Direct from Cannes, this eerie tour visits sites of ‘violent righteousness’.

Recalling Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (also screening at MIFF 2024), Very Gentle Work traverses the modern-day sites in Manhattan where, across the 20th century, an array of anarchists and revolutionaries staged bombings. Via brilliantly penned narration and ominous shots of empty New York City streets, director Nate Lavey spins a tale of dissidents that connects Sholem Schwarzbard in the 1920s to the New Left bombings of the 1970s to a fictional narratorial tale spun in the present day.