New York City hosts the last of the year’s major film festivals, and benefits from the sorting process. Highlights from Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto come pre-praised and garlanded with various awards. This year’s New York Film Festival includes the winners of the Golden and Silver Lions, as well as of nearly every category at Cannes—from Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall on down.
Among these is Thien An Pham’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won 2023’s Caméra d’Or for best debut feature. Pham’s film follows Thien (played by Le Phong Vu), a young man living a dissipated life in Saigon. When the film begins, he is drinking at a sidewalk restaurant, mocking his friend’s decision to go live a more spiritual life in the mountains. Like most of the film, the sequence is languorously paced, arranged in one long take that gives the viewer time to scrutinize Pham’s densely detailed frames. It begins to rain; then, suddenly, there is a shattering sound. Rather than cutting, Pham’s camera pans tensely across the tables and stalls, until, at long last, he shows us the aftermath of a crash: two motorbikes broken on the ground, two adults and a child scattered around them.
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