Henry Fonda for President

Originally published by Ink19 on June 11, 2025

Henry Fonda for President
directed by Alexander Horwath

An ominous and uniquely American thread connects the subjects of Mark Rappaport’s essays from 1992 and 1995 on actors Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg and the subject of film historian Alexander Horwath’s ambitious and affecting 185-minute debut feature, Henry Fonda for President. With its starting point in Midwestern small towns, this thread encircles the three screen legends and then extends into an immaterial plane of celebrity that challenges and distorts the distinction between the grounded person and the constructed image.

Both Hudson and Seberg, as evidenced through Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and From the Journals of Jean Seberg, were — by their own symbiotic relationships with celebrity, which were fueled by their acting choices, romantic entanglements, and varying levels of political involvement from non-existent to aggressive — the victims of their crafted identities that eventually superseded any semblance of personal authenticity that is the trademark of the region they came from, leaving them a shell of their former grounded selves as their lives ended prematurely.

These essays now exist as grim biographies of these two actors and how their choices impacted them during socially repressive eras, but more importantly, they exemplify the Hollywood death loop of how celebrity emerges from our collective imagination, manifests into reality, and then reshapes our perception and expectations of said celebrity and ourselves. Though Henry Fonda, by comparison, managed to escape complete tragedy and destruction from this cycle, his survival reveals our nation’s insidious obsession with the concept of the “everyman” and our compulsive need to find it in public figures who are far from average in their work and lifestyles.

Serving as one of two narrators throughout Henry Fonda for President is the actor himself via an unearthed audiotaped interview with Fonda conducted over one week in his final year of life by Playboy magazine’s Lawrence Grobel which was recorded for a written piece to promote the actor’s autobiography, Fonda, My Life. Through carefully selected portions of the interview, we hear an aged Fonda in failing health recount multiple moments from his past. Touching upon everything from his Nebraska upbringing and theater experience to his famed collaborations with John Ford and aspects of his interpersonal connections with his celebrity peers, Fonda also directly addresses the foibles of his perceived public image as the “everyman” in American consciousness and his apathy towards the interpretations of his life filtered through his cinematic portrayals. Fonda’s narration is creatively juxtaposed against director Horwath’s narration as an Austrian-born cineaste who provides his outsider perspective on the actor who many viewed worldwide as the ultimate symbol of the “typical American.”

Beginning with a clip from a 1976 episode of the insufferable Normal Lear sitcom Maude where the titular Bea Arthur concocts a post-Nixon plot to run Henry Fonda for the highest office in the land, Horwath, along with editor Michael Palm, fashions the predominance of his piece in a similar way to Rappaport’s treatments on Hudson and Seberg: by adeptly affixing scenes from Fonda’s projects and films with moments from the actor’s life. But, Horvath expands the scale of his documentary by adding elements of contemporary footage shot at the original locations from Fonda’s most iconic films to weigh the myth-making power of Fonda’s oeuvre against the consequences of capitalism in the 20th century, which is the stronger force in reality today.

To this end, Horwath takes us to present day Tombstone, Arizona, the site of Fonda’s turn as legendary lawman Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine. A silver boom town that almost became a ghost town because of mining companies’ refusal to reinvest in critical water infrastructure after a fire, Tombstone is now a town reduced to a caricature of its frontier days, a cheesy tourist attraction where costumed actors play out gunfights for bemused tourists. As that moment transpires onscreen, Horwath surmises that the town only becomes revitalized by its notable past, a history that Fonda depicted and may have even diluted as evidenced by the shallow descendant representations of that same time in the present. More jarring stops are the still-operating migrant camps that Fonda’s Tom Joad rallied against over eighty years ago in the adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the Old Trails Bridge that the Joad family crosses in the film, which is now owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, who are responsible for generations of environmental poisoning in the area. If Henry Fonda is the everyman in the American psyche, then these places that were the real sites portrayed in his films also have a role to play in the American collective mind, but, over time, both Fonda and the places become artifacts of what we as a nation opportunistically preserve or reject from our mythologies.

Seeing the creation and then dissolution of the Fonda myth through this visual technique of joining the filmic past with an inevitably dire present given our nation’s penchant for championing industry, expendability, and spectacle over quality of life, we begin to wonder to what extent Fonda himself attempted to control the cinematic perception of him as the socially conscious/left-leaning man. He reinforced this persona through his public affiliations with Democratic presidential candidates like Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. And, he openly spoke about the roots of his social awareness, which he recounts in the audio interview narration in Horwath’s documentary: when he was fourteen years old, he observed from his father’s office the horrific hanging of Will Brown — a Black man wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in Omaha in 1919. This event left Fonda feeling deeply outraged, and that outrage stayed with him throughout his life.

So, is it any surprise that throughout his career, Fonda was involved with multiple projects where innocent men are lynched or on trial? He assumed roles ranging from defender to executioner in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln in 1939 to William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident in 1943 to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968, and most notably, played a conscientious juror in his iconic role in Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. He had star power, but in the studio system of old Hollywood, you must always ask: how much autonomy did he have over the projection of Henry Fonda the everyman or the righteous liberal? Did he select the characters according to his own identity? Or was his mythical image carefully constructed for him? At what point did the image permeate Henry Fonda, the human? Horwath’s narration gives us a hint as we learn that John Ford, who directed Fonda in seven seminal films from Drums Along the Mohawk in 1939 to Mister Roberts in 1955, schooled Fonda on every aspect of his screen persona. From the way Fonda walked, talked, and even danced onscreen.

Yet, as Fonda’s career continued on, he would take on more roles as the elderly voice of reason, solidifying his position as the humanistic and astute moral core of cinema. Did he choose these roles — from sane presidents to compassionate fathers — in reaction to his real-life children, Peter and Jane, emerging as the vocal spokespersons for the radical Hollywood of the late 1960s? Was it essential to emphasize the myth more when Peter and Jane were both portrayed as being outside of Henry’s control, at least as seen by the media and public? Given that Henry’s home life was full of unexplained outbursts of rage, often towards himself, and a disturbing coldness towards those closest to him, which was noted by his multiple wives and children and was concerning enough that his second wife’s psychiatrist raised questions about his narcissistic tendencies, it makes sense that Fonda, at least in his later years, stated that he never saw himself in the parts he played. And, Horwath aptly connects these admissions to one of the actor’s films with a title that may be closest to his truth, My Name Is Nobody.

Regardless, Fonda’s audience was more than content with the relayed image. With the 1970s in full force, as the Maude episode implies, post-Nixon and post-Vietnam America was in desperate need of the homegrown, wholesome ideal epitomized by the nation’s perception of Henry Fonda. Shortly after the episode aired, the American public was granted its wish when it elected Jimmy Carter. Carter came into office with good intentions, but he was somewhat hobbled by his disastrous brother, Billy Carter, and was ultimately scorned for how he handled inflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis. And so, when Carter, the everyman, self-made leader, failed to heal the nation, America chose to embrace Fonda’s peer, actor Ronald Reagan, whose rally speeches even included lines from his own movies, most famously “win one for the Gipper,” from his portrayal of dying college football hero George Gipp in the film Knute Rockne, All-American.

It’s with the introduction of Reagan and his meteoric rise to power that Horwath’s film strengthens its thesis as the director draws a biting parallel between Reagan would-be assassin John Hinckley and his delusional obsession with Jodie Foster, which is cinematically mirrored by the Travis Bickle character in Taxi Driver who also aims to gun down a candidate for president. Here, we see Travis from Scorcese’s film with hair shaved into a pre-punk era Mohawk, which itself acts as an allusion to the Mohawk people displaced by the first Fondas who settled in the Mohawk Valley and to Fonda’s own role as Gil Martin, a fictional settler to the same area, in Drums Along the Mohawk. Reality begets image. Image begets reality. And, eventually, image begets image.

As with Rappaport’s essays on Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg, Henry Fonda for President is a deep dive into the biography of a legendary actor that works to effectively dissect the unique American fixation on the elevated celebrity whom we simultaneously hope is one of us. With Hudson, the onscreen epitome of the masculine movie star, the studios labored during his early career to hide his sexuality through arranged relationships until his AIDS diagnosis made his lifestyle public. Seberg, who outside of her well-publicised selection as Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and her role in Godard’s Breathless, remained a minor star, was ill-equipped to survive the onslaught when Feds plotted to end her career and destroy her public and private reputation after they discovered her affiliation with the Black Panthers. Henry Fonda — perhaps due to his ancestral heritage tracing back to the settlement of America or the less controversial nature of his flaws and sins or his blank canvas self that could easily morph and fit into the image created for and by him — lived and died in the eyes of the American public as the ultimate example of our aspirational decency and goodness, a fiction that we told ourselves throughout the 20th century, but did not live by.

Towards the end of Henry Fonda for President, Horwath takes us to Times Square where the images on digital billboards sell things we don’t need and a variety of street entertainers and caricatures capture the attention of tourists. The director follows a performer in a Donald Trump rubber mask, and we’re struck with the realization that the narrative of the everyman is still used today, but to more manipulative and perverse ends and by figures that are further from that myth than Henry Fonda, the actor, the symbol, and the man.

Henry Fonda for President

Photo courtesy of Mischief Films

Lily and Generoso Fierro

A Bright Future

Originally published on Ink 19 on June 6, 2025

A Bright Future
directed by Lucía Garibaldi

Central to the narratives created around the young female protagonists of director Lucía Garibaldi’s first two features are the interplay between the physical and the familial surroundings and their collective effect on each film’s lead. In both features, the fractured state of a particular geography influences the encircling family who in turn bestows its expectations on the psyche of its lead.

The off-season Uruguayan coastal resort that was the setting of Garibaldi’s full-length feature debut, The Sharks (Los tiburones), which earned Garibaldi a Best Director award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Dramatic competition, provides little hope for the teenage Rosina, who begins the film by drawing her family’s ire after she damages her sister’s eye during a fight. Due to the scorn she faces for her transgression and the lack of anything to do in her dumpy seaside town, which is additionally threatened by a shark sighting that removes the sea as a possible egress and jeopardizes any remaining opportunities from tourism, Rosina takes a job with her father’s small landscaping crew, where she is the only female employee.

Angst-ridden, introverted, and with her burgeoning sexual curiosity surfacing, Rosina fixates on Joselo, an equally awkward co-worker who rejects her advances, leaving Rosina confused, vengeful, and frustrated enough to kidnap his dog, and then eventually enraged enough to use the sharks that imprison her to strike out against him. With clear visual and atmospheric nods to the early films of Lucrecia Martel and a central character who is driven to existentially rebel like Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, The Sharks is a rawly delivered and evocative contemporary metaphor for the search for identity in the face of a grim future where the ways to ascend or escape are scarce.

Amazingly, as pallid and hopeless as the metaphoric seaside landscape was in The Sharks, it is a blissful wonderland compared to the youth-depleted and hyperbolically decrepit town at the center of Lucía Garibaldi’s more narratively and visually ambitious second feature, A Bright Future (Un Futuro Brillante). Cleverly juxtaposed against The Sharks’ Rosina is A Bright Future’s Elisa (Martina Passeggi), a smart, thoughtful, and upright teen who lives with her doting mother in a dilapidated housing complex set in a land where environmental circumstances have left it devoid of canines, who have been replaced by barking speakers, and plagued by an “invasion” of ants. Here, Elisa exists not only as her mother Nélida’s (Soledad Pelayo) constant source of pride, but also as the joy of her neighborhood, as Elisa becomes the final young person selected from there to go to the fabled North, an organized utopia where her older sister and the promising neighboring youths have been sent, never to return. Nélida, unfazed by this sad reality, responds to her eldest daughter’s absence by working two jobs to try to win an auction that would also allow her passage to the North and would fulfill her dream of reuniting her family in the region of progress.

At first, Elisa plays along with her mom’s plan for her, and she attends the circa mid-70s self-help-styled adaptation appointments developed by the comfy-sweatered representatives of the North who are searching for brilliant, emotionally repressed and unexpressive candidates under the guise of genetic and psychological stability. Elisa keeps it together and makes it through the early rounds with flying colors, but when her numerous attempts to contact her sister go unreturned, the rumblings of doubt begin to manifest inside her. Adding to the general disruption of her life is the recently arrived Leonor (Sofía Gala Castiglione), a nurse with a prosthetic leg, a thousand-yard stare, and a film noir vibe of danger, who has moved into Elisa’s building where she has Elisa’s mom and the neighbors buzzing due to her sonic nocturnal carnal omissions that somehow succeed in morally drowning out the noise of the ever-present synthetic animal sounds that are the norm.

With all of this fracturing around her, Elisa turns to the one constant person who never leans heavily on her, her uncle Andrés (Alfonso Tort), who owns and operates a run-down convenience store with his husband/partner and stocks its mostly empty shelves with rare items scavenged during his regular trips to the sequestered and unprotected South. Although it’s a dubious voyage, Elisa tags along, but she is forced to exit before crossing over by the border guards who recognize her as a candidate for the North. This moment provides the representative geographic boundary that was also present via the predator-filled waters of The Sharks. Elisa, now trapped, finds comfort in spending her evenings with her uncle and his partner at their store, and it is in this setting, which inherently symbolizes a passive rebellion, where she and Leonor execute a scheme to raise money to support Elisa’s mother’s journey north, which involves Elisa selling the one valuable asset she possesses: her youth.

As was the case with The Sharks, Garibaldi delivers minimal exposition in A Bright Future as she walks a fine line that risks the potential for audience disengagement in favor of a narrative that is wholly unpredictable. This approach pays off as the film builds towards its final act when the narrative’s unexpected maneuvers fuse with the obtuseness of the dialog and visuals to heighten the emotional fissures opening up in Elisa.

Though more playful in tone and infinitely less dour in plot, Garibaldi’s film neatly melds its world construction and dystopian themes in a way that touches on one of our favorite films from 2021, Chema García Ibarra’s The Sacred Spirit, a film that also ran wild with its fantastical elements to comment on our present-day failures in human connection. Much of the credit here should also go to the film’s cinematographer, Arauco Hernandez, whose tight framing and occasionally awkward viewpoints drive the film deeper into the absurd, and production designer Cecilia Guerriero, who creates a fittingly dilapidated yet feebly forward aesthetic that hearkens to the muted and glaring motifs of failed industrial ambition omnipresent in the Greek Weird Wave.

A Bright Future is a daring second feature for Garibaldi, who, along with co-screenwriter Federico Alvarado, cinematically embraces all the trappings of the brave new world to further explore and expand on the way that society and family profoundly impact young people as they drive them towards a misguided and unsuitable vision of progress.

A Bright Future screens in the Viewpoints section of the Tribeca Film Festival from Thursday, June 5, through Saturday, June 7, 2025.

A Bright Future

Feature photo courtesy of Cinema Tropical

Lily and Generoso Fierro

The Damned

Originally published on Ink 19 on May 29, 2025

The Damned
directed by Roberto Minervini

The subjects of The Other Side, Roberto Minervini’s 2015 documentary set in northern Louisiana, share a vague understanding of American freedoms. We spend the first half of that emotionally taxing and uncannily prescient portrayal of modern-day America intimately with Mark, a chemically addicted and visibly racist Caucasian male of unknown age who drifts around town unopposed (and enabled) by those around him. Mark makes ends meet by taking an occasional day labor job whenever available and by dealing homemade controlled substances to finance his life with his equally addicted girlfriend Lisa while also providing what he can for multiple generations of his birth family who are barely surviving. Without looking inward for answers, something or someone has put Mark in this situation, and since he doesn’t have a clear enemy — other than the drugs which he recognizes are inescapable in his community — he chooses to vent his anger on then President Obama.

Cut abruptly to the second half of the film, where a group of predominantly Caucasian disenfranchised men, many military veterans themselves, have assembled as an anti-deep state militia and are getting ready to defend an attack on their liberties from a variety of government agencies, which inevitably leads them to target the federal government and Obama once more. With its two disparate stories, The Other Side articulates how the perception of an amorphous threat against the entitled freedom ingrained in our national identity manifests in extreme and misguided actions and beliefs. However, none of our subjects’ daily lives are made better by identifying and rallying against their common enemy, and instead, their overwhelming fear of lost freedom and consequent focus on contemporary political figureheads distract them away from the multitude of historical, economic, and social forces causing their community to be left behind.

Throughout his career directing hybrid-documentaries, Minervini, an Italian by birth who has resided in Southern US communities for decades, has taken his combinatorial objective outsider and adopted insider perspective to examine America’s contemporary identity by focusing on personal stories within our disenfranchised communities to reveal how regional culture, history, and government have shaped the challenges of today. With his newest film, The Damned, his first fiction feature and one that earned him the Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard section of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Minervini takes aspects of the desperation inherent in his documentary subjects and their settings and goes back in time to 1862. Set during the early years of the Civil War, The Damned follows a small group of otherwise hapless and mostly indigent Union infantrymen who are mysteriously dispatched to patrol the Northwestern part of the country to protect the land against an undefined foe. Factually, the US Army was sent to that region to secure land during the Gold Rush, and facets of that particular deployment are only hinted at in one scene, leaving the viewer to suppose otherwise. But regardless, as Minervini’s film progresses, the need for historical accuracy erodes away along with any need to adhere to the conventions of the war genre in order to allow The Damned’s philosophical, experiential narrative to flourish.

Soon after the foreshadowing supplied by the film’s opening moments, where we witness a pack of wolves steadily devouring a deer carcass, we are introduced to a group of soldiers of varying ages stationed at their frigid tent-strewn encampment as they wile away their days guarding against attack. The men play cards, drink whisky, take shots at passing wild game, and discuss in a modern vernacular the whys of their enlistment and if/how war aligns with their individual belief systems, be they faith-based, survival-based, or morally-based on the obligation to the anti-slavery cause that was their side of the Civil War. The men eschew all discussions of politics that would further ground them to that moment in time, and we attentively reside in these small moments in the first third of The Damned as we instinctively anticipate the time-tested war movie development of empathetic characters to root for against adversity. Yet, those characters remain purposely underdeveloped as the pall of ever-present danger that consistently looms over these men takes precedence over any single man’s story when we’re thrust head first into a fierce battle where our troops are fired upon from all angles by an intentionally hidden and ubiquitous entity closer to phantoms than any wartime enemy.

