OVID’s January Lineup: The Holiday you didn’t (want to) have, Rebels, Worst Enemies, Kyiv Theater, Iranian interrogations, Tiffany Sia x 2, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Martin Margiela & more!

This January OVID presents 18 new films and 13 exclusives.

OVID will start the year with a vacation-in-paradise gone wrong (to make you feel better about your return to the office) with Holiday by Isabella Eklöf (starring The Girl with the Needle‘s Vic Carmen Sonne), plus a twisty noir Three Monkeys by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, director of About Dry Grasses.

Exclusives include a follow-up to Mosco Boucault’s “extraordinary” and “audacious” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker) documentary Terrorists in Retirement from 1983, this new film 23 Foreigners – Our Brothers was broadcast on French TV, adding a contemporary reflection while tracing the ongoing influence of Nazi Resistance members who did not survive. We also take you to Ukraine in Kyiv Theater: An Island of Hope, where actors and amateurs come together to perform under the supervision of Théâtre du Soleil director Ariane Mnouchkine.

Then we take you to Japan with a collection of three famous ghost stories that have haunted people for centuries, along with a more contemporary Japanese drama, Plan 75, about Japan’s aging population.

We’ll be streaming several experimental hybrid films, including My Worst Enemy directed by Mehran Tamadon who enlists renowned actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Best Actress at Cannes for Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider), to channel her own experiences of interrogation by hypothetically occupying the role of an agent of the Islamic Republic. Plus, David Easteal’s The Plains, an Australian docudrama shot almost entirely in a car. We then cap the month off with a bonkers Soviet sci-fi — Kin-dza-dza!

Full details on December’s complete lineup are below.

Image above from Reiner Holzemer's MARTIN MARGIELA: IN HIS OWN WORDS, premiering on OVID on January 15th.

Friday, January 3

Holiday
Directed by Isabella Eklöf
With Vic Carmen Sonne, Lai Yde, Thijs Römer
Breaking Glass Pictures | Feature | Denmark | 2019

Young and beautiful Sascha discovers her dream life of luxury, recklessness and fun comes at a price when she is welcomed into the “family” of her drug lord boyfriend at his holiday villa in the port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riveria. Physical and psychological violence are a way of life for this gangster family, but when the velvet veneer is stripped raw to the bone, Sascha’s eye drifts towards the “normal” life she is leaving behind–is it possible she could still be accepted by polite society?

“A viciously auspicious debut… A cool, hard trip, icy in the fullest glare of the afternoon sun, in which even the pallid, expensively tacky interior of the villa — hats off to production designer Josephine Farsø — invites tension and judgment.” —Guy Lodge, Variety

** Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Competition

Wednesday, January 8

Rebel
Directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah
With Aboubakr Bensaihi, Lubna Azabal, Tara Abboud
Yellow Veil | Feature | Belgium | 2022

When Kamal resolves to change his life for the better, he leaves Belgium to help war victims in Syria. But, having arrived, he is forced to join ISIS and is left stranded in Raqqa. Back home, his younger brother Nassim quickly becomes easy prey for radical recruiters, who promise to reunite him with his brother. Their mother, Leila, fights to protect the only thing she has left: her youngest son.

Festivals: Cannes Film Festival, Philadelphia International Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival

“A cri de coeur against the moral abyss of religious fanaticism.” —Brandon David Wilson, RogerEbert.com

“Audacious. The movie’s bulldozer bravado in presenting complex issues in the bluntly simplifying language of the action movie — one that the young male viewers most vulnerable to the deceitful seductions of extremist ideologies will not only understand but might even seek out as entertainment — could ultimately be its chief virtue.” —Jesica Kiang, Variety

Thursday, January 9

Kyiv Theater: An Island of Hope
Directed by Duccio Bellugi-Vannuccini & Thomas Briat
AndanaFilms/Icarus Films | Documentary | Ukraine | 2024

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings back dark memories of 1930s Europe for Ariane Mnouchkine, the 84-year-old theater director and founder of the prestigious Théâtre du Soleil in Paris. Against this backdrop and in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance, Mnouchkine decides to put together a theater workshop in Kyiv, Ukraine. Twelve days of intensive training bring together hundreds of Ukranian actors — amateurs, students, and professionals from all over the country — to try their hand at Mnouchkine’s unique form of improvisational theater. With little more than a rehearsal room, yellow curtain, and a few costumes, the actors will create their own island of artistic expression. Resisting both defeatism and naïve optimism, this is an essential and timely exploration of what it means to create art in times of war.

