “First Light” truly reveals its excellence with the first mission, which sends Bond, a few of his colleagues named Monroe (Chris O’Reilly) and Cressida (Jessica Rhodes), and his handler John Greenway (James) to track down a rogue agent, 009, who has been spotted at a hotel in Slovakia.

As Bond cases the scene, eavesdropping on conversations and spotting opportunities to track 009, “First Light” echoes the authorship of “Hitman,” a series founded on the idea that missions could be completed in multiple ways, even using booby traps and disguises. It’s a bit more linear than the true open-world missions of recent “Hitman” games, but some of the mechanics are the same, right down to using a Q-watch to set traps or otherwise use the environment to your advantage. Alternating detective work with both melee and gunplay action sequence, ending with an incredible car chase that leads to a plane sequence, “First Light” sets its bar with this first mission and then mostly stays at that high level of entertainment for the next 15 hours or so.

The Slovakia mission goes very wrong, leading to the death of one of Bond’s allies, and sending Bond and Greenway to Mauritania to track the enemy. The plot of “First Light” won’t be spoiled, but it’s classic Bond stuff, including double crosses and action scenes that take place both far from home and right back in the heart of MI6. One of the key villains of “First Light” ends up being an AI pioneer who is using his access and technology to rule the world, giving the games a timeliness that even the Craig movies often dismissed. In a sense, it’s a story of old-fashioned spycraft defeating a tech sector that values profit and power over people. Sure, Bond gets a few Q-designed toys to play with, but his best weapons are still his fists and his silencer.

It’s also a fun reimagining of the Bond persona as a young, reckless spy instead of a mature, suave one. Risk-taking in the name of justice has been a part of some of the best pieces of Bond fiction, but it’s wonderfully embedded in this origin story in that this Bond acts more out of instinct than planning, and the strongest aspect of the writing of “First Light” is how well it performs as an origin story, taking James Bond from heroic aircrewman to recruit to training to superspy. As you develop your gameplay mechanics and abilities, it feels like you’re growing into the 007 character with your avatar.

As for that gameplay, it’s a confident mix of stealth, puzzle-solving, melee combat, and third-person shooting. Many missions can be completed with almost no combat, but there may be times when you want to punch or shoot your way to safety. Melee is smooth and often environmentally enhanced, such as in times when Bond can grab someone and throw them off a ledge or into a glass cabinet. At its core, it follows the “Arkham Asylum” model with punches, dodges, and parries. Gunplay has numerous variables, including being able to shoot weapons out of your enemy’s hands or even take them out at the knees. And if it’s Bond, there must be gadgets, so you’ll also have access to things like a Missile Pen and a Shockwave Camera, which are pretty self-explanatory.

“First Light” isn’t perfect. Some of the in-game graphics can be a bit janky, and even the cutscenes don’t look quite as polished as they should in 2026, at least on PS5. The settings are wonderfully varied from a luxury resort in Vietnam to an evil research lab atop a snowy mountain, but a close look reveals a bit of repetitive flatness in the character and environment design. These are elements that feel like they’ll be easily enhanced in future installments, as will the occasional bit of repetitive gameplay and the sense that there’s a bit too much exposition delivered via walk-and-talk sequences.

“007 First Light” is an action video game that’s designed to recall things that players have loved before from the Bond movies to “Uncharted” set pieces to “Hitman” gameplay, but it combines these things in a way that makes them feel fresh and new again. Everything that holds it back from Game of the Year status feels like something that will be ironed out in an inevitable sequel.

Of course, the game ends with a “James Bond Will Return” promise. Not soon enough.

The publisher provided a review copy of this title, played on PS5. It is now available.

An exploration of those internal impulses we don’t always understand ourselves and the impact that they can have on our lives, filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler‘s third feature film, “The Currents,” follows Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), an Argentinian designer in the aftermath of a drastic decision. While in Switzerland accepting an award, she flees the ceremony and soon finds herself with the urge to jump into a frozen river. Surviving the fall, she heads back to her home in Buenos Aires with a debilitating fear of water, something she does not share with her husband (Esteban Bigliardi). 

