The New York Film Festival is unusual among its peers in that it does not involve a competition or the distribution of awards. Instead, it presents a wide array of films from around the world (this year, 119 films from 46 countries and regions), from both established filmmakers and up-and-coming talents, which organizers simply think deserve to be seen. Some of these have already played and won awards at other festivals, but others are being highlighted for the first time here in New York. This round-up focuses on the former: two major prize-winners from this year’s Cannes Film Festival and another that was just honored in Venice. All three are worthy of your attention.
Fjord (Cristian Mungiu)
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival—the second time Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu has received the honor—Fjord is a film designed to make you think and, in all likelihood, also make you mad. Inspired by the real-life story of the Bodnariu family, the film focuses on a conservative Christian family recently relocated from Romania to Norway, whose values are scrutinized by their more progressive new neighbors. It poses a difficult question: can you really call yourself tolerant if you immediately judge anyone whose lifestyle is different from your own?
Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan), his wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), and their five children have just moved to Lisbet’s Norwegian hometown. They dress conservatively, mandate daily prayer and Bible study, and forbid their children from having cell phones and accessing the Internet. However, this doesn’t stop the two eldest children, Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu) and Elia (Vanessa Ceban), from bonding with the rebellious girl next door, Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), who becomes utterly infatuated with Elia.
However, things take a dark turn when bus driver and Child Protection Services liaison Frida (Lisa Loven Kongsli) notices bruises on Elia’s face and back. The Gheorghiu family’s conservative, close-minded values have already aroused suspicion at school; when Emmanuel and Elia are brought in for questioning, they casually admit that, on occasion, their mother and father have slapped them. (Whether or not those slaps are the cause of the bruises on Elia’s body is one of many things that remain ambiguous throughout Fjord.)
Within hours, all five Gheorghiu children are forcefully taken from their parents, who are subjected to an intensive investigation into their values and lifestyle. What follows is an extended courtroom sequence that will no doubt remind viewers of Anatomy of a Fall, especially since, like that earlier Palme d’Or winner, Fjord never gives the question of guilt or innocence a definitive answer. The film purposefully leaves a lot to the imagination; the alleged abuse is never actually seen, only referred to, and by different people in different ways, so that you’re incapable of knowing who is actually telling the truth…if anyone is at all.
Fjord eschews close-ups for wide shots capturing the stunning Norwegian landscape and long takes that leave the viewer feeling rather uncomfortable, like a voyeur. The performances are phenomenal across the board. Stan and Reinsve, reliably excellent, portray Mihai and Lisbet as complicated characters that you find yourself empathizing with against your better judgment. But it’s Lund-Olsen who steals every scene she’s in as the irrepressible Noora; her burgeoning relationship with Elia, which beautifully depicts how two incredibly different people can still connect on a deep level, is the real heart of the film. I do wish we had seen even more from the children’s perspective, especially once they are removed to the foster homes; the second half of Fjord largely focuses on the parents’ efforts in court, and all we see from the children are Emmanuel and Elia telling their parents that they want to come home.
Naturally, Fjord has elicited some wildly divergent opinions, which was no doubt Mungiu’s intention; the film exists to play devil’s advocate, forcing us to examine our own hypocrisies and sympathize with characters we may not agree with. I don’t think the film sets out to demonize Child Protective Services or promote conservative values, as some have suggested. That is too simple a take on what is a very complex film: one that reminds us we would do well not to jump to immediate conclusions about anyone different from ourselves, even if we fundamentally disagree with them. I, for one, don’t really want to be tolerant of people who have brainwashed their seven-year-old daughter to believe homosexuality is a sin; still, I’d rather watch a film that pisses me off and makes me think than one that plays it safe and doesn’t say anything eliciting any emotion at all.
All of a Sudden (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
At first glance, a collection of letters between a philosopher and a medical anthropologist titled You and I – The Illness Suddenly Gets Worse doesn’t seem to be ideal filmmaking material. But Ryusuke Hamaguchi is no ordinary filmmaker, and his fictionalized adaptation of those letters is an extraordinary film: one that dwells on the importance of dignity and care for all, values that are too often left by the wayside in a capitalist society focused on individual gain at the expense of collective benefit.
Like Hamaguchi’s previous masterpiece, the Oscar-winning Drive My Car, All of a Sudden clocks in at over three hours; like that earlier film, the length perfectly suits the subject matter, giving us an appropriate amount of time to get to know these characters and truly care about them. The film is carried by two lovely performances that deservedly shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes: Virginie Efira as Marie-Lou, the director of a private nursing home for patients with dementia, and Tao Okamoto as Mari, a theater director suffering from terminal cancer. And while that might sound bleak, All of a Sudden is anything but; it’s one of the most hopeful films I’ve seen, in this or any year.
Marie-Lou is a devoted proponent of a caregiving technique called Humanitude that focuses on reminding the patient that the caregiver is present and narrating what they are doing so as not to startle them. It also encourages patients to stand and walk, something that many nurses at the care home think puts them at too much risk, even if it has been proven to help. It’s not the easiest or most efficient caregiving technique, but Marie-Lou believes human dignity should not be sacrificed for the sake of convenience, and that the priority of private care homes like theirs should be regaining public trust, not increasing profits.
A chance meeting on the streets of Paris leads Marie-Lou to attend a performance of Mari’s play about Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, who led the charge to abolish mental hospitals in Italy. The subject matter deeply resonates with Marie-Lou, and afterward the two women spend hours talking about their approaches to life (and death) and their experiences with each other’s cultures. Whether or not you believe their mutual attraction is romantic, it is clear these two are soulmates who were destined to meet and change each other’s lives for the better. When Mari’s cancer returns with a vengeance, leaving her with only a few months to live, Marie-Lou convinces her to move into the care home and run workshops with the residents. The workshops, focused on breathing and physical touch, including foot massage, have a positive effect not just on the residents, but the staff as well.