For the duration of this ferocious attack, which only lasts minutes (but given its intensity feels endless), Minervini and first-time cinematographer, though longtime collaborator, Carlos Alfonso Corral closely stick to either one or a few of our Union troops at a time as they return rounds while desperately attempting to survive the ordeal that sees many of their number down and the rest in a state of confusion. Once the battle subsides, it is time for the living to gather the dead and continue with their assignments, even though the purpose of their mission, given the unnamed but now very impactful threat, forces our men to question not only their place at this moment, but also the greater meaning of their own existence in a section of a divided country where wilderness still reigns above all else. When the narrative progresses slowly past the days that follow the violence, the conversation shifts as the reality of further assaults, diminishing rations, and the ever-increasing frost and cold creates a wider array of dangers for the troops, who start to exhibit greater levels of vulnerability.

During these moments where the short seconds of silence add a deafening tone, Carlos Alfonso Corral’s camera smartly tightens the frame to examine the winter-worn and increasingly concerned faces of the men as their journeys meander into realms unknown. Onscreen, we see the familiar cinematic image of Union soldiers and the genre specifics of a Civil War epic, yet the mostly improvised, anachronistic dialogue, coupled with the enigmatic idea of evil, suggests a timeless aspect to the crisis depicted: for the echoes of its historical context stretch from the 19th century to the 21st, and the ideas discussed remain at the core of most contemporary conflicts and problems.

As was the case with Minervini’s The Other Side and 2018’s What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, The Damned becomes less of a film about good versus evil and more about the existential crisis that occurs in this nation when faced with an unseen enemy that is taking its physical and psychological toll on us. By cleverly manipulating our expectations for what we have come to expect out of a historical war film, Minervini creates an effective allegory for our current political and social situation where our frustrations with the dysfunctional status quo demand our efforts to assign blame to and attack a physical entity rather than comprehensively addressing the complex institutionalized errors that will most likely never be fully repaired due to the unrelenting waves of perceived threats before us that hijack our attention and demand our immediate, albeit ultimately futile, response.

The Damned screens in Los Angeles at 2220 Arts + Archives on June 13th, 2025 at 8pm with director Roberto Minervini in person. The screening begins the Acropolis Cinema’s multi-evening Minervini retrospective.

The Damned

Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film

Lily & Generoso Fierro

Best of Film 2024

Originally published on Ink19 on December 13, 2024

In a year where chaos continued to reign supreme, our favorite films naturally do not have a consistent thread running through them. Instead, there are patterns that convene in our best of film selections that may not logically fit together, but alas, feel like an accurate collage of the ideas, images, sounds, and texts that reverberated in our minds this year.

For the first time, we have four films from Canadian directors that represent three provinces on our list, with each film capturing key essences of its portrayed region. We also have three films that meditate on the concept of the spiritual quest. There are two challenges to the biopic form, two Argentinian re-interpretations of the crime genre, and two works from French cinema stalwarts that cultivate all of their fascinations and their methods into supreme culminations. In addition, there are three documentaries that use repetition in thought-provoking and revelatory ways.

Despite these many differing motifs, there’s one commonality, perhaps obvious, in our selections for 2024 that we should articulate. All of these films are specific: to a geography, to a zeitgeist, to an experience, to a technique. This may seem like a prerequisite for any respectable piece of art, but as the forces of cultural homogenization become more dominant via algorithms every day, never has specificity been more necessary and critical.

As with every year, we’d like to give our appreciation to the outstanding folks behind Acropolis Cinema, AFI Fest, Independent Film Festival Boston, the Brattle Theater, Films at Lincoln Center, the Coolidge Corner Theater, and the Cleveland Cinematheque for their programming and their unwavering efforts to preserve the communal experience and audiovisual wonder of filmgoing. Please support these festivals, microcinemas, and independent theaters in their substantial work.

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Việt and Nam / Philippines, France, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Vietnam / dir. Trương Minh Quý

With each of Trương Minh Quý’s films, the director sets forth ideas of the cosmic and the historic along with the multi-layered conceptions of house and home and allows us to watch all of these forces clash and interplay. In his most recent feature, Việt and Nam, Trương’s method has reached its highest form to date, resulting in a hypnotic, moving film made up of various interwoven, open-ended essays on Vietnamese culture and history, all of which are framed by the relationship between the two titular characters. The plot of Việt and Nam is simple albeit particular: Việt and Nam are miners who are best friends and lovers. In the year 2001, Nam is getting ready to leave Vietnam in search of a better future outside of the country, and the film documents the period where Nam looks towards his unknown future and bids his farewell to a present that will soon become the past. As such, history and collective memories weigh heavily on each of Nam’s interactions with his surroundings — his home, his workplace in the mine, and the forest where he attempts to help his mother recover the remains of his father who was killed in the Vietnam War — and his relationships with his mother and Việt, imbuing Việt and Nam with a profoundly elegiac tone. Haunted by the real future incident of the discovery of thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants who were killed in a lorry container that landed in the UK in 2019, Việt and Nam intimates a tragic end to Nam’s departure, but remains fixed throughout on all of the forces that encourage Nam’s migration. Trương offers a multitude of ways that fixations on the past extinguish potential, swelling up Việt and Nam into a mourning cry for the loss of home for all who departed Vietnam’s shores and the loss of opportunities and vibrancy for a country that lost its people. Misinterpreted as a work of slow cinema in the manner of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Việt and Nam is, in fact, a collage of cinematic techniques ranging from long-takes to cross-cuts, which build the momentum of the film to take us from the bowels of the Earth to its surface and then to a plane above. We had the honor of speaking with Trương Minh Quý in the days before Việt and Nam screened at AFI Fest 2024. You can read that conversation here.

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New Dawn Fades (Yeni șafak solarken) / Turkey, Italy / dir. Gürcan Keltek

Symbols and signs have never been more important, and less recognized, than they are today. We are constantly bombarded with visual stimuli as our experiences of reality are mediated by a variety of screens on phones, laptops, televisions, etc. In order to make it through the day without a complete cognitive meltdown, we rarely stop to try to decipher each image and word and deduce what is being signified, and we certainly are remiss in paying such close attention to the objects in our physical reality too. Gürcan Keltek’s superb fiction debut, New Dawn Fades, valiantly takes up the task of revitalizing the significance of sign theory in experience. The film opens in the Hagia Sophia, panning the walls covered in writing and the geometric ceilings of the iconic place of worship, and then narrows its view on Akın (Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu), our physical and mental guide through Istanbul’s present and unseen past. As we look at Akın in the mosque (and former church), we hear unintelligible, multilayered whispers: the tourists in the background are speaking, but voices from the past or from within Akın are present too. He then returns home to his mother, where we learn that he has recently completed a period of institutionalization. He is clearly still not well, but his mother worsens the situation by relying on medieval beliefs and practices to try to release the malevolent spirits plaguing her son. As such, home is not a place of convalescence and restoration for Akın, and he takes to wandering Istanbul, visiting people and places of varying degrees of significance to him as ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, and contemporary forces infuse into his perception. Keltek allows us to experience everything as Akın does, and the sound design by Son of Philip acts as a non-verbal representation of Akın’s sign processing, which steadily builds towards a messianic vision (or delusion). Akın’s mental response to the symbols that he encounters may not be fully understandable by those of sound mind, but his ability to detect such signs remind us of how powerful they can be and how our decisions to avoid interpreting them may be paradoxically protective and destructive. We wrote a full review of New Dawn Fades during its festival run this year. That piece is available here.

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Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude) / Spain / dir. Albert Serra

In many of Albert Serra’s films, the frame is the theater stage with a pedestal, and on it is some figure(s) of grand stature, by way of history, notoriousness, and/or national standing, whom the director will strip down and reduce to their most basic form for all of us to examine away from any facades that once entranced us. This Serra method is in full effect in his latest film, Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary which meticulously captures the in-arena trials and tribulations of the world’s leading torero, Andrés Roca Rey. There’s little glory to be had or found in Serra’s rendering of Spain’s controversial, but nevertheless significant national pastime: the director presents close-up studies of multiple corridas without any shot of audience reactions, and though the fights are stitched together by a handful of beyond the arena scenes of transit, undressing, and dressing, the bullfights develop into an increasingly predictable loop, with each fight differentiated merely by the change in costumes by Rey and his cuadrilla and, of course, by the change in the bull opponent. Like a three-act play, a bullfight is structured in thirds, and its script plays out as consistently as that of a passion play. Occasionally, the fight veers off course: a bull attacks and nearly steps on Rey in one and pins him to the arena wall in another, but the script corrects itself each time, with the cuadrilla stepping in to help, Rey returning to the battle full of bravado, and voices exclaiming admiration for Rey’s manhood heard over the images of the torero continuing on until the bull is killed and dragged away by horses, leaving a large streak of blood in the arena sand. Even though we see the arcs of the bullfight over and over again, Serra’s documentation of this national play/shared ritual never becomes tedious thanks to the incredible close-ups and dynamic editing that draws our eyes to the faces and the natural materials and fluids as well as the man-made substances and objects that are essential to a bullfight. The horror of the violence repeatedly enacted towards the bulls in the arena does not go away, but our emotional activation dampens with each fight, replaced by a new lucidity: bullfighting is a tradition that feeds the spectator’s primeval motivations and tendencies at the cost of animal and human life. Afternoons of Solitude dissolves our collective consciousness’s fascination with bullfighting and confronts the culpability of the viewers of the sport. It could become one of the most important records of a long extinct pastime some day in the future — if only we could step away from our deeply rooted attachment to violence.

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Comme le feu (Who by Fire) / Canada, France / dir. Philippe Lesage

One of the most energetic reflexive works about filmmaking that we’ve seen in many years, Philippe Lesage’s Who By Fire lures us into a spider web overseen by Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), a once famous fiction filmmaker who has moved on to become a documentarian and a woodsman (of sorts). Blake invites his former screenwriting partner, Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), for a retreat and reunion at his palatial cabin in the woods, and Albert brings along his college-aged children, his daughter, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), and his son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon). And Max brings along his best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), an aspiring filmmaker. When Albert and company arrive to the cabin by a seaplane flown by Blake himself, they meet Blake’s editor, Millie (Sophie Desmarais), his best friend and assistant/wilderness guide, Barney (Carlo Harrietha), and the house chef, Ferran (Guillaume Laurin). At this point, nearly all of the crew members needed to make a film are present, and Blake naturally takes on his role as the director as well as the lead actor in the group’s dynamic even though the cameras aren’t rolling. Blake’s command at the dinner table the first night raises old tensions between him and Albert, and this clash between the former collaborators lets loose an uneasiness that permeates the film. Despite the dominance of Blake as a character, Lesage anchors Who By Fire on Jeff, and as the film progresses, we see the awkward and highly sensitive Jeff get caught between his attraction to Aliocha and his eagerness to impress and learn from Blake, who is quick to share his director’s copy of the screenplay for one of his most famous films with his aspiring disciple. Much to his embarrassment, Jeff gets lost in the woods at night after making a confusing pass at Aliocha and has to be rescued by Blake the next morning. Then, in the late hours of the same day, Jeff catches Blake and Aloicha together as his would-be mentor takes partially clothed photos of his object of desire. Jeff seethes, but he can do little in this space where all activities, including lounging, fishing, dining, or canoeing, are set up and helmed by Blake. As a result, Who By Fire materializes a microcosm where artistic striving crashes into grappling between generations, the older clutching onto what remains of its dominance and the younger trying to ascend while also desperate to glean knowledge and wisdom from its contender. And yet, the film is also an ode to filmmaking: a celebration of the joy, dread, drama, and sadness that the moving image can bring because Blake takes Jeff and all of the people in the cabin through each of these emotions with different situations masterfully constructed and integrated together by Lesage and effortlessly lensed by cinematographer Balthazar Lab. In turn, Who By Fire rejoices the possibilities of cinema as an artform while also sharply articulating the limitations to its progression that people, be it themselves or others, place on it.

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L’Été dernier (Last Summer) / France, Norway / dir. Catherine Breillat

There’s something amazing about Last Summer even though its premise around an illicit affair between a stepmother and her stepson is straightforward and its execution doesn’t immediately appear to challenge any conventions of cinema on an initial viewing. But, after some contemplation, what readily becomes apparent about Last Summer is its effortlessness in its unraveling of female desire in an extremely inappropriate relationship, a topic that has dominated the works of Catherine Breillat for decades. With Last Summer, all of Breillat’s daring provocations and examinations of female desire are elegantly channeled into the relationships, self-image construction, and traumas of Anne (Léa Drucker), a prominent attorney who protects abused minors. Anne has a seemingly enviable life: she is well-respected in her career and lives in splendor with a successful and loving businessman husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), and two adorable adopted Asian daughters on a modest estate protected from the outside world and nearby Paris by lush foliage and beautiful lawns. But, in a moment of intimacy between Anne and Pierre, we see fissures in Anne’s picture perfect existence that hint at a traumatic early sexual experience, and upon the arrival of her stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher), the fissures begin to rupture, propelled by an entangled mess of Anne’s first sexual encounter, the repression of her sexuality overall due to the AIDS pandemic during her early adult years, a fatalistic desire to demolish the life she’s created for herself, and her attraction to Théo’s beauty, sensuality, and rebellious energy. All of these are heavy forces that compel Anne to continue her relationship with Théo, but Breillat expertly infuses them into glances, conversations, and, of course, sexual acts such that nothing ever feels like an overt proclamation or explanation of motivations. As a result, such nuances extend Anne’s character naturally in a highly unnatural, objectionable situation to the point where our judgment of Anne is overtaken by a lucid understanding of her actions. We all know Anne’s relationship with Théo is wrong, but the reasons for its existence and endurance are fundamentally human and, though complicated, within the realm of reasonable comprehension. Last Summer feels like a film that only a later stage of Catherine Breillat could make: there’s no viscera or physical brutality here, only the psychological tumult brought on by the self and others as well as by societal and familial forces — a kind of violence that permeates our own thoughts and desires even if our consequent actions are radically divergent from Anne’s. We reviewed Last Summer during its US theatrical release. You can read our full piece here.

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C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me) / France / dir. Leos Carax

Before we dig into It’s Not Me, we do feel the need to address the “what” of Leos Carax in output and opinion prior to this point in his career…Carax was only 24 in 1984 when his celebrated debut feature, Boy Meets Girl, was released. Universal acclaim for his triumphant follow-up, Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood), exalted him as the next great young voice in French cinema, a title that was virtually stripped away after his third feature Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) went spectacularly over-budget and polarized critics, which led him to respond with Pola X, his fittingly bitter adaptation of Herman Melville’s critically detested novel, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. After the death of his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier in 2003, it would be nine more years before Carax’s Holy Motors would hit theaters, a luxuriously enigmatic masterwork that simultaneously honored and challenged cinematic conventions — a film that also subsequently landed on multiple best of the decade lists, including ours. Now, at 64, with his long desired Sparks musical Annette directed and behind him, Carax has internalised the loss of Jean-Luc Godard and connects JLG’s later compositional filter to his own œuvre and historical and contemporary worldview to compose It’s Not Me, a commissioned short film for The Centre Pompidou, a video essay response to the question posed by them: “Who Are You, Leos Carax?” Visually stunning and enthusiastically chaotic in presentation, Carax pulls together the pieces that vacillate wildly inside his mind, from the films seared into him from his own filmography to Murnau’s Sunrise and Hitchcock’s Vertigo to stark documentary footage of Nazi rallies, dictators galore, and drowned migrant children. Carax connects the stimuli to his psyche and supplies his own over-narration, which at times is as judgemental of others as it is self-effacing, and even occasionally lovely with sequences dedicated to the people closest to him, his daughter and Jean-Yves Escoffier. For those uninitiated to and less appreciative of all things Carax, It’s Not Me, will most likely not have the same kind of impact as other directors’ introspection pieces like Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey Through French Cinema or Varda by Agnès, as those delightful films strive more for a display of personal influences and experiences than what Carax clearly intended for his short: an admission that he still actively searching history and himself for answers to the whys of the world and the present state and potential future of his beloved medium. Though Carax’s undertaking may seem a bit overwhelming to address in a scant forty minutes, It’s Not Me’s overall power lies less in any answer given, but in its glittering omnibus of ideas that come together as questions. Lastly, we must thank Leos for giving us the most surprising and exhilarating post-credit sequence in film history!

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Matt and Mara / Canada / dir. Kazik Radwanski

A comedy of manners about the reunion of two estranged friends who are writers living in a rarefied air, Matt and Mara has the construction of a modern love story but is, in fact, a kinetic exploration of the blurred line between an artist’s life and work. When we first meet the pair, Matt (Matt Johnson) surprises Mara (Deragh Campbell) as she hurries towards the door of her classroom. From her furrowed brow and overall countenance, we can immediately tell she’s uncomfortable with his presence. He tells her he’s back in town and wants to meet with her. In quick response, she lets him know she’ll be in touch via email and proceeds to enter the lecture hall. The film then cuts to the beginning of Mara’s lecture for a poetry class and her shifting attention to Matt tiptoeing into the classroom and clumsily looking for a seat. Mara smiles, and we can sense that these two have known each other incredibly well, despite the tension in their interaction in the opening scene. After Mara’s class, the duo head to a cafe where they talk about the ideas that they are creatively reflecting on: Matt is trying to find proximity to characters in his writing that are far different from himself, and Mara is interested in a protagonist who “truly believes that they know nothing about themselves and that all of their desires are complete secrets from them.” We learn more about the past dynamic between Matt and Mara from conversations Mara has with one of her colleagues as well as with her husband, moments that are interspersed between scenes of Matt and Mara in the present. With Matt back in Toronto after an extended period in New York, the two friends frolic and play around on the city’s sidewalks, get passport photos taken, attend a party at the house of Mara’s department head, and visit Matt’s comatose father in the hospital. The pair are radically different, but together, both have a vibrancy and warmth with each other that is noticeably different from their relationships with others in their respective lives. And yet, Mara’s own uncertainty with herself and Matt’s false extroversion that distracts away from his lack of confidence eventually come to a head when Matt chaperones Mara to a conference, and both writers are forced to assess their relationship with each other as people, not artistic personas. With Matt and Mara, Kazik Radwanski exhibits a refreshingly contemporary understanding of communication, action, and intimacy and where they all break down, making Matt and Mara one of the most sharply resonant and observant films that we saw this year. You can read a full review of Matt and Mara here

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Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed) / Argentina / dir. Hernán Rosselli

With his hybrid-fiction crime film, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, director Hernán Rosselli creates a visually diverse and complex low-budget feature that is as innovative in its inception as it is thoughtful in its construction. Utilizing ideas from his own familial experiences, along with surveillance footage, news reports, and the home videos given to him by his longtime Lomas de Zamora neighbor (and ultimately the star of his film), Maribel Felpeto, Rosselli cleverly composes a fictional narrative on a family’s illegal gambling business that blurs reality in a similar fashion to our own memories through the use of the aforementioned varied media elements. The plot is centered on Maribel, who, along with her mother Alejandra (portrayed by Maribel’s real-life mother, Alejandra Cánepa) and some trusted allies, attempts to carry on the their clandestine bookmaking operation after the sudden suicide of the family’s patriarch, Hugo Felpeto. While attempting to stay two steps ahead of federal officers, who are systematically raiding gambling dens all over the country in defense of the growing national lottery, Maribel is tasked with destroying any documents that could be found incriminating in a raid and breaking into her late father’s laptop to see if he moved any money to secret accounts. This search by Maribel through her father’s online accounts turns up evidence of her father’s extramarital activities, which prompts her to search for answers that, when found, leave her questioning everything from her family’s structure to her own identity and purpose. Operating as the central narrator, Maribel’s thoughts are effectively matched throughout the narrative with the real-life home videos shot by Hugo that primarily serve to paint an affecting portrait of her mother’s transformation from an intelligent, but naive fiancée to the decisive and ruthless leader whom Maribel was raised to emulate. Through the use of surveillance footage that provides emotional distance and also foreshadows the raid that will shutter the family’s business forever, we as the audience become less concerned with a dramatic outcome, leaving us free to examine how our perceptions of reality are formed when we are inundated with a barrage of misleading stories about and by the people we trust throughout our lives. Take a look at our full review of Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, which was published here on Ink 19 on December 9th.

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Universal Language / Canada / dir. Matthew Rankin

When we viewed Matthew Rankin’s debut feature, The Twentieth Century, we were immediately charmed by his idiosyncratic style of overlaying farce on top of a selection of events in Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s life. The bizarre but vibrant aesthetic of the film, hearkening to Futurism, German Expressionism, and Surrealism filtered through the Golden Age of Television proclaimed the Winnipeg-born director as a clear descendent of Guy Maddin. This lineage is reaffirmed with Rankin’s second full-length, Universal Language, but the director introduces the influence of an additional parent, Iranian cinema. Universal Language reimagines Winnipeg as the Tehran of Canada, a place where the beige architecture and snow of one of the world’s coldest cities live side by side with the city’s Persian culture and dominant language, Farsi. The film tells two tales and gathers them together with an enthusiastic tour guide who shows people the marvels of Winnipeg. One of the stories pays homage to Jafar Panahi’s White Balloon: two sisters (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) roam the city looking for an ax to excavate money frozen in ice in order to pay for the replacement glasses of one of the sister’s classmates. And, in the other, a man — played by Rankin himself as a nod to the tradition of Iranian directors playing themselves in their own films — leaves Montréal and returns to Winnipeg only to find that his mother’s exact whereabouts are a mystery as his childhood home has been sold and is occupied instead by a kind family. Meanwhile, the tour guide (executive producer and co-writer Pirouz Nemati) emphatically highlights Winnipeg’s modest sights such as its abandoned mall and a forgotten briefcase that no one has ever taken or opened, which has become a city landmark as an emblem for human honesty and trustworthiness. The characters roam around Winnipeg’s streets and sidewalks seeking completely separate things, but, gradually, their paths move closer to each other and lead them to the tour guide’s apartment where revelations transpire. By superimposing Tehran on Winnipeg, Rankin implicitly raises issues around autonomy and independence inherent in the tensions between Canada’s Anglo and French origins while also noting the multiculturalism of Canada that accelerated in the twentieth century. The Winnipeg of Universal Language is as foreign to Montréal as Paris is and vice versa, but both cities are related through their history, particularly by Louis Riel, whose monument is notably featured in the film next to a highway. Born in Saint Boniface (which is now a part of present-day Winnipeg) to a Métis father and French-Canadian mother in 1844 and educated in Montréal, Riel founded the province of Manitoba and fought against the Canadian government’s attempts to take over Métis land in the region. His charge of treason and subsequent execution catalyzed a rise in Québec nationalism in the late 1880s, which, in the century to follow, gave rise to the Québec sovereignty movement. Riel thus embodies Canadian plurality, and the scenes featuring his monument stress this concept that is dear to the film and its filmmaker. Universal Language envisions an entirely Persian Winnipeg, but in doing so, it demonstrates how we, despite our divisions, are inextricably linked in ways seen and unseen, and there’s something lovely and amazing about that.

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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng) / Vietnam, Singapore / dir. Phạm Thiên Ân

A sinuous road film flowing with sensorial delights, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell takes us from Saigon to the Lâm Đồng province in Vietnam’s Southern Central highlands where the director Phạm and his cinematic analog, Thiên (Lê Phong Vũ), grew up. In the earliest parts of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, we observe Thiên moving listlessly through his life in Saigon: he edits wedding videos in his small apartment; he hangs out with his friends; he gets a massage. Phạm, along with his cinematographer, Đinh Duy Hưng, present these moments in long takes, allowing the audience to see what’s happening around Thiên and how it all fails to inspire any activation from him. When Thiên’s young nephew Đào (Nguyễn Thịnh) manages to survive a motorbike accident that kills his mother, Thiên suddenly becomes Đào’s guardian and takes on the duty of bringing his nephew as well as his sister-in-law’s body back to their shared hometown in the countryside. Once the van that he hires for transport out of Saigon arrives at Lâm Đồng, Thiên is reimmersed in the physical and the spiritual landscape that he had left behind. The service for his sister-in-law is held in the Catholic church that he attended as a child. And, he is surrounded by the lush mountains of the highlands and a constant mist and fog, evoking a mixed sense of the mystical, primordial, and holy. The long takes continue here, but Thiên is noticeably more aware and pensive as figures and moments from his past re-emerge and lead him to embark on a mission to find his brother, Tâm, who departed years ago on a spiritual mission with destination unknown. Thiên rides his motorbike and walks on mountainous roads, and his upward movement physically parallels his ascension of metaphysical planes. Navigating between multiple dualities — reality and dreams, city and country, earthly and divine — to render the complexity and beauty of the spiritual quest, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a highly accomplished debut feature that remained in our minds throughout 2024. We had the privilege of speaking with Phạm Thiên Ân at the beginning of this year about his Camera d’Or winning film. You can read that conversation here.

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SUPPLEMENTAL FILMS

Anora / USA / Sean Baker

It’s too easy to simply reclassify Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning feature Anora as a modern and more realistic reimagining of one of the most inept and insulting Hollywood films ever made, Pretty Woman. Sure, the setup is virtually the same…A streetwise sex worker from the wrong side of the tracks comes to know a wealthy John who pulls her into a world of privilege she never dreamed of, and it all seems grand until the straights complain about the woman of a questionable past, and it becomes a fight to end the affair. But, with its torrid pace, central characters, and, most importantly, the silent growing camaraderie between its central characters who are put into an impossible situation that reflects upon their place in New York City, Baker remarkably manages with Anora to draw an unlikely comparison to one of the finest genre masterworks of 1970s American cinema, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. Here, the titular Anora (Mikey Madison) is, in her voice and attitude, the pure embodiment of many generations of Brooklyn rolled into one. A descendant of Russian immigrants, Anora lives in a second-story working-class apartment with her sister, where she sleeps during the day and works as an exotic dancer at night at a less-than-opulent men’s club. On one of those nights, she is commanded by the club’s owner to utilize her Russian language skills in order to attend to Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spastic adult son of absent oligarch parents who have left their boy in the States with just a palatial mansion and an unlimited expense account to keep him entertained while he skips out on college. Always up for a good time, Vanya requests that Anora come to his estate for a paid sexual encounter, which then turns into a party invitation and a request to exclusively escort him for a week, leading to some casual hangs and an airplane ride that lands the pair in Vegas for a quickie wedding.

It’s all starry-eyed for a moment for the newlyweds until they head back to New York, where the beleaguered paid assistants of Vanya’s parents, Toros (Karren Karagulian), Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), race to the mansion to send Anora packing. Once at the mansion, though, the goonish trio subdues Anora after a long, drawn-out fight, and Vanya, ever the cowardly brat, runs away, leaving his bride behind. For the remaining two-thirds of Baker’s film, Anora, Toros, Garnick, and Igor frantically race through a frozen NYC on a desperate and, at times, comedic search for Vanya, and it is this grouping of broken individuals, who should be constantly at one another who come to realize that they are all, by their lot in life, stuck in this miserable situation in an unforgiving city, that pulls Anora into the same universe inhabited by Sonny, Sal, the scared tellers, and even the cops of Lumet’s sweltering summer bank heist film gone wrong. In the end, like Dog Day Afternoon, Anora ultimately benefits from stunning, unique performances that fuel the well-written characters in each film to wholly depict New York City in their respective eras as a place where anything can happen, but where the majority of its citizens are struggling under the thumb of a power too strong to overcome.

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Youth (Spring) / France, Luxembourg, Netherlands / dir. Wang Bing

Carved from 2,600 hours of footage, Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) exhaustively considers the cyclical nature of the terms of its title as expressed by the everyday moments of teenagers and young adults working in small factories in Zhili City, approximately 150 kilometers away from Shanghai. For each year’s garment making season, which begins in colder months and ends sometime in spring, the young from rural provinces travel to Zhili City to make children’s clothing. Each factory produces a set of styles determined by the managers and owners, and payment for each laborer is based on a pattern’s complexity and the total number of pieces sewn by the end of the season. The work is undoubtedly grueling, but the workers manage to find life and do the things that newly emerging adults do: bicker and fight, fall in and out of love, play video games, scroll on phones, hang out with their friends and colleagues, and find creative ways to bear each day of labor. The vivacity and wide-eyedness of the workers is not far from the spirit and energy of their university-bound peers, but Wang reminds us with small details — such as the decaying walls of the dormitories that house our laboring youth and the various social rituals performed around fetching water from industrial spigots to wash each night because the buildings are not equipped with showers — and the constant reiteration of miniature pants, dresses, jackets, and shirts being sewn and stacked, along with extended scenes of negotiation for better payment prices per style, that the factory setting is not a place of mind expansion and development: it is a vicious cycle where youth is commodified and cannibalized, leaving little promise of a different future for the children who will wear the clothes being manufactured. Much has been made about the over three hour runtime of Youth (Spring), but all of that time is needed because the minutiae and the high, low, and in-between moments from the workers’ lives show us how youth disappears not in a single grand event, but rather day-by-day, which is a heartbreaking tragedy that no one can stop, but one that we should avoid accelerating as much as possible.

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Los delincuentes (The Delinquents) / Argentina / dir. Rodrigo Moreno

There are two outstanding original Argentine crime films on our list this year: Hernán Rosselli’s harrowing hybrid-fiction essay that challenges our perception of family and identity and its comedic and ethereal counterpart from Rodrigo Moreno that reimagines the bank heist genre into a masterfully entertaining statement on the duality of man. The Delinquents begins with longtime bank employee Morán (Daniel Elías), a paunchy and balding middle-aged man whose visual appearance could easily meld into the corduroy couch of a 70s sitcom, getting ready for his work. One day, with the ease of a master criminal, Morán absconds from his place of employment with a few hundred thousand dollars in a satchel. Later that evening, he meets up with and blackmails his coworker Román (Esteban Bigliardi) to become a post-crime accomplice. The deal: Morán promises to confess to the theft after he returns from a trip out of town and will cut Román in for half of the money if he hides it for him while he serves a three-year jail sentence — the sum for each share of the loot equaling another twenty-plus years of drudgery in the bank. Unfortunately for Román, if he turns this opportunity down, Morán will name him as an accessory, leaving Román with no choice but to nervously stash the plunder in his flat without telling his adoring girlfriend. From this moment on, Román and Morán’s experiences existentially diverge and converge as Morán’s peacefully planned incarceration is rudely interrupted by his extortion-heavy cell block leader, who is, of course, played by the same actor who portrayed his bank supervisor (Germán de Silva), while Román flees to the countryside to hide the cash, where he meets the luminous pastoral Norma (Margarita Molfino), who unbeknownst to Román has previously shared a tryst with Morán (yes, anagrams delightfully abound here)! For its over three-hour running time that blithely goes by, The Delinquents thoughtfully shares notes of criminal symmetry and absurdity with Jarmusch’s Down By Law and yet still emerges as its own distinctly beguiling epic on greed and contentment, richly played through two characters who are the incomplete sides of the same coin.

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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat / Belgium, France, Netherlands / dir. Johan Grimonprez

In the same way that jazz musicians come together to create a dazzling, intricate mixture of sound comprised of melody and rhythm, regrettably, so too did the Belgian monarchy, the US government, and a slew of corporations in January of 1961 to conspire to execute their insipid plot to delegitimize and kill the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. As he did with his 2017 feature documentary Blue Orchid, which delved into the global arms trade, Belgian multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez once again turns his camera towards the unsavory underbelly of political maneuvering where lives are traded for profit with Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Drawing from the books My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History, and Congo, Inc., here, Grimonprez expertly fuses everything from spoken word pieces to archival footage of the jazz that was performed by a who’s who of iconic artists who were sent by the US State Department to Africa during the 1950s and 60s under the guise of a goodwill mission that actually functioned as a smokescreen for covert operations to undermine post-colonial governments. Implementing a method to cleverly beguile you into a sense of nostalgic joy early in the narrative, Grimonprez and his team of editors enthrall you with a cascade of mesmerizing sounds and visuals from jazz legends, luring you into a state of bliss before steadily pulling the carpet out from under you when the onerous details substantiated through various forms of hard evidence paint a grotesque and calculated picture of America and Belgium’s joint mission to preserve access to Africa’s vast mineral resources, resources that the US feared were slipping away when many of Africa’s nations began to, one by one, unify, strengthen, and pull away from their colonial oppressors. As Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat details the actions of an American propaganda machine that sought to turn every message of support for Africa’s first post-colonial nation into one of fear and Communist rhetoric, the film thankfully calls out the few brave western artists who caught wind of the plot to dismantle Lumumba’s government who subsequently boycotted being used in the campaign, and so, as the plot unfolds and these musicians and activists express their disdain, the music responds in kind by moving away from bop and into sounds of protest from the Africa that incorporate the continent’s many original rhythms. Given the ambitious nature of the entire composition of Grimonprez’s film, one may fear that the method might overwhelm the subject at times, but instead, the inevitable death of Lumumba still hits hard as it’s presented here, as an outro for the piece that draws a line towards a present-day Congo where dour campaigns continue by governments who now vie for that nation’s coltan, a mineral required to power today’s electronics.

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Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs) South Korea / dir. Hong Sang-soo

Considering the seemingly effortless nature of their previous collaborations, it is a surprise that Isabelle Huppert and Hong Sang-soo have only worked together twice in the last dozen years. As seen in 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera, Hong’s immense adoration for Huppert fills the duo’s latest joint project, A Traveler’s Needs, and his absurdist setups continue to showcase Huppert’s considerable talents as a comedic actress. Huppert portrays Iris, a French woman whose mysterious mission in South Korea leans on a method she recently developed to teach the locals her native tongue in order to pay for a portion of her stay, and although she has doubts about her system’s capacity to facilitate language learning, her eccentric nature allows her to test it on anyone who is open to giving it a try. Iris, whose fanciful manner of speaking hangs perfectly inside of a Hong Sang-soo frame, asks her clients to share their most personal thoughts as part of her quasi-remedial process, and after having lengthy discussions with the student in English, Iris writes a succinct synopsis of the ideas and thoughts that emerge in French and requests that the student recite it repeatedly into a tape machine prior to their next meeting. Hong presents two lessons with two different pupils, and within both sessions happens an unprovoked musical performance executed in a lifeless fashion by the students who identically critique their own poor proficiency and admit the desire to have better skill with the same exact words. Iris includes these musical incidents with her students’ disclosed thoughts in the French sentences she gives them, but each line exists as her own reflection on them and commentary on their lack of self-awareness. Each of these statements composed by Iris thereby act as a vehicle for Hong’s criticism of his own people’s desire to constrain art with precise and rigid execution instead of allowing it to flourish with joy from the act of expression and inspiration from the elemental. To this end, Hong carefully distinguishes Iris’s wardrobe from that of the people around her: others mostly wear neutral shades, but Iris wears a delightful springtime nymph inspired ensemble featuring a bright pink floral dress and grass-green sweater, which blends as easily into a park’s landscape as it does into a green terrace where Iris pauses for a rest, suggesting that she is a representation of the natural flow that needs to be embraced by those around her. Alternately, when the scene shifts from the pastoral to the confines of Iris’s apartment bedroom, where she is serenaded by the piano-playing of her flatmate, a poet named In-guk (Ha Seong-guk), Iris’s attire changes to suitably match the room’s warm tones as she persuades her friend and willing benefactor who is allowing her to stay for free to not over fixate on the notes he needs to play next and instead focus on the present sound. But soon, this thoughtful and gentle moment between two friends is interrupted by In-guk’s mother, whose insecurities and unreasonable desire for safety are directed towards her son as she casts doubt on Iris’s wholesome intentions. This dire moment between In-guk and his mother in the final third of A Traveler’s Needs radically shifts the film away from the whimsical and into an even starker cultural statement by Hong of his own people’s reluctance to relinquish their need for control, which suppresses their capacity to connect with their emotions and, in the long run, hinders any meaningful form of expression. The success of A Traveler’s Needs can be largely attributed to Huppert, who gives Iris several dimensions with a single look and contributes significantly to the most recent chapter in Hong’s post-COVID output, which once more features our director issuing a sobering wake-up call to those asleep in complacency in the face of an uncertain future.