Growing increasingly isolated, Lina slowly distances herself from everything she once held dear—her career, her husband, and even her 5-year-old daughter, Sofía (Emma Fayo Duerte). Will she ever find her way back?

Born in Argentina in 1977, Mumenthaler was raised in Switzerland, where her family immigrated during the country’s military dictatorship. Mumenthaler has directed numerous short films and three acclaimed feature films, all of which, in one way or another, explore the intimacy and interiority of women’s lives.

Her debut feature film, “Back to Stay,” about sisters grieving the loss of the grandmother who raised them, won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2011. Her follow-up feature, “The Idea of a Lake,” explores the fragmentation of memory through the story of a photographer who finds a photograph of her father, which inspires her to revisit his mysterious disappearance during the dictatorship. 

Her latest film, “The Currents,” premiered at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival. In her three-star review of the film, Sheila O’Malley writes that “‘The Currents’’s willingness to suggest, rather than show, to create echoes rather than draw verbal conclusions is the film’s main source of power.” 

For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Mumenthaler over Zoom and via a translator about the image that inspired her film, her exploration of dissociation and of navigating our many selves, her use of music by Gustav Holst, and her making of films that generate questions rather than offering answers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is such an emotional film, and I wondered what the initial kernel of inspiration was. Was there a question, an emotion, an image, or a feeling that you developed this story from?

At the beginning of this project, there was a picture, an image where I was going along the edge of the Rhône in Geneva, and all of a sudden, I imagined a woman throwing herself into the freezing water. It was an image that stuck with me for some time. It started out as an image that raised many questions about who this woman was, whether she was aware of what she had done, or whether her body had spoken for her. 

There’s something very intimate about working so much based on the character herself, putting me in her shoes or in her skin, and trying to be very perceptive and to really see where this condition she’s in takes her. Being actively adrift. I think that turns it into a very sensorial movie where you can really feel what the character sees or hears.

It very much feels like a film that’s trying to represent the feeling of disassociation. Did you research disassociation, or was this more of an intuitive exploration of that process and way of being?

There was a bit of both. There was a formal process in which I worked with a psychoanalyst throughout the filmmaking process, and I also leaned on readings more closely connected to neurology and psychology. But beyond that, I think there is something where, for anyone, the film’s character has a more existential conflict that becomes more evident after the event that puts a life in danger. All of us can ask ourselves, are there other possible lives for us? Can we just split off? Disappear? Or reinvent ourselves? 

Those questions are very much at the forefront right now. Lina is clearly someone who asks herself all those questions and even allows herself to physically go through that process. But she also has a very important anchor in her daughter. I think motherhood is what keeps her grounded, what keeps her present, and ultimately leads her to stay. 

For her work and her family, she is known as Lina, but with her friend, she is Cata. She is at once two different people. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that character’s attempt to blend those two lives, and whether you think it’s possible for someone to be multiple people at once. 

In the film, she is Cata, but Cata refers more to a past life, and Lina refers to her current life. Lina is someone who has moved between social classes. I think that in order to exist, she has to leave Cata behind and transform herself into Lina. So, for me, one of her biggest crises has to do with a sense of belonging, and how she doesn’t really feel like either Cata or Lina. So deep down, the question is, who is she really? 

I do think we can all be different people. I think each of us changes depending on where we are and what circles we move around in. Because in all of them, we are perceived differently as well. So, in that dynamic of relationships, we change. You are never the same person within your family because assigned and unassigned roles make us act or speak in certain ways; perhaps in another environment, we become different people with different roles. 

We don’t always occupy the same role in every space. We always present ourselves differently, or we always can, and we appear differently as well. And while all of this is going on, inside we’re still another person entirely, and I think the film talks a lot about precisely that tension between the objective outward appearance and the intimate subjective inner self.

You mentioned her daughter as an anchor for her, but obviously, her mother is another big factor in psychology and is maybe pulling her, like you said, back to her previous life. That tension she has with her mom might be holding her back a bit. Her mother and her daughter are such different anchors, both pulling her in such different directions at the end.

