AFI Fest 2025
Los Angeles, California • October 22-26, 2025
by Lily and Generoso Fierro
For us, no fall is complete without reviewing the wildly eclectic offerings of the American Film Institute’s five-day festival that annually takes over the TCL Chinese Theatres on Hollywood Boulevard.
Every October, for five days and nights, AFI Fest presents some of the finest shorts and features drawn from the year’s prominent film festivals and pairs them with star-studded Hollywood premieres and first-time offerings. Over the last eleven years, we have frantically caught everything that we could during the fest and presented you with our capsule reviews of our favorite watches.
This year, we carefully selected 17 feature films to watch from the over 161 films in a stellar program comprised of 7 Red Carpet Premieres, 12 Special Screenings, 14 Luminaries selections, 15 Discovery films, 20 World Cinema selections, 15 Documentaries, 6 After Dark titles, 44 Short films, and 23 films from the AFI Conservatory Showcase! As has been the case in previous years at AFI Fest, the majority of our picks this year were drawn from the Luminaries, World Cinema, Documentary, and Discovery sections. Another strategy for us, especially given the larger than ever amount of programming offered, was to avoid films that already had scheduled nationwide releases for shortly after the festival, which allowed us to conserve our time for those that most likely wouldn’t make it to US theaters until 2026.
Mixed into the offerings were 19 Best International Feature Oscar® submissions, and we are thankful that we had the chance to see several of them, including Simón Mesa Soto’s accomplished second feature, Un Poeta (A Poet), from Colombia, Igor Bezinović’s innovative hybrid-documentary, Fiume o morte! (Rijeka or death!), and Jeunes mères (Young Mothers), another in a long line of social realist masterworks from the Dardenne Brothers representing Belgium, all three of which we have reviewed for you below along with five other films that we admire, beginning with our favorite from this year’s festival.
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Pin De Fartie
dir Alejo Moguillansky / Argentina
A film of variations, Pin de Fartie projects, stretches, and morphs the acts of viewing and storytelling inherent in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (Fin de Partie) to form a vital dialog about filmmaking itself. In the sections closest to Beckett’s play, a girl (portrayed by director Alejo Moguillansky’s daughter and regular collaborator Cleo Moguillansky) serves as a weary caretaker to a demanding blind man (Santiago Gobernori). We also watch two silent and unnamed filmmakers creating sounds and models for the film we’re actively viewing, two actors rehearsing Endgame and falling in and out of their characters and their emerging romance, a mother and son reading Endgame and aligning their reality with the fiction, and a couple living in a large garbage bin somewhere in Buenos Aires. Interspliced between these various storylines, a woman (Luciana Acuña, Moguillansky’s wife and creative partner) provides connective narration alongside a musician (Maxi Prietto) who sings the sentiments and themes of each scenario. And, to top it all off, we view glimpses of the director’s hand underlining key passages in a printed copy of Endgame. Pin de Fartie brings together literature, music, and cinema, allowing the three to share the stage of the frame and communicate with each other. From their intertwining, Moguillansky reveals the magic of film as the conduit that can incorporate each artform’s strengths to bring us to new truths. A work ever moving towards farewells, Pin de Fartie has a mournful tone for what has been and what will be lost in each of its stories and in our overall zeitgeist, but rejoices in the endurance and infinite possibilities of the moving image and encourages us to place our hope there. A work that reaffirms El Pampero Cine’s standing as one of the most significant filmmaking collectives in the world, Pin de Fartie is a culmination of Moguillansky’s innovative, spirited, and collaborative methods of cinema and perfectly represents the ethos of the collective he co-founded. We had the privilege of speaking with director Alejo Moguillansky prior to the festival, and that conversation is available here.
