Mill Valley Film Festival 48 Preview

Supporting the 48th Mill Valley Film Festival (hereafter “MVFF48”) is also about supporting culture that’s outside fascist control.  Culture at its best highlights what the people can either remember and/or imagine.  Making memory and imagination independent is anathema to a mindset that prizes control above all else.

 Over its 11-day run from October 2-12, 2025, MVFF48 will show 138 films from 40 countries.  Fascist types will hate how the festival repeatedly demonstrates cinema culture is a lot bigger than Hollywood’s commercial concerns.  Relish the thought that MVFFF48’s selections repeatedly demonstrate that female and non-binary filmmakers possess the same skills or better than their male counterparts, as it will cause late hatemonger Charlie Kirk to spin furiously in his grave.  

MVFF48 mainly takes place at such Marin County venues as the Smith Rafael Film Center and the Sequoia Cinema.  However, a small selection of films will also be shown at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive in its “Mill Valley Film Festival At BAMPFA” film series from October 3-12, 2025. 

MVFF 48 opens with “Hamnet,” an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel by  “Nomadland” director Chloe Zhao.  It’s a romance between two extraordinary people and set in 16th century England.  Agnes (Jessie Buckley) is a healer having a mystical connection with nature.  One day she meets William (Paul Mescal), a young Latin scholar who’s the son of a glovemaker.  They fall in love, marry, and have a son named Hamnet.  But this Latin scholar has a greater destiny awaiting him, one where he writes timeless plays including one whose title comes from a variation of his son’s name.

History and celebrity merges with photography in the ravishing Maura Smith documentary “Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere.”  It’s a portrait of the photographer whose breathtaking images featured subjects ranging from the striking experiences of ordinary people to cultural icons (e.g. Barbra Streisand and David Bowie) to such Civil Rights Movement icons as John Lewis and Muhammed Ali.

Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s new documentary “Everywhere Man: The Lives And Times Of Peter Asher” shows how its titular subject’s creative life has hit several amazing peaks.  Peter Asher has been a child actor, half of a rock act which scored a #1 hit, and the person who made James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt superstars.

Another rock superstar is brought to life by Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”).  Scott Cooper’s biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere”  follows legendary singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen (White) at a critical time in his life.  As he privately deals with childhood traumas, he works on the songs that will make up his classic album “Nebraska.”  The record label may not be happy with The Boss’ album, but fortunately friend and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) has Springsteen’s back.

Personal dissatisfaction may seem to mark “Peter Hujar’s Day.”   Yet as director Ira Sachs’ (“Keep The Lights On”) drama about that December 1974 day shows, those 24 hours proved far more momentous than Hujar realized.  Gay photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) may have thought he was doing writer Linda Rosenkranz (Rebecca Hall) a favor by recording all his activities whether significant or mundane over the course of a day.  But his subsequent talk with the writer about his day results in dredging up “insignificant” details about a period filled with such things as calls to Sontag and a photo shoot with Ginsberg.

Another significant day provides the dramatic springboard for Hassan Hadi’s “The President’s Cake.”  In the waning years of Saddam Hussein’s rule of Iraq, the dictator still loved to celebrate his birthday.  Part of the festivities included forcing school children to bake him cakes even in the midst of food shortages…on pain of either imprisonment or death.  9-year-old Lamia gets the dubious honor this year.  But obtaining the basic ingredients means traveling to the city.  The search for those ingredients sends Lamia, her pet rooster Hindi, and her best friend Saeed on a day-long adventure that will test Lamia’s ability to persevere in the face of setbacks.

Perseverance in the face of hardship also describes the life of single mother Shu-fen.  Not only does she run a noodle stand in Taipei’s night market, she constantly has to deal with debt and depression, as well as the headaches of raising rebellious daughter 20-year-old I-Ann.  Yet neither of these women is the titular character referenced in Shih-Ching Tsou’s debut family drama “Left-Handed Girl,” a film co-written and produced by “Anora” director Sean Baker.  That honor belongs to Shu-fen’s younger daughter and the film’s viewpoint character, curious 5-year-old I-Jing.  Now she’s also starting to become rebellious thanks to internalized shame for displaying left-handedness.   Her grandfather claims that dexterity shows she’s been marked by the devil.

