by Tim Gordon
This category highlights five exceptional films that have screened at other Festivals over the past year. The Eight Mountains (Cannes Film Festival) and Squaring the Circle (Telluride Film Festival) are among the selections of this year’s Spotlight section.
Joyland
As the Ranas, a happily patriarchal joint family, yearn for the birth of a baby boy to continue the family line, their youngest son secretly joins an erotic dance theater and falls for an ambitious trans starlet. Their impossible love story illuminates the entire family’s desire for a sexual rebellion.
L’Immensità
Clara has relocated to Rome with Felice and their three children. From their new apartment, Clara sees a city in transition: an old society washed away by an emerging middle class. The paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, but expectations around family, desire, and gender remain traditional as ever.
Other People’s Children
Rachel is 40 years old with no children. She loves her life: her high school students, her friends, and her guitar lessons. When she falls in love with Ali, she becomes attached to Leila, his 4-year-old daughter. She loves her like her own, but to love other people’s children is risky.
Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
An inside look at the studio responsible for some of the most iconic and recognizable album covers of all time. From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon to Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, the studio ruled the ’70s.
The Eight Mountains
Pietro spends his childhood summers in the same secluded Italian mountain village where Bruno was raised, in which they form a decades-long friendship. Over the years, their paths diverge as Bruno remains faithful to the mountain while Pietro comes and goes from the city.