"It's not really foreign anymore"

NYFF's latest dispatch praises three works — Claudia Llosa's At Night, a feature about a woman whose insomnia unmoors her from linear time, alongside two shorts, Foreign Travel and Joy of Joys — as individually meritorious films from elsewhere. What the praise stops short of naming is the curatorial assumption these three actually share: they have abandoned any investment in national or political meaning altogether.

A film about a woman's insomnia and a film about a man watching traffic operate under different logics entirely. One label contains them both. That label, 'foreign,' no longer means what it once did. It no longer signals a cinema rooted in a particular nation's concerns, its history, its way of seeing conflict or family or time. It now functions as a marketing category for apolitical cinema. Work that privileges intimate psychological states over social context, interiority over the world.

This shift tracks with what happened post-2020, when the category 'foreign film' itself became contested. Festival programmers faced a genuine reckoning: were they selecting films because they came from elsewhere, or because they offered something aesthetically distinct? The answer they landed on was neither. They began selecting for a particular kind of consciousness. One that refuses or evades political interpretation, that treats the self as the only reliable subject, that aestheticizes psychological fragmentation as universal truth.

At Night exemplifies this perfectly. Llosa's camera dwells on a woman's internal rhythms, her relationship to sleep and waking, her disconnection from the city around her. It is formally sophisticated and genuinely moving. It is also fundamentally uninterested in Peru, in Spanish America, in anything that would locate her suffering in a particular place. The film could take place anywhere. That portability is not a weakness. It is the feature that makes it festival-legible to American curators and audiences. When a programmer selects work that could happen nowhere, they have selected for something called 'universal,' which always means American aesthetics with foreign subtitles.

Understand what this means for how you see the world. If you work in any field that requires you to choose what gets attention. A publication, a gallery, a grant panel, an algorithm. You are probably already sorting by a category that stopped meaning what you think it does. You call it 'quality' or 'innovation' or 'authenticity' when what you are actually selecting for is familiarity disguised as strangeness, emotional legibility disguised as cultural specificity. The work that gets through is the work that has already decided not to demand anything from you except recognition.