Illustration by Franz Lang.

The sunlight swells in six slices, then dims in the same style, on ten bridges across the Yahagi River. Tomonari Nishikawa made Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon(2016) by exposing a sixth of the frame at a time; having shot the leftmost part of the image for thirty seconds, he moved the masking, rewound the camera, and exposed the same length of film to the next length of bridge, gradually creating a composite image that spans both a body of water and a piece of time. A light rain falls at twilight on just two bands of the river, clearing up as darkness comes to the opposite bank.

Nishikawa and his father—to whom the film is dedicated—were both born near the Yahagi’s source, on Mount Ōkawairi, and must have crossed the river countless times in the course of their lives. When vehicles and people cross it in these films, they emerge out of thin air and soon vanish back into it. A jogging man appears three times in the course of his laps, once going the other way.

Ten Mornings Ten Evenings opened the first Wavelengths shorts program at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it had premiered nine years ago. It was intended as a memorial to Nishikawa, who died suddenly in April at the age of 55, and a subsequent retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in New York filled out his impressive filmography. His earliest films are slipstream city symphonies, shot in and around San Francisco and New York. The camera-eye is made liquid and drawn rapidly through the narrow tubes of the built environment, guided by split-second formal and typological associations. At times, one gets the sense of a child looking out the window of a moving vehicle, playing imaginary games with the passing guardrails and telephone poles.

Top: Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon(Tomonari Nishikawa, 2016). Bottom: Shibuya - Tokyo(Tomonari Nishikawa, 2010).

Two of Nishikawa’s films, *Tokyo - Ebisu*and Shibuya - Tokyo (both 2010), apply the masking technique he would later use on bridges to train stations along the Japan Railway Company’s Yamanote Line. They divide the frame into a five-by-four grid; in each square appears a distinct section of time. The ocular play is transformed into a delirious worry: a traveler standing again on the platform to which they have surrendered hours of their life, racking their brain for a forgotten object, a familiar face, a stray thought. Time is not collapsed and resequenced, as in typical montage, but rather splayed across the surface of the film—glimmers, ghosts, and impressions combining for an omniscient whole.

After a century or so, many of us have come to take the miracle of recorded media for granted, directing our inquiries to its contents rather than its form. Cinema’s most sensitive practitioners, however, never tire of probing the medium’s inherent displacements and deferrals in time and space, which have given new dimension to our lives. After recent spates of magical realism and docufiction hybridization on the festival circuit, a transtemporal turn is now making itself felt: films that operate across multiple timelines, evincing the vagaries of memory, anticipation, nostalgia, reflection, desire, regret, and remorse—and which may even seek to repair or requite the past with the knowledge of the present, and vice versa. When machines can convincingly approximate our visual and verbal languages, the last redoubt of human expression could lie in our particular relationship to time, and in the machine by which we seem to alter our passage through it.

Blue Heron(Sophy Romvari, 2025).

Elsewhere in the Toronto program, another means of mass transit—a Vancouver Island ferry—is a vehicle hurtling strangely through time. Where Nishikawa’s transtemporality has everything to do with the possibilities of his 16mm film camera, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron(all films 2025 unless otherwise noted) is premised upon the logic of nonlinear video editing. As a Hungarian Canadian family adjusts to their new home in the mid-1990s, the director’s present-day proxy, Sasha (Amy Zimmer), reviews old home videos in one Adobe Premiere timeline and her filmed counsel of social workers in another. It must be possible, she seems to wish, to splice them together such that one can make sense of the other.

Those who have been following Romvari’s work will have seen many of the original family photos and videos on which these are based in her short Still Processing(2020), which documents her own discovery of these idyllic, and now tragic, images by way of a memorial to her two brothers. Blue Heron, her first feature, is pointedly more verbal than visual on the subject of the family’s difficulties, the worst of which are kept offscreen and heard through walls. A frantic mother (Iringó Réti) asks eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) why she thinks her eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), is “acting out,” “behaving this way,” being “crazy.” Like Sasha, we don’t yet understand quite what she means. A teenage son from his mother’s previous relationship, Jeremy is sometimes brooding, churlish, and confrontational, but at other times suddenly sweet. One day, he is picked up for shoplifting. One night, he puts his hand through a plate-glass window. We later learn from Jeremy’s case files that at other times he will keep gasoline canisters in his bedroom and threaten to burn the house down with the family inside. In a session the mother secretly records, a psychologist proffers a preliminary diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder, but only when pressed.

