The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut.

Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital -- head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha) --plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia's film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence.

All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

Part of our "New Visions, New Voices" series. Courtesy of Variance Films. In Malayalam, Hindi, with English subtitles.

Sasha is a young vampire with a very serious problem: she's too sensitive to kill! Frustrated by their daughter's empathy for humans, Sasha's parents decide to cut off her blood supply to force her to learn how to huntÉ or starve! Just as she decides to reject her vampire instincts and embrace a final death, she meets a lonely teenager named Paul who is willing to give his life to save hers, on the condition that she help to fulfill his final wishes before day breaks.

Part of our "Nosferatu Afterlives" series. Courtesy of Drafthouse Films. In French with English subtitles.

Widely considered the most important film in the history of Ukranian cinema, Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is a masterwork that boldly combines folkloric pageantry, fairy tale mysticism, and frenetic, hallucinatory cinematography.

Adapted from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's novel, Shadows tells the story of Ivan (Ivan Mykolaichuk), a young Hutsul peasant who witnesses his father's murder by the local miser. Years later, Ivan falls in love with the miser's daughter, Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova), but her shocking death leaves him wallowing in grief until he meets Palahna (Tatyana Bestayeva), a beautiful woman who seems to restore his faith in life and hope for the future. When the ghost of Marichka begins to haunt Ivan, however, Palahna is driven into the arms of the local sorcerer (Spartak Bagashvili), with tragic results.

Shadows is steeped in the earthy atmosphere of the Carpathian mountains; filmed by Parajanov and cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko with an eye for constantly innovative camera movements and vivid color; and suffused by Hutsul culture in the form of composer Myroslav Skoryk's collage-like score, which brings together Ukrainian folk melodies with modernist, experimental orchestration. It is one of cinema's singular productions, capturing the spiritual majesty of the past by creatively forging the medium's future.

The film screens in 4K restoration by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and in association with the Dovzhenko Film Studio. Special thanks to Daniel Bird and _ukasz Ceranka. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Part of our "Restorations & Rediscoveries" series. Courtesy of Janus Films. In Ukrainian with English subtitles.

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the prestigious André Bazin Prize from Cahiers du Cinema, both celebrating outstanding feature debuts, this enthralling work from Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Thien An is a reverie on faith, loss, and nature expressed with uncommon invention and depth.

The sudden death of his sister-in-law brings unexpected responsibilities to Thien (Le Phong Vu), who is reluctantly tasked with bringing his five-year-old nephew Dao to their countryside hometown. On the road, Thien is drawn into a search for his long-missing older brother, haunted and spurred forward by a series of sublime dreams that reignite suppressed memories, forbidden desires, and specters of his own youth. What began as a journey home becomes a pilgrimage marked by visual splendor and mystical overtones, a quest for understanding and certainty in a Vietnam that seems unable to provide any clear answers. As Thien battles with the existential question of what is worth living for, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell interrogates the persistence and complexity of faith, not only in the spiritual but in the delicate beauty of earthly existence.

Part of our "New Visions, New Voices" series. Courtesy of Kino Lorber. In Vietnamese with English subtitles.

Roland Marchal, CNRS, SciencesPo

For a longtime observer of armed conflicts in Central and Eastern Africa, it is striking that we are witnessing a higher number of conflicts than in 1991. This presentation will address several recurrent aspects. First, Marchal will address the intricacies of violence and local politics. Second, the organization of armed groups frequently does not correspond to the kind of violence they are exercising on the population. And third, paradoxically, the international community has often been unable and unwilling to frame its understanding of conflict, with the consequence that transitions to peace are becoming more problematic, while international support for conflict grows.

Hosted by Brooks Center on Global Democracy with support from the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Institute for African Development.