Richard Brody’s dispatch from the first week of this year’s New York Film Festival leads with a director who has been making films for two decades but has never had one in the festival: Mani Haghighi, whose new documentary premieres September 30 under the title “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies.”

The subject is a couple in Tabriz, Iran — Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi — who both describe themselves the same way: “artist, archivist, collector.”

  • Their collecting and archiving is presented as political: a way of resisting official histories that privilege the stories and artifacts of the rich and powerful, and of preserving the creations of ordinary people.
  • The film itself was shaped by repression. Haghighi’s original opening sequence was lost when security forces confiscated his footage on the charge that he had filmed women without head scarves; the US-Israeli war on Iran also bears on what he could depict.
  • Their scavenged material — discarded photo albums, outsider-art notebooks, clandestine photographs from decades of Iranian life — carries histories that would otherwise be erased.

Brody’s sharpest critical argument is about how filmmakers should treat archival images. Haghighi zeroes in macrophotographically on banal family slides until small gestures and faces resolve into portraiture with the force of classical painting, then further into grain, shadow and color that read as avant-garde abstraction. Archival images, Brody says, should not be used as “history by the yard” but as subjects in their own right, needing directorial intervention as much as any fiction.

Also in the week:

  • Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s “NAZA,” built on interviews with Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers about how AI-assisted systems produced a high civilian death toll in Gaza.
  • William and David Greaves’s “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” the completion of a 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance figures in Duke Ellington’s apartment.
  • Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown,” a body-swap melodrama whose transformations have no cause at all — no catastrophe, mutation, or curse — which Brody reads as tragedy landing in the middle of ordinary working life.
  • Hong Sangsoo’s “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” a double manifesto on voice-over and on the basic act of seeing, with the family drama of whether a young experimental filmmaker’s work is a “hobby” or a life.

The thread across the week is films that treat looking itself as a political and moral act — what gets filmed, what gets confiscated, and whose discarded lives get archived.