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Bai ta zhi guang (The Shadowless Tower) / China / dir. Zhang Lü

For his fourteenth feature, Sino-Korean director Zhang Lü presents a subtle and poignant examination of urban loneliness, memory, and reconciliation with The Shadowless Tower. As the title suggests, the Miaoying Temple, with its looming pagoda erected in the thirteenth century in Beijing’s Xicheng district, is known by locals as the “tower without shadow,” as its architectural design allows the absence of a visible imprint on the ground below from any angle. Serving as the tower’s personified center is Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), a middle-aged divorced food critic and father of a young daughter who leads an otherwise stable, but emotionally distant life that will soon be pulled into several different directions. On the occasion of the second anniversary of the passing of his mother, Wentong receives news that his long-estranged father has been keeping tabs on him and his sister via his sister’s husband, Li (Wang Hongwei), who has kept this secret for decades. Wentong, now with his father’s nearby address and phone number in his hand, considers a possible reconnection. Concurrently, he develops a cautious relationship with Ouyang Wenhui (Huang Yao), a pixie-like young photographer who takes pictures of the restaurant food to accompany Wentong’s articles and is drawn to him by a great respect and admiration for his writing. The pair spend ample time together in various locales around the city, and although Wenhui is blissfully youthful and expressive, Wentong remains subdued and polite, but when Wenhui admits that she is from Beidaihe, where his father Gu Yunlai (portrayed by the brilliant director of The Blue Kite, Tian Zhuangzhuang) currently resides, he suggests they take a trip there. Once they descend on the beach town, Wentong gently stalks his father while he is out and about, going as far as to tour his apartment when his father is not home, and Wenhui unknowingly befriends Wentong’s father during his regular kite-flying sessions. Wentong tries to better understand his father by looking through the few items in his modest apartment, and when his father returns, Wentong has left, but the father senses his son’s visit and proceeds to leave treats for him, an act of recognition and hope that he will return. These dreamlike and lovely scenes of skewed unspoken reconnections are some of our favorite moments from The Shadowless Tower, and they eventually culminate in an actual reacquaintance between father and son facilitated by Wenhui that sheds light on Yunlai’s absence from Wentong’s life, a reveal that may help Wentong to look inward and reconnect with the world around him. Elegantly lensed by Piao Songri, The Shadowless Tower explores characters in their environment as few films did this year, offering us a skillful and thoughtful commentary on post-COVID urban alienation in modern China.

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Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth (Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth ) / Canada, Mexico / dir. Matías Meyer

Few genres in cinema are as hackneyed and overwrought as the biopic. And funny enough, we have two quasi-biopics in our list this year, Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaalí! and Matías Meyer’s Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth. While Daaaaaalí! is a parody of the making of a biopic that becomes an essay on the creation of the fantastical artistic and public persona that was Salvador Dalí, Meyer’s foray into the form is a personal reflection on one’s own ethnic, national, and spiritual identity as an outsider channeled through the legendary Canadian figure, Louis Riel, leader of the Métis people and founder of Manitoba. The director, like Louis Riel, speaks English and French fluently, is close in age to Riel during the time period captured in the film (in fact, during production, Meyer was only one year older), is also from a Catholic culture, and has similar spiritual beliefs grounded in the connection between nature and God. At this point, you may have some expectations of a conversational film between Meyer, the director, and Riel, the subject, but let us make it clear that Meyer never directly discusses any of his own experiences in Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth. The director does, however, play the titular character/historical figure and reads Riel’s own diaries and writings throughout the film, Meyer’s first feature directed outside of his home country of Mexico and in Canada instead, where he’s lived since 2011. Louis Riel is one of the most written about and chronicled figures in Canadian history, and consequently, determining which part of Riel’s life to study is a challenge. Meyer selects the period of Riel’s imprisonment prior to his execution for treason and focuses on his messianic visions, reconciliation with the Catholic church, and articulation of the spiritual legacy he’d like to leave for his children and people. The director presents to us a meditative Riel preparing for the end of his life, making Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth less concerned about specific biographical details and more interested in portraying Riel’s state of mind. Hence, the film navigates between Riel’s earthly existence and his heavenly projections, and what makes it particularly commendable is its discipline in tone, which is consistently reflective and never dramatic as Riel’s turmoils in life are quieted by his own thoughts into a place of peace. We had the opportunity to interview Matías Meyer prior to the premiere of the film at FICUNAM 2024. You can read that conversation here.

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Daaaaaalí! / France / dir. Quentin Dupieux

It’s been seventeen years since the release of Steak, the directorial debut feature from Quentin Dupieux (a.k.a. Mr. Oizo), and since Steak, we have been treated to a dazzling array of wildly imaginative surrealist comedies that usually find their way into our favorite film list year after year. Of course, as we’ve been admirers of his work, which usually stars a modest cast of exceptionally talented actors, we were beyond stunned early this year when we read that his film, The Second Act (Le Deuxième Acte), featured the A-list talents of Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, and Louis Garrel, and was selected as the opening film at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival! For a director whom we’ve often viewed as an idiosyncratic outsider, we wondered how Dupieux could prepare for that thrush of mainstream attention. Perhaps the most astute way to pre-humble oneself for the glare of the spotlight is to construct a portrait of an artist whose immense popularity in his lifetime helped to foster a media persona that would, at times, outweigh the impact of his work: Salvador Dalí! First premiering at Venice in September of 2023 and released here in the States this fall, Daaaaaalí! is a sublimely narratively scrambled seventy-seven-minute snapshot of the personage of Dalí, which, despite its short running time, could not be portrayed by simply one actor but five: Eduoard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmai, and a couple of Dupieux’s usual suspects: Gilles Lellouche and Alain Chabat. The film’s setup has Judith (played by another of Dupieux’s regulars, Anaïs Demoustier), a pharmacist turned documentarian who has scheduled an interview with Dalí for print, which he hopes/expects/demands as a documentary piece, complete with giant cameras and microphones. Eager for a chance at a big break, Judith agrees to a filmed conversation, which is again aborted by Dalí, who destroys the camera. This is then followed by a third meeting where Dalí insists on interviewing Judith, much to the ire of her short-tempered producer, Jérôme (Romain Duris). Eventually, the overwhelming amount of Dalí’s machinations incorporates Judith, and the film is led down paths-a-plenty that are rapidly reimagined, from desert sojourns to killer cowboys to trips to Hell to Dalí repeatedly imagining himself as an elderly Dalí, all in service of the creation of the Dalí celebrity monolith. Despite its dizzying tangents that purposely fragment in multiple directions, Daaaaaalí! is a disarmingly funny poke at the timeless art of self-mythologization, a practice that is all too common and far less entertaining in our constantly connected and documented lives.

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BEST REPERTORY/RESTORATION SCREENING

Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) / France / dir. Bertrand Tavernier

As devoted fans of Jim Thompson’s novels, there has been a long-running conversation in our home around the sharpest cinematic adaptations of Thompson’s work. Back in 2020, we were treated to the sublime 4K restoration of Série noire, Alain Corneau’s rarely screened take on Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman, and earlier this year we rewatched another of our favorites, James Foley’s 1990 compelling go at Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet, but inevitably, the debate ends at Coup de Torchon, Tavernier’s radical transformation of Thompson’s Pop. 1280, which rises high above the rest. Cleverly, Tavernier, along with legendary screenwriter Jean Aurenche, extracted Thompson’s bumbling, ineffectual, cuckolded, Southern cop and placed him deep into the misery of 1938 French West Africa to create an occasionally grotesque black comedy that takes dead aim at the inhumanity inherent in colonialism. The wonderful Philippe Noiret commands the film as the philandering, corrupt police chief, Lucien Cordier, who embraces his public role as the town fool only to obfuscate his true self, that of a nihilistic and calculating killer who is more than willing to execute anyone who opposes the moral code that he himself has created. Step by step throughout Coup de Torchon, Cordier becomes the human personification of a colonial government. At first, he appears to carry with him the formal code of justice from his homeland, but as time goes on and the absurdist nature that he and his fellow countrymen represent in this foreign land where the locals have become nothing more than exploited labor, Cordier becomes more hypocritical to his own code of ethics. A last spark of rational hope comes for Cordier in the form of a comely French school teacher, who embodies the good of all that is the homeland’s culture, yet she too becomes another blight for our police chief that makes his colonialist cancer complete with a body count formed out of the mutation. Noiret, who excelled in Tavernier’s L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (The Clockmaker) and La Vie et Rien D’autre (Life and Nothing But), delivers his finest and most emotionally complex performance in a very unsavory role for the ages. The Cleveland Cinematheque screened the new 4K restoration of Coup de Torchon in March, and we thank them immensely for the opportunity to see one of our favorite films of all time restored to new brilliance.

Featured photo courtesy of Epicmedia Productions Inc.

Lily and Generoso Fierro

AFI Fest 2024

Originally published on Ink19 on November 5, 2024

Los Angeles, California • October 23-27, 2024

by Lily and Generoso Fierro

We are extremely proud to write that this year marks our tenth time covering Los Angeles’s unofficial premiere film festival, AFI Fest!

This year saw one of the largest totals of films programmed at the festival at 158, of which four were World Premieres, six were North American Premieres, and seven were US Premieres! The program represented forty-four countries and boasted nine Best International Feature Oscar® submissions, such as Mati Diop’s hybrid documentary, Dahomey, and Matthew Rankin’s second feature, Universal Language, two of our favorite watches from the impressive slate of films that we were able to catch during the five days of AFI Fest 2024!

In fact, this time around, we took in a total of sixteen features during the festival, and as per usual, our selections drew heavily from the World Cinema, Luminaries, and Discovery sections, but with an added focus this year on the Documentary section, where we caught four features, including the aforementioned Dahomey and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Johan Grimonprez’s innovative and impactful essay on the events that led to the killing of the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

As always, we couldn’t make it to everything that we had hoped to see. We’re saddened that the stars didn’t align so that we could attend screenings of the new offerings from Miguel Gomes, Payal Kapadia, and Alain Guiraudie, but we’re extremely glad that we were able to view the latest features from Albert Serra, Hong Sang-soo, and Philippe Lesage, amongst other notable filmmakers we’ve come to appreciate!

Overall, the films that we selected to review below constitute one of the most eclectic mixes of cinema that we have seen over our ten years of coverage of AFI Fest, and for our piece, we have chosen the thirteen movies that we admired the most, beginning with our number one selection from the festival!

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Việt and Nam

dir. Trương Minh Quý / Philippines, France, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Vietnam

With each of Trương Minh Quý’s films, the director sets forth ideas of the cosmic and the historic along with the multi-layered conceptions of house and home and allows us to watch all of these forces clash and interplay. In his most recent feature, Việt and Nam, Trương’s method has reached its highest form to date, resulting in a hypnotic, moving film made up of various interwoven, open-ended essays on Vietnamese culture and history, all of which are framed by the relationship between the two titular characters. The plot of Việt and Nam is simple albeit particular: Việt and Nam are miners who are best friends and lovers. In the year 2001, Nam is getting ready to leave Vietnam in search of a better future outside of the country, and the film documents the period where Nam looks towards his unknown future and bids his farewell to a present that will soon become the past. As such, history and collective memories weigh heavily on each of Nam’s interactions with his surroundings — his home, his workplace in the mine, and the forest where he attempts to help his mother recover the remains of his father who was killed in the Vietnam War — and his relationships with his mother and Việt, imbuing Việt and Nam with a profoundly elegiac tone. Haunted by the real future incident of the discovery of thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants who were killed in a lorry container that landed in the UK in 2019, Việt and Nam intimates a tragic end to Nam’s departure, but remains fixed throughout on all of the forces that encourage Nam’s migration. Trương offers a multitude of ways that fixations on the past extinguish potential, swelling up Việt and Nam into a mourning cry for the loss of home for all who departed Vietnam’s shores and the loss of opportunities and vibrancy for a country that lost its people. Misinterpreted as a work of slow cinema in the manner of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Việt and Nam is, in fact, a collage of cinematic techniques ranging from long-takes to cross-cuts, which build the momentum of the film to take us from the bowels of the Earth to its surface and then to a plane above. We had the honor of speaking with Trương Minh Quý in the days before Việt and Nam screened at AFI Fest 2024. You can read that conversation here.

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Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude)

dir. Albert Serra / Spain

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Comme le feu (Who by Fire)

dir. Philippe Lesage / Canada, France

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Universal Language

dir. Matthew Rankin / Canada

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Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs)

dir. Hong Sang-soo / South Korea

Considering the seemingly effortless nature of their previous collaborations, it is a surprise that Isabelle Huppert and Hong Sang-soo have only worked together twice in the last dozen years. As seen in 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera, Hong’s immense adoration for Huppert fills the duo’s latest joint project, A Traveler’s Needs, and his absurdist setups continue to showcase Huppert’s considerable talents as a comedic actress. Huppert portrays Iris, a French woman whose mysterious mission in South Korea leans on a method she recently developed to teach the locals her native tongue in order to pay for a portion of her stay, and although she has doubts about her system’s capacity to facilitate language learning, her eccentric nature allows her to test it on anyone who is open to giving it a try. Iris, whose fanciful manner of speaking hangs perfectly inside of a Hong Sang-soo frame, asks her clients to share their most personal thoughts as part of her quasi-remedial process, and after having lengthy discussions with the student in English, Iris writes a succinct synopsis of the ideas and thoughts that emerge in French and requests that the student recite it repeatedly into a tape machine prior to their next meeting. Hong presents two lessons with two different pupils, and within both sessions happens an unprovoked musical performance executed in a lifeless fashion by the students who identically critique their own poor proficiency and admit the desire to have better skill with the same exact words. Iris includes these musical incidents with her students’ disclosed thoughts in the French sentences she gives them, but each line exists as her own reflection on them and commentary on their lack of self-awareness. Each of these statements composed by Iris thereby act as a vehicle for Hong’s criticism of his own people’s desire to constrain art with precise and rigid execution instead of allowing it to flourish with joy from the act of expression and inspiration from the elemental. To this end, Hong carefully distinguishes Iris’s wardrobe from that of the people around her: others mostly wear neutral shades, but Iris wears a delightful springtime nymph inspired ensemble featuring a bright pink floral dress and grass-green sweater, which blends as easily into a park’s landscape as it does into a green terrace where Iris pauses for a rest, suggesting that she is a representation of the natural flow that needs to be embraced by those around her. Alternately, when the scene shifts from the pastoral to the confines of Iris’s apartment bedroom, where she is serenaded by the piano-playing of her flatmate, a poet named In-guk (Ha Seong-guk), Iris’s attire changes to suitably match the room’s warm tones as she persuades her friend and willing benefactor who is allowing her to stay for free to not over fixate on the notes he needs to play next and instead focus on the present sound. But soon, this thoughtful and gentle moment between two friends is interrupted by In-guk’s mother, whose insecurities and unreasonable desire for safety are directed towards her son as she casts doubt on Iris’s wholesome intentions. Ultimately, this dire moment between In-guk and his mother in the final third of A Traveler’s Needs radically shifts the film away from the whimsical and into an even starker cultural statement by Hong of his own people’s reluctance to relinquish their need for control, which suppresses their capacity to connect with their emotions and, in the long run, hinders any meaningful form of expression. The success of A Traveler’s Needs can be largely attributed to Huppert, who gives Iris several dimensions with a single look and contributes significantly to the most recent chapter in Hong’s post-COVID output, which once more features our director issuing a sobering wake-up call to those asleep in complacency in the face of an uncertain future.

