Best Films 2022

El sembrador de estrellas (The Sower of Stars, Lois Patiño, 2022)

Tokyo. The city as apparition. Leaving trains, boats and nighttime lights. The souls of the living questioning, contemplating and awaiting their deaths.

Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodovar, 2021)

Two women connected by chance. Their lives, their relationships, their children growing apart and together with intertwining ties. The unreconcilable past of of men’s cruelty and tragedy bringing the threads of history – real, fictional, personal, political – together like a blood knot.

Mother Lode (Matteo Tortone, 2021)

Neo Realism becomes Neo Surrealism. La Rinconada, mining town high in the Andes, is where the story of Jose collides with the absurdities, horrors and horrific wonders of exploitative – of the Earth and of people – capitalism.

After Yang (Kogonada, 2021)

Being defined by memory. Memory defined by recording and documentation. Did memory exist before movies? Life and loving transcending beyond it all.

La ciudad oculta (The Hidden City, Víctor Moreno, 2018)

Madrid. A city symphony of what lies beneath it. Seeming endless tunnels. Workers silent and diligent doing unexplained tasks. Animals surviving in the darkness. A vivid expression of Robert Smithson’s idea of what a true underground cinema could be.

Alegrías Riojanas (Velasco Broca, 2022)

If you kill a priest at the beginning of a movie… A journey into the afterlife full of devils, medieval grotesqueries, retro-futuristic aliens and other monsters from the sleep of reason.

50 (o Dos ballenas se encuentran en la playa (50 or Two Whales Meet on the Beach, Jorge Cuchi, 2020)

Heaven is a shoreline littered with beached whales. A love story of manipulation, sex, murder and suicide. Death making an impossible love transcendent.

Nossa Senhora da Loja do Chinês (Our Lady of the Chinese Shop, Ery Claver, 2022)

A house weeps because of the grief within it. A man searches for a lost dog he will never find. A plastic Virgin Mary becomes a locus for stories of exploitation, faith, sorrow and anger that crisscross the streets, houses, shops and unfinished monuments of Luanda.

Tales of the Purple House (Abbas Fahdel, 2022)

The years of pandemic lockdown in Lebanon. The new routines of life. The waves of worldwide political turmoil. The tragedy of the Beirut explosion. Hope against hopelessness. And cats!