The 45th edition of New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase of work from emerging filmmakers from around the world, jointly presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, opens on March 16. The simple format of the festival over its decades-long run hasn’t changed: the program serves as an introduction to new filmmakers and films, but “new” is a loose category here, as not all the films are debuts and some, if you’re counting previous festival exposure, are almost a year old. But the work is all distinctive, the kind of films that, if they do manage to make a run on the festival circuit, might get buried within a sidebar at Locarno, Berlin, or Rotterdam, under the shadow of the main competition and the ever-present glitzy premieres.The films presented at ND/NF often challenge easy definitions of what film is or what it should be. “Eldorado XXI,” for example, one of my favorite films from the festival, is also one of the most provocative. The documentary, directed by Salomé Lamas, presents itself as an ethnographic document of La Rinconada, a mining town in the Peruvian Andes. But from its almost hour-long opening shot of hundreds of miners moving up a muddy path through a static composition, often only illuminated by the flashlights attached to their helmets, it’s clear that the film is as interested in sensation as it is information. Before we even know where we are — an interview, presented in voice-over, begins to introduce the location — we can feel the difficulty of the place. The film later moves into something that resembles a traditional documentary, but everything you need to know is in that first patience-testing shot: there’s a reason the characters move from the bottom of the frame to the top, as if attempting to climb out of a hole.In terms of films that provoke and perplex at this festival, however, an hour-long shot is tame. Chinese director Bi Gan’s “Kaili Blues,” for example, is a dream-puzzle about a small-town doctor searching for his half-brother’s son, who might have been sold to a watchmaker. A road film on its surface, it’s anchored by bits of poetic narration and a series of different formal strategies that throw the viewer off its tail like a game of cat-and-mouse. The poems are written by Gan, from his book “Roadside Picnic,” which brings to mind the 1971 science-fiction novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky of the same name and adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky into “Stalker,” another mind-bending road movie that exists within its own sense of time and place. Equally as mystifying is Zhang Hanyi’s “Life After Life,” a film of ghosts and quiet emotions, set against literal and figurative empty spaces.In many ways both films are blank slates, as open to interpretation as possible. What they withhold in terms of narrative focus is supplanted by emotion and curiosity, with room for the viewer to roam within the film’s fading outline. Other work at New Directors/New Films uses more solid and recognizable genre signposts as a means to the same end. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Happy Hour,” at over five hours, is the longest film at the festival but also the most engaging in its novelistic depth. The story of four female friends navigating marriage, work, and their nagging lack of freedom, it employs an instantly familiar structure that it then expands further and further, until you’re so deep in the story that there’s no way you’re leaving. It reminded me of the way the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang, in films like “A Brighter Summer Day” (1991) and “Yi Yi” (2000) used time — each film reaches near three hours — to heighten emotion and break the distance between viewer and character. Different in pretty much every way, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s visually stunning “Evolution,” about a young boy who lives on a strange island where all the mothers (no fathers are present) gather at night for strange rituals on the beach and send the children to a hospital for mysterious injections, uses elements from science fiction and horror to spin its sensitive tale of innocence lost. In the same manner, Babak Anvari’s “Under the Shadow,” the opening night film of the festival, uses psychological terror to tell its story of the fear of life during wartime, with a mother in Tehran who is slowly convinced her young daughter is haunted by hostile ghosts after her husband leaves to serve in the army.Children, in various ways, dominate much of the work at New Directors/New Films. A theme that also circles these films is that of youth, and moving (or refusing to move) out of it. Ted Fendt’s “Short Stay,” a deadpan comedy about arrested development and stifled emotions, plays nicely up against Kris Avedisian’s “Donald Cried,” about a man coming back to his hometown and having to deal with his reckless past and the friends he left behind. There is also, of course, “Weiner,” a vérité portrait of dick-pic politician Anthony Weiner during his 2013 mayoral campaign in New York City. A perpetual man-child, clueless in a way that is both laughable and sad, he refuses to let go of the past and move forward. He must clutch to whatever he can, perhaps for fear of losing it, but also out of mindless pride and deeply wound complexes that would give a therapist a heart attack.Anna Rose Holmer’s “The Fits,” a delightfully enigmatic film about a young girl’s transition out of childhood and the anxiety around growing up, deals with some of these issues as well, but with a level of visual and narrative confidence that is missing from some of the other work. The film tells the story of 11-year-old Toni, who boxes with her older brother and his friends at the school gym and becomes enchanted by the local dance team. The group’s choreographed movements awaken emotions and heighten fears — dancers break into convulsive “fits” that can’t be explained — and the film is rendered inside intimate compositions that move with rhythmic precision. Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson,” a more directly personal and self-reflexive film, also deals with these themes but in a more tangential way. Johnson is a camera operator who has worked with Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Barbara Kopple, and many others, and “Cameraperson” is composed, mostly, of footage from their films. What we’re seeing is a compilation of what she has seen, and heard, and felt, including footage she shot of her personal life: Johnson films her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, and her children as they visit her childhood home. These moments are put up against scenes from her travels around the world shooting different films — Bosnia, Nigeria, Yemen — and spark a desire to reexamine and reclaim the past, to work through the emotions of the inevitable shifts and changes one encounters in life, and the process of time.
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