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Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say To You)
dir Hong Sangsoo / South Korea
When we think of Hong Sangsoo’s films, we first recall his consistent tools for filmmaking: his regular players, particularly Kim Minhee and Kwon Haehyo, alcohol (often in soju or makgeolli form), cigarettes, and an artist protagonist. In reflecting on some of our favorite films of Hong, we recognize another common device — a painfully uncomfortable, embarrassing, and awkward confrontation. In 2024’s A Traveler’s Needs, the cringing point arrives when the mother of poet In-guk histrionically questions the young man’s reasons for allowing a French stranger (Isabelle Huppert) to live with him. In 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, it appears when the painter (Kim Minhee) awakens the director (Jung Jaeyoung) from his drunken sleep and proceeds to berate him after she learns about his reputation of disingenuousness. And in Hong’s latest, What Does That Nature Say To You, a genteel drinking challenge generates one of the most tortuous outbursts we’ve ever seen in a Hong Sangsoo film. What Does That Nature Say To You captures a single day for thirty-something poet Donghwa (Ha Seongguk). It all begins innocently enough: Donghwa drives his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi) to her family home in Yeoju. He plans to drop her off and return immediately back to Seoul, but when he pulls up the driveway, Junhee’s father (Kwon Haehyo) is outside and insists that Donghwa stay for dinner. This naturally forces Donghwa to meet all of Junhee’s family for the first time, and they seize the opportunity to learn more about the boyfriend they’ve heard about for the past few years. Junhee’s sister (Park Miso) fixates on Donghwa’s esteemed attorney father and repeatedly prods to try to understand how much of his wealth has landed on Donghwa. Junhee’s father gives him a tour of the lush grounds of the family home originally built for Junhee’s grandmother, and in the process, quietly tests for Donghwa’s intentions with his daughter as well as his capacity to feel. Then, once she arrives home from work, Junhee’s mother (Cho Yunhee) makes a feast for everyone and proceeds to inquire about Donghwa’s poetry. Throughout the meal, Donghwa is gracious, complementary, respectful, and incredibly thoughtful in his comments around the mother’s poetry and the father’s landscaping talents. The parents meanwhile appear as good hosts, but in between smiles and then eventually drinks poured non-stop by Junhee’s father, they reveal their skepticism about Donghwa’s attempts to be independent, his philosophy for simple living, and his talent as a poet. After an intoxicated recitation of one of his poems and a modest criticism from Junhee’s sister, Donghwa melts down, precipitating a sequence of brutal revelations. With What Does That Nature Say To You, Hong utilizes the typical family drama trope of meeting a child’s romantic partner for the first time to provoke challenging questions about how familial structures and economic viability erode artistic inspiration and pure intentions. Donghwa may not be a good poet, but his spirit is exemplary, and watching it get challenged throughout What Does That Nature Say To You makes this one of Hong’s more tragic films to date.
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Kontinental ‘25
dir Radu Jude / Romania
In the final scene of Rossellini’s neo-realist film, Europa ‘51, the namesake and quasi-inspiration for Radu Jude’s latest feature, a grief-stricken bourgeois wife of an American businessman, Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman), now committed to a mental hospital, waves at the grateful destitute people she’s tried to help throughout her journey, and they proclaim her as a modern saint. Overwhelmed and rendered near catatonic by the unexpected suicide of her young son in the film’s first quarter, Irene’s journey in Europa ‘51 begins as a serendipitous clandestine mission outside of any faith or political agenda to help everyone she encounters as a method to compensate for a life of tone-deafness towards all outside of her elite circle. For Irene, a walk through any post-war Roman neighborhood beyond her own provides an instant opportunity for a philanthropic effort, but can she really make any difference given the scale of misery around her at that time? The same question can be asked of Kontinental ‘25’s Orsolya (in an outstanding performance from Eszter Tompa), an ethnic Hungarian court bailiff in the city of Cluj, Romania, who, like Irene, is gobsmacked from the guilt of a suicide she feels responsible for — that of a homeless man who crudely hangs himself when she gives him a moment to collect his belongings while she is carrying out her court-appointed duty of evicting him from a squat. Like Rossellini’s Irene, Orsolya at first takes refuge in her bed, but as the story of the suicide becomes more public through partisan news reports, she must also confront the onslaught of online comments from people who not only show their hatred for her actions, but also seem to relish the opportunity to slam her Hungarian background, stressing that particular divide in the country. Now inconsolable, Orsolya decides to let her family vacation without her in Greece as she roams the streets of her city, telling everyone she can find, from her mother to a priest to a former student turned bike delivery person, about her sadness. She is rudderless, and as we would expect from a Jude film, her journey is a dark and absurdly comedic one that has Orsolya taking an almost opposite path of that of Irene’s that is more endemic of our time of constant meaningless input. Lost in her misery, she helps no one in her travels, opting instead to clumsily descend towards a debaucherous rock bottom to gain some sense of clarity. In many ways, but most importantly with its use of a flawed but empathic protagonist, Kontinental ‘25 is the logical next feature for Jude, whose immensely profound and utterly enjoyable gut punch from 2023, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, also utilized a film from the past in its structure as a contrasting force to aggressively jab at the pitfalls of the Romanian version of late-stage capitalism that sees profits over the best interests of its citizens, who, like Orsolya, are uncertain of the necessary philosophy to adopt to overcome.
