Acts of Love
New films by Abdellah Taïa, Marthe Peters, Liz Roberts, Kim Torres, and Darryl Daley
Caitlin Quinlan
Cairo Streets
Director ABDELLAH TAÏA
Year
2025
Country FRANCE
Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep
Director MARTHE PETERS
Year
2026
Country
BELGIUM
Love is the Drug
Director
LIZ ROBERTS
Year
2025
Country USA
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Soñé con un paisaje (I Dreamed of a Gentle Landscape)
Director
KIM TORRES
Year
2025
Country COSTA RICA, CHINA
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New World
Director
DARRYL DALEY
Year
2025
Country UK
Glazed with the fuzzy nostalgia of early 2000s digital, Abdellah Taïa’s vignettes of life in Cairo Streets convey time and longing through form and subject. In their crackling haze, these images wax and wane like memories until something—the striking cerulean allure of one man’s galabiya, the yellow walls of a grandmother’s kitchen, a buttery green tiled wall of a subway station—pulls things sharply into focus. The search for Taïa’s lost love, Omar, announced through on-screen notes addressed to him, sets a tone of yearning that will make these colours so much more vivid for the love and lost time they represent.
A similar construction is used by Marthe Peters in Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep, in which the epistolary form meets grainy, saturated images of pink gel pens and plastic toys hung from the ceiling light. Like Taïa, Peters searches through these visions of youth to find connection with herself and her cat, Henry—not a human lover but her beloved, nonetheless. Peters’ soft, sleepy filmmaking lingers on images of ever-changing bedsheets and dozing figures, while the twinkly synths of musician maya dhondt serve as a gentle lullaby. The comforts of Peters’ visual and aural space disguise some of the lonelier truths in this portrait of friendship. “My body knows more scars than marks,” the director narrates; Peters questions the imposition of love onto her pet, asking if it is too much for an animal to carry. Taïa’s and Peters’ films centres on one perspective: that of the yearner who has a voice, whether expressed through text or voiceover, and a camera with which to document their love. What might Omar’s—or Henry’s—side of the story be? Contemplative and rhythmic, both films nevertheless convey the deeply felt and lasting love of their authors.
Liz Roberts’ Love is the Drug opens up love as a durational force beyond personal intimacy, documenting the work of DIY healthcare organiser Heather Edney in facilitating one of the United States’ first clean needle exchange programmes in Santa Cruz, California. Part of Edney’s impetus for taking up prevention work came from her role as a carer for a young child born HIV-positive. Her adoptive parenthood of MyLeia forms an interconnected stream of love in the film, one that shows how the power of an intimate bond can stretch outwards to others.
Edney’s work in supporting intravenous drug users to adopt safe practices and access clean supplies since the 1990s reflects the immensity of her capacity for love and care, leading to a profound achievement in harm reduction. The consistency and transparency of the support from Edney and others in the needle exchange programme is fundamental; here is drug safety for users, created by users, with practical, instructional information. If you love your community, tell them what they need to know, and Edney made use of many avenues of communication through radical publishing projects; Roberts herself innovatively conveys this living, functioning archive through a multimedia approach, layering video news footage from the era with new 16mm shots, often interspersed with documents and ephemera from Edney’s print work.
How to make love feel tangible? The gathering of materials across these films, both through objects, documents and film formats, offers something to hold onto. Kim Torres and Darryl Daley introduce another element in their respective films I Dreamed of a Gentle Landscape and New World: water. Torres’ oneiric portrait of Chunyan, a woman who moved from China to Costa Rica for her love, imagines their romance against the quotidian reality of operating their beach side shop. Drifting between colour and black and white images, Torres captures something hyperreal—the wonder of their coastal paradise, the distance from home, the strangeness of the gap between the two worlds Chunyan has known. The hum of the ocean, moving in perpetuity, is never far.