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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

dir. Johan Grimonprez / Belgium, France, Netherlands

In the same way that jazz musicians come together to create a dazzling, intricate mixture of sound comprised of melody and rhythm, regrettably, so too did the Belgian monarchy, the US government, and a slew of corporations in January of 1961 to conspire to execute their insipid plot to delegitimize and kill the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. As he did with his 2017 feature documentary Blue Orchid, which delved into the global arms trade, Belgian multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez once again turns his camera towards the unsavory underbelly of political maneuvering where lives are traded for profit with Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Drawing from the books My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History, and Congo, Inc., here, Grimonprez expertly fuses everything from spoken word pieces to archival footage of the jazz that was performed by a who’s who of iconic artists who were sent by the US State Department to Africa during the 1950s and 60s under the guise of a goodwill mission that actually functioned as a smokescreen for covert operations to undermine post-colonial governments. Implementing a method to cleverly beguile you into a sense of nostalgic joy early in the narrative, Grimonprez and his team of editors enthrall you with a cascade of mesmerizing sounds and visuals from jazz legends, luring you into a state of bliss before steadily pulling the carpet out from under you when the onerous details substantiated through various forms of hard evidence paint a grotesque and calculated picture of America and Belgium’s joint mission to preserve access to Africa’s vast mineral resources, resources that the US feared were slipping away when many of Africa’s nations began to, one by one, unify, strengthen, and pull away from their colonial oppressors. As Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat details the actions of an American propaganda machine that sought to turn every message of support for Africa’s first post-colonial nation into one of fear and Communist rhetoric, the film thankfully calls out the few brave western artists who caught wind of the plot to dismantle Lumumba’s government who subsequently boycotted being used in the campaign, and so, as the plot unfolds and these musicians and activists express their disdain, the music responds in kind by moving away from bop and into sounds of protest from the Africa that incorporate the continent’s many original rhythms. Given the ambitious nature of the entire composition of Grimonprez’s film, one may fear that the method might overwhelm the subject at times, but instead, the inevitable death of Lumumba still hits hard as it’s presented here, as an outro for the piece that draws a line towards a present-day Congo where dour campaigns continue by governments who now vie for that nation’s coltan, a mineral required to power today’s electronics. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat opens nationally in theaters on Friday, November 15th.

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Harvest

dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari / UK, US, Germany, France

For Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari, one of the pillars of the Greek Weird Wave, deviates away from the odd to tell the story of the beginning of modern Western civilization, right at the precipitating moment marking our transition from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. Set in a village in Scotland loosely around the 1600s, Harvest gives us Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) as a guide to the idyllic, fairytale-like expanse of lands owned by the village’s lord, Master Charles Kent (Harry Melling). All of the residents tend to the fields except for Walter, who was Charles’s manservant in childhood and adolescence and, as an adult, has somewhat continued to exist in this same capacity. Consequently, Walter is not treated as a member of the village tribe and exists as a bystander and observer who studies the people in his surroundings as much as the flora along the nearby hills. When Charles’s stable is set ablaze, Walter steps in to rescue his lord’s beloved horse, and although he knows the culprits of the act of arson, he withholds their names, aware of how the others would perceive his identification of the offenders as some of their own. Thankfully, the good-natured Charles dismisses the fire as an accident, but this event quietly ushers in a massive wave of change. Soon after, a woman and two men arrive by canoe and try to camp by the side of the nearby lake, but instead are blamed for the stable fire and are accordingly punished. At the celebration for the end of the growing season, Charles introduces everyone to Phillip Earle, a mapmaker who has arrived to survey the land, and announces a new economic vision for the village: sheep herding for the purposes of the burgeoning wool industry. With the villagers’ paranoia already raised by these recent events, their suspicions and fears escalate further upon the arrival of Edmund Jourdan, Master Kent’s late wife’s cousin and the incarnate of malevolence, who asserts himself as the true owner of the land and the mastermind behind the new vision of sheep. On the request of Charles, Walter assists Phillip Earle, but through all of these changes, which severely impact the villagers and even Charles himself, Walt mostly observes and maintains his distance. As the film proceeds, inaction becomes more despicable, and Harvest reveals itself as a sharply contemporary tale of a non-hero, a man caught between forces that he can’t overcome, one who must piece together some semblance of integrity in a cruel world with few options. Walter isn’t accepted as a member of the peasant class. He’s certainly not a member of the lord class. He’s in the void between, and he must determine if he’s going to participate in Edmund Jordan’s future for him as an administrator of the new business or venture on to new lands and unimagined futures.

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Devo

dir. Chris Smith / USA

Before writing this critique of Chris Smith’s deliriously entertaining feature on New Wave pioneers Devo, we seriously considered recusing ourselves from the assignment as we have long revered this innovative outfit that rose up from the Rubber City (also known as Akron, Ohio) to national prominence. Over the years, we’ve seen far too many documentaries on musical artists we admire that fire dead center into the cookie-cutter model of assembling onscreen celebrity talking heads who espouse fanatical adoration and intercutting these lionizations with faded clips from the musician’s heyday, a tiresome approach in direct conflict with the creativity and the vibrancy of the subject artist. Thankfully, for Devo, veteran documentarian Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) thoughtfully utilizes the abundant library of avant-garde footage created by the band themselves as his documentary’s base and interweaves it with only retro-commercial footage and interviews with the band’s members and outside collaborators, sidestepping all of the antiquated conventions of the rock doc as the director sheds light on the enigmatic political underpinnings of the band’s origins, which began after the protest shootings at Kent State, their mindset behind their early performance art styled live shows, and their subsequent rise through the corporate record industry machine that was the enemy of their self-defined ethos that extolled the ever-evolving de-evolution of man. Though Devo saw fame as a method for getting their social messaging out, the level of how famous the band wanted to become is left intentionally ambiguous by Smith. There are glimpses into the amount of joy that the lucrative record contracts gave the band, but that success was also something that caused Devo endless internal strife. This all may sound a bit serious in tone and warrant comparisons to Todd Haynes’s fittingly austere and highly accomplished doc on the Velvet Underground from 2021, but the editing of Smith’s treatment on what makes Devo who they are comes at you in bright waves, matching the wit and tongue-in-cheek spirit that are fundamental to the band. Smith’s film is funny when he listens to the band’s early forays into creating an image, dour during moments when founding members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh reveal their frustrations with the powers that be, and joyful when we see footage of the band doing what they do best — exercising their ample talents to subversively criticize the dysfunctional system that they slyly ascended and innovated within, if only for a few years.

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Dahomey

dir. Mati Diop / France, Senegal, Benin

Five years have passed since the premiere of French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s critically lauded feature debut, Atlantique. Set in the capital city of Dakar, Diop’s first full-length fiction work, is a gripping and mystical drama where Diop expertly melded the film’s environment with the characters’ responses to desperate situations to create an absorbing contemporary portrait of a place and its people. For her latest feature, Dahomey, Diop again combines elements of environment and a fictional engine, but here she also joins them with a key moment in history to present a slender yet affecting hybrid documentary that fosters critical dialogues around France’s 2021 repatriation of 26 stolen relics (from a total of over 7,000 looted) to the Republic of Benin, the former Kingdom of Dahomey. Diop presents this repatriation of stolen items in three fluid parts. The first section introduces us to the 26 artifacts still housed in the Musée du Quai Branly followed by their transportation from Paris to Cotonou. In the film’s second section, we witness students from the University of Abomey-Calavi engage in a fierce and impassioned debate about the significance of the return of their cultural possessions; and in the final third, the statues and other artifacts are displayed for the first time in a Beninese museum. When outlined, Dahomey’s overall narrative structure may sound like the makings of a standard documentary, but Diop’s imaginative choice to anthropomorphize the 26th item returned, the figure of King Ghézo, who ruled the Kingdom of Dahomey from 1797 to 1818, boldly distinguishes her work. As the film’s central narrator, King Ghézo speaks in the Dahomean language of Fon, articulating his thoughts on being trapped in the darkness of his shipping crate and his ruminations on his own existence and history. Resoundingly rendered so that Ghézo’s voice sounds like a soul communicating from centuries long ago, Diop’s technique brings emotionality to Ghézo’s symbolic plight as a representative of the items being returned to Benin, while also elevating the difficult eternal debate around the ethics and impact of any attempt by colonial governments to repatriate plundered culturally significant items, an act that serves as only a banal gesture towards the citizens of the victimized country who long for their remaining stolen artifacts and resources that will most likely never be returned.

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Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point

dir. Tyler Taormina / USA

One must always remember that the word “nostalgia” is a learned formation of a Greek compound consisting of nóstos, meaning “homecoming,” and álgos, meaning “pain.” Keeping that in mind, possibly no song provokes greater “nostalgia” within us than the Goffin-King-penned track, “Point of No Return,” a top 40 hit for Gene McDaniels back in 1962. To digress for a moment…When we first moved to Knoxville in 2018, the sole oldies station in town was clearly engaged in an all-out blitzkrieg to revive this McDaniels’ cut, which, if you’ve never heard it before, is rife with over-annunciation, stark dramatic pauses, and a lavish orchestration that feels more akin to a John Barry score or a Tom Jones performance for Ed Sullivan than the soulful arrangement the song’s heartbreaking lyrics warranted. For about a year or so, we would giggle whenever “Point of No Return” blasted through our kitchen, but all that changed after months of being trapped inside during COVID. The McDaniels song took on an entirely different meaning, circumventing any semblance of kitsch and veering towards something closer to political reeducation announcements. Since his impressive debut feature, Ham on Rye, director Tyler Taormina has harnessed the fiendish power that nostalgia has over us by selectively introducing us to warm and fuzzy sounds and images from multiple eras via film language whilst loudly injecting an underlying tone that suggests the layers of brokenness we mindlessly gloss over while engaging in pointless, familiar ritual. So, with Taormina’s ethos firmly established, we readied ourselves for a viewing of the director’s latest, knowing full well that there is no greater Holy Grail of nostalgia than that of the holiday film. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a faded and ragu-smeared Yuletide snapshot gathering of the obtusely Long Island blue-collar Italian-American family, the Bolsanos, whom we observe as they merrily and not-so-merrily bask in the clichés of the season. Food cooks, gifts are exchanged, teens sneak out to be with their friends, and the grownups argue about putting Mom into a home while sonically lurking by the boughs of holly and bowls of green and red M&Ms is “Point of No Return,” one of the many ironic non-holiday torch songs from yesteryear that gets a bonus play or two on the soundtrack for that extra taste of a past becoming further obsolete. Sharply edited into a frenzy so that no thread is followed beyond a moment or two of tension-filled dialog, leaving zero chance for the development of any dramatic event that would distinguish this celebration from the myriad of other Christmas Eves in the Bolsano home, even though traces of impending change creep throughout, Taormina’s film works like that final obligatory school Christmas pageant, an extravagant display of holiday tropes that are overshadowed by individual interests and concerns unrelated to the event, with its paraphernalia and associated warmth soon destined, just like the oldies of the soundtrack, for dusty boxes in storage once and for all.

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Karlovy Vary (Second Chance)

dir. Subhadra Mahajan / India

It is almost impossible to believe that only a few generations ago a sense of community in an urban landscape was alive and well. Before the 2000s and the rapid repopulation of cities by people of substantial means, communities were kept alive by the residents who carried innate knowledge of their neighborhood, creating an environment that, despite its mammoth size, was able to foster a sense of belonging by its people who were imbibed by a firm sense of that place and its capabilities to foster its own world. For Nia (Dheera Johnson), an emotionally distraught upper-class young woman, an exodus from Delhi becomes critical for her well-being following the abandonment by her boyfriend due to her unwanted pregnancy. Physically and psychologically fragile after ingesting abortion pills, Nia, with a nervously clutched cellphone in hand, arrives at her family’s summer home high up in the Pir Panjal mountain range to recuperate. It’s a place that Nia has come to know well since her youth, and with the winter descending on the region, she is promised a quiet space to convalesce with only the caretaker Raju (Rajesh Kumar) and his small family on the property. But, shortly after Nia arrives, Raju is called away, and Nia is left with Raju’s elderly mother-in-law, Bhemi (Thakra Devi), and his wildly boisterous yet disarmingly sweet son, Sunny (Kanav Thakur), both of whom offer assistance to Nia whichever way they can. However, omnipresent throughout the growing relationship between Nia, Bhemi, and Sunny is a question of class prerogative, and director Mahajan adeptly implies the socioeconomic distance between the three with the small moments that occur between them, whether it be Nia’s joy in soundly beating Sunny in a casual game of cricket or Nia’s refusal to eat the food that Bhemi skillfully crafts for her. The divide is never overtly stated, but it generates a tension early on that drives the narrative while also giving insight into Nia’s inability to feel comfortable in her own skin, whether she is in Delhi or seemingly light years away in nature. As the days go by and Nia is thrust into distressing situations that require serious assistance, she begins to accept the emotional and physical help that she gets from her surrogate family and starts to recognize their extraordinary symbiosis with the land, which gives Nia the strength to solemnly examine her own situation. Aided by the superb black and white camerawork by Swapnil Suhas Sonawane that captures not only the beauty, but also the harsh isolation of the film’s setting, Mahajan’s impressive feature debut goes far beyond the cliché of the urbanite who finds themself by succumbing to the mystical wiles of nature: Second Chance is a somber, yet occasionally funny, and ultimately complex character study that speaks volumes about the ever-growing chasm between the societally mandated expectations we thoughtlessly place on ourselves and the power of place and the people connected to it who help us reestablish our natural sense of self.

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Gou Zhen (Black Dog)

dir. Guan Hu / China

Set in the months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics in a small town on the outskirts of the Gobi desert, Guan Hu’s, Black Dog, the winner of Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes, is, at its core, a man and his dog story elevated to a sprawling, sometimes allegory-overwrought, but absorbing political drama. Returning to his slowly withering hometown to spend time with his dying father is our near-silent anti-hero, Lang (Eddie Peng), a musician of some notoriety, stunt motorcyclist, and ex-con who just ended his ten year prison sentence after being convicted of manslaughter for the accidental death of his riding partner, a crime that many of the locals still hold over Lang’s head. Left with few friends in town and even slimmer prospects for work, Lang joins the local governmental effort to round up the exceedingly large number of wild dogs deemed undesirable by the town, with the infamous titular canine, a rumored carrier of rabies, singled out as the coveted prize given the sizable reward for its capture. Although Lang, slightly mauled by the hunted emaciated dog early in the film, makes the decision to keep the cur once his job dictates that he captures the animal, this act of defiance unites these outcasts, who along with the packs of stray dogs, serve as a symbol against Beijing’s plan for sweeping change in this arid region that would require the elimination of any roadblocks and eyesores standing in the way of progress. Alternating between comedy, sentimentality, and social commentary mixed with healthy doses of magical realism, Guan Hu’s film is affecting for a good portion of its 149 minute running time, especially in the quieter moments when it concentrates on the relationship between Lang and his newfound four-legged friend, but the narrative stumbles a bit when it expands its scope to include too many subplots, such as the underdeveloped romance between Lang and a traveling circus performer named Grape. But, despite its desire for an unnecessarily epic scale and a nagging sense that some intended messaging may have been censored, Black Dog is a well-acted and poignant take on an ever-evolving China that may be changing too quickly without any regard for its own people.

• •

All films were screened at AFI Fest 2024. Many thanks and congratulations to the staff and volunteers of AFI Fest for another excellent year of cinema and conversations, and a special thanks to Johanna Calderón-Dakin, Senior Publicity Associate for AFI Fest, who made our coverage possible.

Featured photo courtesy of AFI Fest.

AFI Fest

Trương Minh Quý

Originally published on Ink19 on October 21, 2024

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on October 14, 2024

With his previous feature, the hybrid documentary, The Tree House (Nhà cây), director Trương Minh Quý presented his keen essayistic approach to the history of Vietnam by weaving his reflections on home and memory with the stories of members of the Ruc, Kor, and Jarai people, ethnic minorities who have all experienced displacement in the decades after the Vietnam War. The Tree House established Trương as a distinctive voice in Southeast Asia: his cinema examined and challenged the subjectivity and objectivity of the viewer, filmmaker, and documentary subject, all while discussing impacts of the Vietnam War that were lesser known to the West. Trương cleverly sidestepped Western assumptions and charged emotions around the contentious war and instead used it as a common historical reference point to ask broader questions around the forces that shape our attachment to houses and the concept of home.

For his third full-length film and first fiction feature, Việt and Nam, Trương includes the Vietnam War again, but layers on conventions of slow cinema from Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as well as portrayals of Vietnam in American movies and counterpoints all of these cinematic expectations of Southeast Asia with documentary-like footage of work and home life, elements of classical cinema such as cross-cutting, and meticulously composed shots in various natural settings that manage to take the viewer somewhere far beyond our Earth — all in order to delve further into the history of Vietnam from after the war to the early 2000s and its influence on familial and romantic relationships and the reality of the future. The two titular characters of Việt and Nam form the center of the film’s cosmos: they work together in a coal mine and are lovers as well as each other’s closest friend. Vietnam’s past and recent history collide into their lives via Nam’s mother, who is searching for the body of her husband who was a soldier killed in the war, and through Nam’s preparations to embark on a treacherous migration out of Vietnam, a common but dangerous practice for many Vietnamese seeking better lives and opportunities abroad.

With Việt and Nam, Trương shows us how to sculpt the symbolic and historical weight of every image, every element of cinema into a philosophical yet emotionally striking kind of filmmaking that is entirely his own. After reviewing The Tree House in 2019, we could not wait to see what Trương would do next, and Việt and Nam went beyond our hopes. Thus, when we had the opportunity to speak with Trương in advance of the screening of Việt and Nam at this year’s AFI Fest, we were delighted to talk to the director about his images of Vietnam, his continued interest in the meanings of physical spaces, and his thoughtful manipulations of cinematic grammar to entwine a story of love with the forces of history, time, and place to form an urgent rumination on collective memories and their role in our interpretations of the present and our projections of the future.

• •

LF: For us, Việt and Nam and The Tree House are interpretations of history via landscape. The Tree House was focused on life above the ground level of Earth in various elevations, be it in caves in mountain sides, trees/tree houses, or the highlands. On the other hand, Việt and Nam was about digging into the earth in shallow (when making clay, when looking for the bodies of martyrs) and deep ways (the coal mine). How conscious were you of this difference? After The Tree House, was it important to make a film in the opposite orientation to the surface of Earth?

TMQ: I wasn’t intentionally thinking like that, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I’d like to consider this for a moment. In The Tree House, we see the duality of everything we think of as a house: the normal house and the tree house, but we also have a house for the dead, which is the negative of a normal house. Việt and Nam also begins with a feeling of home, but it’s more like a feeling of homelessness. In The Tree House, we see the physical home, but then as the film goes on, we understand that the film is trying to say something about the memories of the childhood home, which was lost by the characters in the film and by everyone at some point.

