This article appeared in the February 14, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (Julian Castronovo, 2025)

Near the end of Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a 180-minute essay film about the rise and fall of video stores, Maya Hawke, the movie’s narrator, describes the rental shop as “the final bastion for the accountability of [the viewer’s] taste.” Nowadays, with video stores having essentially gone the way of the dodo bird, the same might be said of the film festival. Navigating a festival program is probably the closest one can get to indiscriminately sifting through racks of VHS tapes until a stray image or title catches your eye, only for that choice to be questioned or embraced by fellow festivalgoers. At this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, there were plenty of movies to discuss—probably too many, as the Dutch event, now in its 54th year, continues to program an overwhelming number of titles that no one person could possibly take in over the festival’s 11 days. Attendees thus tend to have very different experiences at IFFR, depending on their interests and dedication to exploring the program’s furthest reaches. For me, watching Videoheaven turned out to be an appropriate way to begin my festival—it was the first, longest, and richest film that I saw there—as most of the standouts in this year’s edition were either American films or the kinds of idiosyncratic works that, in years gone by, you might have hoped to stumble across when visiting your local video store.

Inspired by Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store and Thom Andersen’s landmark film-historical video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Perry traces the evolution of the brick-and-mortar rental house through its depiction in the movies: from its first appearances as a space of lurid interests and desire in films like Body Double and Disconnected (both 1984), through its pop-cultural apex in the ’90s on television shows Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier, to its slow death across the aughts and 2010s. In this latter era, chain stores like Blockbuster parlayed the mom-and-pop energy of independently owned operations into increasingly sterile and corporatized environments, though even those, ironically, feel somewhat quaint in today’s era of algorithmic at-home streaming services.

Coupled with Perry’s theoretical musings (delivered by Hawke in pleasingly dulcet voiceover) on video stores as sites of wide-ranging cinematic and (sub)cultural value (we’re reminded throughout that you could once pick up a porno tape to go along with that Oscar-winning classic you’d been meaning to watch), the montage of film clips brings the analog era rushing back to life. It’s enough to make one yearn not only for the days of tangible home media, but the experience of commiserating about cinema with like-minded patrons and highfalutin clerks—or, indeed, avoiding these encounters entirely, as they might reveal more about your taste and lifestyle than you’d care to admit publicly.

The filmmaking duo Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan are uninhibited by such reservations: they’ve made a habit of putting their lives on screen. New Strains, their first feature as a writer-director pair which won a Special Jury prize at IFFR 2023, is a Hi8-shot document of life during the COVID-19 lockdown era that looks like one of the scuzzier artifacts that Perry and his editor Clyde Folley dug up for Videoheaven. Shaw and Kamalakanthan’s latest, Removal of the Eye, looks to have been filmed with a more up-to-date camera but happily retains the earlier film’s manic mix of post-millennial humor and urban-romantic anxiety. This funny and personal followup similarly centers on the filmmakers, playing versions of themselves, Kallia and Ram, a young couple living in New York who are confronted by a situation that they are not equipped to handle: after the birth of their baby and a series of relatively harmless accidents, Kallia’s mother (played by Shaw’s real-life mom, Ekaterini Perganti Shaw) insists on performing a Greek exorcism ritual on the infant. Shaw and Kamalakanthan use the cultural and creative nuances of their mixed-race partnership (they are of Greek and Indian descent, respectively) to craft a modern-day domestic comedy with surprisingly fresh insights into parenting in a post-Pandemic world of Zoom meetings and homebound artistic expression.

If director Julian Castronovo left his home more than a couple of times to make his imaginatively titled first feature, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, it’s not immediately evident in the finished work, which looks and feels like an amateur detective film made on a laptop, or perhaps a true crime podcast presented in slideshow form. This proudly DIY project turns the fictional story of a missing filmmaker (played by Castronovo) and a Chinese art forger (Song Hui) into a self-reflexive study of fakery and the slippery nature of authorship. Narrated by a rotating cast of characters both seen and not, the film is structured as a montage of still and moving images of ambiguous origin (some footage seems to have been shot by Castronovo around his apartment, while other sequences look to be constructed from images appropriated from the internet). Castronovo builds this speculative story around a series of MacGuffins and rabbit holes related to the forger but ultimately pointing back to the director character himself—a not-so-veiled stand-in for Castronovo—whose frustrated attempts to make a more conventional movie are reflected in a subplot about an aspiring filmmaker being conned by a Hollywood studio and a potential conspiracy linked to his disappearance. On the evidence of this inventive feature, Castronovo has the talent to produce the kind of film his surrogate in Debut dreams of making—but it also suggests that he may just as well be served by continuing to explore the tools currently at his disposal.

Debut was presented in the Bright Future program for first features, but it would have made a bold choice for the festival’s marquee Tiger Competition, which was thin on highlights. Of what I managed to see, my favorite was Vitrival – The Most Beautiful Village in the World, a deadpan comedy by Noëlle Bastin and Baptiste Bogaert about a pair of Belgian cops investigating a series of suicides in the titular town; the film plays like a Dumontian spin on Alessandro Comodin’s similarly themed tale of rural existentialism, The Adventures of Gigi the Law (2022).

Luckily, viewers intrepid enough to explore the festival’s sidebars were frequently rewarded. Like Removal of the Eye, Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda’s co-directed documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office premiered in the Harbour section, dedicated to more adventurous fare, which this strange peek behind the curtain of postwar America certainly is. Centered on the eponymous mid-century neuroscientist, the film journeys into Lilly’s psychoanalytic studies of human and animal consciousness via his controversial experiments with dolphins, which, among other things, involved the use of psychedelic drugs. Employing striking archival footage of Lilly at work and in various television appearances, Stephens and Almereyda show how this inscrutable figure became a kind of counterculture spokesman à la his contemporaries Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, bringing mind-expanding notions of ethnological interconnectedness to the masses. The directors have openly admitted to their differing levels of affection for their subject, and there’s an appropriately palpable tension to the film’s restless form, which shifts between Stephens’s signature essayistic approach and talking-head interviews that the veteran Almereyda felt would help demystify Lilly. During the Q&A, the directors were open to critiques from the audience about the film’s structure, which they say may change as it continues to travel‚ proving that festivals may be a final bastion for the accountability of not only the viewer’s taste, but of filmmakers’ as well.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and the founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series in Los Angeles. In addition to his work for Film Comment, he is a regular contributor to Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound, and more. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.