It could be argued that religious transphobes treat trans folks such as Congresswoman Sarah McBride as being marked by the devil.  Chase Joynt’s documentary “State Of Firsts” follows McBride during a campaign which made her the first transgender member of Congress.  But the undisguised bigotry she encounters even from so-called colleagues on the Republican side doesn’t stop her from seeking opportunities to fight for her constituents.

Keeping going in the face of larger outside events is also the challenge facing Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), the new choral master for the Ramsden, Yorkshire Choral Society.  .How do you replenish a choral society when some of its members are off fighting in World War One?  His imperious attitude and his having studied in Germany don’t make his job any easier.  Elgar’s horror at Guthrie’s updating his “The Dream Of Gerontius” also adds fuel to the proverbial fire.  See what happens in Nicholas Hytner”s “The Choral,” especially given that the script’s written by the legendary Alan Bennett (“A Private Function”).

In Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life,” Jodie Foster is psychiatrist turned amateur sleuth Lillian Steiner.  The suicide of Steiner’s former patient Paula raises her suspicions that it might be an unsolved murder.  However, the film isn’t one of those straightforward whodunnits.  There’s hypnotism, possible reincarnation, and a reconnection with her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil).

A far different type of reconnection takes place in director Jafar Panahi’s Cannes Camera d’Or-winning comedic revenge thriller “It Was Just An Accident.”  Mechanic Vahid is convinced the middle-aged man who’s walked into his shop one evening is Eqbal The Gimp, the government interrogator and torturer whose brutality left him with a permanent kidney injury and an unquenched desire for revenge.  Yet the mechanic’s not 100% sure he’s kidnapped the right man.  So he goes on a quest to find other victims of Eqbal’s torture to conclusively verify this is Vahid’s old tormentor.  What will the car mechanic do when it comes time to make the killing decision?

Was the death at the core of Geeta Gandbhir’s Sundance award-winning documentary “The Perfect Neighbor” the killing of a tormentor?  In a Marion County, Florida neighborhood, a single middle-aged woman routinely calls 911 to complain about the group of children who loudly whoop, holler, and play near her home.  As far as she’s concerned, the kids are “trespassing” but the cops won’t do anything.  When this white woman shoots through her closed and locked front door and kills the Black mother of some of these children, was the shooter truly fearing for her life under Florida's “Stand Your Ground” law?  The director deliberately provides only footage from police body-cams and interviews, so the viewer is left to decide for themselves why this tragedy happened.   

However, law enforcement officials aren’t always the best judges of appropriate punishment.  Directors Charlotte Kaufman and Andrew Jarecki’s attendance at an Alabama state prison’s annual BBQ for prisoners may have been intended to give the institute for incarceration some good PR.  However, as their horrifying documentary “The Alabama Solution” shows, prison officials' supposed benevolence conceals an institution which houses its charges in inhumane conditions, is corrupt and ineffective, and essentially practices a modern form of slavery.

 A different victim of economic cruelty is the protagonist of Park Chan-wook’s (“Decision To Leave”) new film “No Other Choice.”  It’s a darkly comic adaptation of the Donald E. Westlake novel The Ax.  Businessman Man-soo’s life starts to crumble after his paper company employer lays him off.  Several months pass by without any signs of a new job on the horizon.  To beat his competitors for an open position that will allow him to reclaim his comfortable life, this ambitious businessman will have to literally rub out his competition.