From the very beginning, there is this sense that, in some way, all roads lead back to her mother. When she sees the embroidery, and when she gets lost in that theatre where they’re doing the photoshoot, or later, of the lighthouse as well, when we find ourselves in front of that house without yet knowing what that house is as a viewer. Every path leads to the mother, in a way. Her mother is a bit like the seed of this story, or at least of what Lina is going through. In order for Lina to exist for herself, she had to flee from her mother’s house. When you have a mother who is so fragile and so consumed by her mental illness, there is an abandonment of the people who are near to her. 

Lina, in that sense, returns to her mother’s house to seek answers. I don’t think she finds them there, but the place she goes in search of answers ultimately affirms her in her own motherhood and allows her to stay beside her daughter without repeating what her mother did. She differentiates herself. On this note, many times in family relationships, even when we can be very critical of the relationship or family dynamics, those reference points remain, and we involuntarily end up falling into the same behaviors and attitudes as the people we may have critiqued.

I wanted to ask about the use of Gustav Holst’s “Venus, The Bringer of Peace.” It’s such a beautiful, calming piece of music, which contrasts with the very chaotic interiority Lina is going through at this moment. How did you land on that piece of music?

The moments when the “Venus” piece is used for the music, we knew the piece needed to have certain characteristics, and first it had to be something that moves you forward, a theme or a piece that feels like it’s going somewhere. Because some music is more repetitive or more rhythmic, while other pieces carry you toward a destination, so to speak.

It also had to contain a certain fairy-tale-like quality. Lina, in this active drifting state that she’s in throughout the film, has something very playful about her. In the sense of giving herself up to the experience, surrendering herself to the experience, to see what happens. To me, these elements represent Lina’s state very well. There’s tension because she doesn’t know, right? Just as her body suddenly spoke and threw her into the freezing water, she didn’t know what might happen next. 

There’s also nostalgia, because I think that Lina is a deeply nostalgic character throughout the film. It’s a representation of how she sees the world. So you feel that nostalgia when she’s looking at the embroidery or watching the woman make the corset. These are all activities that come from a totally different rhythm of life, very different from her work, that chaotic, frantic pace of her everyday life. I think that Lina carries that nostalgia within herself. 

Then there is the playful side. She’s not trying to find a concrete answer to the question “Well, what exactly is wrong with me?” She isn’t looking for a definitive diagnosis. She lets herself be carried away, and there’s something playful in that. A kind of “let’s see what happens.” But then there’s also a side of courage to it. 

So when we started looking for the music, I had all of those elements in the forefront of my mind. We would start listening to pieces, and we say, “Well, not this one because it doesn’t have that fairytale feeling,” or “Not this one” because it lacks something else. When we heard “Venus” by Gustav Holst, it was perfect. It reflected Lina’s emotional state exactly.

There are so many different interpretations that you can take from this film, depending on your own perspective on the character, on your own perspective on modern life. Do you have any hopes for what people might take away for their own lives after watching your film?

I don’t know if I’d say I want people to take something specific away, but I do think cinema should be a place for reflection or for carrying something with you afterward. Not necessarily forever, but at least for a little while, leaving you, as a viewer, asking yourself some questions. So that’s the spirit in which I make my films. 

My films ask for an active, involved viewer. Not in the sense that they’re demanding something from the audience, but in the sense of leaving space for the viewer to do something with what they’ve seen, instead of giving them every single answer. I don’t want the film to end and for it to simply be “Oh, okay. That’s what it meant. That was the message. That’s it.” 

Deep down, we are mysterious people, and there aren’t answers for everything. I like that we have mystery inside ourselves. Mystery has always been part of humanity, and I think it is important to make films that generate questions rather than answers or conclusions. 

Are there any filmmakers who are women or films that are made by women that have either inspired you, or that you think are really cool and you think other readers should seek out?

For many years, while working on this film, I made a conscious decision to read women authors. So, in some way, the film and I are defined by the stories women tell. Then, specifically for this project, it was about immersing myself in a world closely connected to how women perceive it through literature. 

But there is also an American director that I really like, Kelly Reichardt. I like her way of working, where there is always something almost Chekovian underneath, something quietly happening beneath the surface, but you don’t really know what exactly. She manages to create tension throughout her films like that, and I find that really interesting and fascinating. 

