The New Friend
- warm
- brisk
- gentle
- tender
- intimate
Warm, kinetic, gentle animation / latvian, inventive in texture. Redemptive, intimate, tender, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, most foreigners and multinational companies had already packed up and left Afghanistan. Going against the stream of foreigners fleeing the country was a group looking for "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunities: Chinese entrepreneurs. Despite the ongoing unrest, an economic crisis and United Nations' concerns over human rights, more Chinese citizens are joining the country's "gold rush". Once a small minority, Chinese nationals now make up Afghanistan's biggest group of expatriates.
Our read · The New Friend (1968) reads as a warm, kinetic, inventive animation · latvian · puppet entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, tender in temperature, redemptive in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
More info & search links
The shape of The New Friend
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a short documentary on Chinese entrepreneurs chasing opportunity in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.”
Skip it tonight — You want fiction or entertainment rather than real-world economics and conflict zone realities.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself