The idyllic, beach-side life of a retired Triad boss, his daughter Lap (Joey Wong) and her boyfriend Rick (Kenny Bee), shatters when a mob favor turns into a bloody shootout. Trading her freedom for her father’s, Lap becomes mistress to Godfather Shen, while Rick goes into exile. Years later, as Shen unknowingly hires Rick as a hitman, Lap sees her chance at escape, while doe-eyed Triad gofer (Tony …

The latest film from Iranian master Shahram Mokri (FISH & CAT, CARELESS CRIME) is another mysterious M.C. Escher-like thriller about reality and illusion, doubles and doppelgängers and uncanny synchronicities, involving stories-within-stories set during production of a film plagued by a prop gun that is hellbent on revenge.

The Stocamine project, in Alsace, was supposed to allow tons of dangerous industrial waste to be stored deep underground for thousands of years, with no risk to the environment. Just three years later, fire broke out. Then the underground galleries started to collapse. One of Europe’s most important groundwater sources was at risk.  TOXIC WASTE: A TIME BOMB UNDER OUR FEET explores the recent push …

Will trees save the planet? That is the promise made by governments, the logging industry and various environmental organizations. As deforestation accelerates and CO2 emissions hit record highs, planting trees is touted as a common-sense solution to the ecological crisis. But is it really that simple? In TREEWASHING: THE PLANTING ILLUSION, François-Xavier Drouet takes his investigation into this …

Fiercely independent 90-year-old Agatha Bock lives alone on her ancestral farm. Despite health challenges, she defiantly tends to her land, cultivating heirloom seeds passed down through generations. Employing antiquated techniques, Agatha plants and harvests her expansive field of watermelons, beans, flowers, herbs, and vegetables entirely by hand. Without a car, cell phone, running water, or even …

Estonian director Grigori Kromanov's dazzling, paranoid mixture of locked-room mystery, 1970s Euro giallo, classic noir whodunit, and (unbelievably) alien sci-fi ala THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, based on a novel by famed Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (STALKER, HARD TO BE A GOD).

Ai (a super Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution. Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on …

Ultra-rare German silent horror film from pioneering director/writer Henrik Galeen (who wrote NOSFERATU and WAXWORKS). In ALRAUNE, Brigitte Helm (METROPOLIS) is the unholy offspring of a genetics experiment conducted by her scientist "father" Paul Wegener (THE GOLEM).

Ultra-rare German silent horror film from pioneering director/writer Henrik Galeen (who wrote NOSFERATU and WAXWORKS). In THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE, Conrad Veidt (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI) stars as a hellraising student who sells his soul to the Devil.

The Water Rats captures the adventures of twelve strangers from diverse walks of life––mixed ages, ethnicities, and interests––as they unite and grow into a motley crew of outlaws swimming in the wild cold waters of London's Hampstead Heath during (and in spite of) the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Directed by award-winning photographer Jillian Edelstein, the film explores the power of human connection …

21-year-old Kana (rising star Yuumi Kawai) works a disaffected job at a beauty salon, where she bristles against the beauty expectations placed on women her age. Her erratic mood and default to self-destruct impacts all of her relationships, as moments of levity erupt into violence and optimism simmers to despair. Bored with her slavish boyfriend, she finds another; the novel excitement of it all … More

Shunzo (Bengal) and his wife Michi (Masako Motai) run a beloved greengrocer on the outskirts of Tokyo. When Lee, a struggling exchange student from China, visits the shop but is unable to afford the produce, an uneasy relationship sprouts. Begrudgingly, Shunzo agrees to lower his prices. Soon, Lee’s classmates begin frequenting the shop. As Shunzo’s generosity sneaks up on him and strains his family’s … More

A filmmaker who late in life acquired an organic apple farm, Alexandra Lexton found herself searching for “stories of others who’d reconnected with nature in different ways, then brought their experiences in some meaningful way into the world.” Fools’ Paradise (lost?) finds Lexton eliciting wisdom from 10 such interviewees, including a globetrotting photographer, a journalist, a Navajo scholar, an … More

Czech director Otakar Vávra's astonishing KRAKATIT is a literal fever dream of a movie that mixes 1940s Film Noir, paranoid thriller and speculative atomic-bomb Sci-Fi in the story of a chemist named Prokop who hallucinates fragments of how he's invented a proto-nuclear weapon -- and the mystery of what's happened to the formula for it.

Abu Haraz is set in a small village in northern Sudan, where life has followed the same natural rhythms for a thousand years. But everything changes when a huge dam is built on the Nile, threatening to flood the land and submerge the village under 35 meters of water. As the floodwaters approach, the residents face a profound crisis: Can their culture and way of life continue in a new place, or will … More

Investigating the murder of the young Hanzel (Yul Servo) shot dead one winter night, detective Juan Mijares (Joel Torres) plumbs the depths of the Filipino gangs of Jersey city who trade in crystal meth. Talking to the boy’s mother, remarried to an American; to his grandfather, an ex-soldier, bigger questions emerge: what dark history has pushed so many Filipinos to migrate this wintry land? What … More

Lebanon at the end of the 80s. Ghassan Salhab’s debut follows Khalil as he returns to Beirut under a new identity, forced to confront the old friends and comrades he left behind following his faked death a decade earlier. Phantom Beirut is a haunting exploration of the official silences and collective amnesias that stalk the lives of those who live through conflict.

State of Weightlessness is a documentary that uses long-duration Soviet space missions as a lens through which to examine the psychological and historical dislocation of the late Cold War period. Drawing on rare audio recordings from orbit, the film explores how cosmonauts experienced isolation, suspension, and uncertainty while the political system that sent them into space was collapsing below. … More