Another beleaguered parent who’s considerably less successful at dealing with domestic hardship is played by Spotlight honoree Rose Byrne.  She won a Berlinale Silver Bear for her performance as the beleaguered Montauk mother in Mary Bronstein’s dramedy “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”  The sudden appearance of a massive hole in her apartment’s ceiling heralds the steady unraveling of Linda’s (Byrne) life.  She’s got an absent husband, a daughter with a mysterious illness, and psychotherapy patients whose needs only seem to escalate.  Can Linda retain some sense of stability with the help of her therapist (Conan O’Brien) and a charming motel super (A$AP Rocky)?

Despite the grim title, the four leading women in the Cannes Jury Prize-winning drama Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound Of Falling” have comparatively more stable lives.  They all live in the same house at different times over the course of a century.  These characters range from World War II teen Erika to modern day young woman Lenka.  All of these women constantly battle repression and misogyny, but they also find moments of grace and beauty.

A different sort of fall takes place in Luca Gudagnino’s academia-set button-pushing drama “After The Hunt.”  The Yale campus gets rocked when Black Ph.D. candidate Maggie Price (Ayo Edibiri) accuses professor Henrik Gibson (Andrew Garfield) of sexually assaulting her.  The accusation could affect the professional futures of both Gibson and professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), neither of whom has yet been given tenure.

The hunt for crypto riches can give a person’s financial future a turn for the worse.  Ben McKenzie’s debut documentary “Everyone Is Lying To You For Money” serves as a must-see in this age of cryptocurrency hype.  His skeptical primer goes into the hazards of cryptocurrency, including interviews with people who got badly financially burned while pursuing supposed crypto riches.

For a reminder that the Internet can be used for good, check out James Barbash and Mason Dall’s short “404: An Internet Archive Doc.”  It introduces viewers to one of San Francisco’s great cultural treasures, The Internet Archive.  In particular, the short spotlights Brewster Kahle and Mark Graham and their amazing Wayback Machine.  That device preserves important digital data that would otherwise be lost, such as U.S. government websites which haven’t been scrubbed of information contradicting the Orange Cuck’s bigotries and lies.

A different sort of San Francisco treasure can be found in Jay Rosenblatt and Stephanie Rapp’s “Tripawds.”  It’s a short documentary about an annual San Francisco gathering of three-legged dogs and their forever humans.

Another S.F.-based short film is Sylvie Lee’s “Pine Cones On Divisadero.”  It’s both a return to the filmmaker’s old neighborhood as well as the hopeful unraveling of the mystery alluded to in the film’s title. 

Wild in a different way and also happening in San Francisco is Ari Gold’s “live cinema musical drama” “Brother Verses Brother.”  Take two brothers going to an audition.  Toss in such San Francisco North Beach sites as Vesuvio’s, Jack Kerouac Alley, and Russian Hill.  Add in lots of improvisational acting and the catchy indie music of Ethan Gold.  The result: a charming experimental film starring “The Brothers Gold And The People Of San Francisco.”

Centerpiece honors go to Jonas Akerlund’s new documentary “Metallica Saved My Life.”  It’s a look at the fan community that has grown up around this iconic Bay Area band.  Whether dispossessed or isolated, interviewees talk about finding and being part of a diverse and accepting community bound by music that sometimes literally changed their lives.  

Weirdest and most entertaining MVFF48 documentary honors must go to Tony Benna’s “Andre Is An Idiot.”  The harsh tone of the film’s title comes from the consequences of central subject Andre Ricciardi’s refusal to do a colonoscopy.  To wit, the advertising whiz and San Francisco artist discovers he has stage 4 colon cancer.  So Ricciardi produced this farewell biography…except there’s nothing boringly reverent here.  Viewers will learn about doing a death yell properly, see a guest appearance by Tommy Chong, learn about Ricciardi’s “complex” relationship with drugs and alcohol, and even see him show up on “The Newlywed Game.”

Surrealistic in a different way is Oliver Laxe’s Cannes Jury Prize-winner “Sirat.”  It follows father Luis on a desperate search across the southern Morocco desert.  He’s looking for his daughter, who went to a desert rave yet never returned.  Joined by his son Esteban, the duo will encounter both transcendence and terror in the sandy yet beautiful wastes.

