NYFF 64: Beatrice Gibson's "At Night" is a dreamy exploration of womanhood

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

There’s nothing like writing about the premier selections of the New York Film Festival... at night. Speaking of, let’s talk about Beatrice Gibson’s debut feature At Night, a delicate, hypnotic city symphony that premiered to great reviews at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, where she won the Best Emerging Director Award, before being programmed into NYFF's Currents program. At Night stars Gibson as a filmmaker named B who’s scouting locations in Paris for an upcoming project. Being so far from her partner and her child has made her melancholic.

These explorations lead her to encountering former friend and artistic collaborator Didi (Diocuda Diaoune), a Black immigrant and single mother trying to make ends meet while living in social housing. Rather than dichotomizing their experiences, At Night frames their duet as part of a larger, porous pursuit for commonality among women, especially those who make up the city’s night life. The film’s attention sprawls to encompass six other figures of different backgrounds and occupations to be its stewards, artists and poets and sex workers and laborers...

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NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Forget spectacle, forget box office, forget IP and star power. Digger? I hardly know her! The biggest, most epic movie of the year is Julia Loktev’s six-hour documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile, a continuation of last year’s Part I, subtitled Last Air in Moscow. That film followed roughly a dozen journalists, most of them women, at the independent reporting outfit known as TV Rain. These folks had already spent years operating as “undesirables” or “foreign agents” (ie, folks not mindlessly repeating government propaganda), and worked to undermine the dictums coming from the Kremlin despite constant surveillance and the imprisonment of several colleagues. Last Air in Moscow concluded with a huge chunk of TV Rain’s reporters fleeing Russia following the start of their invasion into Ukraine in February 2022.

The military operation led Putin’s government to immediately crack down on independent media, meaning these journalists had to get the fuck out of dodge or risk being jailed. Last Air in Moscow filmed across a span of several months in 2021-2022, and Exile takes up right where that film left off, seeing those same faces (and a few new ones) all the way to March 2026...

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NYFF 64: Currents Program #4 - "The Real World" Confronts Reality Head-On

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

We’re coming to you live from the 64th New York Film Festival with the hottest ticket of the whole event: The Currents short film programs! Program #4 is cheekily subtitled “The Real World”, bringing to you four films with unique narrative and stylistic understanding to one very fair question: How many realities does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Especially at a moment in time where “reality” has become so easy to manufacture, and memories created and destroyed at a moment’s notice for no reason other than capitalist convenience, that’s an important question to ask, whether the goal is to speculate on the future or reclaim a past. There’s no easy answer, but the human creativity and inventiveness these directors bring show how rewarding it can be to wrestle with such topics...

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VOD Catch-Up: "We Are Pat" is a Fun, Intelligent Ode to Queer Dissection

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

I’m not sure when I first heard of Julia Sweeney’s breakout SNL sketch “It’s Pat!”. Joe Reid’s comprehensive article on SNL’s queer catalogue was what made me aware of it years ago. Then a young adult of less inquisitive sensitivities, I almost certainly brushed off the whole project as a reflex, the controversial legacy of Pat’s discomforted, gender-nonconformist schtick stinking as too problematic and outdated to bother engaging with. Watching it as a slightly older adult, I can’t say brushing this off was a bad move, even if my reasoning was flawed. There’s certainly a lot of material to seriously analyze - if I felt it was worth the effort. What exactly is the ultimate joke of this character? Are they worth rehabilitating under the progressive gaze of the gays, let alone any other group who feels represented by Pat, for better or worse?

Lucky for us, director Ro Haber saw plenty to discuss, and their 2025 documentary We Are Pat gives this character the intelligent, playful, communal autopsy they deserve . . . .

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