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Friday, January 10

My Maysoon
Directed by Batoul Karbijha
First Hand Films | Documentary | Netherlands | 2023

Filmmaker Batoul Karbijha decides that making a film about what happened to her sister Maysoon is the only way to deal with a pain is so great that no one in her family can talk about it. On 24 August 2014, 20-year-old Maysoon was on her way from Syria to Europe when her boat capsized. Of the 712 people on board, 488 were rescued, 24 where found washed up on the Italian shore, and the 200 people remaining have been missing ever since. Maysoon is one of them. Batoul’s search takes her from Sicily to Tunisia and to Libya, and confronts her with graveyards full of missing migrants, in a labyrinth of ignorance, indifference, and powerlessness.

OVID EXCLUSIVE

My Worst Enemy
Directed by Mehran Tamadon
With Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mehran Tamadon
Andana Films | Documentary | France | 2024

Mehran Tamadon has lived in France for many years. As an experiment, he asks exiled Iranians to interrogate him as an agent of the Islamic Republic might. One of them, a renowned actress with first-hand knowledge of such mistreatment, accepts the challenge. Zar Amir Ebrahimi is among other individuals who have been thrown into prison and ideologically interrogated in Iran.

“A daring experiment… loaded with shocking stabs of confession, continually grappling with the frightening psychological excesses of power.” –High on Films

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Tuesday, January 14

Sisterhood
Directed by Nora El Hourch
With Leah Aubert, Médina Diarra, and Salma Takaline
Distrib Films | Feature | France | 2023

Despite their different social backgrounds, Amina, Djeneba, and Zineb have been friends for as long as they can remember. When Zineb experiences harassment from her brother’s best friend, Amina decides to post a compromising video of him on social media, hoping he will stop. Little does she know that the video will not only jeopardize her safety, but also threatens their close-knit friendship. A poignantly contemporary film about a generation of young women growing up in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the film reminds us that growing up is anything but easy.

“A hopeful debut film that tells a story of sisterhood beyond social boundaries. It reminds us that feminism without class struggle and anti-racism is not feminism.” —Marie Claire

“A fiercely feminist and passionate story.” —Le Dauphiné Libéré

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Wednesday, January 15

Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
By Reiner Holzemer
With Martin Margiela, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Carine Roitfeld
Oscilloscope | Documentary | France | 2019

One of the most revolutionary and influential fashion designers of his time, Martin Margiela has remained an elusive figure the entirety of his decades-long career. From Jean Paul Gaultier’s assistant to creative director at Hermès to leading his own House, Margiela never showed his face publicly and avoided interviews, but reinvented fashion with his radical style through forty-one provocative collections. Now, for the first time, the “Banksy of fashion” reveals his drawings, notes, and personal items in this exclusive, intimate profile of his vision.

“Offers perhaps the most complete insight yet into one of fashion’s most elusive geniuses.” —Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire 

“It’s a greatest-hits celebration of one of the last great fashion radicals, whose choices, decades later, still have the sting of the fresh. More intriguingly, though, it is a poem about the ways in which the speed and ubiquity demanded by the internet have squeezed certain creative wells dry, perhaps irreparably.”  —Jon Caramanica, The New York Times 

Thursday, January 16

The Sojourn
Directed by Tiffany Sia
OVID | Short | USA | 2024

Visiting scenic locations shot by filmmaker King Hu Jinquan, this short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. She then visits the elementary school of Indigenous filmmaker and principal Pilin Yapu of the Atayal tribe. Absent of conventional subtitles, the essay film employs text burned into the center of the frame, resisting disclosure.

