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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2018 (March 28–April 8, 2018)
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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2018
This now venerable series introduces New York audiences to the work of emerging filmmakers from around the world, bold new artists who push the envelope. I plan to review around 22 of these. A varied selection including some of the most exciting or new offerings from Locarno, Cannes, Berlin, and Rotterdam, and one or two other festivals last year, shown to the public at two venues in New York, Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. This is an annual collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.
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GUILTY (GUSTAV MÖLLER)
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films are digitally projected unless otherwise noted
OPENING NIGHT
Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.
Stephen Loveridge, Sri Lanka/United Kingdom/USA, 2018, 95m
In English and Tamil with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Before rapper M.I.A. became a global sensation, known for her musical daring and tireless political activism for the Tamil people in her native Sri Lanka, she was an aspiring filmmaker, having made countless video diaries chronicling her youth and private life. First-time documentarian Stephen Loveridge, who attended art school in London with M.I.A. in the nineties, uses this first-hand material to craft a nuanced and intimate portrait of a woman finding her roots, voice, and stardom, and a deeply personal statement from a pop star yearning to express herself.
Wednesday, March 28, 7:00 & 7:30pm [MoMA]
Thursday, March 29, 6:30pm [FSLC]
CLOSING NIGHT
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
RaMell Ross, USA, 2018, 76m
New York Premiere
“The American stranger knows Blackness as a fact—even though it is fiction,” says writer-director RaMell Ross. For his visionary and political debut feature, which premiered to great acclaim at Sundance in 2018, Ross spent five years intimately observing African American families living in Hale County, Alabama. It’s a region made unforgettable by Walker Evans and James Agee’s landmark 1941 photographic essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the impoverished lives of white sharecropper families in Alabama’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ross’s poetic return to this place shows changed demographics, and depicts people resilient in the face of adversity and invisibility. Hale County This Morning, This Evening introduces a distinct and powerful new voice in American filmmaking.
Saturday, April 7, 8:30pm [FSLC]
Sunday, April 8, 2:00pm [MoMA]
3/4
Ilian Metev, Bulgaria, 2017, 82m
Bulgarian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
3/4 evokes the intimacies, joys, and tensions of a contemporary Bulgarian family facing an uncertain future; the father is an astrophysicist with his head in the clouds, his son a waywardly antic teenager, his daughter a gifted but anxious pianist. Illian Metev (whose previous film was the gripping documentary Sofia’s Last Ambulance) won the Filmmakers of the Present prize at the 2017 Locarno Festival for this fiction feature debut, a gracefully shot, uncommonly tender character study that plays like an exquisite piece of chamber music.
Thursday, March 29, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Saturday, March 31, 1:00pm [FSLC]
Ava
Sadaf Foroughi, Iran/Canada/Qatar, 2017, 103m
Farsi with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Adolescence creates intense pressure for any girl, but it’s particularly strong for 17-year-old Ava, buffeted by the harsh strictures of home and school in contemporary Tehran. Iranian writer-director Sadaf Foroughi won the jury prize at the Toronto International Film Festival for her intimate and intensely dramatic portrait of a young woman whose private longings drive her to rebellion and lead to public shaming. A Grasshopper Film release.
Thursday, March 29, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 1, 7:30pm [FSLC]
Azougue Nazaré
Tiago Melo, Brazil, 2017, 80m
Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
No measure of hellfire preaching can quell the boisterous and bawdy passions of Maracatu, an Afro-Brazilian burlesque carnival tradition with roots in slavery that takes place in the northeast state of Pernambuco. As the Falstaffian character Tiao, Valmir do Coco leads a nonprofessional cast of authentic Maracatu practitioners in a tale told through dance, music, and the supernatural, set in the sugarcane fields outside Recife. The fabulous—and fabulist—Azougue Nazaré is the first film by Tiago Melo, who worked on such recent celebrated Brazilian films as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (NYFF 2016) and Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull (ND/NF 2016), and who was awarded the Bright Future prize at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Friday, March 30, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, March 31, 7:30pm [MoMA]
Black Mother
Khalik Allah, USA, 2018, 75m
New York Premiere
The second feature by filmmaker and photographer Khalik Allah is a kind of documentary tone poem, a polyphonic work rich in atmosphere and intimate portraiture. Allah immerses us in Jamaica’s neighboring worlds of charismatic holy men and equally charismatic prostitutes, the sacred and the profane alike. Allah captures them and their environments with a haunting visual style and absorbing sense of rhythm entirely his own, their testimonies flooding the soundtrack with reflections on everyday survival and hopes for the future. Seamlessly switching from Super-8mm to HD video, Black Mother affirms its maker as one of the great stylists in documentary cinema today.
