Programmers' Picks: Martin Schwartz on SIFF 2025
The Safe House
Lionel Baier has the gift of a light touch with serious material, and this film, with its nods to cultural touchstones of 1960s Paris, its jazz score, and its extremely stylish filmmaking, oozes charm while making a serious argument about history, memory, and movies.
Riefenstahl
Didn’t Mick Jagger say once that Triumph of the Will, by Hitler and Goebbels’ house director, was his favorite movie? Here are all the reasons that’s problematic, and also all the reasons it’s plausible.
John Cranko
Have you wept at any ballet recently? It’s your time. John Cranko is a sorely needed reminder that humans do occasionally make beautiful things.
Hanami
The dry, rocky, sunny, breezy Atlantic nation of Cape Verde meets the mind of a child and a cinematic vision with a sense for magic. Gorgeous colors and textures: an ancient woman’s face, the light from a flickering lantern. I can’t wait to see this on the big screen.
Moon
Starts out with a punch to the face, literally, inside a women’s MMA bout, then shifts to Jordan, where the fighter goes to train three wealthy, cloistered young women. As in Sonne (SIFF 2023), Ayub, a protegée of Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl, gives an uppercut to Western ignorance of the reality of girls’ lives in the Arab world.
Under the Volcano
What if you’re on vacation in Spain and your country gets invaded? Ruthlessly contemporary: middle-class family vacation cringe meets horrific geopolitical events.
