New Directors/New Films 2016; Film Comments Selects

[Chris Knipp]

SHORTS PROGRAM 1


UNDER THE SUN

Shorts Program One
Under the Sun / Ri Guang Zhi Xia
Yang Qiu, China, 2015, 19m
Chinese with English subtitles
An incident of random nature entangles two families and brings their plights into sharp focus.

We are in strong ironic Jia Zhang-ke territory here, with the cool, distant camera placement, the grim urban backgrounds, and the slow buildup through dialogue of a picture of backbiting, corruption, and cynicism in he face of China's economic explosion and eco-nightmare. The story focuses, crabwise, onn a young man who helped an old lady in an accident, and has been persecuted and threatened with a lawsuit ever since by police and greedy relatives. The best and most significant film in this set. Made under the aegis of Australia's Melbourne University film school, it was an official selection at Cannes 2015 and has received best short nominations at nine different international festivals.

Dirt
Darius Clark Monroe, USA, 2014, 7m
With an unsettling lyricism all his own, Darius Clark Monroe traces an evocative and elliptical portrait of a dirty deed.

Strong, vivid filmmaking doesn't mean this makes much sense or grabs much purchase on its narrative, but may be promise of something powerful to come. Monroe directed the autobiographical 2014 documentary feature Evolution of a Criminal, which I saw and reported on from IFC Center. Dirt was shown and nominated for best short at Sundance. It shows former jailed bank robber Monroe is still making films and it has more polish than his debut.

Totem
Marte Vold, Norway, 2015, 20m
Norwegian with English subtitles
In seemingly idyllic Oslo, a couple demonstrates the discontents of intimacy with wit and biting honesty. U.S. Premiere

This meandering series of domestic incidents is a bore. A few touches of humor aren't enough to make it memorable.

Reluctantly Queer
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana/USA, 2016, 8m
In a letter home to his beloved mother, a young Ghanaian man attempts to unpack his queerness in light of her love. North American Premiere

Simple and sincere, this doesn't get very ambitious with its discreetly homoerotic images focused on collaborator on the writing, Kwame Edwin Otu, sitting around, taking a shower, and in bed with a white lover. The evidently autobiographical narration is touching. Most tellingly, he explains to his mother in Ghana that while in America he faces the legacy of slavery every day and is surveilled, still there is the advantage over back home where he cannot show his "secret" nature, his gayness as he can here. Shown in six festivals in early 2016.

Isabella Morra
Isabel Pagliai, France, 2015, 22m
French with English subtitles
The courtyards of a housing project become a de facto stage on which unsupervised children perform, spreading rumors and shouting insults in an imitation of adulthood. North American Premiere

It's astonishing to see the large number of people involved in making this uninteresting film of kids in the banlieu talking about nothing, playing with a doll, or sitting around. The aim is to show how much time is wasted here. But there have been so many exciting, imaginative, important films made about life in the cités. Matthieu Kasovitz's La Haine and Abdellatif Kechiche's early Games of Love and Chance come to mind. This simply seems lazy. A waste of time.

[Chris Knipp]

T.W. PITTMAN, KELLY DANIELA NORRIS: NAKOM (2015)



A choice between traditional culture and individual service

In Nakom,a talented Ghana medical student, Iddrisu (the splendid Jacob Ayanaba) is forced by his father's death to return to his tiny, primitive farming village and has choose between returning to finish his education and pursue an urban medical career and remaining to for his family's survival.

There is something splendidly open and bright about this film from the start, with its wide aspect ratio, teeming images of the urban Kumasi, university campus, city streets, and then the wide flat landscapes of the farm. Once Iddrisu is back home, he's immediately plunged into family problems His mother (Justina Kulidu) isn't speaking to his father's second wife (Shetu Musah); his sister Damata (Grace Ayariga) resents that there's not enough family money to continue her own studies. His younger brother Kamal (Abdul Aziz) is lazy and has gotten a relative pregnant. The family property may fall into the hands Iddrisu's better off, more prestigious o Uncle Napoleon (Thomas Kulidu), whom his father borrowed money from after a bad crop year.

Iddrisu handles everything justly, wielding authority with sureness and tact. He arranges to have his scholarship suspended so he can spend a year away from his studies, and we follow as he takes change -- but always with the recurring question: Is this role more important than the life he led studying medicine (which he goes on studying in his spare time)? Is he indispensable now? These questions give urgency to events that are fascinating in themselves. (This story is a little like the middle panel of Satyagit Ray's Apu Trilogy.)

