Selected for the Special 75th Anniversary Award at Cannes, this 2022 film by Belgium filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne follows the story of two African migrants struggling to build a life in Belgium. Through portraying the teens’ scramble for survival in the criminal world due to class differences, the empathetic film transmits an urgent message of social injustice. This movie comes with a pre-screening virtual meet-the-filmmaker talk.

Produced by A24, the company behind the recent hit Everything Everywhere All at Once and Oscar-winning Moonlight, Lamb is a horror-proximate fantasy based on Icelandic folklore and the director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s childhood experiences at his grandparents’ farm. Jóhannsson’s debut is a strange tale about a bereaved couple who adopt a baby lamb-cross-human chimera as their own child. It won the Prize of Originality at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard category.

Birds falling from the sky is a recent reality in Delhi, where worsening air pollution is impacting the area’s birdlife. Brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad set out to rescue one of the affected species, the black kite, by setting up a bird hospital. This documentary parallels the birds’ peril with escalating civil unrest within the city. It won L’Œil d’Or for Best Documentary at Cannes and Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary at Sundance.

This 1996 Cantonese film, part-experimental art piece, is made up of four stories in which Sandra Ng plays four different women to depict the different facets of a woman: a lonely prostitute, a long-suffering wife who is secretly a mistress to her husband’s friends, a lesbian avenging her comatose twin sister, and a woman who seeks a different life after having been suffocated by a failing marriage. The film is also known for Christopher Doyle’s cinematography.

Ng will be present at the post-screening talk at M+ Grand Stair.

In case you missed: Cinematographer Christopher Doyle Reflects On His 40-Year Career And What’s Next For Him

Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart band together in this erotic science-fiction body horror film by David Cronenberg. While this film shares the same title with Cronenberg’s 1970 film that focuses on a clinic for wealthy patients of pathological skin conditions, this production—his first in eight years—is based on a completely different concept and story. It imagines a future where the human species undergoes mutations, which results in extra organs sprouting from bodies and any sense of pain being lost. Performance artist Saul Tenser’s partner surgically removes his superfluous organs, which rouses the suspicion of the National Organ Registry, whose investigator has a more-than-professional interest in Tenser. This horrifying tale triggers thoughts on how humanity may adapt to the ecosystem we destroyed.

A murder film can be chilling, especially when it’s based on a true story. Vincent Le Port’s film is about a young seminarian—a student of theology—who murders a 13-year-old boy in the French countryside in 1901. As the killer recounts his life leading up to his crime, the film also reveals the inner workings of psychopathy and early criminal profiling.

Cannes-winning British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s documentary observes the daily life and motherhood of an often-overlooked subject: a dairy cow. Eschewing narration, the film observes Luma, who gives birth to calves and gets manhandled to a steel milking brace, through a camera lens that comes eye-to-eye with the farm animal. This unusual documentary offers a strong statement against animal suffering caused by human dominion.

Newcomer Wang Yuxuan took home the Golden Horse Award and Taipei Film Award for best supporting actress for her role in last year’s Taiwanese psychological drama, Goddamned Asura. The film portrays a teenager, who is addicted to online games and creates a popular web comic, and who shoots randomly in a night market on his 18th birthday after his father forces him into studying abroad. It examines the high-pressure environment of modern society in which people resort to using extreme means to survive.

Kinuyo Tanaka was an actress who acted in more than 250 films in her lifetime and became Japan’s only second female film director. She is known for films that document the socio-political and cultural changes and women of Japan. This 1974 film features her final performance, for which she was named best actress at the Berlinale. The film follows Osaki, an elderly woman who was sold into sexual slavery overseas as a child. The restrained drama provokes the audience to reflect on a traumatic chapter in the history of a society that refuses to look back.

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