CIFF 2025: “Wind, speak to me”, “Brand new landscape”, “The Girl in the Snow” | Festivals and awards

“Atmospheric” and “measured” are the two words that describe the three films making up this latest dispatch from the Chicago International Film Festival. The three works, from the festival’s New Directors Competition, are films that unhurriedly address loss and isolation. These sensory works are also ambitious and assured, trusting the audience to accompany their stories on narrative paths whose emotional endings are not easily given; they are won.

A gently moving film about grief, from writer/director Stefan Djordjevic “Wind, talk to me” is an unpretentious hybrid work that effortlessly blends documentary and fiction. It follows a sad Djordjevic, who, while driving to visit his grandmother for her 80th birthday, accidentally hits a dog with his car. Eventually, Djordjevic will adopt this dog and name her Lija. This fictional element of this docudrama, however, is only a fragment of the entire film. Djordjevic arrives at his grandparents’ house with a heavy heart: his mother Negrica recently died and he hopes to finish the real film he was making about her.

Without warning, Djordjevic’s film sails into the past, becoming several films within a film. The first concerns the documentary footage Djordjevic is shooting, showing his family climbing trees, lounging in their rural spaces and completing a lakeside house. The second film is made up of previously shot footage of Djordjevic’s mother, such as the holistic treatment she underwent and her many thoughts on how humans can control the wind. So the majority of “Wind, Talk To Me” is Djordjevic using these two elements, including his therapeutic relationship with Lija, to deal with his loss.

In his meditations, nature becomes its own character. A close-up shows Djordjevic’s hand rubbing the bark of a tree, creating a sound similar to charred tissue paper crumbling. At other times, the wind and leaves whisper with moving intensity. The film’s cinematographer, Marko Brdar, is particularly sensitive to the sensory environment, enveloping us in its majesty and solemnity with gentle precision. And while “Wind, Talk To Me” can be knowingly distant, juxtaposing Djordjevic’s lonely heart with the intimacy of family life, the docudrama is never too cute or too vague. In the end, we fully perceive the need to live and cherish every moment with a loved one, seizing opportunities to simply commune with them.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily call “Brand new landscape“, the melancholic debut feature from writer/director Yuiga Danzuka, slow cinema. It’s certainly an unhurried rumination. It begins with a family of four who have arrived at a vacation home for the weekend when their selfish architect father Hajime (Kenichi Endo) asks his wife if he can leave immediately for work. The boldness Tanakao displays as he slowly rejects the many his wife’s counter-arguments, to the point of exhausting him in a fetal position, permanently change his observant son. Ten years later, his son Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) delivers flowers and his daughter Emi (Mai Kiryû) prepares to get married.

Danzuka’s film does not easily turn into melodrama. Ren is such a silent spectator that when Emi tells him about her impending marriage, he can barely mutter “congratulations.” It is only when he discovers a flower arrangement addressed to his father, who has just returned home after working abroad for three years, that he is shaken emotionally. Emi, for her part, declares that she doesn’t really care about their father anymore. But as she gets closer and closer to her date with her fiancé, we see how her father’s abandonment has affected her, too. This delicate dynamic between these three characters holds much of “Brand New Landscape” together, especially as the film veers into fantasy territory.

However, “Brand New Landscape” becomes more fragile when Danzuka moves away from the family drama of the story to criticize the soulless new structures dotting Tokyo. While he attempts to parallel his aesthetic disgust with Hajime’s condemnation in the film – the character’s most famous project is a bland mega-mall that required the government to evacuate the homeless from the land to be built – his questioning remains too far outside the film to fully succeed. Fortunately, this failure can easily be attributed to the problems of beginning filmmakers. The character-based components of “Brand New Landscape” are so strong that it’s easy to overlook the flaws in its foundation.

The hypnotic and sumptuous by Louise Hémon “The girl in the snow” uses the arrival of French teacher Aimée Lazare (Galatea Bellugi) in 1899 to criticize customs, homophobia and female sexual repression in a small snowy village in the Hautes-Alpes. Originally from the plains, Aimée arrived in this mountainous setting without any knowledge of local beliefs. When she tries to teach the children what a cow looks like, they correct her by telling her that a cow makes a “broo broo” cry rather than a “moo” sound. When she attempts to bathe two of her students, the older women scold her: in their minds, children need a scab on their heads to protect their brains. Worse still for this very horny protagonist, she becomes attracted to the local men – Pépin (Samuel Kircher) and Enoch (Matthieu Lucci) – while ignoring the infatuation displayed by the quiet boy stable Daniel (Oscar Pons).

With a piquant folk score, “The Girl in the Snow” becomes a supernatural tale that proposes the sensuality of a woman as a kind of malevolent spirit. Homosexuality is also presented as a desire that must be hidden, often in caves, under penalty of upsetting the “natural” balance of the village. Of course, the more hidden these appetites are, the more anxiety and unrest they inspire within this small hamlet which believes that the mountain gives gifts and takes people away. Despite this tension, it would be a mistake to think that Hémon’s film considers these modest people as petty. When Aimée writes one of their oral histories, especially in French – the inhabitants speak Occitan – the elders are furious. Not only does Aimée not see how she erases their language, thus enclosing this amorphous tradition in a sort of colonized state. She also laments that all she wants is to bring them enlightenment.

It is with this in mind that Hémon displays a captivating visual eye. The snowy, hilly landscape allows the director and her cinematographer Marine Atlan to rely on negative space to visualize how Aimée is separated from the spirit of the land on which she resides and the ideas of the people who inhabit it. If the chiaroscuro shadows of the director and cinematographer are often reminiscent of the Dutch masters, their hallucinatory staging, which combines overhead lighting with a kind of rural claustrophobia, deepens the haunting residue the film leaves. The effect is a surprising debut whose sense of place and atmosphere become as timeless as a folk tale.