Wednesday, April 4, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Saturday, April 7, 6:00pm [FSLC]
Closeness / Tesnota
Kantemir Balagov, Russia, 2017, 118m
Russian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A young woman is trapped in a tight-knit Jewish community in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, located in Russia’s North Caucasus, that demands her total dedication but provides her with little protection from the perpetual violence encompassing all aspects of life. Shot mostly in interior spaces, Closeness conjures a world of darkness and claustrophobia as the heroine quietly revolts yet succumbs to her bleak existence. This debut feature by Kantemir Balagov feels more beholden to the social realism of the Dardenne brothers than to the transcendental flair of his mentor, Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov (a producer on this film). Warning: this film contains a scene featuring images of documented violence that viewers may find upsetting.
Saturday, March 31, 4:30pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 1, 4:30pm [FSLC]
Cocote
Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic/Brazil/Argentina, 2017, 107m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This format-mixing, formally eclectic opus is at once a profound film about religion and a unique tale of revenge. Upon learning that his father has been murdered by a powerful local figure, Dominican private gardener Alberto travels from Santo Domingo back to his hometown to participate in his funeral rites—a mixture of Catholicism and West African mysticism that flies in the face of Alberto’s own evangelicalism. But Alberto’s family has vengeance in mind, and he finds himself at a spiritual and existential crossroads. Boldly synthesizing ethnographic documentary and scripted drama, Cocote is a visually resplendent and stylistically audacious work that evokes the films of Glauber Rocha and the fiction of Roberto Bolaño. A Grasshopper Film release.
Tuesday, April 3, 6:15pm [FSLC]
Wednesday, April 4, 8:15pm [MoMA]
Djon África
João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis, Portugal/Brazil/Cape Verde, 2018, 95m
In Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Documentarians João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis turn the subject of their previous film into the central character of their debut fiction work. A Cape Verdean in Portugal, Miguel Moreira, also known as Djon África, travels back home to look for his birth father. This hopefully soul-searching journey quickly gets derailed as he comes across beautiful women, colorful parties, and the local liquor known as grogue. Written by Pedro Pinho, director of The Nothing Factory, also playing in this festival, this woozily intoxicating road movie is as youthful, charming, and adventurous as its title character.
Wednesday, April 4, 9:15pm [FSLC]
Friday, April 6, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Drift
Helena Wittmann, Germany, 2017, 96m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Filmmaker-artist Helena Wittmann’s subtly audacious first feature follows friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, as they spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate— Josefina eventually returns to her family in Argentina and Theresa crosses the Atlantic for the Caribbean—and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space. Self-consciously evoking the work of Michael Snow and masterfully lensed by Wittmann herself, Drift is by turns cosmic and intimate.
Thursday, April 5, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 4:00pm [MoMA]
An Elephant Sitting Still
Hu Bo, China, 2018, 234m
Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Sure to be remembered as a landmark in Chinese cinema, this intensely felt epic marks a career cut tragically short: its debut director Hu Bo took his own life last October, at the age of 29. The protagonist of this modern reworking of the tale of Jason and the Argonauts is teenage Wei Bu, who critically injures a school bully by accident. Over a single, eventful day, he crosses paths with a classmate, an elderly neighbor, and the bully’s older brother, all of them bearing their own individual burdens, and all drawn as if by gravity to the city of Manzhouli, where a mythical elephant is said to sit, indifferent to a cruel world. Full of moody close-ups and virtuosic tracking shots, An Elephant Sitting Still is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Sunday, April 1, 6:30pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 8, 6:00pm [FSLC]
Good Manners / As Boas Maneiras
Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas, Brazil/France, 2017, 135m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
An immaculately stylized twist on the monster movie, Dutra and Rojas’s second collaboration (following the acclaimed Hard Labor) inventively engages matters of race, class, and desire. Set in São Paulo, the narrative initially concerns the curious relationship between rich, white, pregnant socialite Ana (Marjorie Estiano) and her new housemaid Clara (Isabél Zuaa). As the two women grow closer, their rapport turns first sexual then shockingly macabre. Good Manners evolves into a werewolf movie unlike any other, a delirious and compulsively watchable cross between Disney and Jacques Tourneur. A Distrib Films US release.