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Fiume o morte! (Rijeka or death!)
dir Igor Bezinović / Croatia, Italy, Slovenia
This year marks the 106th anniversary of the unparalleled absurdity that was the siege and occupation of the Adriatic port of Fiume led by the eminent Italian poet, playwright, aristocrat, and army general Gabriele D’Annunzio. Angered that the city, which once had a substantial population of ethnic Italians, would be annexed by the then newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, D’Annunzio led a force of 186 “legionaries” from Ronchi in Italy to Fiume with the initial goal of reclaiming the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. Once established in Fiume, these troops received reinforcements totalling over 2,500 men who were composed of Italian veterans of the Battles of the Isonzo and nationalists who subsequently forced the withdrawal of the Allied occupying forces there, leading to the establishment of the self-proclaimed state of the Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro, an event so audacious that it inspired the political leanings of a young Benito Mussolini. Now, as historically significant as all of this sounds on paper, a casual questioning of the current residents of Rijeka, Croatia (the former Fiume) garners only spotty recollections of this event, if any at all. Thus, in a salute to what Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” hometown director Igor Bezinović leads the people of Rijeka into recreating D’Annunzio’s invasion for his oddly entertaining, but thought-provoking hybrid documentary, Fiume o morte! Fittingly, as a method to reconstruct the event for this current era of media oversaturation to forever bind this part of the town’s history in the minds of locals, Bezinović recruited anyone willing to don the military regalia of the invading forces to play a part and opted as well to find an endless throng of bald-headed men to play the Duce himself. With our players in place, and with the ethos similar to that of D’Annunzio, who hired professional photographers and cinematographers back in 1919 to film his actions to appear more like an artistic rendezvous rather than a hard-fought military campaign, the proceeding filming by Bezinović and cinematographer Gregor Bozic matches note for note the grand splendor of the images that were once sent back to the Italian homeland, where D’Annunzio, already revered as a celebrated artist and war hero, would be lauded as a conquering ruler. These contemporary scenes filmed by Bezinović are matched with archival footage and photographs throughout Fiume o morte!, which at first feel whimsical as the locals jest while being costumed, but as the combined images segue to December of 1920, when the city’s bridges were destroyed and soldiers laid dead after the town was stormed by the Royal Italian Army, these merged scenes dramatically change the tone of the film to accentuate the fatuity of that dark moment in Rijeka’s past. That shift in tone hammers home the ultimate message inherent in Fiume o morte!: although few in Rijeka remember D’Annunzio’s occupation, elaborately staged and documented audacious acts perpetrated by a cult of personality have an eternally seductive power that survives in many figures of today.
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Jeunes mères (Young Mothers)
dirs Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne / Belgium, France
For many months before viewing Young Mothers, the newest feature from veteran social realist directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, we’ve had their work at the forefront of our minds as Émilie Dequenne, the bright star of the brothers’ Palme D’Or-winning feature from 1999, Rosetta, passed away at the age of 43 in March of this year. Dequenne deservedly picked up a Best Actress award at Cannes for her devastating performance as the titular character, the only child of an incapable alcoholic mother who ferociously scrapes out a meager existence while living in a despot trailer park. Rosetta, like many of the protagonists of the Dardennes’ films, is thrust into a role that would hobble many adults twice her age while still only a child herself. A similar predicament can be said of the women at the center of Young Mothers: Jessica (Babette Verbeek), Perla (Lucie Laruelle), Julia (Elsa Houben), and Ariane (Janaïna Halloy), an in-need group of teens with dramatically different backgrounds who have recently given birth or are expecting to and who all reside in a publicly funded center in the Belgian city of Liège that offers them forms of assistance as they transition into parenthood or opt to offer their children up for adoption. Visually structured to feel like a hybrid documentary, our protagonists were actually portrayed by non-professional actresses who triumph when they convey their emotional makeups every time the focus shifts to their plights in this rare ensemble piece from the Dardennes, who have, over their long careers, normally opted to concentrate their stories on one or two central characters. In fact, given the subject matter of Young Mothers, it is near impossible not to think of the brothers’ film from twenty years ago, L’Enfant, which centers on a young couple who are ill-prepared to raise a child and consequently make criminal decisions to attempt to improve their situation. But unlike the desperate nature and pace of L’Enfant and Rosetta, Young Mothers distinguishes itself in its ability to absorb the hard times experienced by its central characters through a complete picture of each of their struggles in conjunction with the support system of the group home that allows each of them to understand the options for their futures with some clarity. Although the outcome is far from a happy ending, this affecting and poignant feature presents a compelling positive shift in perspective for the Dardennes, who here illuminate a pathway for their characters that stems more from individual growth facilitated by community support and less from the survival instincts needed to overcome daily hardships that marked the predominance of their early work.