Also, Việt and Nam is somewhat set in the present, which is juxtaposed against The Tree House where everyone is concerned with the past and the home that they have lost. In Việt and Nam, we witness Nam, his mother, and their surrounding community residing in their homes in a present timeline, although they still are concerned about the past while living there. As Nam gets ready for the future, we get the impression that his home will become a part of his past because he will be homeless once he departs from his home and country.

In regards to the difference between the surface and underground, it is true that in Việt and Nam we can see that the underground space is very present and occupied visually and emotionally. I’ve noticed that what audiences remember most about the film is the darkness of the underground. My choice of the underground is based on the narrative of living inside and traveling into the Earth not only to search for material, but also to search for the spiritual in a way because there is also a search for a father, and in that sense, the underground becomes a space of the past. We see Nam and Việt and all of the miners, traverse vertically to search for something created by the past, and this becomes a parallel construct to the search for history occurring as the two main characters venture with Nam’s mother to look for Nam’s father’s body.

GF: You ended The Tree House with a quote from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which we understand was a huge influence for that film. Bachelard focuses on home as the center of the universe, and home as the original, the primordial cave. The Tree House is a direct engagement with this concept, whereas Việt and Nam is a more poetic interpretation and expansion on this concept. Were you regularly revisiting Bachelard in the making of Việt and Nam?

TMQ: I wasn’t doing so consciously, but I believe that his philosophy was certainly there in the back of my mind while making my film. Starting with The Tree House and Gaston Bachelard’s ideas of a house as a place where we store our memories because a house becomes a home when there are memories, and as memories need a physical space, we thought that we could expand this concept beyond a house to a river, a town, or a country. Thus, in spite of the fact that Việt and Nam has no direct connection to Bachelard’s philosophy, it nevertheless plays a significant role in the movie.

For me, when I shot some scenes, like the scene where Nam is in bed with his mother with the darkness around them, and you see the mirror and hear the rain, all of these sensations are an attempt to create a feeling of home, and yes, it is also true that I concentrate on geographies, or should I say locations, because I need to know a place to get a feeling from it so that I can build a story. Most of the locations we used in Việt and Nam are real locations, like the house of Nam and his mother. Their house, for example, looks exactly like that in reality, and we didn’t do anything to change it. In our process, there is first a layer of documenting a real place. We go out and try to find a place with certain memories inherent in that place, and then we add a layer of fiction. But, we try not to interpret or manipulate the reality, the truth that lies in the documentary foundation.

GF: What is incredibly impressive about your films thus far is their ability to capture Vietnam’s landscape and show how elements of it, especially away from the cities, are completely unique. And yet, in these places, due to history, politics, economics, and other external forces, one’s home is no longer felt even despite being born there. The Vietnam that you present is almost its own planet, alien to the west, alien sometimes to even its own inhabitants. How do you exhibit this feeling of Vietnam as this mysterious planet while avoiding a sense of exoticization?

TMQ: It’s very interesting to think about this point. The answer to this question lies in the distance between the filmmaker and Vietnam or elsewhere. When I start to think about a film, I’m thinking more in cinematic terms like how to transfer feelings and all of the values of cinema through the shot and the mise en scène, as well as the texture of the image, and when I think of these things, I’m not thinking about Vietnam. I suppose that it is different for other filmmakers from America. When they make films about Vietnam, everything for them has to have the adjective “Vietnamese” in front of it. Perhaps they fear that they cannot capture Vietnameseness accurately, so their film becomes exotic. In my case, I discussed with my DP how to avoid that feeling of exoticness. I, of course, did not want to have any feeling of exoticness in my film, but in some situations, I could have fallen into that trap.

However, there is one shot in Việt and Nam where I intentionally tried to make it look like a shot of a Vietnamese landscape that you would see in an Oliver Stone film. It is the first shot of the second half of the film — the one of the rice field. It’s almost like a postcard. I used that shot to play with the expectations of the audience. That is the first time where they really see a landscape in the film, and when they see it, they immediately register that it is a kind of Vietnamese landscape that they’ve seen before. The only thing that is not in the shot is a buffalo (laughs)!

LF: Speaking of expectations, the techniques of slow cinema typically evoke a feeling of meditation that leads to introspection. But, in your film, the conventions feel like they boil up to a great mourning and a touch of anger for the loss of youth and vitality. How important was it for you to play around with expectations of slow cinema, which have been heavily attributed to films from Southeast Asia for the past couple of decades?

TMQ: I’ve seen that many of the reviews of my film compare it to the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. From the outside, I think that is rightly so, as there is a certain inspiration, but for most of the reviewers, I felt that this comparison is the end and not the beginning. That comparison stopped them from digging deeper into Việt and Nam because, if they did, they could see that this is the least Apichatpong-esque film that I have made (laughs)!

When we look at slow cinema in the vein of directors like Apichatpong and Tsai ming-liang, we can see that their films are more conceptual than mine. They have this conceptual feel and lightness about them that is about a certain spirit of loneliness and memory, for example, but in my film, I’m constantly trying to balance the heaviness of history in the documentary components with the fictional narrative, so you can sense that my film, in fact, is not so light in terms of concept and feeling. Instead, it tries to operate in a direct way with some scenes appearing as documentary, but then it slowly tries to reach for something more transcendent as evidenced in the ending shot. That is how I approach the fictional narrative side: I don’t ignore the weight of the documentary, but rather I try to combine both and connect them with the other aspects of the film.

In terms of expectation, I think it’s true that people may think that Việt and Nam is a work of slow cinema, but it is, in fact, about the grammar of cinema. I chose to use multiple techniques of editing to create a certain mood and response, so this film moves in an unexpected way in terms of form and style. For example, the film editing method changes during the scene in the barbershop and in the birthday sequence you see later in the film. They are both edited in a very conventional way with a lot of closeups and short-cut shots. There are even some shots that last only a few seconds, which is a total contradiction to the shots that last three or four minutes. During these two scenes, I wanted to evoke a more romantic connection between the two titular characters, so I needed a more dynamic editing approach. To sum up, I didn’t commit my film to a certain aesthetic, such as slow cinema. But rather, I wanted to deliberately use different devices of cinematic language to create certain moods, and as a result, my film is not aesthetically uniform by choice.

LF: When looking closer at the layers of possible meaning in the minute details of your film, we started to wonder about your selection of Hoa as the name for Nam’s mother. Hoa is a very common female name, but Hoa is also an important word in relation to the term, “Người Hoa,” Vietnamese people of Chinese ancestry. Many Người Hoa were persecuted before, during, and after the war. Consequently, this is also a group that has complicated relationships with the idea of Vietnam as home. Was this an important reason behind Mrs. Hoa’s name, or was it a mere coincidence?

TMQ: No, I actually didn’t use the name Hoa for that purpose. It is a very popular name for women, which is why I used it in the film, but to speak to your point, there are many facets to my film that audiences interpret in different manners. They see many points, many dialogues, even the names of the characters, and feel that these things have meanings that end up being very different from my intentions. I can’t control this, as the film has the space to leave things up for personal interpretation. One of the most problematic of these interpretations — and I say problematic because the interpretation is far from my intention, not because it’s a problem for me — is the one surrounding the accents of Việt and Nam that are made by Vietnamese viewers of the film who notice that one actor speaks in a Northern accent and the other actor speaks in a Southern accent.

For the Vietnamese audiences of my film, they think that there is a symbolic purpose for the actors to speak in different accents, but the reality is that when I was casting the project, I wanted to have two actors who spoke in a North Vietnamese accent, but, as I’m sure you know, the process of filmmaking is rife with accidents, so you end up working with whatever you have. Due to circumstances beyond my control, we cast one actor from Hanoi and the other from Nha Trang, and I wasn’t going to avoid casting him just because he was from the South — that would not be right. At one point, I even considered dubbing his voice so he would have a Northern accent, which would have also been more narratively coherent, but truthfully, I didn’t care about this difference. However, when Vietnamese people eventually saw the film, they took that difference as having a symbolic and political meaning that changed the weight of what I intended for them. For international audiences, the difference in accents had no impact.

GF: We understand that Nam’s aunt, his bác gái, is economically more successful than his mother, as her son has left Vietnam, settled, and is able to send back money, but she also mentioned that she and her family were previously miners. You don’t mention much about how she was able to ascend. Was there something specifically that happened in the early 2000s that led to more economic gains for people like bác gái?

TMQ: My inspiration for the character of bác gái and her house came from a village in the central north of Vietnam, in the province of Hà Tĩnh. The village is so famous that it is called “Immigrant Village” due to the fact that most of the young people who own homes there live overseas and send money back. In that village, like you see in the film, there are many large houses that are mostly empty and usually occupied by only grandparents who take care of their grandchildren while the parents work and live outside of Vietnam. It is a sad and, frankly, absurd situation, but those houses are mostly purchased as investments by these young people so that they can eventually come back to Vietnam for their retirement and enjoy the results of their hard work.

This primarily happens in provincial areas, but I feel that it was more popular in the past than it is now. Of course, there are many Vietnamese people who still work overseas, but it is much easier to travel now than it used to be, and politically, it is definitely more open these days for people to go to and from Vietnam.

For the character of bác gái, do you remember the long red string candy that she gives Nam in the film? It’s a funny detail, but it is based on personal experience, as I had this neighbor when I was a kid whom my brothers and I used to spend time with given that all of her daughters had been living overseas for a very long time. She would have that red candy, and she gave me a string of it once when I was little, and somehow it has forever been lodged in my memory — this flavor of foreign candy — so I had to put it in my film! (laughs)

GF: I have to ask, did your neighbor also keep that red candy in the shrine in her home as bác gái does in your film? We both found that a bit of a curiosity.

TMQ: That shrine, that little house, is very popular in North Vietnam. People usually put them in front of their houses or on their terraces. I originally didn’t have these little houses in mind at the very beginning of my project, but as I began to create the skeleton of my film, I noticed that many of the houses had them. Additionally, the actress who plays bác gái in real life is a bit spooky, as she used to work as a medium. Early on, she told me that besides working as an actress, she was once paid to help some get rid of ghosts! I found that conversation funny, but it also gave me this feeling of the spiritual, and so I combined the earlier memory of the candy with the little house shrine.

LF: Some of the most important scenes in Việt and Nam for me personally were the ones with the medium/psychic. To be honest, I’ve been frustrated with how mediums are used in our culture to over fixate on the past. I may be projecting, but in the scenes with the medium in your film, I felt a similar frustration: people are spending money they don’t have and a lot of time to hire and work with this medium to find people who are ultimately gone, and in turn, they are not looking at what’s in front of them: the young who are leaving, the young who don’t have a future. Can you touch upon your inclusion of the scenes with the medium?

TMQ: I think it’s paradoxical. A lot of people think that if you believe in some guide like a medium or a monk, then you can attain a spiritual life. I think that most people feel this way out of fear and redemption, though not in the Catholic sense. In my opinion, Vietnamese society is religious, though it is beyond a specific religion, as this medium doesn’t ascribe to any religion. It is more of a spiritual thing. If you ask the average person on the street in Vietnam if they believe in the spiritual, they will say yes, or they won’t say anything at all about it. It’s rare that someone will flat out say that they do not believe. I suspect that they are afraid that if they admit that they don’t believe, they will be punished somehow, and that’s why they would rather admit to a spiritual belief or just not talk about it at all.

That said, this spirituality can be a helpful way for people to express their emotions and to deal with their own guilt, even though this guilt is in no way a product of something they did. For example, if your grandfather died and his body is in a forest somewhere, you feel some amount of guilt if you don’t make a real effort to bring his body home. This comes from an instilled sense of familial obligation and duty.

Hence, in my film, you can view the medium as some sort of scammer or fraud, a bit theatrical and even a bit crazy, but many people in Vietnam don’t take this viewpoint, especially people who have had the experience of hiring a medium and taking a similar journey to search for the remains of their loved ones. For these people, this scene with the medium is very realistic, and thus, there are multiple ways of looking at it, but for me, I didn’t want the film to definitively state if she was a scammer or an actual psychic because that fact is less important than why people depend on the medium and the solace that the medium can bring. In the last shot with the daughter of the soldier, she becomes so emotional that she embraces the coffin with the supposed remains of her father inside. What is inside the coffin could be fake or could be real, but regardless of the contents therein, the emotion she expresses is real. In that sense, the medium’s discovery of the body is helpful for the family, as they need to have something physical, something concrete to worship, to bring back to their hometown, and then to move on with their own lives.

In the end, if you look at it in a philosophical manner, the materials of the body have disintegrated over time, and the fragments of bone can’t be differentiated from a rock, and so you cannot concretely say that this matter you found was in fact your father. By this point, there’s not much of a difference between a piece of soil that you claim belonged to your father’s physical form and an actual piece of your father’s remains; the body has become something else entirely, so this discovery and recovery process becomes only important for the living.

LF: Though we understand that your film is not a direct response to the lorry tragedy in the UK in 2019, we’re curious as to your use of water throughout the film because it’s noticeably present in scenes involving migration or states of change. In many ways, water operates in stark contrast to the cosmic and eternal coal mine setting of Việt and Nam’s intimate moments. Given the past connotation of water as a method of escape post-war, how did the early 2000s in Vietnam shape your approach to the role of water in your film?

TMQ: It’s true that we can form a link between my film and the tragedy that occurred with the Vietnamese migrants who died in the storage container in the UK in 2019, but my film is not about that event specifically. People can make that association, and it’s fine, but that was not my actual intention. What is important for me is for people to see the film through the perspective of time, given that the film is set in 2001 and not 2019. People will ask why this is the case. I chose to set the film in 2001 on the account of the narrative demanding it, as 2001 was not too long after the Vietnam War, but, in addition, by bringing the container event to the past, I could create some distance from it and maybe bring some sense of consolation. For me, it was purely an emotional choice.

As for water, of course, Vietnamese people have many different connections to water as it is such a part of everyday life. We see a lot of rain in the film simply because of my memories of my hometown located in the Central Highlands, as every year there are several months of heavy rain. The memory of those rains, especially the sound of rain hitting the roof at night, gives me a sensation of home, so in my film you can see and hear the rain vividly.

But, water is also a force of destruction. This is part of our mythology in Vietnam, as we are all taught this legend of the battle between the water and land during immemorial times. And we just cannot escape the interpretation of the sea not as the sea itself but rather as a path to a destination beyond: when some people see the sea, they don’t see the water, but only the destination that lies on the other side, and for them, the sea then simply becomes something they have to cross.

This all raises points around how the image itself already has so many meanings and how to try to escape those meanings. Personally, the reception of this film has been odd, as many people see it as very political and symbolic on the outside. But, the moments and details I selected to include in the film, such as the lullaby about the stork that Mrs. Hoa sings to Nam, came from a real emotion that I wanted to draw out. The lullaby mentions water, but I didn’t think about its relation to water’s symbolic meaning when I put it in the film. For me, everything starts with a feeling, and I try to say something about that feeling using cinematic language. Of course, the interpretation becomes much more than what I have within my own mind.

Case in point, the ending, which has the story about the watermelon, has taken on a life I did not expect. I had the idea to use the watermelon story long before the current conflict in Gaza, but when we were in the process of editing the scene, the war in Gaza had begun, so now, when people see the scene, it takes on a different meaning due to people using watermelons as a symbol for Palestine during the protests to the conflict. I never had a specific political intention with that scene, but now I see that some interpret it as relating to the war in Gaza. It’s been strange and fascinating to see how elements of Việt and Nam have taken on new and unintended meanings over time as different audiences view the film.

Việt and Nam screens at AFI Fest this Saturday, October 26, at 2 pm.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Featured photo by Daniel Seiffert.

Viet and Nam

MATT AND MARA

Originally published on Ink 19 on September 26th, 2024

Matt and Mara
directed by Kazik Radwanski

Nina Blume: Are you happy?

Stephen Blume: I’m just not miserable. What more could anybody ask for?

For now, let’s call it an elevated ennui. That’s the best way we can assess the mood of Stephen Blume, the central figure of Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, as he utters the above in response to his adoring wife Nina’s simple ask. Stephen is the epitome of the early 1970s elevated ennui. On appearance, he is a figure to be envied. A successful businessman with a lovely home and a caring wife, Stephen should be happy, but from the onset, by means of a clumsy extramarital affair, we know that Stephen is desperately unhappy in his own skin.

It’s an extreme introduction, but what follows in Blume in Love is Stephen’s neurotic journey through the weeds that inevitably steamrolls through two other lives. For us, Mazursky, more than any of the other American auteur directors of his era, keenly understood the flailing of his peers.

Arriving a tick over fifty years after Mazursky’s cinematic gut check on his generation’s malaise over seemingly having it all, Matt and Mara examines Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s peers with a similar scrutiny. Subtly chaotic and delightfully uncomfortable, Matt and Mara presents an existential romantic dilemma that is emblematic of our age.

Radwanski abruptly introduces us to the Stephen Blume of his feature, Mara (Deragh Campbell), a college poetry professor, as she is held up in conversation before teaching her next class by Matt (Matt Johnson), an aggressively charming novelist and old friend of Mara’s who is visiting from New York City. They frantically chat, with only Mara conscious of the students piled up in front of the classroom door. Surprised to see him, Mara makes a sketchy plan to follow up with Matt via email and says goodbye, but as she begins to teach her class, he quietly walks into the room and awkwardly climbs into a seat, bringing an entranced smile to Mara’s face, a smile that immediately suggests that she relishes the impetuous nature of her slightly disheveled, funny friend.

This first scene is brief, but we can easily read volumes into who these people are and what they mean to each other, which is a testament to Campbell’s and Johnson’s considerable talents in creating and establishing a familiar rapport and Radwanski’s ability to wander in and out of the frame to make every exchange more meaningful. The fluid collaboration between these three, which we first admired in one of our favorite films of 2020, Anne at 13,000 Ft., has now transformed into a process that miraculously draws our empathy through a realistic lens despite the construction of characters who are wildly different in presentation, but who equally create an unintended distance between themselves and the world around them.