Like Torres, Daley’s interaction with water in New World reflects the movement of people. The filmmaker’s ethnographic study considers a lineage of transatlantic movement for Black people, an ancestry carried through bodies, and through water as a vessel. Shooting in textured black and white aboard a boat, the camera roams and bobs with the sea’s flux. A smiling face stutters into view, and in fleeting moments of stillness, a man is baptised in a body of water. Faces are glimpsed and muffled voices heard, both revealed and obscured on this journey as real people in the blur of time. Though these oblique devices reveal little about the individuals captured or the precise space they occupy, they help to form a sense of shared, collective experience that spans time. Specificity and structure make way for a fluid community portrait that finds truth and emotion, not in spite of but because of its untethered and multifaceted approach. It is within Daley’s layered retracing and reimagining of Black histories that an act of love emerges.
Caitlin Quinlan is a writer and editor from London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Love is the Drug’ at Close-Up Cinema, 18 April 2026.
A similar construction is used by Marthe Peters in Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep, in which the epistolary form meets grainy, saturated images of pink gel pens and plastic toys hung from the ceiling light. Like Taïa, Peters searches through these visions of youth to find connection with herself and her cat, Henry—not a human lover but her beloved, nonetheless. Peters’ soft, sleepy filmmaking lingers on images of ever-changing bedsheets and dozing figures, while the twinkly synths of musician maya dhondt serve as a gentle lullaby. The comforts of Peters’ visual and aural space disguise some of the lonelier truths in this portrait of friendship. “My body knows more scars than marks,” the director narrates; Peters questions the imposition of love onto her pet, asking if it is too much for an animal to carry. Taïa’s and Peters’ films centres on one perspective: that of the yearner who has a voice, whether expressed through text or voiceover, and a camera with which to document their love. What might Omar’s—or Henry’s—side of the story be? Contemplative and rhythmic, both films nevertheless convey the deeply felt and lasting love of their authors.
Liz Roberts’ Love is the Drug opens up love as a durational force beyond personal intimacy, documenting the work of DIY healthcare organiser Heather Edney in facilitating one of the United States’ first clean needle exchange programmes in Santa Cruz, California. Part of Edney’s impetus for taking up prevention work came from her role as a carer for a young child born HIV-positive. Her adoptive parenthood of MyLeia forms an interconnected stream of love in the film, one that shows how the power of an intimate bond can stretch outwards to others.
Edney’s work in supporting intravenous drug users to adopt safe practices and access clean supplies since the 1990s reflects the immensity of her capacity for love and care, leading to a profound achievement in harm reduction. The consistency and transparency of the support from Edney and others in the needle exchange programme is fundamental; here is drug safety for users, created by users, with practical, instructional information. If you love your community, tell them what they need to know, and Edney made use of many avenues of communication through radical publishing projects; Roberts herself innovatively conveys this living, functioning archive through a multimedia approach, layering video news footage from the era with new 16mm shots, often interspersed with documents and ephemera from Edney’s print work.
How to make love feel tangible? The gathering of materials across these films, both through objects, documents and film formats, offers something to hold onto. Kim Torres and Darryl Daley introduce another element in their respective films I Dreamed of a Gentle Landscape and New World: water. Torres’ oneiric portrait of Chunyan, a woman who moved from China to Costa Rica for her love, imagines their romance against the quotidian reality of operating their beach side shop. Drifting between colour and black and white images, Torres captures something hyperreal—the wonder of their coastal paradise, the distance from home, the strangeness of the gap between the two worlds Chunyan has known. The hum of the ocean, moving in perpetuity, is never far.
Like Torres, Daley’s interaction with water in New World reflects the movement of people. The filmmaker’s ethnographic study considers a lineage of transatlantic movement for Black people, an ancestry carried through bodies, and through water as a vessel. Shooting in textured black and white aboard a boat, the camera roams and bobs with the sea’s flux. A smiling face stutters into view, and in fleeting moments of stillness, a man is baptised in a body of water. Faces are glimpsed and muffled voices heard, both revealed and obscured on this journey as real people in the blur of time. Though these oblique devices reveal little about the individuals captured or the precise space they occupy, they help to form a sense of shared, collective experience that spans time. Specificity and structure make way for a fluid community portrait that finds truth and emotion, not in spite of but because of its untethered and multifaceted approach. It is within Daley’s layered retracing and reimagining of Black histories that an act of love emerges.
Caitlin Quinlan is a writer and editor from London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Love is the Drug’ at Close-Up Cinema, 18 April 2026.