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Un Poeta (A Poet)
dir. Simón Mesa Soto / Colombia, Germany, Sweden
What a coincidence that the poet’s struggle lies at the heart of two of our favorite films from this year’s AFI Fest. And yet, it’s not a surprise in a time when expressive language, written for the mysterious and often indescribable moments and feelings of human existence, is declining, replaced by words generated from a massive corpora of all things online or, more frightfully, by a reductive language that seeks optimal superficial reaction with the fewest words and concepts. In Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) has been battling for an extended period against the forces that led to our current state of language and unfortunately has continued to fail. Once a young and award-winning poet and notable professor, Oscar now spends his days and nights as a drunkard who lives at home with his elderly mother. He consistently avoids working on his next book and takes any opportunity he can to espouse the virtues of poetry and lionize his hero, the tragic poet José Asunción Silva. A constant disappointment and embarrassment to his family and colleagues, Oscar learns about his daughter’s upcoming college plans and consequent financial needs and wants to contribute, even though he’s unequipped to do much. So with the help of his sister, he begrudgingly takes a job as a high school teacher. During one of Oscar’s inebriated lectures attempting to explain poetry to his uninterested pupils, the students point out Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) as the sole young poet in the class, and he’s moved by the natural talent and earnestness in her writings and drawings. Oscar attempts to mentor Yurlady and convinces his poet colleagues to accept her into their poetry school. And for the first time in many years, the community of poets who have long seen Oscar as a wayward stepchild are delighted by one of his actions. But quickly their motivations misalign with Oscar’s: instead of encouraging Yurlady to build on her voice, they immediately laser in on the political value of Yurlady, who comes from a very poor family, and put in place the machinations to create a star sociopolitical poet perfect for the appetite of European donors and sponsors. Though a satire of the commoditization and debasement of art as well as the suffering for art, A Poet maintains an impressive humanity carried by the man portraying Oscar, Ubeimar Rios, a non-professional actor who is actually a high school philosophy teacher in real life. Rios soaks the delusional high poet Oscar with electric feeling and lures us into Oscar’s self-aggrandizement, self-loathing, and self-pity without alienating the viewer. Undoubtedly, Oscar is frustrating, but Rios’s performance along with Simón Mesa Soto’s direction and script instill a peculiar kind of nobility and innocence in a character who, despite all of the disappointing elements of life, art, and society, continues to seek the beauty of unadulterated poetry rooted in the sanctity of words, unfeigned emotion, and sober self-examination.
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Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen (Phantoms of July)
dir Julian Radlmaier / Germany
How and why certain film titles receive entirely new names when they cross the Atlantic completely perplexes us. One case we frequently cite is Wim Wenders’s Im Lauf der Zeit: the title’s direct translation is something along the lines of “as time goes by,” but in the US, the film became known as Kings of the Road. We felt similarly confounded when we learned that Julian Radlmaier’s Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen translates directly to “longing in Sangerhausen,” an apt title given its examination through four different stories set in the eastern German town of Sangerhausen, all unified by the working person’s desire for an unspecified better life, a commonality that triumphs over time, nationality, and personal experience. However, in arriving to American audiences, the title somehow became Phantoms of July, which captures the slightly fantastical tone of the film, but completely erases the importance of the setting and the force that motivates the film’s characters. Please forgive us for the extended complaint, and let’s put aside concerns about the name because Phantoms of July ruminates on the isolation and yearning of workers with an impressive acuity and refreshing gentleness that deserves attention in this year’s AFI Fest wrap up. The film opens in the late 1700s in the home of the German aristocrat and famed romantic poet, Novalis, the author of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the story which introduced the blue flower as a symbol of longing for the Romantic movement. Instead of focusing on Novalis, Radlmaier points our attention to Novalis’s housemaid Lotte, who finds a strangely beautiful blue stone in a field one morning while fetching milk. Lotte later meets a vagabond performer who dreams of travelling to France, for he’s heard, “They cut off the necks of princes there. All people are now equal and live freely like birds.” Inspired by such a place, Lotte and