Un mois de grand cinéma

The first feature from visionary Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty is simply a masterpiece. Winner of the international critics’ award at Cannes, the film’s extraordinary sound design, choppy associative editing, and cool central couple dreaming of escape continues to electrify and inspire.

Working with unseen outtakes from a 1969 French TV interview, director Alain Gomis fashions a riveting, sharp-edged essay on the media’s treatment of a genius of jazz piano, Thelonious Monk. Hypnotic, nerve-wrangling, and immersive, Rewind and Play lets the music—and the silence—do the talking.

Tense, combative, discursive: a meeting with James Baldwin doesn’t quite go according to plan for a group of presumptuous white filmmakers in this rarely seen, Paris-set short film. An illuminating snapshot of Baldwin’s intellectual worldview that bristles with friction and ideas.

One of the earliest surviving works of African-American filmmaking, Oscar Micheaux’s remarkable drama offers a vivid tapestry of the intricacies of the Black experience. A pioneering independent director, Micheaux’s mesmerizing vision acts as a gut-punching indictment of systemic racism in America.

In this seductively twisted, modern romantic thriller, obsession is taken to wondrous and vertiginous extremes. Without a doubt one of the most electrifying minds working in cinema today, Park Chan-wook won the Best Director award at Cannes for his sumptuous, Hitchcockian masterwork.

Temptation knocks at commitment’s door with sounds of men, fire, and dancing in this heady early work from Julie Dash. Dynamic use of montage contrasts an ascetic life with the seductive pleasures of our persistent flesh, as the titular sister narrates her dilemma in mesmerizing, poetic voice-over.

Whisking Africa into France with vigorous song and dance, A Dessert for Constance balances the sweet and sour of the immigrant experience. Brightening the bitterness of poverty and colonial paternalism, the secret ingredient of this uplifting film is zingy joy in everything, especially friendship.

Alice Diop colors in the blind spots of art history with this thoughtful short starring Kayije Kagame (Saint Omer). Countering clichés and absences in Black portraiture with the joys of real life, Fragments for Venus leaves behind Old Masters to widen the frame on where we find aesthetic pleasure.

Fifteen years before she won the Golden Bear for Dahomey, Mati Diop began her career with an atmospheric tale of treacherous voyages and lives risked to the ocean. Flickering with the mercurial hopes of Senegalese youth, Atlantics later inspired her ghostly, acclaimed feature of the same name.

Before she took the Grand Prix at Cannes for All We Imagine As Light, Payal Kapadia crafted a poetic, thought-provoking chronicle of student unrest amid the chaos of Modi’s India. Aching with the urgency of revolution, this romantic, epistolary documentary is a flickering love letter to cinema.

Calling the shots on the first feature ever directed by a Palestinian woman, Annemarie Jacir is nothing short of a pioneer in Arab cinema. This sophomore feature was Palestine’s official entry for the 2012 Oscars®: a delicate coming-of-age drama, and an insightful study of absence, exile, and war.

A classic of African cinema, Ivory Coast filmmaker Roger Gnoan M’Bala came to international attention for this enticing, subversive social satire. Scathing in its comedy, In the Name of Christ takes aim at the theatre and—even more ambitiously—the colonial enterprise of religion in West Africa.