Efira and Okamoto are so wonderful in their roles, with such easy and natural chemistry, that they make an extended mid-film conversation about capitalism (and its inherent self-destructiveness) feel rich, interesting, and anything but dry; you feel as though you are eavesdropping on a discussion between two of the smartest and kindest people you know, desperate to join in yourself but also unwilling to break the spell being cast by their words. (That they have these conversations in both Japanese and French makes their performances all the more remarkable.) Like Fjord, the film is shot primarily in long takes, with few close-ups, yet the feeling elicited by this technique in All of a Sudden is completely different. Whereas Mungiu’s film feels inherently cold, keeping the viewer at arm’s length, Hamaguchi’s is suffused with warmth, culminating in a moment when Mari’s play is performed for the residents at the care home that feels downright euphoric, albeit also incredibly bittersweet.
All of a Sudden is a movie that moves you to tears not because it is sad—though sadness is certainly there—but because it is about people who are good. Roger Ebert said it best in a 2012 essay describing this feeling of emotional elevation: “What I experience is the welling up of a few tears in my eyes, a certain tightness in my throat, and a feeling of uplift: Yes, there is a good person, doing a good thing.” The characters who populate All of a Sudden—not just Marie-Lou and Mari, but crotchety nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel), caregiver and aspiring rapper Djibril (Gabriel Dahmani), and aging actor Gorô (Kyōzō Nagatsuka)—are good, and aspire to do good for others; watching them, and being reminded that such people still exist in our world, cannot help but leave you with a sense of hope, even in these increasingly hopeless times.
NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)
Films like All of a Sudden are capable of restoring one’s faith in humanity, which is all too necessary after viewing a film like NAZA. Executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the new documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor—the two Israeli members of the filmmaking quartet responsible for No Other Land, the Oscar-winning examination of settler violence in the West Bank—shines a harsh light on the inhumane tactics utilized by Israel in its ongoing genocide against the people of Palestine. That Benjamin Netanyahu is now threatening to strip Abraham and Szor of their Israeli citizenship tells you all you need to know about how damning this film is. While All of a Sudden is my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year, it’s easy to say that NAZA is the most essential.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, NAZA takes its name from the euphemistic acronym used by the Israeli military to describe the number of Palestinian civilians it expects will be killed in a given airstrike. The bulk of the film consists of interviews conducted by Abraham with members of the Israeli military, their faces and voices disguised to protect them from retaliation by the regime. The film is shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, because, as Abraham puts it, “You can see the city, but the city can’t see you.”
It’s also fitting, as Tel Aviv figures prominently as a character in the film; its very existence is the result of Palestinians being expelled from their land, the peacefully glittering skyscrapers belying the violence that led to their existence and that continues to be perpetrated in the name of their defense. Anonymous people are shown relaxing in their homes, watching Netanyahu attempt to justify the genocide on their televisions. Archival footage is also woven in, reminding us that the expansive surveillance and targeting of Palestinians has been going on for decades; this is not something new, but something systemic, baked into Israeli military strategy since the beginning.
The interviewees describe how they use artificial intelligence and algorithms to target specific cell phones that may belong to Hamas operatives; when it comes time to execute a strike, they often do it when the target is at home at night, because it’s more likely to be successful. Most insidious is the admission that hearing a child on a tapped phone line say “daddy’s home” is a signal that the target is home and the strike can proceed…never mind that the target’s family, including said child, will also die. They also use pens and paper to draw diagrams showing how they break down a village in Gaza into various small components that they then empty of inhabitants by any means necessary. They even describe how they set snipers up to shoot Palestinians as they run to grab food and other supplies, and use drones to kill anyone who crosses a specific demarcation line.
It’s clear that the use of screens and other forms of advanced technology in these war crimes helps contribute to the overall dehumanization of Palestinians; they’re treated like NPCs in a video game. Several interviewees openly admit that a successful airstrike energized them and that they found their work to be a lot of fun. NAZA shows us the brutal consequences of their actions: a man in Gaza digging through a destroyed building, crying as he searches for his children, lifeless legs hanging limply from the rubble. These aren’t mere pixels, but real people.
The interviewees responsible for the algorithmic targeting, not the bombing, try to wash their hands of the death that occurs as a direct result of their work, claiming that they’re not the ones who did the actual killing. Abraham, to his immense credit, doesn’t allow them to escape with clear consciences; he repeatedly pushes back against their statements, informing them that they are in fact complicit in mass murder. Others are more haunted by what they have seen, describing mass graves left open to the elements and bodies being left where they fell after a drone strike to be eaten by dogs. Some express regret that they never pushed back against what they were asked to do. But others use lines of defense that hauntingly echo those used in Nuremberg in the late 1940s: they were just following orders and defending their homeland, after all.
NAZA is aware of these parallels; at one point, the camera lingers on a large poster advertising a Claude Lanzmann film retrospective before showing us clips of Netanyahu evoking the horrors of the Holocaust to justify the actions of the present. As one of the interviewees notes regarding a visit to Poland in their youth, “I asked myself how Germans could live with that…but today I understand.” What really needs to be understood, however, is that no amount of horrors in one people’s past can justify erasing another people’s future.
Fjord is screening in the Spotlight section while All of a Sudden and Naza are screening in the Main Slate at the 64th New York Film Festival, which runs from September 25 to October 12, 2026.
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