OVID EXCLUSIVE

A Child Already Knows 
Directed by Tiffany Sia
OVID | Short | USA | 2024

A short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a sojourn through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same period. The child becomes aware of the world of adult secrets. 

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Friday, January 17

Plan 75
Directed by Chie Hayakawa
With Chieko Baishō, Hayato Isomura, Stephanie Arianne
KimStim | Feature | Japan | 2022

Faced with a rapidly aging population, a government in near-future Japan rolls out an unsettling agenda. In Chie Hayakawa’s remarkable and sensitive feature film debut, the lives of three ordinary citizens intersect in this new reality as they confront the crushing callousness of a world ready to dispose of those no longer deemed valuable. On the surface, the plan and its hawkers exude a kindness that serves as the film’s chilling vision of bureaucratic indifference and our increasing loss of interconnectedness. However, Hayakawa’s view is far from grim, as these characters soon learn to fully reckon with their own lives and what it truly means to live.

“Playing out like an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror but with more emotional nuance… Hayakawa’s first feature film is a clever, introspective gem.” —Calum Russell, Far Out Magazine

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Tuesday, January 21

Silvio Rodriguez: My First Calling
Directed by Catherine Murphy
New Day Films | Documentary Short | USA, Cuba | 2022

The little-known story of Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, speaking in first person about the life-defining experience he had at 14-years-old when he signed up to join the youth brigades of the 1961 Literacy Campaign and taught a campesino family how to read and write.

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Wednesday, January 22

23 Foreigners — Our Brothers
Directed by Ruth Zylberman & Mosco Levi Boucault
Icarus Films | Documentary | France | 2024

Just outside Paris, in a peaceful clearing surrounded by woods, a French flag flies above a bare concrete pad. Here, on February 21, 1944, Nazi occupiers executed 23 Resistance fighters by firing squad. After the executions, the Nazis highlighted many of the murdered fighters on a notorious red poster, labeling them as foreigners, communists, and Jews. The filmmakers tell the stories behind some of the faces on that poster, exploring their lives through archival photos, letters they wrote on the eve of their deaths, and moving interviews with their descendants. Where this film’s predecessor, Boucault’s 1983 documentary Terrorists in Retirement, focused on Resistance members who survived, this new film captures the ongoing influence of Resistance members who did not.

“Extraordinary! Audacious, passionate, and exalted… One of the great films about the Holocaust.” —Richard Brody reviews Terrorists in Retirement for The New Yorker

OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD PREMIERE

Thursday, January 16

Daiei Gothic – Japanese Ghost Stories

A collection of three of Japan’s most famous ghost stories that have haunted people for centuries. These three film versions from the Daiei studio form a pinnacle of atmospheric Japanese horror. Their elegant visuals and ominous shadows rival the best of Terence Fisher or Mario Bava, while their iconic female ghosts would greatly influence Asian genre cinema, from Hong Kong fantasy spectacles to J-horror. 

4K Restoration

The Ghost Of Yotsuya
Directed by Kenji Misumi        
With Yasuko Nakada, Kazuo Hasegawa, Yoko Uraji
Radiance Films | Feature | Japan | 1959

In one of Japan’s most frequently told ghost stories, a murdered wife returns in an act of vengeance. This time around, however, she may have her husband there to help. Misumi’s brilliant black-and-white version of this bloody tale puts a new twist on the old story. With some of the best special effects of his early career, Misumi’s Yotsuya Ghost Story is a thrilling and chilling horror film.

“Expertly executed… it is not hard to see how much Misumi’s vision has influenced Japanese horror cinema even decades later” —EasternKicks.com

OVID EXCLUSIVE

4K Restoration

The Bride From Hades
Directed by Satsuo Yamamoto  
With Kojiro Hongo, Mayumi Ogawa, Miyoko Akaza
Radiance Films | Feature | Japan | 1968

A chilling Japanese ghost tale with jaw-dropping visuals and incredible atmosphere, this film follows a handsome samurai who falls in love with a mysterious courtesan hiding a terrible secret. Hauntingly beautiful and evocatively shot, few horror films deliver a careful balance of majesty and terror quite like this.