Lori Felker’s “Patient” cleverly takes the viewer on a couple of unexpected turns.  Cleverness isn’t the point, but its humanity is, or at least it might be. We start by eavesdropping in on a few discussions between patients and their doctors as they answer a series of questions designed to get at the heart of what ails them. We’ve all been here. Our doctors ask us questions about our health that eventually reveal something about ourselves we’d rather not admit out loud. 

We listen to these people in white gowns anyway, identifying with their secrecy and perhaps even the sadness that exists in their lives. The doctors, all of them young and probably starting out, listen with great understanding as they take notes and repeat their patients’ answers back to them, free of judgment. In the end, they figure out a solution, and we hope, for the patient’s sake, that the medication or aid will be sufficient and affordable. End of discussion.

End of description as well, because this is a short film best watched without prior knowledge of some of what happens.

Director Felker is interested in both subjects on screen, even as we see multiple interviews. The doctors and their patients are given equal screen time and weight. We identify with the patients, but we also understand the doctors’ need to tread lightly and to form conclusions without appearing too vulnerable or judgmental. It’s a true balancing act.

Felker’s film will remind documentary students of the great Frederick Wiseman. The camera remains stationary the entire time, and we wonder: Is this a film about bedside manner? Or about the experience of seeing a doctor? The health system in America? Or all these things? The feeling of eavesdropping and of being grateful not to be in a doctor’s office or hospital at the moment will be palpable, but we also walk away from “Patient” wondering what we just watched. See for yourself. 

Q&A with Lori Felker – SPOILERS AHEAD.

How did this come about?

“Patient” was born of research for a feature film also called “Patient,” in which the protagonist is a Standardized Patient. While I was writing that script, I visited a few simulation centers in the Midwest to incorporate the research into my writing. Shortly after I met the team at the University of Wisconsin Health Sciences Learning Center, I knew we had to make a short film together. Working with them gave me the opportunity to get to know this special process intimately, as well as to practice working with the architecture of this unique facility, improvise directly, and design the medical cases.

All of the SPs in this short film work there as SPs in real life. All the medical students are also played by SPs. For the most part, they are doing their job as they always do, except I wrote the cases and patient character descriptions, and there were film cameras in the room. 

This may be too much, but if the question goes back further to how I became obsessed with Standardized Patients in the first place, it was from reading Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams,” in which she writes beautifully about her experience of being an SP in college. 

What was the casting process like? And did that dovetail with the writing process in any way?

All the actors in this short film worked at the Madison simulation center, and they were so talented, generous, and caring. They really inspired me. I met most of them the day I went to conduct research and slotted them directly into the film as either SPs or Med Students. Kathleen Tissot, who plays the administrator in the film, is pretty much playing herself and is doing what she normally does at work. There isn’t really a script; I wrote an outline of the day, character backgrounds for three of the main characters, and I worked with Kathleen to write the medical cases the SPs could work with. 

For the in-between and ending scenes, I had a narrative thread and knew how I wanted them to feel and how the day was going for them, but I would also ask, “Where do you normally sit when you do this?” Or what do you normally do at this point? And they would show me, and I would fold that in. There are shades of observation, reenactment, documentary, and fiction throughout the film. I was a little short on actors, so we sent out a casting call to their full SP pool to see if I could get a few more people I hadn’t met during my research trip—three roles were cast this way. 

How did you and the cast approach this when shooting? Did you all treat it as an improv exercise? Were there multiple versions of scenarios? 

They basically did their jobs, but also coached me through how they do theirs along the way. I wrote the medical cases (with guidance and examples, of course!), and then I met with the SPs and Kathleen over Zoom (as they normally do) to review the cases, answer their questions, and make sure they connect with them and can perform the learning objective. The cases are just a couple of pages and aren’t formatted like a script, but they do provide basic medical information, the learning objective, character trajectory, and a roadmap for answering the med student’s questions. 