Matt and Mara are two sides of the same foibled creator of enigmatic wealth who vacillate between the blasé non-satisfaction of working in a rarified air and the search for people to breathe that rarified air with them on their own idiosyncratic terms. After Mara’s class, while catching up at a coffee shop, Matt describes his absurd approach to writing characters who are not himself and receives a sharp critique from Mara, which he graciously accepts. Soon after, once Matt promises to give her a safe space to share what she’s working on, Mara discusses the idea that is motivating her to come out of her writing hiatus: the concept of “a person who truly believes that they know nothing about themselves and that all of their desires are complete secrets from them and that these desires could be revealed at any moment and ruin her life.” Matt’s enthusiastic response around the timeliness of the idea and the increasingly louder music in the shop distract us away from the gravity of Mara’s words, but Radwanski embeds them into all of Mara’s following scenes, blurring the line between the writer and her subject of interest and establishing the film’s unsettling rhythm generated by Mara’s unpredictability.

Thus, when Matt and Mara cuts from the titular characters exiting the coffee shop to Mara returning home to her husband, Samir (Mounir Al Shami), a distractingly beautiful indie musician, and their infant daughter, we’re taken by surprise, because Mara made absolutely no mention of her family to Matt. Samir more than adequately fills the role as the perfect art couple complement to Mara, but in his presence, Mara is a completely different being. In the moments that we see the couple away from the eyes of others, they calmly play guitar with their infant child, make small talk prepping dinner, and go through the motions of a peaceful young family. Emotionally, Samir is consistently placid in his demeanor, never argumentative, but also never deeply engaged, and she is mostly the same with him, suggesting either an underlying schism in their relationship that might soon bubble up to the surface, or oddly, an even more worrisome possibility that both have become accustomed and committed to their respective manifestations of the clichéd aloof artist — that withdrawn creative who has a hard time relating to people outside of their own medium — and both continue to live on without any expectation of great emotional attention from each other.

This hypothesis receives further proof when Mara admits that she is ambivalent about music in general to Samir’s musician friends at a dinner party; such a statement draws the polite ire of Samir’s friends, but only elicits a brief comment from Samir during their drive home. He agrees with his friends that it’s peculiar that his wife has little connection to his medium, but he’s not stirred by Mara’s lack of interest in music. And, in this opportune moment, Samir does not offer a thought or opinion on Mara’s medium, either.

In stark contrast, each time when Mara and Matt meet as the film proceeds, he showers her with adoration and attention while also encouraging her to step outside of her head. He wishes that Mara would attempt to overcome her inability/lack of desire to play the game of life a tiny bit and make herself accessible to others by means of something as easy as a smile, a trait that Matt himself has mastered, though with a certain amount of reluctance. According to Matt, Mara, who holds her emotions tightly, is “made of glass,” but Matt’s nervous extroverted behavior speaks volumes about his insecurity and insatiable need to be liked by others, especially as he encounters the people of Mara’s professional world: her colleagues, her students, and their shared peers. Though the pair might drastically differ in the way they approach strangers and acquaintances, there is a closeness that is achieved through their ability to talk openly, sometimes uncomfortably so, to each other, and Radwanski and cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov reinforce their intimacy by the way they hold them in shots throughout, whether they are walking on a sidewalk, sitting in a car, playing near a water fountain, attending a party with professors, or perusing a convenience store aisle together.

Though we are privy to only small hints of their past together as friends, we sense a more profound connection between Mara and Matt than between Mara and Samir. Mara and Matt know each other like no one will ever know them, and whether they are visiting Matt’s dying father or discussing Mara’s book idea, there is an unspoken, inherent understanding of the intention behind their expressed thoughts, which adds a great deal to every joke Matt utters and every thought Mara suspends. Regardless of the romantic ambiguity between them, Matt and Mara clearly have a profound relationship that spans years, and so, when Mara announces to Samir that her writer friend Matt’s father has died, leaving Samir to wonder if he had ever met Matt, it is a stunner. Is Matt a treasured keepsake for Mara, or have Mara and Samir never expressed any consequential aspect of themselves to each other during the entirety of their marriage?

By leaving so much unsaid or even said callously, Radwanski’s film evokes within us that nagging realization of a post-Covid zeitgeist where we find ourselves constantly wondering about the misalignment of our social interactions and relationships. The film then becomes a much needed reality check that makes us question our own connections to those around us, be it lovers or friends, and thus, Matt and Mara becomes vital to our psyche in the same way that Mazursky’s cinematic check-ins were vital during the post-love generation period in Blume in Love or at the height of the women’s movement in An Unmarried Woman.

Like Mazursky, the dialog of Radwanski’s film is an essential touchstone, but whereas divorce was the agent of change during the times of Mazursky’s aforementioned films, persistent inner tumult from the lack of knowing what one truly wants has become so indicative and constant that it is the comfortable baseline, not the precipitant, of today. All one has to do to see this shift is study the differences in the running scenes between the married couples in An Unmarried Woman and Matt and Mara. Those scenes of couples at odds both exhibit a clear break, but our couple’s break in An Unmarried Woman is verbal. Is Mazursky’s Martin’s accusation that Erica subconsciously led him into dog crap any less painful than Mara leaving Samir and his cramping leg in the dust? One does eventually lead to divorce and the other doesn’t, but do those outcomes even matter? Do they make the words that were/weren’t said in response any less uneasy? Well, we guess it depends on the era.

Matt and Mara is currently playing in Chicago and opens at Acropolis Cinema in Los Angeles on October 10, 2024, and Cleveland Cinematheque on October 26, 2024.

Featured photo courtesy of MDFF Films and Cinema Guild.

Matt and Mara

Lily and Generoso Fierro

NEW DAWN FADES

Originally published on Ink 19 on September 4th, 2024

New Dawn Fades
directed by Gürcan Keltek

We were first introduced to Gürcan Keltek’s work through Meteors (Meteorlar), his accomplished hybrid documentary from 2017 that captured growing conflicts in Turkey while connecting them to a broader, underlying ebb and flow of violence and peace seen in nature on Earth and in the universe beyond. Meteors proved Keltek’s distinctive approach. He could take what is immediately registered as important and unique from our human-centric perspective, strip away our anthropocentric tendencies, and reveal the foundational, basic forces that have long influenced and modulated all life and natural systems, thus rendering the conflicts currently seen into instances of a historical pattern of conflict that continues to repeat itself everyday.

For his follow up, Keltek narrowed the scope of his focus to a single subject. His short from 2018, Gulyabani, focused on clairvoyant Fethiye Sessiz and her plight as a victim of kidnapping and torture as told through the use of ethereal visuals and narration of Sessiz’s diary entries and letters to her son. Though the inspiration for Keltek’s latest film, New Dawn Fades (Yeni șafak solarken), which had its world premiere in the Concorso Internazionale section of this year’s Locarno Film Festival, emerged before Meteors and Gulyabani, it benefits from and expands on the methods and approaches developed in both films.

In 2015, Keltek began recording conversations with Akın Altın, an emotionally disturbed man, for the purpose of a documentary project about the recurring and transient nature of episodes of mental illness, but the director opted to shelve the project due to the deteriorating condition of Altın during a period of observation. Several years later, to create New Dawn Fades, Keltek returned to those recordings and combined them with the research he was doing on a group of doctors and physicians who started an occult, spiritualist movement in Turkey in the 1940s along with ideas from The Divine Order and the Universe, a key text for the occult movement during the beginning of the Turkish Republic written by the philosopher and clairvoyant Bedri Ruhselman.

New Dawn Fades features a fictionalized portrayal of the aforementioned Akın, effectively portrayed by actor Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu. For the entirety of the film, we follow Akın during the first three days after his release from a mental health facility. Restricted to his family’s house and consumed by remorse over the horrific legacy of his father—whom he refers to as the “Butcher of Belgrade”—Akın initially only leaves the house to visit Istanbul’s houses of worship in what appears to be an effort to find comfort in religion to appease his inner suffering.

As Akın gradually separates from reality and his path leads him away from institutionalized religion and towards more ancient forms of Paganism, we find ourselves more empathetic to his predicament thanks to the skillful lensing of cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, who acts as a careful observer, inconspicuously capturing Akın’s attempts to bond with the intrinsic message of Istanbul’s monuments and the people whom he stumbles upon from his past such as a fellow patient from his mental hospital stay, a doctor who believes that he can still help Akın, and a former romantic interest. These moments of failed connections are shot in lengthy takes with a documentary-style that benefits from Zeitlinger’s lack of imposed perspective and, as Keltek disclosed in a Locarno interview, provided his performers the freedom to react however they saw fit. These passive techniques are skillfully mixed with an experimental sound design of varying noise intensities and a sophisticated electronic score by Son of Philip to create a feeling of unease in the audience that seems to mirror Akın’s tormentous, but mostly silent, inner monologue.

In the attempt to heal himself, Akın travels to and from the disparate religions and spiritual influences across eras in Istanbul, all of which are detectable to him. However, this capacity to notice and absorb all of these forces further isolates Akın and begins to create a delusional belief that he is a prophet or someone more divine because he can see beyond the normal human eye, raising a larger question regarding the lucidity of madness. Akın is on the verge of believing that he is a prophet, and this belief does not seem completely unfounded because of Keltek’s free-flowing narrative structure, Zeitlinger’s documentary lens, and Son of Philip’s other-worldly sounds. New Dawn Fades is not about explaining why a messianic vision emerged in a single person, and instead, it shows you how such a vision could arise by placing us in Akın’s environment and allowing us to react as he does the same.

Since ancient times, philosophers have proposed meanings behind bouts of madness. In New Dawn Fades, Akın’s mania serves as a means of experiencing the convergence of Istanbul’s psychological and cultural past with present day practices and conventions. Ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, and contemporary times collide and coexist in Istanbul, and Akın’s dysfunction takes him through the beliefs of each of these eras in search of the ones that will suit him and bring him peace, a pursuit which, unfortunately, may have no end.

As we viewed New Dawn Fades, we noticed themes that harkened back to director Matías Meyer’s most recent work, Louis Riel, or Heaven Touches the Earth, for both films present uncompromised, disciplined studies into central figures intermittently seeking divinity and experiencing madness while remaining connected to specific geographies. Back in June of this year, we sat down with Meyer to discuss his film, an intimate portrayal of the imprisonment of the titular religious zealot and political leader of the Métis people as he awaited his execution by the Canadian government for treason. Drawing from Riel’s own writings during this period, Meyer effectively created a complex, symbiotic relationship between Riel’s confinement, the pastoral setting around his prison cell, his fragile mental state, and his complex relationship with God, as well as the Catholic church, as he faced his own mortality.

Both Meyer’s and Keltek’s films eschew formal structure for the experiential. In turn, both Louis Riel, or Heaven Touches the Earth and New Dawn Fades navigate the intricacies of their protagonists’ relationship with their environment and with divine forces primarily through observations and reactions that reveal the composite identities of each protagonist in ways that he may not be able to articulate himself. With Louis Riel for Meyer and Akın for Keltek, the directors guide us through the process of seeking a higher calling through unstable eyes/minds, forcing us to look inward and outward in order to understand how identities are formed by inherent character, shaped by external forces, and disturbed by moments when the two conflict.

New Dawn Fades is currently on the festival circuit. Featured photo courtesy of Heretic.

New Dawn Fades

Lily and Generoso Fierro

LAST SUMMER

Originally published on Ink 19 on August 16, 2024

Last Summer
directed by Catherine Breillat

It has been a decade since novelist and auteur filmmaker Catherine Breillat presented her last feature, Abus de faiblesse (Abuse of Weakness), a harrowing, semi-autobiographical film based on her own 2009 book that delved into her real-life victimization by a notorious conman decades her junior. As had been the case for the predominance of Breillat’s oeuvre with works like 36 Fillette and Romance, Abuse of Weakness deftly and viscerally confronted our notions of intimacy and sexuality in a way that few filmmakers are able to achieve by forcing one into the uneasy skin of its protagonist.

Surprisingly, for her latest feature, L’été dernier (Last Summer), Breillat decided to reimagine the critically acclaimed 2019 film Dronningen (Queen of Hearts) by May el-Toukhy, in which a lawyer, who specializes in representing young women who have experienced sexual abuse, turns into the abuser of her own teenage stepson.

We’ve long admired Breillat’s distinct style as a filmmaker, often drawing from her own writings and novels, so learning ahead of the film’s release that she was trying to remake another feature — especially one this recent — was fascinating. Given the themes present in the predominance of her filmography and her recent experiences, it made sense why Breillat would be drawn to this particular story, but on description alone it was unclear how her idiosyncratic style would alter the narrative.

However, in the first minutes when we see the veteran actress Léa Drucker embodying the role of Anne in Breillat’s adaptation and hear the compact and effortlessly constructed and delivered dialog, Breillat’s signature approach firmly announces its arrival. In this initial scene, Anne is meticulously preparing a young female client for the virulent questioning from defense attorneys that will most likely occur during an upcoming trial. Anne is confident and raw in her approach, but we also see her as someone who possesses elements of tempered compassion: she’s severe because she wants her client to be prepared for the questions that will aim to discredit her testimony, but she also reassures her client that she believes in her. When the scene eventually shifts to Anne’s idyllic country home, we meet her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a beleaguered financier who tells Anne that Théo (Samuel Kircher), his teenage son from a previous marriage, has gotten into trouble that is beyond his mother’s capabilities to handle and must move in with them for an undetermined amount of time. This potentially upsetting addition to their blissful family dynamic, which already includes two adolescent adopted Asian daughters, is agreed upon with no argument from the loving couple.

Once Théo arrives at Anne and Pierre’s home, he gives off the classic appearance of a rebellious and mildly cosmopolitan teen who has been exiled to the sticks as a form of punishment, but as he settles in, his behavior vacillates between bratty (almost on the verge of malevolent) and gleeful. He throws verbal barbs at his father that most of us would shudder to think of, and yet he readily accepts the role of a doting older brother to his stepsisters, whom he adores almost instantaneously. Anne’s first reaction to Théo’s jibes thrusts her into an authoritarian figure, but after Anne agrees to never speak of an aggravated transgression from Théo and brokers a deal with him to protect the stability and cohesiveness of the family, the separation between the stepmother and stepson dissipates into an unspoken connection. And, the once stern talks give way into cigarette sharing hangs behind the house and Anne riding pillion on Théo’s scooter though the countryside to a local bar, where the two speak openly with a camaraderie likened to that of close friends.

Inevitably, when the ever-growing sexual tension between the two materializes into a physical act, Breillat tightens her focus on the level of warmth, comfort, and intimacy between them, suggesting that their bond comes from more of an empathetic place than simply a carnal one, which is a key point of departure for Breillat’s rendering from the original Queen of Hearts, where Anne’s attraction to her stepson stems from a simplistic need to feel younger. Initially, Breillat lets the carefree moments between Anne and Théo happen from a safe distance that never feels contrived, and although it’s unsettling to watch, every second between the pair says volumes about Anne’s current mental state while naturally alluding to the very personal reasons why she decided to become a lawyer for abuse victims. Astonishingly, through the careful execution of the verbal and physical interactions between Anne and Théo, we even come to see Anne as a victim herself, but when the potential exposure of their illegal tryst becomes eminent and Anne breaks off her relationship with Théo much to his discontent, we see Anne radically shift from victim back into an attorney who knows the language of abuse and can use it to her advantage in silencing her stepson’s allegations.

Besides the drastic change in outcomes between the two films, a difference which may heavily suggest why Breillat chose to make this adaptation, the key to Breillat’s affecting interpretation of Queen of Hearts is the director’s decision to remove all elements of melodrama that were hard-wired into May el-Toukhy’s film. Breillat’s choice softens the obvious points of contention in the film related to the morality of Anne’s actions, which orients Last Summer far away from a sensationalistic, manufactured drama and towards its in-depth and compelling analysis of Anne as a mother, wife, woman, and foibled human. We (and Anne herself) absolutely know that she should not have a romantic relationship with Théo, but Breillat doesn’t expend energy on trying to rile up judgment from the audience towards Anne to encourage an air of superiority. Instead, the director guides us through Anne’s actions, motivations, and responses, all of which become understandable, albeit uncomfortably so.

Ultimately, Last Summer sets itself apart from Queen of Hearts with a tone more akin to Agnès Varda’s 1988 film Kung-Fu Master!, another subdued and nuanced film about the illicit relationship between an older woman and an underaged boy. Breillat artfully infuses her long-cultivated sensibilities into every aspect of Last Summer in a knowing way that tempers the overtly audacious delivery that was more present in her earlier films while still continuing to question and challenge our assumptions about how factors such as class, power, attractiveness, and trauma can control and distort women’s desires as well as the subjects of their desire. Both Varda’s and Breillat’s pieces benefited from the skillful artistic vision of seasoned filmmakers who fearlessly examined the complexity of flawed women who, despite their outward appearances of stability, have psyches and pasts that betray their best intentions.

Featured photo courtesy of Janus Films and Sideshow.

Last Summer

Lily and Generoso Fierro

Matías Meyer

Originally published on Ink 19 on June 12, 2024

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on June 3, 2024

In the six years since we last spoke with Matías Meyer, the director has experienced a few landmark changes, personally and creatively. In 2019, he released Amores Modernos, which was an exploration into an ensemble cast and multi-threaded narrative contained primarily in the interiors of a family home, all of which were uncharted concepts in the director’s previous works of solitude in expansive environments. And, with his latest film, Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth, which premieres at FICUNAM (Festival Internacional de Cine de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) on Saturday, June 15, 2024, Meyer establishes his personal and professional base in Canada by meditating on the spiritual presence of one of Canada’s most notable and discussed historical figures, Louis Riel.