Thursday, April 5, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Friday, April 6, 8:45pm [FSLC]
The Great Buddha +
Huang Hsin-yao, Taiwan, 2017, 104m
Taiwanese and Mandarin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Provincial friends Pickle and Belly Button idle away their nights in the security booth of a Buddha statue factory, where Pickle works as a guard. One evening, when the TV is on the fritz, they put on video from the boss's dashcam—only to discover illicit trysts and a mysterious act of violence. Expanded from a short, Huang Hsin-yao's fiction feature debut The Great Buddha + (the plus sign cheekily nodding to the smartphone model) is a stylish, rip-roaring satire on class and corruption in contemporary Taiwanese society. A Cheng Cheng Films release.
Tuesday, April 3, 8:45pm [MoMA]
Wednesday, April 4, 6:30pm [FSLC]
The Guilty
Gustav Möller, Denmark, 2017, 85m
Danish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In this pulsating crime thriller set entirely inside a claustrophobic emergency call center, police officer Asger is assigned to dispatcher duty following a fatal incident. An initially slow evening takes a sharp turn when he receives a mysterious call for help, and Asger must spring into action, embarking on a hair-raising journey—on the phone—to bring the caller to safety. Debut feature filmmaker Gustav Möller keeps the tension and the viewer’s imagination alive in this chamber piece that won audience awards at the Rotterdam and Sundance film festivals. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Friday, March 30, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Saturday, March 31, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Makala
Emmanuel Gras, France, 2017, 96m
French and Swahili with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Gras’s transfixing road movie and Cannes Film Festival prizewinner follows a young Congolese man named Kabwita through the making, transporting, and selling of charcoal—from the felling of a tree to pushing a teetering bicycle weighed down with bulging sacks along treacherous dirt roads to contending with motorists, extortionists, and potential customers. As Gras observes Kabwita’s perilous trade, he derives beauty from the monumental efforts that go into his day-to-day existence. Makala is a documentary that resembles a neorealist parable, locating an epic dimension in the humblest of existences. A Kino Lorber release.
Sunday, April 1, 2:00pm [FSLC]
Monday, April 2, 8:45pm [MoMA]
Milla
Valérie Massadian, France/Portugal, 2017, 128m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Following up her acclaimed 2011 debut Nana, Valérie Massadian has made a moving, visually striking meditation on young motherhood and the vagaries of growing up. Severine Jonckeere turns in a remarkably subtle performance as the titular 17-year-old; just as her youthful romance with Leo (Luc Chessel) seems ready to cross the threshold into teenage parenthood, Massadian performs a radical formal gesture that both complicates Milla’s predicament and evokes the beauty and cruelty of time’s passage. A prizewinner at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, Milla audaciously eschews conventional melodrama, searching instead for a complex, truthful reflection of life itself. A Grasshopper Film release.
Sunday, April 1, 3:30pm [MoMA]
Monday, April 2, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Nervous Translation
Shireen Seno, Philippines, 2018, 90m
Filipino with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Informed by filmmaker Shireen Seno’s childhood in the Filipino diaspora and her dual training in film and architecture, this sophomore work is a stylized evocation of a child's fanciful interpretation of the world around her. Eight-year-old Yael, left to her own devices after school, secretly plays and replays audio cassettes her father sends home to her mother while working overseas; pursues happiness as communicated to her via a TV advertisement; and, in fanciful scenes that evoke the work of American artist Laurie Simmons, enters the meditative, immersive world of her dollhouse’s kitchen. Seno offers fleeting clues from the late-eighties outside world, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos's ouster and complicated adult relations, but these never overshadow her film‘s touching depiction of childhood imagination.
Saturday, April 7, 8:45pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 8, 1:00pm [FSLC]
Notes on an Appearance
Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2018, 60m
North American Premiere
Ricky D’Ambrose’s debut feature follows a quiet young man (Bingham Bryant) who mysteriously disappears soon after starting a new life in Brooklyn's artistic circles. Distraught friends (including Keith Poulson and Tallie Medel) search for him with the help of notebooks, letters, postcards, and other tiny clues; meanwhile, a parallel story about an elusive and controversial philosopher provides a rather sinister backdrop to their pursuit. This dark, minimalist pseudo-detective tale offers plenty of humor and displays a distinctive aesthetic. Following a series of remarkable shorts, D’Ambrose has clearly defined himself as a talent to watch.