Diego Cespedes’ “The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo" takes viewers to an isolated mining town in 1982 Chile.  There’s a mysterious illness wracking the town, and it’s supposedly transmitted through the looks lovers exchange with each other at the town’s defiantly queer bar.  While fear and superstition take hold of the town’s inhabitants, pre-teen Lidia, who’s grown up among trans women and the bar’s regulars, seeks the truth.  The film’s a blend of magic realism, melodrama, coming-of-age, and the joys of a found family.  The film took Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Jury Prize.

Why is humanity eternally fascinated by subterranean spaces?  Find out in Robert Petit’s documentary “Underland,” an adaptation of Robert Macfarlane’s best-seller.  Actress Sandra Huller (“Anatomy Of A Fall”) narrates this documentary that takes viewers to: a sacred Mayan cave and the archeologist attempting to map it; present-day tunnel dwellers and the urban explorer hoping to preserve their stories;  and a very underground lab where a scientist searches for dark matter.   Produced by Darren Aronofsky (“Caught Stealing”).

Yorgos Lanthimos, like Aronofsky, is an old hand at doing wildly offbeat films.  His new feature “Bugonia” offers a funny take on Colony Collapse Disorder.  Beekeeping cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Donny Gatz want to save their beehives (and humanity) from this dangerous apiary disease.  Because the duo happen to be conspiracy-obsessed survivalists, they also believe biotech and modernity are actually controlled by aliens.  Their crusade will eventually take them to Big Pharma CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), whom they feel can get them an audience on the mothership of the aliens they hold responsible for humanity’s current messes.

Those viewers living in the reality-based world, on the other hand, welcome the hard-hitting journalism of “Democracy Now”’s Amy Goodman.  “Trouble The Water” directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin return with their cinematic biography of Goodman, “Steal This Story, Please!”  It’s partly a portrait of how she became a left-wing cultural icon.  But it’s also a look at Goodman’s formative experiences including reporting in the 1970s on Suharto’s militarized genocide in East Timor.

The renowned Kleber Mendonca Filho takes viewers to 1977 Recife during Carnival for his new film “The Secret Agent.”  Life in the celebrating Brazilian city is understandably chaotic at this time.  But that’s perfect for Marcelo, who’s sneaked back into town for two reasons.  One is to reunite with his son.  The other is to make a very risky escape under the noses of the military regime ruling Brazil at the time.

What if global migration ultimately benefits societies?  Nathaniel Lezra’s epic documentary “Roads Of Fire” looks at the global migration crisis beyond the usual “scary foreigners” media coverage.  The film may humble the average viewer with the realization that they don’t understand the situation as well as they thought.  It looks at the migration challenge on several levels: a human smuggler who’s a Venezuelan refugee, a wife who’s fleeing domestic abuse in her home country, and a volunteer aid group facing a political crisis.

A cultural migration takes place in Yuriko Gamo Romer’s documentary “Diamond Diplomacy.”   It tells the amazing story of how baseball became a mutual obsession of both Japan and the United States.   Starting with Americans introducing the game to the Japanese in the late 19th century, her film traces how this game of nine innings over time reduced the cultural distance between the two countries to the point where seeing such Japanese players as Hideo Nomo and Shohei Ohtani on MLB teams is no big deal.  Among the amazing facts revealed in the film is learning that the Japanese accepted Black baseball players long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the U.S.

Closing out MVFF48 is the Hikari dramedy “Rental Family.”  Philip (Brendan Fraser) is a generally unemployed American actor living in Tokyo.  When he gets a gig to play a mourner at a Japanese funeral, it’s his entry into a Japanese industry where surrogates can be hired for people who lack family, friends, or colleagues.  However, this ideal gig starts going south when Philip’s own personal loneliness mixes disastrously with his compassion for his lonely clients.