The SPs memorize/absorb those cases, then improvise on top of them in the room for about 15 minutes. Then, when it goes into feedback, they sort of turn back into themselves as educators and have an earnest conversation with the med student. We followed that format. I wrote two medical cases, and each med student/SP combo performed both with feedback, for 20 minutes straight. We shot the exams with two cameras, and I pretty much never said cut or asked them to redo anything. I was trying to capture the actual flow of a conversation, searching for questions and answers, and the progression of the actual interaction between these real people. 

At first, I had wanted to work with actual Med Students to make it even more real, but that wasn’t possible for obvious reasons. The SPs were the first to speak up and say, “No one knows the Med Students better than we do!” and it’s true! They knew the procedures, the questions, and even the emotions of these students well enough to improvise in those characters.

In the end, I had 160 minutes of exam footage for a 20-minute film.

How many cuts or versions did you go through in the editing process before you decided on the best time to reveal what was happening here?

I knew from the start that I was interested in making viewers think that the first encounter in the film was “real”, even if just for a moment. I knew I had to establish Gayle (played by Ronna Trapanese) and Melanie (Rainy Armstrong) as people we felt we knew and could care about before we cut away from them, but I also had to find the right cut point. 

Fairly early on, I tried the cut on the hands, demonstrating where the pain was as I jumped from one actor to the other. When I showed friends an early cut, it was such a clear winner and served as the building block for the pacing and structure of the rest of the film. It showed the repetition and standardization of what they do, but there was also no question that these two actors were not at all the same people. 

After that, it’s gradual. Some people pick up on things right away because they’re familiar with this idea (from a relative in medicine or from Kramer on Seinfeld). Some viewers don’t exclaim “oh!” until the SPs are in the lounge, walking through with their gowns on in the middle of the film.  I think the reveal starts early and slowly unwinds, allowing viewers to find the time that works for them.

Did you sit in on bedside manner sessions like this?

I did!  At a few centers in IL and WI, I sat down at the observation computer with headphones and could switch between rooms or watch multiple exams at once. It was such a visually exciting way to see the similarities and variations between the performances and personalities in the room. I was also able to concentrate on the med students’ “performances” and how nervous or confident they were. 

I know the feature version of “Patient” is in the works. Is there anything you want to tell us about it? 

The feature version of “Patient” is a mix between the fascinating work of standardized patients and one of my own frustrating medical experiences. There’s a main character, Reggie, with family and a roommate, and there’s a whole script, but there are also scenes at Reggie’s job that look like I lifted them straight out of the short (because we planned and shot them in a similar way). The feature is in post, and I hope for a premiere later this year or at the beginning of 2027. 

The hangout sitcom has a few, set-in-stone principles: an attractive, charming cast, struggling to balance the demands of work and love, wrangling an array of neuroses and errors of judgment. When their professional and personal worlds begin to overlap, the narrative ought to become funnier and deeper. Unfortunately, “Not Suitable for Work,” like creator Mindy Kaling’s previous sitcom offerings, offers too many cliches to result in anything other than mediocrity.

Set in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York City, the series stars an ensemble cast, including Ella Hunt, who has charm to spare in her portrayal of Boston native and obsessive investment bank analyst AJ. Avantika, who stole the show as Karen in the musical reboot of “Mean Girls,” is practically gasping for more to do in her role as Abby, assistant to celebrity stylist Vanessa Hsu (Constance Wu, enjoying riffing on the Miranda Priestly model of fashion boss) and AJ’s encouraging roommate.

I cannot say the same of the young men who live across the hall from AJ and Abby. Davis (Will Angus) works with Abby, worships their no-nonsense boss Bill (Jay Ellis), and tries to speed-run interactions with every woman he meets in the hopes of landing a wife. Nepo baby Josh (Jack Martin) feels constant guilt about his wealth, but not enough to avoid dropping his surname during a job interview with a respected journalist he knows reports to his CEO father. And Kel Washington (Nicholas DuVernay) is simply a rehash of unhappy finance bro Nikesh Patel from Kaling’s 2019 sitcom “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” except that Kel is in medical school. All three struggle to bring verve to their roles; the two-dimensional nature of their portrayals is, at times, both boring and irritating.