Preceded by:
Young Girls Vanish / Des jeunes filles disparaissent
Clément Pinteaux, France, 2017, 16m
French with English subtitles
North American premiere
Clément Pinteaux explores the echoes of violence in Essonne, France, where dozens of girls were killed by wolves in the 1600s. Centuries later, young women begin disappearing again.
Friday, April 6, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 6:30pm [MoMA]
The Nothing Factory / A Fábrica de Nada
Pedro Pinho, Portugal, 2017, 177m
Portuguese and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A rich and formally surprising film of ideas, beautifully shot on 16mm, and featuring one of recent cinema’s most memorable musical numbers, Portuguese director Pedro Pinho’s nearly three-hour epic concerns the occupation of an elevator plant by its workers. They are stirred to action when the factory’s machinery is removed in the middle of the night by the owners; they rapidly organize, kick out the brass who have arrived offering buyouts, and discuss the feasibility of managing the facility themselves—all the while a Marxist theorist exerts ideological influence from the sidelines. The Nothing Factory is a serious and singular look at the meaning of work today, further developing Pinho’s interest in the status of labor amid his country’s financial crisis.
Saturday, April 7, 2:00pm [FSLC]
Sunday, April 8, 4:30pm [MoMA]
Our House / Watashitachi no ie
Yui Kiyohara, Japan, 2017, 80m
Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
This feature debut is an evocative and surprising exploration of female friendship, parallel realities, and the mysteries of everyday life. An adolescent girl named Seri lives with her mother in an old house in a coastal town. Seemingly in the very same house, amnesiac Sana is taken in by Toko, a young woman who harbors secrets of her own. As the parallel stories unfold, the boundaries between these two worlds grow increasingly porous... Inspired by the fugues of Bach and recalling the films of Jacques Rivette, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and David Lynch, Our House announces Yui Kiyohara as an exciting new voice in Japanese cinema.
Friday, April 6, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 8, 3:30pm [FSLC]
Scary Mother / Sashishi Deda
Ana Urushadze, Georgia/Estonia, 2018, 107m
Georgian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In Georgian filmmaker Ana Urushadze’s gripping and bleakly comic feature debut, Manana, a 50-year-old Tbilisi mother abandons her duties as a wife and mother to pursue an obsessive and hermetic life of writing poetry. In a performance of coiled fear and rage that recalls the best of Isabelle Huppert, Nato Murvanidze plunges into Manana‘s feverish imagination. Scary Mother, which won awards at film festivals around the world, is a haunting, singular new vision.
Saturday, March 31, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Monday, April 2, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Those Who Are Fine / Dene wos guet geit
Cyril Schäublin, Switzerland, 2017, 71m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
This dark comic study of an alienated contemporary Zurich begins by following an impassive twenty-something, a call center worker by day who initiates phone scams targeting elderly workers after hours. The film then spirals out to incorporate into its narrative city residents—police, bank tellers, reporters—obliquely linked to this swindle. Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin’s feature debut (following a half-dozen short films to his name, including Stampede, ND/NF 2013) is a razor-sharp, formalist satire, using the city’s grey concrete architecture; clipped, digit-dominated exchanges between urbanites (phone numbers, Wi-Fi passwords, credit cards); and even a dash of sci-fi-esque atmospherics to portray a fractured, contemporary dystopia.
Thursday, April 5, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 1:45pm [MoMA]
Until the Birds Return / En attendant les hirondelles
Karim Moussaoui, Algeria/France/Germany, 2017, 113m
Arabic and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A property developer is witness to random street violence. A pair of secret lovers make their way across the desert. A doctor is accused of having a criminal past. In these three interconnected tales, exciting newcomer Karim Moussaoui—whom critics at Cannes compared to Abbas Kiarostami and Leos Carax—takes the pulse of modern-day Algiers, a country once riven by colonial occupation and sectarian warfare yet still abundant in beauty and promise. A KimStim release.
Friday, March 30, 8:30pm [MoMA]
Saturday, March 31, 3:30pm [FSLC]
A Violent Life / Une Vie Violente
Thierry de Peretti, France, 2017, 107m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Stéphane returns to Corsica for the funeral of a childhood friend and gang member, despite having a target on his back. Through flashbacks, this sophomore feature by Corsican filmmaker Thierry de Peretti tensely unspools as a coming-of-age tale dashed with crime, political radicalism, and youthful idealism born of the island's separatist movement. Loosely based on actual events and cast with local actors, A Violent Life resonates with regional folklore and crafts a poignant portrait of a marginalized generation. A Distrib Films release.
