In March, I attended the US premiere of director Pete Ohs and writer Jeremy O. Harris’s Erupcja at SXSW. It stars Charli XCX as the wayward heroine Bethany, who gets stranded in Warsaw, Poland with her smitten boyfriend as a volcano is about to erupt. A month later, I returned to those nebulous feelings and finally had a proper conversation with the director. Ohs opened up about his process, rooted in intuition, presence, and a willingness to follow coincidence wherever it leads. Harris, sharp and electric, joined in as well, infusing the interview with the wit and prose that characterize the film. 

I first met director Ben Mullinkosson when I interviewed him for The Last Year of Darkness (2023), his intimate, fluorescent documentary about the underground club scene in Chengdu, China—my hometown. He has always struck me as someone who meets life where it is, with equal parts determination and whimsy.

In director Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend (2025), a ginkgo tree becomes both witness and participant in a century-spanning triptych unfolding at a university in Marburg, Germany. 

Weiting Liu interviews German director Christian Petzold on the topic of his latest feature, Miroirs No. 3.

Julian Schnabel’s empathy is melancholic and metatextual: he invites us to experience the world as his subjects once experienced it, to sense the nearness of those they loved, and to relive the delicate joys that sustained them. It is through this lineage of shared visions and refracted selves that In the Hand of Dante culminates, unfurling from the canonical poet’s inner reveries into a sweeping mythos.

Using her characteristically realist approaches, Moselle, alongside Harden, made The Black Sea on location in a small coastal town in Bulgaria, where they recruited locals to play themselves in the film. Harden also plays its protagonist Khalid, a Brownsville slacker who gets into a foreign fish-out-of-water crisis and embarks on an eventful journey of self-discovery far away from home.

Wilson turns an intimate, in-depth lens onto seven New York psychics this time around. Switching back and forth between the consulting sessions and their private home lives, the film has one clear throughline: psychic reading as mutual therapy between the psychics and their clients with shared grief and struggles.