Cairo Streets. 2025. France. Directed by Abdellah Taïa. DCP. In Arabic, French; English and French subtitles. 19 min.
Hysterical Fit of Laughter. 2025. Serbia/Croatia. Written and directed by Matija Gluščević and Dušan Zorić. With Snježana Sinovčić-Šiškov, Momir Milošević, Radivoj Knežević. DCP. In Serbian, Croatian; English subtitles. 15 min.
Morning Circle. 2025. Canada/United Arab Emirates. Directed by Basma Al-Sharif. DCP. In Arabic, Armenian, German; English subtitles. 20 min.
How to Shoot a Ghost. 2025. USA/Greece. Directed by Charlie Kaufman. Screenplay by Eva H.D. With Jessie Buckley, Josef Akiki. DCP. 27 min.
Set in Cairo, Belgrade, Athens, and Berlin, these four stories showcase the imagination of filmmakers working in portrait miniature. In Abdellah Taïa’s Cairo Streets, the Moroccan author and director (whose Salvation Army was featured in New Directors/New Films 2014) goes in search of a lost lover in the Egyptian capital, and along the way encounters the great filmmaker Youssef Chahine. In Hysterical Fit of Laughter by Dušan Zorić and Matija Gluščević (Have You Seen This Woman?, New Directors/New Films 2025), when a mild-mannered, middle-aged doctor turns out to be a dominatrix behind closed doors, her son is none too pleased. Basma alSharif’s Morning Circle is a triptych that furthers the Palestinian artist and filmmaker’s ambitious experiments in elliptical storytelling (so vividly demonstrated in Doc Fortnight 2020), as immigrant parents and children negotiate an uneasy new life in Berlin. And in their latest collaboration How to Shoot a Ghost, Charlie Kaufman, the writer-director of Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Eva H.D., the Canadian-born poet and translator of Constantine P. Cavafy and Vassilis Alexakis, use Athens, a city haunted by its tragic past, as the backdrop for a ghost story about two dead souls (Jesse Buckley and Josef Akiki) who look back on their past lives to find some sort of enduring meaning.
Program approx. 81 min.