Romvari is ambivalent on the transformative power of therapeutic, as well as cinematic, interventions. When her adult double takes that windswept ferry across the Strait of Georgia, it delivers her to a Vancouver Island twenty years in the past. She stands on the threshold of her family’s home like an actress who has forgotten her lines. Her father presumes she is a social worker and invites her inside, where it is all she can do to read tearfully from a handwritten letter the prophecy of their tragedy: “It will never get better.” Time travel is one of the things Jeremy had wished for in a questionnaire administered by his psychologist, along with fabulous wealth and a driver’s license. Here, it is mobilized in service of a deeply felt futility that can only be recovered as artwork: Like her mother, Sasha secretly records her visit home, a revised recreation of an episode the survivors will spend the rest of their lives replaying.

The Secret Agent(Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025).

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agentlikewise encloses a transtemporal device in what is otherwise a period piece. Its story of a political refugee, Armando (Wagner Moura), in 1977 Brazil is incongruously framed by the work of two present-day research assistants tasked with transcribing audiocassette recordings from the time of the military dictatorship. Their occasional appearance in a university library presents its own kind of fabulist warp in a film that also features a cat with two faces and a severed leg, reanimated and still kicking.

The manhunt plot, set in the midst of carnival, is paced to accommodate all manner of details and detours: a student activist killed and fed to sharks; the benefactress of a safehouse (Tânia Maria) in denial of her grief, having been a communist and then an anarchist in Mussolini’s Italy; a German Jewish tailor (Udo Kier) made to show his war scars to men who cannot understand even what guns issued the bullets. Under an assumed name, Armando takes a job at the civil registration office and searches for documentation of his mother, an Indigenous domestic worker for his father’s family, who gave birth to him when she was a minor. His scavenging for the source of his trauma in the archives, a little like Romvari’s, is knowingly futile but deeply felt.

The northern Brazilian coastal city of Recife, in which Mendonça Filho was born and lived most of his life, has been the setting of all but one of his five features to date. The exception, Bacurau(2019), imagines a safari of foreign tourists hunting villagers in the sertão backcountry. His latest synthesizes the mondo-grindhouse fusillade of that film with the quieter, closely observed social realism of Neighboring Sounds(2012) and Aquarius(2016). Mendonça Filho’s recent documentary essay, Pictures of Ghosts(2023), generated a wealth of material for The Secret Agent, particularly concerning the trio of cinema palaces that once anchored Recife’s downtown. The crucial testimony, which will be replayed and transcribed some 50 years later, is delivered in an apartment adjoining the projection booth of one of these theaters, the São Luiz, amid the screams and squeals of an audience watching Jaws(1975) below. Returning finally to the present, we are left with a decidedly low-key denouement on grainy newspaper microfiche. There can be no satisfying conclusion, the film suggests, to our human dramas, subject to the unfeeling exercises of power—only, perhaps, a meaningful coincidence.

By one such coincidence, the film premiered in Toronto on September 7, Brazilian Independence Day. Mendonça Filho and Moura appeared on the stage of the historic Royal Alexandra Theatre between twin balconies marked “Comedy” and “Tragedy” to raucous applause and shouts of “Sem anistia!” (“No amnesty!”) from their many countrymen in the audience, referring to the ongoing effort to pardon former president Jair Bolsonaro for his part in the 2022 attempted coup. “This film is about self-inflicted amnesia,” the director said, “which is part of the history of my country.” An echo of the 1979 Amnesty Law, by which the regime forgave itself of all wrongdoing, is now being heard in the Brazilian National Congress. It remains to be seen whether the past will repeat itself, or if the future will be made anew.

Magellan(Lav Diaz, 2025).

Lav Diaz’s Magellanfollows the titular conquistador almost all the way around the world over the course of ten years. It begins with the conquest of Malacca, in present-day Malaysia, and ends just twenty longitudinal degrees away, in the Philippines, with the Battle of Mactan, where Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) was killed. In the 160 minutes in between, the film’s scenes on land and at sea are connected by historical inevitability, not dramatic causation. The reckless voyage, plagued by mutiny and desertion, is not so much a hero’s journey as a hopelessly delayed report, such as a colony would receive from the metropole, months or years after the fact.