“Abounds in gorgeously eerie moments… Even its ostensibly happy ending will send chills down your spine—a perfect example of the kaidan’s ability to meld the romantic and erotic with the ghastly and otherworldly.” —Slant

OVID EXCLUSIVE

4K Restoration

The Snow Woman
Directed by Tokuzo Tanaka        
With Akira Ishihama, Shiho Fujimura, Machiko Hasegawa
Radiance Films | Feature | Japan | 1968

In The Snow Woman, directed by Tokuzo Tanaka (Zatoichi), a woodcutter must keep his oath to a vengeful female spirit or pay the ultimate price.

“Visually striking… It’s as much a tragic love story as it is a horror film, and its final few scenes are both heart-wrenching and haunting, tinged with a melancholy vengeance that’s distinctly Japanese.” —Slant

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Tuesday, January 28

The Plains
By David Easteal
With David Easteal, Andrew Rakowski, Cheri LeCornu, Inga Rakowski
OVID | Docudrama | Australia | 2022

A three-hour film set almost entirely in a car as a middle-aged lawyer on his daily commute calls his family, listens to the radio, and gives a lift to a younger colleague.

“Sound interesting? Of course not. But this extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art. Such pared-back voyeurism provokes many interesting ideas: that drama can exist without the dramatic and that engaging narratives are everywhere around us, observable with the right eyes.” –5 stars! Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Wednesday, January 29

Kin-dza-dza! 
Directed by Georgiy Daneliya
With Stanislav Lyubshin, Evgeniy Leonov, Yuriy Yakovlev, Levan Gabriadze
MVD | Feature | Soviet Union | 1986

Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you’ll come close to the existential weirdness of this loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy. Two average Muscovites – a plainspoken construction foreman and a Georgian violin student – encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, ‘Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?’ In a flash, they’re teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy – a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative. A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, and Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune, the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction.

“Possibly the most underrated science fiction film of the past 50 years … A collapsed Ferris wheel provides a home for destitute desert dwellers. Graves are marked by balloons containing the deceased’s final breath. The color of your trousers signifies social status, so they are powerful barter items… There is no convoluted plot, but instead a convoluted universe, and its incredulous victims ready to point out the farcicality therein.” —Joel Blackledge, Little White Lies

OVID EXCLUSIVE

Friday, January 31

Three Monkeys
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
With Yavuz Bingöl, Hatice Aslan, Ahmet Rifat Sungar
Cinema Guild | Feature | Turkey | 2008

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Three Monkeys is a moving, visually unforgettable triumph from Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan (About Dry Grasses). A politician flees a hit-and-run accident in the dead of night and afraid of hurting his election chances, he pays off his chauffeur to take the rap. This devil’s bargain takes its toll.

“An elegant exercise with four characters trapped by class, guilt and greed.”
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

“A peculiarly nationalistic eulogy, because what lies at the heart of this nationalism isn’t pride in national identity, but rather a quintessentially humanistic stance. It’s a recognition of the people’s ambivalence and failings, and a tribute to their endurance in the face of the human condition.” —Film Comment 

OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD PREMIERE

Complete list of films premiering on OVID this month (in alphabetical order):

23 Foreigners — Our Brothers, Ruth Zylberman & Mosco Boucault (2024)
A Child Already Knows, Tiffany Sia (2024)
Holiday, Isabella Eklöf (2019) 
Kin-dza-dza! Georgiy Daneliya (1986) 
Kyiv Theater: An Island of Hope, Duccio Bellugi-Vannuccini & Thomas Briat (2024)
Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, Reiner Holzemer (2019) 
My Maysoon, Batoul Karbijha (2023)
My Worst Enemy, Mehran Tamadon (2024) 
Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa (2022)
Rebel, Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah (2022) 
Silvio Rodriguez: My First Calling, Catherine Murphy (2022) 
Sisterhood, Nora El Hourch (2023) 
The Bride From Hades, Satsuo Yamamoto (1968) 
The Ghost of Yotsuya, Kenji Misumi (1959)    
The Plains, David Easteal (2022)  
The Snow Woman, Tokuzo Tanaka (1968)  
The Sojourn, Tiffany Sia (2024)
Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2008)