As a figure who came to symbolize the tensions in culture, language, and religion between the English and French settlers of Canada, Riel has been portrayed in books, films, and television, as well as in the heralded Chester Brown serialized comic and graphic novel, Louis Riel. Most accounts have been rooted in the historical facts of Riel’s life, tracing his beginnings to his execution, but Riel was a prolific writer throughout his life, and during his months in prison prior to his execution, his correspondences and writings were nearly entirely preserved, forming an incredible, direct view into Riel’s mind as he prepared to leave the Earth. These letters set the foundation of Meyer’s film, and the director, who also plays Riel himself, fuses his similar perspectives on nature and Catholicism with the words and thoughts of Riel to present an intimate portrayal of the soul of the man with a legacy and presence that stretches through Canadian history to today.

We were grateful to have the opportunity to speak with Matías Meyer again after all of these years. In our conversation, we discussed his everlasting interest in spirituality, how his life in Montreal has shaped his perspective as a filmmaker, his personal connections to the life and words of Louis Riel, and his grassroots, DIY production process.

• •

LF: In Wadley, Moros y Cristianos, and Los Últimos Cristeros, you approached spirituality in relation to its environment: many of your central figures travel through physical spaces to find God in some way. This has been a recurring theme in your work, and it is also present in Louis Riel. Did this consistent intellectual/philosophical interest ultimately compel you towards the story of Louis Riel?

MM: Thank you for presenting this question in these beautiful words, which I couldn’t synthesize in that way. After the retrospective of my films that I had at the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2016, I realized that all of my films have confined characters, and my film on Louis Riel is very much that. It became so much more physical and even more obvious this time around. In my film, Yo, the central character is trapped in a childlike state, and in Los Últimos Cristeros, the characters are confined by nature, the mountains to be more specific, but in Louis Riel, my lead character is confined by an actual prison cell.

When I came to live in Montreal in 2011, I was very lost in the beginning — and I am still sometimes very lost here — about what I can identify with in this new country and culture. Louis Riel felt familiar to me because his story and words had all of these elements that you raise in your question. Riel has this spirituality, a mixed spirituality seen in my films, like in Los Últimos Cristeros where God is present in nature, in sunlight, in wind, and in the trees alongside the world of Catholicism, and Riel was that for me. He had these beautiful allegories about God and nature. Right now, I am reminded of the line when he says, and I am paraphrasing here, “I have thirty-two days to live, thirty-two hours, thirty-two seconds and how the wind, the chinook, is burning me.”

There is a scene in the film where I am shooting the leaves of a tree and the sun, and I incorporate a passage where he says, “The sun is trying to shine for everyone with the same intensity,” and he then circles that tree so that he can touch every branch. I find words like these so very beautiful. And, I identify with them because I come from a Catholic culture, but at the same time, my actual church is just life and nature. It is that mix that is appealing to me. I feel God when I walk in a natural setting or when I experience phenomena like the recent eclipse. It was magical. It is these relatable aspects of Riel’s perspective and beliefs that made me feel that I could do this film here in Montreal. As a Mexican filmmaker, I had become so accustomed to our culture and country, which is so full of things happening at the same time. There is the pre-Hispanic period, the colonial period, and the modern period — all of them are part of our everyday life, and there is such a mix of all of the colors, the smells, the races, and it is all so noisy. You just step out of your home, and you feel so alive. But here in Canada, you sometimes step outside and wonder where the people are. It is so big, and it can feel empty on occasion.

Beyond my personal interests and my adaptation to Canada, there is another element that attracted me to the story of Louis Riel. In one way or another, we all accept an inheritance from our parents. Since the age of twenty, my father has been very passionate about Louis Riel, and he transferred that passion to me.

GF: In your positioning of Louis Riel in a pastoral setting that further opens him up to direct communication with God, we find a similarity between him and Father Grandier in Ken Russell’s adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. Father Grandier is also considered a heretic, but receives his revelatory message from God while immersed in nature. From the conversations you include between Riel and Father André, we understand that Riel had proclaimed that he was a prophet, and from historical accounts, we understand that he had messianic callings throughout his life. How important was it to you to show Riel communicating with God in a different way from his past during his imprisonment? How much did the natural setting away from political structures and away from his home play a role in presenting this shift as Riel prepares for death (and Heaven)?

MM: I don’t think that it was fully conceived in the script. It developed organically through location scouting. I was looking for a prison, and luckily, I found this location only one hour from Montreal called Canadiana Village that used to be an open-air museum, but after many years in existence, it began to fall apart. However, about five years ago, a young French man purchased the place and attempted to restore it in order to make it into a new glamping destination. In its current state, it is very much like an old Western town where you can actually go inside of the houses that are there, and these places are furnished. When I visited the place, they had just finished filming a television series. And, by chance, for that series, they had to build a prison, which became the one you see in my film. The prison was in the middle of nature, and I fell in love with it because it was a kind of oasis. The man who owned the village agreed to rent me a couple of the properties there: the prison and the other building where the interview with the journalist is conducted. It all arrived so magically.

In the beginning, I wanted to shoot in Manitoba, not only because of Riel’s legacy there, but also because part of the title, Heaven Touches the Earth, refers to the plains of the region, where there is just a thin line that divides the sky from the earth. But, given that I didn’t have a large budget, I couldn’t afford to move the production there, and so I decided to let go of certain factual elements of Riel’s life in favor of capturing his essence. For example, Riel’s execution occurred on November 16 in Regina, but in my film, it’s clearly not cold when it happens, and the leaves are still on the trees because it was thirty degrees Celsius when we filmed the scene. I didn’t worry about the accuracy of these kinds of specifics, because Riel’s essence is more about how he feels and the words he said than the exact minutiae he experienced. In my film, Riel has a view from his prison cell, but in reality, I’m not sure that he had a view. But, I wanted to show him seeing the trees outside and how they vertically blend with the bars on his windows, and depending on how the focus on the camera was adjusted, you are not sure if you are seeing trees or the bars. Also, on this site, I could go outside, and there were these fields where I shot the scene with my daughter, who portrays Riel’s son in the film. There was this lovely ambiance with nature in this location — it was all un coup de chance, but it ended up being so inspiring.

This happenstance is present in some of my other films as well. In Los Últimos Cristeros, we were scouting, and we discovered this cave. During sunset, the cave had this effect that led to a shot that you may remember: when all of the Cristeros are sleeping and the sun slowly sets, it casts shadows on the walls, giving a feeling that the presence of God was in that place and that He was with them.

LF: Based on what you’ve described so far, it sounds like Riel’s writings always involve this element of poetry and nature, and the location brought out that poetry in an unexpected but meaningful way. It’s amazing that this setting in and around Canadiana Village was the element that clarified the essence that you were trying to capture.

MM: Maybe if I had had some more time or patience I could have waited for the winter, which I’m sure would’ve also been very beautiful too. In the poem that he wrote for Robert Gordon [the prison guard], Riel speaks about the snow and how the ground is all white from when heaven comes here. He saw the symbolism of white as representing purity. I also read that what he asked for as his last meal was what you see in my film: a glass of milk and some hard boiled eggs. Of course, eggs are a Catholic symbol, but he is also trying to arrive at the moment of his death with his soul as pure as possible.

LF: In your research into Riel’s writings from prison, did you see evidence of an abandonment of his beliefs that were considered heretical by the Catholic church? Did he still consider himself as a messianic figure during this time?

MM: Indeed, he did. In the first page of his book, Massinahican, which means “the book” or “the Bible” in Cree, and in his journals, he declared that he was a medium of God. Thus, this was a particularly important aspect to consider when writing and editing the moment when Riel signed the document that rejected the notion of his prophetic nature as a means to be allowed back into the Church. Of course, that signature made me think of Joan of Arc, as depicted in the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson, when she is spared execution if she signs a document rejecting her claims. She signs the paper, but then she repents because it would be like claiming that all that had happened to her was a lie.

I wondered if I should have used this moment of Riel’s concession as a dramatic narrative element of my story, but I ultimately made the decision that it wasn’t so important. I think that Riel signed it as a way of convenience because he really needed the Catholic Church to be with him. He needed the healing of a priest, but at the same time, his calling was stronger than him. It wasn’t that he signed the paper and then believed that he wasn’t a prophet anymore. I don’t know what this morally means overall, but for me, he just signed the paper and continued to write his prophecies. As a spectator, do you feel disappointed by that? For me, I don’t care that he signed this paper that asserted that he was not a prophet of the new world.

GF: Louis Riel or Heaven Touches The Earth explains at the beginning that the letters and writings from the period of Louis Riel’s imprisonment were nearly completely preserved, thus establishing the setting and focus of your film. Did you consider including any of Riel’s earlier correspondences and writings to provide a contrast to his state of being, such as the letters to and from Gabriel Dumont, who ultimately convinced Riel to leave the life he created in Montana to return to Saskatchewan, or his religious discourses around the time of his asylum stay while he was in exile in Quebec?

MM: The process of writing was pretty complex, and at some point I made the choice to take a pure and minimalist approach. That decision cut any possibilities of using flashbacks to look at different periods of his life. I have versions of the script that involve the Battle of Batoche and the time when Riel fought his attorneys when they wanted him to take an insanity plea, which he firmly rejected. About the latter incident, he wrote an amazing sentence to the effect of, “If I admit that I am insane, I would be negating my intellect and my humanity, and thus I would become like any other animal.” Regardless, his lawyers asked the judge to forbid Riel from speaking during the trial. He was allowed to speak only at the end of the proceedings, and at that point, he gave a long statement.

Dramatically, I found it interesting that he was fighting his own lawyers because they weren’t defending what he wanted to defend. Riel, in fact, wanted this process to be a moment of truth that exposed all of the crimes that were committed by the government of Canada against the Métis people. I also had written a scene around the moment when Riel surrendered. In the moments before he did, he took off his shoes and walked through the snow to the generals. But, in the end, I omitted these scenes outside of his period of imprisonment.

I feel that the linearity of the way that the film was put together works dramatically in that he moves little by little towards an end that you know is inevitable. This goes against the classic narrative convention where you want to surprise the audience by the ending. You know instinctively by the tone of the film (alongside the historical facts of the subject) that Riel is going to die. The structure is similar to another film by Bresson, A Man Escaped. From the beginning of Bresson’s film, you know what is going to happen at the end, but I like this constraint because you can still build so much on top of that.

I have a friend, a photographer who worked on my earlier films, who asked me to shoot a scene where you see Riel in a state of fury or possession because we know that he had these moments of rage throughout his life. My friend wanted a scene of an enraged Riel as a means of contrast for how we eventually see him in my film, but I didn’t want to do that.

LF: I agree that excluding such an impassioned scene was a good thing because it would have disrupted the tone you constructed. Your film, as it stands, is an extended sequence of meditation up to a very intense and dramatic event. There are also so many accounts of Riel’s more wild moments, so it is good to see this other side of him, whether it is entirely real or done to capture some essence of who he was. One of the things that impressed us immediately after seeing your film was the discipline of tone and the discipline of minimalism. That kind of impassioned scene would take so much away from that.

MM: Yes, it is true that it is difficult to mix tones like that, and what you are saying reminds me of the first page of my father’s book on Louis Riel. He wrote that in his cell, Riel is finally calm. The war, the travels, the persecution, and all of the paranoia has been left behind, and now he can rest and write. It’s strange that the first two or three pages of my father’s book cover my entire film. Riel will be in his prison cell, and he will be at peace. He did what he needed to do, and he surrendered. He created a process where he evidenced all of the bad things that the Canadian government had perpetrated against the Métis. He surrendered because Macdonald wanted Riel, and if he hadn’t given himself up, Macdonald and his officials would’ve continued to go after his people instead.

So yes, he did what he needed to do ever since he began the first movement in 1870, and the many years that followed were very stressful for him. Being a political leader every day was never his ambition. He became a leader because he was so well educated. Riel’s most formative and rigorous years of education started in Montreal when he was around thirteen, and he came back when he was almost twenty five years old to Winnipeg — though of course, it wasn’t called that then — to help his mother because his father had passed away. When he returned, he brought back his learnings from his education as well as the experiences of working at a law firm and a newspaper.

When he arrived at his village, he saw the colonizers coming and surveyors sent by the government, and that was the moment that changed his life. A cousin of Riel’s told him that these people were surveying our land, and Riel responded by going to them, putting his foot down on their Gunter’s chain, and telling these surveyors to get out of their land. From this moment on through the next fifteen years, Riel had so many adventures: becoming the leader of his people, defending their rights, going into exile in the United States, filling himself up with paranoia and ending up in an asylum, getting married, and having some peace while teaching children. But then, he was again called back to his village to defend the rights of the people there. Thus, while awaiting execution in his cell, Riel finally had the time and peace to ponder his spirituality.

GF: We know that you’ve wanted to make this film for years, and we were fascinated to see you performing as Riel himself because you have not acted in your feature films. Was your decision to play Riel based on your proximity to all of the research? What aspect of Louis Riel’s prison correspondence did you key in on while preparing yourself for the titular role?

MM: To be candid, I didn’t need extra preparation for the role. I was prepared by the entire process of writing the script so many times — wanting to not do the film anymore and then coming back to it. I knew that I needed a very good actor to play Riel, but no one would be as passionate about this character as I was because I had been working on this project for so many years, and I had been feeling it so deeply and suffered through a lot of rejection through the process: not finding any producers, not finding any money, and coming to Canada and having to begin all over again here. I made five feature films in Mexico, but they didn’t amount to anything here in Canada, and I had to start from ground zero. I accepted all of this and approached it as I did with my feature, Wadley: I’m going to do this by myself, with no money, and I don’t care.

I also felt like I was incarnating the character in some way — not just lending the film my abilities as a director, writer, and producer, but also giving it my own flesh. I felt this would make the film stronger. Also, I felt that the film was a reflection of my time in Canada and the many years that I spent in this country feeling isolated.

Most of the other people you see in the film are friends of mine whom I met here. None of them are professional actors. Almost everyone is part of my life here in Canada. In the eerie scene — which I love because it’s both erotic and frightening — where a voice of the dead says, “When everyone leaves I will stay here with you because I love you, I want you, and I desire you,” that voice is the voice of my wife Roxanne. My daughter Alina, as I mentioned earlier, plays Riel’s son in the film, and adding to all of this, at that time I had a health issue that has thankfully been resolved.

During the pandemic, I used to travel to the mountains, but I began to have some chest pains, and when the pandemic was over, I went to the doctor and told her about the pains. My doctor took x-rays of my chest, and a few days after that, she asked me to come into the office because she saw something that concerned her. Then, she ordered a CT scan, which caused me great concern. The scan took place during Canada Day, and so I had to wait five days for the results. I remember being on the terrace one day during that waiting period, and Alina entered, and upon seeing her I was so sad. In the end, it turned out to be nothing bad, just a scar that I had for some time, but then they discovered that I had asthma and had been living with it for almost twenty years without knowing.

It was at that period that I decided that I was going to portray Riel because I felt like I was a condemned man (laughs). It all turned out fine, but I felt so close to the character. There were also some very mysterious moments that happened during shooting whenever I was left alone. For example, in the early scene when the priest visits him and says something like, “If you don’t sign this paper, the Church is not going to commute you,” and the priest leaves the room, and I am left alone there. I began to cry at that moment, and that reaction was not scripted or planned. The priest left. I was alone, and it happened. Whenever people would leave the cell, such as when the journalist leaves me alone in the end, these reactions would occur. I wasn’t looking for them. They just happened. That was interesting to me.

Finally, I wanted to leave this film as a portrait for my children, an image of who their father was at this age. Oddly, I was forty-two when I made this film, and Riel was forty-one when he died. I could also speak in French and in English. Many things were in place to connect my person and being to the spirit of Louis Riel. ◼

Featured photo courtesy of La Distributrice de films.

Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth • FICUNAM • Matías Meyer

Việt and Nam / Philippines, France, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Vietnam / dir. Trương Minh Quý

New Dawn Fades (Yeni șafak solarken) / Turkey, Italy / dir. Gürcan Keltek

Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude) / Spain / dir. Albert Serra

Comme le feu (Who by Fire) / Canada, France / dir. Philippe Lesage

L’Été dernier (Last Summer) / France, Norway / dir. Catherine Breillat

C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me) / France / dir. Leos Carax

Matt and Mara / Canada / dir. Kazik Radwanski

Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed) / Argentina / dir. Hernán Rosselli

Universal Language / Canada / dir. Matthew Rankin

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Bên Trong Vỏ Kén Vàng) / Vietnam, Singapore / dir. Phạm Thiên Ân

Anora / USA / Sean Baker

Youth (Spring) / France, Luxembourg, Netherlands / dir. Wang Bing

Los delincuentes (The Delinquents) / Argentina / dir. Rodrigo Moreno

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat / Belgium, France, Netherlands / dir. Johan Grimonprez

Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs) South Korea / dir. Hong Sang-soo

Bai ta zhi guang (The Shadowless Tower) / China / dir. Zhang Lü

Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth (Louis Riel or Heaven Touches the Earth ) / Canada, Mexico / dir. Matías Meyer

Daaaaaalí! / France / dir. Quentin Dupieux

Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) / France / dir. Bertrand Tavernier

Originally published on Ink19 on November 5, 2024Los Angeles, California • October 23-27, 2024

by Lily and Generoso Fierro

Việt and Nam

Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude)

Comme le feu (Who by Fire)

Universal Language

Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveler’s Needs)

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Harvest

Devo

Dahomey

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point

Karlovy Vary (Second Chance)

Gou Zhen (Black Dog)

Originally published on Ink19 on November 5, 2024

Los Angeles, California • October 23-27, 2024