Director Kelly Reichardt is known for her focus on society’s outsiders. She doesn’t romanticize the marginal figures she portrays but shows them in all their flaws and contradictions. In her new film The Mastermind, J.B. Mooney, an outsider who initially wins the audience’s sympathy, becomes a criminal who doesn’t shy away from violence. What begins as a humorous rebellion against the dull bourgeois life of the 1970s soon turns into a story of fear, overreach, and downfall. In the end, he finds himself in prison, but not for the crime he actually committed.

The art heist carried out by J.B. Mooney and his partners is set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War protests – events that seem to leave the protagonist unmoved, until he realizes he can benefit from them.

The Mastermind is a film about the romanticized fantasy of the gangster dream and a critique of the protagonist’s uncompromising individualism, without condescension.

Based on true events, the film tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl who fights with all her might to reclaim her voice in a sea of silence.

The sound of falling is unsettling — sudden, inevitable, and hard to ignore. Much like this film, it lingers with a sense of unease and melancholy. Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski unfolds across four timelines spanning one hundred years, all connected by a single farm in the Altmark region of Germany. The lives of the people who inhabit this place, with a particular focus on the women, are told through interwoven strands of time and memory.
With striking set design and costumes, the characters are brought to life in their full complexity and uniqueness, evoking a strong yet uneasy sense of nostalgia. The inhabitants are deeply marked by the different eras they happen to live in, while the women in particular must endure the intrusiveness and oppression of the men on the small farm. Camera angles and, at times, unsettling editing amplify the emotions of the different characters, while visual effects like lens flares and sweeping camera movements occasionally overwhelm, while still contributing to the density of the films entangled narrative.

Recurring elements across the different time periods strengthen the sense of interconnection, while also highlighting the weight of inherited trauma that threads through generations.

Already awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes, Sound of Falling stands as a haunting meditation on history, memory and the enduring impact of time.

A few days after the withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2021, director Ibrahim Nash’at arrived in Kabul, “with only an Afghan translator and a camera.” Though under constant surveillance, Nash’at had been granted access to follow the day-in day-out of two selected Taliban officials at the newly occupied Hollywoodgate complex in Kabul. 

“I came to see in whose hands this country was left in.” 

It becomes obvious that the Taliban are aware of the power of images, restricting what is allowed to be filmed by Nash’at and what is off-limits. Still, the final edit of Hollywoodgate, resulting from two hundred and twenty hours of raw documentary footage, is far from the propaganda movie the Taliban had envisioned when they first let the man with the camera into the country they claim as their own.  

With all this complexity, Hollywoodgate gives us a glimpse into how the Taliban think and conduct their days, while also revealing the impulsive violence with which they execute their power. It’s a violence that is not only – and not necessarily – loud, but whose destructive power also lies in the quiet moments: in their conversations, their off-hand comments, their laughter, in every action and choice they act upon. 

“I was kept away from the daily suffering of the Afghans, yet I feel it everywhere I go.”

However, Nash’at also wants us to remember that the people in Afghanistan are not only facing the violence of the Taliban but also the abandonment of those that spent the last twenty years making promises of betterment to them. It’s estimated that 7.1 billion dollars worth of advanced equipment was left behind by US forces – from army rifles, to helicopters and fighter jets. 

Their daily suffering is being passed on and transforms; as easily as newly seized AK-47’s are passed on from one pair of hands to the other. 

What we see in Hollywoodgate is just what Nash’at saw:

“The obscene power and the pain that it causes.”