Alice Rohrwacher’s last feature, Happy as Lazzaro, has grown in my estimation more than just about any film of 2018, in part because of the way she infuses a fantastical surrealism into otherwise ordinary sequences of life in the Italian countryside. Somewhere between a dream and a nightmare for both the audience and the characters, Rohrwacher’s stories often double as cinematic hypnotism. With La Chimera the Italian auteur, another fable centered on a sort of plundering of rural Italy, uses this same mysticism to explore the holes we dig ourselves into in service of the past. 

Smack dab in the middle of the Trump era, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine trained their cameras on an ambitious bunch of teenage boys in Texas participating in a weeklong program designed to simulate American government. Shot just before the pandemic ground everything to a halt, and released in the darkest depths of it, Boys State found a moment to reflect the insidious ways in which the politics of the day influence the politicians of the future and offered a glimmer of hope that the future generations might yet offer a balm for the divisions of the moment. Four years later, Moss and McBaine have found another eerily perfect moment for Girls State, examining if the politically engaged girls of America might form a more perfect union in an equally divisive time.