Diaz made only one take of each shot through his fixed frame, and each set-up is calibrated to convey a single idea. The result is a bracing semantic economy. A battle, for instance, is represented by its conclusion: two men regarding each other from across a quiet field of corpses. The dialogue—in Portuguese, Spanish, and Cebuano—might be exactly that which was actually spoken at the events in question, 500 years ago; that is to say it is clumsy, inarticulate, mostly functional, sometimes bloviating. Repetition, especially, runs through the film, the same words issued twice or more in a row: to pray, to persuade, to assent, to beseech, to translate; in pain, in desperation, in disgust.

The film will be controversial in the director’s home country, no doubt, for a bit of historical revisionism. Lapulapu, the national hero credited with the defeat of Magellan, is here a boogeyman invented by the Rajah Humabon, whom the Europeans had converted to Christianity and taken as an ally. In the present-day Philippines, Lapulapu’s name and imagined likeness appear everywhere from monuments and holidays to police and fire department crests—a patriotic mythmaking to which Diaz has attributed, in part, the rise of the Marcos and Duterte regimes.

Aside from an indulgence in spectral figuration in the case of the explorer’s wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo, to whom Diaz plans to dedicate a nine-hour cut of the film), Magellan is most notable for its sense of reenacted actuality. The present-day timeline, represented in Blue Heronand The Secret Agentby filmmakers, social workers, and archivists, is here implicit in our own viewing, centuries after the fact. It is not hard to imagine the film being used as a classroom resource: “Here, kids, is how it might have really happened.”

Rose of Nevada(Mark Jenkin, 2025).

On a perilous sea journey of a different kind are the two men at the center of Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, one of whom becomes a prisoner and the other an escapee in a land of slip time. In a sleepy village in Cornwall, the titular fishing boat reappears in its mooring thirty years after it was lost at sea, and a mysterious captain (Francis Magee) soon materializes to take the helm. Nick (George MacKay) signs on, in need of money to fix his family’s kitchen ceiling. Liam (Callum Turner), who has been sleeping rough by the docks, rounds out the crew, hoping for an advance on his bar tab. After a successful first haul, the boat returns to a curiously active harbor, and it soon becomes apparent that the voyage has sent them into an alternate past, where Nick and Liam are cast in the roles of two men long dead in their own time: one drowned in the Rose’s fateful voyage, the other a suicide in its aftermath.

In this way, Jenkin makes speculative fiction out of what could otherwise be the lyrics to a sea shanty. From the first moments of the film, the materiality of his high-contrast 16mm medium is analogized to the rusted maritime implements and scarified wood of his setting. The filmmaker’s attachments to small-gauge celluloid and to Cornish history are knowingly quaint, representing an insistence upon obsolescent cultural forms in the face of a cultural industry that would as soon forget them. The scenes are often broken by the white and red flashes of reel ends, and the story is told mostly in close-ups: weather-cracked faces, work-hardened hands, feet on solid ground or a shifting deck. A tolling synth score, composed by Jenkin, seems to submerge into whalesong when we are at sea, accompanying the men’s grunts, the gull’s cries, the motor’s thrum, and the ship’s wooden complaints.

“For every man at sea, there’s five ashore relying on you,” the captain advises his small crew, which comes to seem a key to their purgatorial displacement. Whether by curse or prophecy, as penance or in fulfillment of a psychic debt, they become understudies in the lives of other men, given the choice of repeating their tragic fate or sacrificing themselves in service of a new timeline, from which they may never be able to return. Their presence there will do nothing to offset the impending economic crisis, but it can at least stabilize a few lives in the interim. “Feels good to be needed,” Liam shrugs.

A short Super 8 diary film by Jenkin, I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, appeared in the second Wavelengths program. In three nonsequentially numbered chapters, the director travels from Liverpool to the Isle of Man to Dublin to Brittany, and finally on to Santa Monica, attending festivals in support of various films and in search of ideas for his next. Like a rabidly cinephilic Sebald, he breathlessly narrates his encounters with locals and the resonance between his surroundings and his memories, which are full of films: the villa Hitchcock used as inspiration for the Bates’ manse in Psycho(1960), the seaside where Éric Rohmer sets Gaspard’s romantic caprice in A Summer’s Tale(1996). One shot zooms in on a red boat on the horizon, plausibly identifying the moment at which inspiration struck for Rose of Nevada. “Some of it is true, some of it is completely untrue,” Jenkin has confessed of his narration. “Some of it is exaggeration. Some of it is resurfaced.” Of the duration of any thought or feeling, the same might be said.

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