Monday, April 2, 6:15pm [FSLC]
Tuesday, April 3, 6:00pm [MoMA]
Winter Brothers / Vinterbrødre
Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark/Iceland, 2017, 100m
English and Danish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This debut feature from Hlynur Pálmason, an Icelandic visual artist/filmmaker based in Denmark, is an immersive sensory experience set in a desolate Danish limestone mining community. A landscape covered in indistinguishable white ash and snow masks the darkness enveloping Emil, a lonely and eccentric young man who works in the mine with his much more sociable brother. Few notice Emil until he is suspected of causing a co-worker’s grave illness, which leads to his ostracization. A relentless industrial soundscape accompanies this portrait of a man trapped in unforgiving isolation. A KimStim release.
Thursday, March 29, 9:00pm [FSLC]
Saturday, March 31, 2:00pm [MoMA]
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VALÉRIE MASSADIAN,MILLA
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WINTER BROTHERS/VINTERBRØDRE (Hlynur Pálmason 2017)
Oddball Danish character study set mostly in and around a remote limestone plant with card tricks, nude wrestling, piss contests, magic, and hooch made from stolen plant chemicals that may have caused a worker's death. It does not all quite come together.
THE GUILTY/SKYLDIGE (Gustav Möller 2017)
A nail-biter that won an audience prize at Sundance and was snapped up by Magnolia for US distribution, concerning a disgraced cop on emergency phone duty who tries to save a woman who's been abducted by her ex-husband. Prompted by me (favorable) comparisons with Tom Hardy in Locke and Michael Shannon in the play, Mistakes Were Made.
AZOUGUE NAZARE (Tiago Melo 2017)
A colorful study of clashing cultures, native Maracatu and evangelical Christian, in NW Brazil at the time of a festival, using local non actors. A mixed success that prompted memories of the far superior use of locals in a Brazilian tale in Marcel Camus' 1959 Black Orpheus and its 1999 local remake Orfeu.
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UNTIL THE BIRDS RETURN/EN ATTENDANT LES HIRONDELLES (Karim Moussaoui 2017)
An accomplished and sophisticated first feature reps three quite separate short stories, really, all set in Algeria, about a property developer whose son and daughter are drifting away, a couple of secret lovers on the road, and a respectable doctor accused of complicity in a mass rape during the revolution. Featured in last May's Cannes Un Certain Regard.
CLOSENESS/TESNOTA (Kantemir Balagov 2017)
Academy ratio, intensified color, and intense closeups mark this study of a Jewish family in Nineties Russia who experience a kidnapping and decide to move on again. Much, well, closeness. Also in Cannes Un Certain Regard.
SCARY MOTHER /SASHISHI DEDA (Ana Urushadze 2018)
A first feature from Georgia with an unusual, semi-surreal subject of a fifty-year-old mother of a regular middle class family who indulges a long repressed urge to become a writer. Her 150-page manuscript is greeted as deranged pornography, except by her friend and champion, who runs a stationary store. Does creativity just seem like madness to ordinary people? The adroit narrative structure at times takes on the quality of a thriller.
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AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (Hu Bo 2018)
This four-hour, intimate, almost real-time epic follows several people of different ages at the end of their tether who converge finally at the train station heading for the same escape. The style made me think both of Edward Yang and Jia Zhang-ke, and this profound, ambitious work of an impressive new filmmaker takes on a tragic resonance because he committed suicide, at 29, so all this promise will never be realized again. A sad astonishment.
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In memory of Hu bo
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COCOTE (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Aria 2017)
Dominican feature blends documentary footage of voodoo and born again rituals with a revenge story of a city gardener who returns to his country pueblo after the death of his father, who has been brutally assassinated.
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THE GREAT BUDDHA (Huang Hsin-yao 2017)
Marking a resurgence of originality in Taiwan cinema, this big local prize-winner is a devilishly clever black and white film about a couple of losers who for amusement steal and watch a boss's dashcam footage - in living color - and find out shocking stuff. Details also about corrupt politics and religious hypocrisy. With self-reflective irony, the director narrates as the director. I don't know why this reminded me of the charming Mexican minimalist Fernando Eimbcke, but it did.
