Father Mother Sister Brother

Somewhere in the United States, a brother and sister visit their aging father after a long absence. In Dublin, an elderly writer prepares to meet her two adult daughters that she sees once a year. In Paris, young twins—a brother and sister—go to the apartment left behind by their late parents. Jim Jarmusch’s new film consists of three short stories of fleeting reunions between parents and children, with each episode capturing moments of closeness, estrangement, longing and solitude. Though unrelated in plot, these separate vignettes form a surreal puzzle bound together by recurring motifs: toasts with tea or water, spontaneous colour pairings and Rolex watches—real or fake. Combined with subtly grotesque performances and dialogues, these quintessential “Jarmuschian” details highlight the absurdity and mystery of daily rituals—awkward, confusing, quietly tragic, sometimes empty yet never meaningless. As always, Jarmusch is as preoccupied with the everyday as he is with the abstract. In this “action film without action”—a phrase once coined by the director himself—the banal becomes a veil for the sublime, invisible to most and probably only glimpsed by the free skaters who drift through the film like visions. (Evgeny Gusyatinskiy)

Jim Jarmusch (selection): PERMANENT VACATION (1980), STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984), DOWN BY LAW (1986), MYSTERY TRAIN (1989), DEAD MAN (1995), GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999), COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2003), BROKEN FLOWERS (2005), ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013), PATERSON (2016), THE DEAD DON’T DIE (2019)