Directorial film debuts you cannot miss

The New Horizons section of the 11th edition of QCinema, which runs from Nov. 17 to 26, features five acclaimed directorial film debuts: City Of Wind by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, Foremost By Night by Victor Iriarte, Scrapper by Charlotte Regan, Through The Night by Delphine Girard, and Women From Rote Island by Jeremias Nyangoen.

City of Wind, the Mongolian entry to the 96th Academy Awards, is a coming-of-age film of a young shaman, who experiences what it is to be young and in love. City of Wind is a snapshot of Mongolia in the present day, still immersed in mystical tradition, even as society moves forward into modernity.

Foremost By Night revolves around two women who meet for the first time. One is in search of her biological son she gave up for adoption. The other, unable to bear children of her own, adopted a child she raised as her own.

Iriarte crafts a movie around an issue that rarely gets talked about in her native Spain, and delves into the damage done to the victims of a very shameful crime committed upon infants.

Scrapper is about 12-year-old Georgie, who is wise beyond her years, reconnecting with her absent father after her mother died. Scrapper is a brazenly optimistic tale of life at the edges of UK society. It finds warmth and color in what from the outside only seems like tragedy.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Through The Night is based on Girard’s Oscar-nominated short film A Sister. In this film, she expands on the fallout of a traumatic event, examining the ways in which the damage stays with the people involved.

The film shifts between the perspective of a victim of sexual assault, her alleged assaulter, and the phone operator who took the call about the crime.

Lastly, Women from the Rote Island is set in the southernmost island of Indonesia where a grieving wife, who is set to bury her husband, is awaiting the return of her daughter so that she may finally bury him in accordance with local tradition.

With a naturalistic approach that highlights the beauty of their rural surroundings, Nyangoen, in his promising debut, brings attention to the plight of women who are too far removed from the public eye to be a part of the greater movement toward gender equality.