Here are two more must-see films which will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival. Go here for showtimes and tickets.

There are no actual shipwrecks in Deniz Eroglu’s wonderfully imaginative film “The Shipwrecked Triptych.” Instead the the term is a metaphor for when a person’s shelter becomes lost or is precarious. Three narratives, set in different times, present eerie and sometimes comical predicaments of characters who react to an at least semi-safe environment being disrupted. Different film stocks are employed to define the different time periods.

The first episode, shot in 16mm, is set on New Year’s Eve 1982 in a German nursing home in remote snowy mountains. The cavalier staff (all male) hurry the residents to bed so they can enjoy the food and alcohol of that night’s party all to themselves. Some of the gay staff worry about the rise of the AIDs epidemic as one obese resident slips out and wanders out into the snow.

The second episode advances to the early 1990s and looks like VHS footage. A sleazy man goes to the home of a Congolese refugee family and poses as a civil servant demanding to inspect their house. They oblige but become quickly realize that he may be a fake as he wears out his welcome with increasingly invasive requests. 

The final episode follows a band of nomads in Medieval times, filmed in black-and-white. There is no dialogue but we hear sounds of nature. This segment is very spooky yet enchanting and when one member is cast out of the tribe he ventures forth to face hostile forces and psychedelic visions.

Eroglu cast a mix of professionals and non-actors in his debut film and it is one of the most stunning films I’ve seen this year. I can’t wait to see his future work.

You may have mixed feelings about how involved the U.S. should be in the Ukraine/Russian war but you can’t deny the horrors Ukraine people have experienced. Filmed over two years in that country, “Songs of Slow Burning Earth,” directed by Olha Zhurba, it captures the shock and fear at the beginning of the war as civilians hurry to flee the country, pushing into crowded trains and waiting hours in long car convoys at the border, and the subsequent horrors of villagers dealing with invading Russian troops.

In one of the most memorable sequences we see through a vehicle windshield along a winding country road. Everyone standing on the side of the road bends to the ground and prays. Cars on the other side of the road pull aside and stop. We infer it must be a funeral procession and later we see it is a truck carrying a dead Ukrainian soldier.

After Russians abandon occupying one town, Ukrainian boys play war amongst blown up tanks and other weaponry. Children hurry to a bomb shelter. Wounded soldiers adjust to new prosthetic limbs at a hospital. Dead pigs lie in a partially destroyed hog farm. Doctors conduct a long line of autopsies, collecting the victim’s personal effects into zip-locked bags. I’ve seen several documentaries about the war in Ukraine but this one is perhaps the most chilling because it advances quietly, almost poetically, with no narration and a succession of haunting images which will wound you indelibly.