the performer take a horse from Novalis and try to escape to the freer land, but don’t get there. Fast forward to the Sangerhausen of the 21st century where Ursula, Neda, and Sungnam strive to make a living. Ursula, a daughter of the town whose family has lived in the area for too many generations to count, works as an off-hours cleaner for a furniture depot and as a waitress for the cafe in the Sangerhausen’s famous rose gardens. Neda, an Iranian refugee, travels around the town with her arm in a sling from an unknown injury and records sterile and insincere commentary of the sights. A former filmmaker who studied with Iran’s greatest directors, she’s attempting to build a career as a travel influencer and struggling to make ends meet. And in the town square, Sungnam, donning a neck brace, offers tours in an aging powder blue van daily without any takers. The three don’t have any reason to interact with each other, but elements from their working lives coincidentally propel them towards each other and towards Sangerhausen’s history. Phantoms of July excels in understanding how class and status as immigrants create separations between people and how such divides can be breeding grounds for cruelty but also unity without overstating its purpose and intention. In fact, Phantoms of July has a light touch that reveals a mutual hope between its characters that enables them to have empathy for each other, an understanding that we desperately need now.
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The Ozu Diaries
dir Daniel Raim / USA
I (Generoso) owe an almost four-decades-overdue thanks to the clerk of a now defunct art video store off of South Street in Philadelphia who insisted that I couldn’t leave his shop without renting Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story. As a young cineaste who had only seen a few essential films by Kurosawa up to that point, including an unplanned screening of Ran during a rainstorm that I hold as a pivotal point in my development, I outwardly longed to view more Japanese cinema, which inspired the aforementioned rental challenge from the employee at the video store, who thankfully was always beyond eager to make an on-point recommendation. My subsequent viewing of Ozu’s film, despite the less-than-ideal quality of the VHS tape and my small television screen, affected me in a way that few films had, which led me to hunt for as many of Ozu’s other works that I could find on video at that time in the 1980s and to read whatever books and articles I could to help me understand why these films impacted me so profoundly. A trip to the downtown central library put Donald Petrie’s book, Ozu: His Life and Films, in my hands, and although I have read multiple pieces since, I am forever interested in delving deeper into Ozu’s biographical history and creative process. Fortunately, back in 2018 and 2019, director Daniel Raim, who clearly shares a similar passion for Ozu, created two short films that examined specific aspects of the creative underpinnings of the director: The Search for Ozu and Ozu and Noda. The former film delves into the inspirations and techniques that went into the visual composition of Ozu’s films, and the latter shorter piece takes a look at Ozu’s personal relationship and screenwriting partnership with Kogo Noda, which resulted in twenty-seven films over a thirty-five year period that ended with Ozu’s death in 1963. For his latest full-length documentary, The Ozu Diaries, Raim uses unprecedented access to Ozu’s personal journals to create a more intimate portrait of the director that spans from his earliest memories of his parents, through his experiences as a young filmmaker and a combat soldier, and into to his most private thoughts as a veteran director looking at his cinematic collaborators and close friends. Structurally, apart from an early scene in The Ozu Diaries where Ozu elucidates on his father’s death, Raim’s film follows a linear timeline and uses voiceovers that draw directly from Ozu’s writings, which are placed over an astonishing array of corresponding visuals of photos and segments from Ozu’s films that effectively draw you into Ozu’s mindset, creating a somber tone for the documentary, disrupted only by spliced in testimonies to Ozu from contemporary filmmakers, which do more to distract than add to the overall impact of the piece. Despite the inclusion of these talking heads, The Ozu Diaries successfully builds on Raim’s earlier shorts on Ozu while accomplishing its goal of offering insight into the filmmaker’s life to give any admirer of the director a deeper understanding of the possible motivations and inspirations behind the perspicacious and affecting choices that he made for the screen.
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All films were screened at AFI Fest 2025. We offer our thanks and congratulations to the staff and volunteers of AFI Fest for another excellent year of cinema and conversations, and we send a special thanks as always to Johanna Calderón-Dakin, Senior Publicity Associate for AFI Fest, who made our coverage possible.
Featured photo of Guest Artistic Director Guillermo del Toro at AFI FEST 2025 courtesy of AFI Fest.
https://fest.afi.com
