New Directors/New Films 2026 Preview: STRANGE RIVER, TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS, and More

Strange River - Jaume Claret Muxart

We get a first glimpse of 16-year-old Dídac (Jan Monter), resembling a St. Sebastian in some Renaissance painting, bicycling in the forest, along with his family, as he looks straight at the camera. Dad, mom, and his two younger brothers Biel and Guiu, are on a bicycle trip along the Danube river, camping along the way.

Mom and Dad are fully aware that it will be the last trip with Dídac, who is growing up fast. There's an obvious tension between him and Biel, who is a couple of years younger, who needs to share a tent with him. As with any family trips, there is some usual annoying family stuff they deal withL arguments on the directions and following the map, sibling rivalries, sleeping arrangements, and so forth.

Dídac's parents are very supportive in acknowledging Dídac's homosexuality, but they are not perfect. They argue about small things and engage in extramarital affairs.

As they take a break and swim in the river, Dídac witnesses a naked man swimming by them. Is it his imagination or a real person?

Spanish director Jaume Claret Muxart's feature debut, Strange River, is both a coming of age story told like a fairytale and an astute observation of family dynamics. With its clear-eyed gay protagonist, it gracefully skirts around the graphic nature of teen desires and instead concentrates on the purity of longing for someone, and the possibilities of finding love anywhere, real or imagined.

The theme of rivers, connecting all the tributaries into one stream, as a metaphor for human relationships is beautifully and tenderly realized in Strange River.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers - Miyake Sho

Director Miyake Sho has been steadily making films about delicate human connections over the years. Adapting from short manga stories (A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo) by cult cartoonist Tsuge Yoshiharu, who passed away this year, Two Seasons, Two Stranger is a strange and wonderful diptych about a screenwriter (played by Korean actress Shim Eunkyung) and her stories as she travels throughout Japan.

As she writes, we get to see the film, which is about two shy young people (Kawai Yuumi and Takada Mansaku) on their summer vacation, meeting on the beach and their brief friendship. The young man does most of the talking and reveals his background, while the pensive young woman listens. It culminates in them swimming in the ocean together on a rainy day.

Then the story pivots to the writer taking the train to a snowy countryside on a whim. She can't find lodging since she didn't book anything. Over the mountain, she finds an isolated quaint inn, run by a grunt who doesn't reveal anything about his private life, such as, why he is alone running the inn, which is traditionally done as a family business. On his part, after hearing that she is a screenwriter for movies and TV shows, he suggests she write about his inn, hoping for more business.

Getting bored being snowed in, the innkeeper suggests checking out a large ornamental carp pond his neighbor owns in the middle of the night. Then he proceeds to steal a carp despite the protest from the writer. But in fact, this is the most fun she has had in a long time.

Miyake goes on sketching out the human connections among strangers in a gentle, playful, abstract way, blurring both fiction and real life/creator and its creations.

Next Life - Tenjin Phuntsog

Tenjin Phuntsog's feature debut, Next Life, is a quiet contemplation on death, statelessness and rebirth. It starts with the elderly father of the family being examined by a traditional Tibetan doctor.

Western medicine couldn't figure out what's wrong with him. Living in California, far away from home, affects his condition, the doctor tells him, describing it as a deep wound in his heart that will kill him. Resigned to his fate, the family prepares for the impending passing.

Shot minimalistically with a handful of characters and setting, Phuntsog somberly goes about contemplating the impermanence of human life and the rituals we keep for the dead and remembrance. As a family, they cope with living in exile in California with family karaoke sessions and periodic walks in nature. They indulge themselves with a VR setup, walking in a tranquil field that resembles their homeland.

As the son is trying to arrange his ailing father's wish to visit Tibet, he encounters Chinese bureaucracy issuing him a visa -- because Tibet is still under Chinese rule. On the father's deathbed, they are told by Tibetan monks that he will be reborn in Tibet as a bird. It's intended as consolation for the remaining family in their mourning.

All is unhurriedly and quietly observed like a documentary in Next Life. The human pulse sounds like a river running. The repeated prayers have their own rhythm. Watching the film, far apart from Western storytelling tradition, is a quite unique experience.

Fantasy - Isabel Pagliai

Prompted by a chance encounter, director Isabel Pagliai and her teen subject Louise Morel decided to make a film, a documentary on Morel's daily lives from her diary entries. But as the film goes along, it becomes, well, a fantasy of sorts, delving deeply and intimately into the inner life of a teenage girl.

Armed with a handycam, Louis documents the dark interior of her house, singing, taking baths, scrolling on her phone, playing with her calico cat and pining for someone named Antoine. Louise has a ferocity of young Sandrine Bonnaire in A Nous Amours, as she delves guilessly into her sexuality and pours out her inner thoughts.

We only find out her name later in the film, just because a stranger, Thomas (Thomas Ducasse), who is reading her diary in the beginning of the film, manifests himself at night in the forest, to be with Louise. Is this a fantasy of Louise or Thomas? Or is it a mutual one? Nights in the forest go by as they engage in conversations by the stream.

Fantasy is a shapeless, formless exploration of the inner life of a teenager. And Pagliai makes it into a uniquely enthralling cinematic experience.

Memory - Vladlena Sandu

Vladlena Sandu's searing wartime film memoir, dedicated to the children of war, is filled with vivid and unforgettable images. The vibrant colors, mise-en-scene and poetic images immediately remind you of the work of Parajanov and Tarkovsky. Sandu makes a point of the effects of growing up in war and violence and condemns the culture of child soldiers and cycle of violence.

It tells the story of young Vladlena (played by (Selima Agamirzaeva, then Amina Taisumova, and later by director herself) moving to Grozny, Chechenia, from Cremia, Ukraine, her birth place, after her artist parents divorce. There she endures a tyrannical grandfather, who was a WWII vet and a strict Lenin devotee.

But it's the 80s. When the USSR dissolves, there are changes, and the decade long Russo-Chechen war is coming. Being Russian/Ukrainian, Vladlena's family find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Then the tanks roll in, and the bombardment of Grozny begins. And Vladlena witnesses unspeakable violence and death. Memory is all told in a mix of symbolic imagery, newsreel footage, home videos and photo collages.

As Sandu struggles with her grandfather's legacy, her father's drug addiction and her mother's sacrifice, she paints a truly human experience in the sweeping current of not-so-distant history. Memory is a remarkable debut feature and a crowning cinematic achievement.