The usual ensues when all five (and their bosses and clients) meet, and their lives get going: attraction, both forbidden and overt; confusion; righteous indignation; ups and downs at work and at home. But the stakes do not invite investment, nor is any of it particularly funny, probably because there is more anxiety in the setups than inherent humor. The dialogue structure becomes repetitive; at least thrice, characters say to one another, “I knew other people [add harmful act here]. I didn’t think you would.” Many of the production’s creative choices defy logic; if the series is aimed at people in their 20s, why are the needle drops heavy on music most familiar to Boomers and Millennials? 

The stilted nature of the series’ visual language began to grate on me; there ought to be a ban on using interstitial shots of the New York skyline at night or of throngs of cabs as transitions between scenes. Are there no other ways to tell stories? But I should not be surprised, as “The Sex Lives of College Girls” suffered from the exact same problem, as did “The Mindy Project.”

By far the brightest spots of “Not Suitable for Work” are tantalizingly brief appearances by three of the best “30 Rock” alumni: Michael Benjamin Washington steals the show every time he appears as the lead character’s landlord, Antoine; this is no surprise to anyone who saw him do much the same as Tracy Jordan’s faux illegitimate son, Donald. John Lutz has a recurring but limited role as a member of Josh’s workplace, and Jack McBrayer has exactly one delightful scene as his wholesome self. One wonders what this show could have been if their talents had been better utilized.

Given the title of the series, you’d think this is a series that’s trying to push boundaries, literally and figuratively. The cursing, however, is minimal, the sex is limited, and at its most daring, “Not Suitable for Work” resembles a comically Temu “Industry.” There is far too much expository dialogue, and things work out far too neatly for all involved. Worst of all, the status quo remains unchanged and unchallenged. In this writer’s opinion, the revival of a format for a new generation ought to alter the formula in at least one meaningful way. Yet again, the Mid TV gods have scored: production design 1, writing 0. 

“Not Suitable for Work” ought to have been a chance to reflect on the absurdities, funny and grave, of being a young person battling late-stage capitalism. But the series does not diverge from “Friends,” one of the whitest and most creatively conservative comedies in history, in any meaningful way. Sure, the cast is slightly more diverse, but everyone is heterosexual, no one is worried about making rent, and life is just one make-out session away from being tolerable.

Entire series screened for review. Streams on Hulu.

Having just come off the set of a movie and renewed my appreciation for accidents, deadlines, compromises, and heartbreak, I thought I’d look back at the work of the much-missed Lynn Shelton, one of the finest unsung American romantic directors. Shelton decided, sadly, what turned out to be more than halfway through her life, that she was going to become a film director, and then she went out and did it. 

I took my time getting around to Shelton, taking for granted that we had a dozen directors like her, making the kinds of gentle films that Sundance was then making its stock-in-trade. The festival was softening, and Shelton’s movies seemed endemic of a shift towards easy victories. It was an easy position to take. I felt inundated with that kind of work.

But then I actually sat down and watched “Your Sister’s Sister” and found something shocking in its subtlety. Shelton’s mise en scène was open, clear, and bright. Actors in rooms, digital photography, honest, unadorned. This showed you what you were looking at. And then, without warning, I felt a shift inside me. I’d seen everything plainly, but felt something greater than for which the facts seemed to allow. 

It was her relationship to Marc Maron, her work directing episodes of “Glow,” his stand-up specials, and the magnificently madcap “Sword of Trust,” that turned me from a casual fan into a full-blown acolyte. Her back catalog then opened up—the Claire Denis cursive of “We Go Way Back,” the searing critique of foppish male posturing in “My Effortless Brilliance,” the whisper-quiet treatise on intimacy in “Touchy Feely,” and finally the openhearted luster of “Laggies,” this month’s Unloved. 

As a huge Keira Knightley fan, the mediocre reviews hurt my heart. Seeing it, I was even more flummoxed, but maybe it’s just that this movie was made just for me: A film about retreating in plain sight, a house becoming a sight of secrets and turmoil while the rest of the world waits for resolution. It hit me right where it was meant to, and very much influenced my own movie.

We keep Shelton alive now through our connection to her movies and the tension that comes with bad intentions that crawl toward self-actualization. I’ll miss the way her little movies would grow so large. I’ll miss knowing the next Lynn Shelton movie was just a few years away.