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Isidore Bethel

Isidore Bethel

Directing

Biography

Isidore Bethel is an editor, director, and producer whom Filmmaker named one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2020. His work uses filmmaking to make sense of overwhelming experiences and touches on recurrent themes of displacement, grief, therapy, aging, trauma, and sexuality. His first feature film as director, Liam, premiered at the Boston LGBT Film Festival in 2018 and received the Jury Prize in the Documentary section of the Paris LGBTQ+ Film Festival. His second film, Acts of Love, co-directed with French actor Francis Leplay, premiered at Hot Docs in 2021. The films he has edited and produced have screened at Cannes (Official and ACID sections), IDFA, Visions du Réel, Cinéma du Réel, True/False, and MoMA's Documentary Fortnight. In addition to working in the United States, Mexico, and France, he has also edited and produced films with filmmakers in Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, and Turkey. Critics have characterized his work as demonstrative of "admirable restraint," "Wiseman-esque," "tender," and "elegant."

Known For

Wi Cyah Stay
N/A

When their homes in rural Jamaica become unsafe, a queer teen and his cousin dare to confide in their aunt.

Wi Cyah Stay

2025
Hummingbirds
7.0

Best friends Silvia and Beba record their lives as they dance, make music, and face an uncertain immigration process in Texas near the Mexican border.

Hummingbirds

2023
Horse Wrangler
6.0

Nando, a young horse wrangler in a rural Mexican village, has taken his own life following a disagreement with his father. Caballerango shows the boy’s family members and townspeople as they reckon with the new realities borne out of this inexplicable tragedy. Each account of Nando’s story reveals a different aspect of this rural town, which is deeply affected by modernization. The confrontation between the centuries-old ways of life and the modern-day world seems to be creating serious identity crises among the younger generation. The story is told in a patient, observational style with methodical shots of the landscape, ranches, and of the two white horses, whom Nando and his father tended to. Those horses, the last to see Nando alive, connect us to an ethereal sensation of almost otherworldly mystical beings.

Horse Wrangler

2018
Acts of Love
3.5

When his older boyfriend loses interest in him, the filmmaker relocates to Chicago and uses dating apps to cast new lovers in an amorphous project that his mother hates.

Acts of Love

2021
unseen
N/A

An aspiring social worker, Pedro must confront political restrictions as a blind, undocumented immigrant to get his college degree and support his family. But when attaining his dreams leads to new and unexpected challenges, what will Pedro do?

unseen

2023
Liam
N/A

Just after Isidore moves to France to study filmmaking, his best friend dies back in the US. Through documentary, performance, and animation, a ghostly portrait emerges, prompting Isidore to question his relationships with his parents and his boyfriend in Paris.

Liam

2018
So Late So Soon
5.0

Chicago artists Jackie and Don Seiden are a half-century into their marriage, time spent creating distinct yet congruous bodies of work. Jackie makes art of everything around her. Central to her practice is a recognition of the fragility of materials. That conceptual interest has turned into daily reality, as both her body and one of her most ambitious art projects, her canary-yellow Victorian house, start to fall apart. Don’s work reveals a mind resigned to death. He has always been interested in the rules of nature, and now he finds himself facing inevitable health scares. So Late So Soon is a sensitively constructed, playful character study that honors Jackie and Don’s art, and even becomes a part of it, while also locating in it glimmers of their essence.

So Late So Soon

2020
What We Leave Behind
6.3

At the age of 89, Julián Moreno takes one last bus ride to El Paso, Texas, to visit his daughters and their children – a lengthy trip he has made without fail every month for decades. After returning to rural Mexico, he quietly starts building a house in the empty lot next to his home. In the absence of his physical visits, can this new house bridge the distance between his loved ones?

What We Leave Behind

2022
The Taste of Mango
N/A

In this hypnotically cinematic love letter flowing through time and generations, director Chloe Abrahams probes raw questions her mother and grandmother have long brushed aside, tenderly untangling painful knots in her family’s unspoken past.

The Taste of Mango

2024
Grandir (O Happy Days!)
4.0

In 2002, on the occasion of her brother’s wedding, Dominique Cabrera begun to shoot the gathering, and decided to continue over 10 years, time imprinting its marks on her family and "becoming the film" as she expresses it. Halfway between Agnès Varda and Alain Cavalier, Dominique Cabrera delivers a sensitive film both intimate and universal: "Ten years ago, my brother Bernard got married for the second time. We all went to the wedding in Boston, where he lives. It felt as if we were four little children again with our mom and dad. I had brought along a small camera, which I began to use to film our family. I've continued to this day..."

Grandir (O Happy Days!)

2013
No image
N/A

Incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch videos of sunset-soaked beaches, wildflowers and forests on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and wilderness. Equal parts meditation and provocation, Blue Room identifies the damage done by withholding access to the outdoors and how we are all prisoners when the essential human need for communion with nature is denied.

Blue Room

2022
What Comes from Sitting in Silence?
N/A

From a cramped Mumbai storefront, Khatoon leads Mumbai's first women-led Islamic court. Amidst heated arguments and raw testimony, these female judges settle cases of domestic conflict, reclaiming religious law from male dominance to offer a new path toward grassroots justice.

What Comes from Sitting in Silence?

2026
Maintenant et ici
N/A

An intimate portrait of the Franco-Iranian painter Davoud Ghanbariha, filmed in the outskirts of Paris. Through a dialogue between his voice and his paintings, Maintenant et ici explores memory, exile, and the act of creation as a fragile bridge between past and present.

Maintenant et ici

2021
The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park
6.0

The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park is a film that celebrates the everyday life of a group of Indigenous people, exiles from Canadian reserves, who, over a fleeting summer, hang out in a contested park in Vancouver. Through direct participation in the filmmaking process, the day to day becomes a ceremonial space in the ongoing confrontation against law and order.

The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park

2016
Hollow Tree
N/A

Hollow Tree follows three teenagers coming of age in their sinking homeland of Louisiana. For the first time, they notice the Mississippi River’s engineering, stumps of cypress trees, and billowing smokestacks. Their different perspectives — as Indigenous, white, and Angolan young women — shape their story of the climate crisis.

Hollow Tree

2022
Of Men and War
6.9

Filmed over five years, this documentary charts the progress of several veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder at a California clinic.

Of Men and War

2014
Some Kind of Intimacy
4.0

The filmmaker tries to communicate with the sheep living where his parents are buried.

Some Kind of Intimacy

2021
Rehearsal for an Encounter
N/A

Charlie practices what he wants to say to his biological mother before meeting her and traveling to Seoul for the first time.

Rehearsal for an Encounter