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BLACK MOTHER (Khalik Allah 2017)
Khalik Allah's short documentary feature is in the nature of a long poem of cross purposes about Jamaica, land of the director's maternal grandfather, with many motion picture snapshots in multiple formats of local people from different times accompanied by multiple voices speaking about life, motherhood, God, Rasta and ganja, and other germane matters but not synched with the images.
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DJON ÁFRICA (João Miller Guerra, Filipa Reis 2017)
An easygoing 25-year-old man born in Portugal of Cape Verdean father goes back to the islands to find that father he's never met, but gets side-tracked by fun and folly. An engaging picture of this world, but a bit superficial and lacking final narrative punch. Documentary elements from a previous film are freely used for this feature.
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GOOD MANNERS (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas 2017)
One of the wow movies of the series. On top of being a lesbian vampire-werewolf tale with social overtones, eye-candy Brazilian mise-en-scene and São Paulo locations, it wants to be a musical, and probably would make a darn good full-fledged one, given half a chance. At over two hours, and divided into two halves, it's a bit overlong. But it's all good nonetheless. I'm already looking forward to seeing it again - with friends.
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Today's special Google search logo reminds me of the images in Dura and Rojas' Good Manners:
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NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE (Ricky D'Ambrose 2018)
Middle class white male small cinema from Brooklyn with a hint of the European, W.G. Sebald, perhaps, better at evoking places and things (and invented documents and authors) than the search for a disappeared young man that ends the short film. A connected group is hinted at too, and Bingham Bryant, who plays the gone boy, recently produced one small fim and c-directed another, and there are connections with New York film critics and programmers.
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THOSE WHO ARE FINE (Cyril Schäublin 2017)
The Swiss don't make movies. But this one did. A chilly, pessimistic and assured first feature in Swiss German dialect about scams on old ladies growing out of a calling center selling wire services, and all the disassociated alienation of modern life. In 71 minutes.
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THE NOTHING FACTORY/A FÁBRICA DE NADA (Pedro Pinho 2017)
FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, the most interesting failure of the year, an overlong improvisational reenactment of the early days of a takeover of the Otis elevator factory in Lisbon, Portugal in 1975, which was run collectively by for forty years. Using workers as the cast. Some of the debates are like plunging into a seminar on marxist economics and though nothing is resolved, it's very thought-provoking. A few personal scenes of a man, his Brazilian partner, and his sprightly adopted son, float like butterflies.
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New Directors/New Films 2018 (early) roundup.
Mike D'Angelo used to attend, and has described New Directors as the "notoriously erratic" but "cleverly timed" series because by early March he is "invariably hungry for anything that doesn't ostentatiously announce itself as clearing-house crap." This is true, but the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema has a similar effect of brightening a dull time - in its case, in a less edgy but more civilized manner.
As for New Directors 2018, there are still a few I've not yet seen but it's already possible to point to the the clearcut keepers and a few honorable mentions.
THE GUILTY (Gustav Möller). The breathlessly entertaining, intense one-man tour de force from Denmark of a disgraced cop on emergency phone duty going into after-hours desperately trying to save a mother abducted by her ex.
AN ELEPHANT STANDING STILL (Hu Bo). The riveting four-hour epic of provincial desperation in a typically urban-rural modern China made more tragic by the gifted young filmmaker's untimely suicide.
GOOD MANNERS/AS BOAS MANEIRAS (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas). Lesbian love and a werewolf in middle school and a musical? It's jaw-dropping and beautiful. A really original blend of arthouse and genre. From São Paulo.
THE GREAT BUDDHA + (Huang Hsin-yao 2017). A lot of ingenuity, sympathy and wit go into this tale from Taiwan of a pair of bored loser buddies in a Buddha factory who wind up spying on a boss through stealing the dash cam memory card of his new Mercedes.
Honorable mentions. I also liked: Algerian Karim Moussaoui's Until the Birds Return, a collection of three sophisticated stories, not specifically related but all keenly expressive of what it's like there now. Ana Urushadze's Georgian feature Scary Mother/Sashishi Deda, which keeps us guessing whether its 50-something novelist is bonkers as her husband says or a late-blooming genius. Pedro Pinha's Nothing Factory about a worker takeover of an Otis elevator plant in LIsbon is much, much too long and meandering, but it has moments that teach and inspire.
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HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENIng (RaMell Ross 2018)
This is where Walker Evans and James Agee's 1941 dust bowl classic photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was set, but it focuses (for 76 minutes) exclusively on African Americans befriended by the photographer during five years where he came to the region to teach photography and coach basketball. The editing is "fractured," the emphasis on kinetic energy. The fractured portraits are vivid and touching. But this made sense to me more as a still photographer's work extended somewhat unnecessarily into motion than as a traditional documentary, which it is not. Let us not think it is a celebration of the short attention span.
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OUR HOUSE わたしたちの家 /(Watashitachi no ie) (Yui Kiyohara 2017)
The young filmmaker is a student of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and it shows. Her Our House is a story of ghosts, because only they could be living simultaneously in the same houseas depicted in this slow-burning drama. A triumph of fine traditional Japanese cinematic style, but a little too low-key to be completely successful.
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NERVOUS TRANSLATION (Shireen Seno 2017)
A painstaking evocation of childhood in the Philippines in the late Eighties. Eight-year-old Yael tries to assuage her longing for her father, largely missing as an overseas worker in the Persian Gulf, by secretly playing over and over cassette tapes he sends to her mother, Kay. Memorably she cooks Filipino specialties her father longs for in her dollhouse kitchen. Distantly adult worlds and the troubles of the Marcos regime are evoked as well. Repetitious, wistful, and sad.
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The four best films of the series, in my view: The Guilty, An Elephant Standing Still, The Great Buddha, Good Manners. There were other good ones. Many liked Makala, which I missed, some liked Closeness, I found Until the Birds Return and Scary Mother interesting. Others show promise or are worth knowing about or, like The Nothing Factory, were interesting failures.
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Good Manners
New Directors/New Films 2018
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March 28-April 8,2018
Links to the reviews
3/4 (Ilian Metev 2017)
Azougue Nazare (Tiago Melo 2017)
Black Mother (Khalik Allah 2018)
Closeness/Tesnota (Kantemir Balagov 2017)
Cocote (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias 2017)
Djon Africa (João Miller Guerra, Filipa Reis 2018)
Drift (Helena Wittmann 2017)
An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, China, 2018) 234 mins.
Good Manners/As Boas Maneiras (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas 2017)
The Great Buddha + (Huang Hsin-yao 2017)
The Guilty/Den Skydige (Gustav Möller 2017)
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross 2018)
Makala (Emmanuel Gras 2017)
Milla (Valérie Massadian 2017)
Nervous Translation (Shireen Seno 2018)
Notes on an Appearance (Ricky D’Ambrose 2018)
The Nothing Factory/A Fábrica de Nada (Pedro Pinho 2017)
Our House/Watashitachi no ie (Yui Kiyohara 2017)
Scary Mother/Sashishi Deda (Ana Urushadze 2018)
Those Who Are Fine/Dene wos guet geit (Cyril Schäublin 2017)
Until the Birds Return/En attendant les hirondelles (Karim Moussaoui 2017)
A Violent Life (107m) A Violent Life/Une Vie Violente (Thierry de Peretti 2017)
Winter Brothers/Vinterbrødre (Hlynur Pálmason 2017)
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New Directors/New Films: the series begins.
ND/NF MAR. 28- APR. 8, 2018
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Hale County This Morning, This Evening
As the series begins to unreel today at MoMA and Lincoln Center, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott list more films in the series that they believe worth your attention - including Black Mother, Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, and Djon Africa, in addition to ones I recommended and continue to recommend, and not mentioning one of my favorites for sure, the jaw-dropping entertainment from Brazil, Dutra and Rojas' Good Manners. They include 3/4, which I missed. Read the Times piece here.
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Note: Showing in NYC & elsewhere now (20 Sept. 2018) from New Directors:
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
At:
IFC Center
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Metascore: 81%
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AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (Hu Bo 2018) ND/NF 2018
Limited US theatrical release begins a year later...
Mar. 15 2019: limited theatrical release of the film by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Laudatory essay about it by Richard Brody dated Mar. 6 in The New Yorker. Same day review in NYTimes by A.O. Scott; a Times "Critic's Pick."
Superlatives abound for this masterpiece that's heartbreaking because it's a one-off due to its 29-year-old maker's suicide.
Trailer See what Ang Lee, Bela Tarr, and other greats say about it.