Reviewing the film at the time of its Berlinale premiere in Variety , Dennis Harvey noted that this second feature for U.S.-based co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and TW Pittman (following their 2013 Sombras de Azul, shot in Cuba) fortunately lacks the outside-looking-in feel of similar international co-productions. "There's an air of authenticity" he wrote, "as well as a pleasingly laid-back yet substantive narrative engagement to this polished effort." That says it all. The action in another New Directors film, Raam Redy's Thithi, makes equally fluent use of a primitive rural setting and a large cast of non-actors, but there is more polish here, and a unifying focus on the tall, lean Jacob Ayanaba, whose face can go from old to young, infinitely sad to bright and happy.

Nakom, 90 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 15 Feb. 2016; it's US debut is in the New Directors/New Films series in NYC put on by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, where it shows 18 Mar. Viewed for this review at a press screening at Lincoln Center 1 Mar.

[Chris Knipp]

OMER FAST: REMAINDER (2015)



An adaptation of Tom McCarthy's cult debut novel by a prolific Israeli video artist; his first feature

As Rudge says in Alan Bennett's The History Boys, "History is just one fuckin' thing after another," and life as seen in Tom McCarthy's 2006 novel Remainder, handsomely condensed in Israeli video artist Omer Faast's feature, is but a concatenation of events, which the protagonist, Tom (Tom Sturridge), is at pains to reconstruct. He has been smashed down on a London street by falling debris, and, after a period in hospital, struggling back to life, finds himself robbed of much of his memory. This includes his early life, and what he was doing on that street.

As Catherine Bray wrote in Variety at the film's October 2015 London debut, Remainder is above all "a beguilement of memory like its predecessors Memento and Mulholland Drive." But it's also a detective story, a "sporadically playful psychological thriller," and an obsessive thriller. Because it's so condensed, McCarhy's story is (as Bray says) "harder to follow for the uninitiated" than the book. With his alabaster skin and bee-sting lips, Sturridge has a face the camera loves. Tom's recovery time is illustrated with many shaky extreme closeups. Fast lets one enjoy simply contemplating the actor's languid impersonation of the lead and the video artist's slick recreation of Tom's explorations of memory and events, a few of which are constantly revisited. In the increasingly obsessive varied versions, scenes from Tom's present and past, a sense of urgency and dirty business arises.

We can't reveal all but there's this. When Tom comes to, heavily bearded, he can't remember anything after the thing falling on him, and not much before. Of the traumatic event anyway he is not supposed to speak, a condition of the £8.5 million settlement a lawyer has arranged for him. He's been in a coma for months, and has to relearn how to move, and take constant pills for pain and to sleep. But a crack seen at a party reawakens memories of his youth, and he starts reconstructing events, using his new wealth and a hired fixer, a tidy, bearded, bespectacled man called Naz (Arsher Ali), sort of like a film director, to do it. He stages a house, several houses, keeps hired actors on call, a woman frying liver, cats on a roof, a whole string of people and things. And all along, people Tom finds who may have a sinister significance. Perhaps the ending, involving protracted reenactments of a robbery, is too much like a thriller. But it is thrilling. Perhaps in this form, we may have too much trouble connecting the dots. We're obviously not meant to always separate real from dreamed, even know if any of this is happening; it's still fun. I haven't read the novel -- yet. But this is material for re-watching and discussion.

Remainder, 97 mins., debuted Oct. 2015 at London, where it was filmed; also at Berlin Feb. 2016. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (FSLC/MoMA), Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ANITA ROCHA DA SILVEIRA: KILL ME PLEASE/MATA-ME POR FAVOR (2015)


VALENTINA HERSZAGE IN KILL ME PLEASE

Vile, beautiful girls make out and dream of death in a posh soulless suburb of Rio

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s bright-colored debut feature wallows adoringly among pretty young Brazilian girls, and a few pretty young Brazilian boys. it is not a "slasher flick," and there is no "teenage angst." There is a lot of kissing, and some dancing, and a background of murders of young women in the wasteland surrounding large new suburban housing estates in Rio de Janeiro’s Barra da Tijuca. The girls, who belong to a competitive clan, are morbidly fascinated with the idea of being murdered, presumably after being raped, by a man. Particularly the pale, pretty, faintly ghoulish Bia (Valentina Herszage).

Bia wants to have sex with her boyfriend, the cute, sweet Pedro, but he follows a Christian agenda. One of the films' more successful outrages are scenes of a heavily made up young female "priest" who delivers trendy sermons and hip Christian songs to a small young audience including Bia and Pedro.

Filmmaker Anita Rocha da Silveira delivers on the exhibitionistic formal eye candy in every scene, with quite a succession of pretty young people. What she cannot seem to deliver on is story. Possible nods to to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, and the atmospheres of David Lynch cannot make up for the fact that there is no narrative structure to speak of. Kill Me Please is more like a music video than a feature film. In his Hollywood Reporter review, Jonathan Holland says the film "packages its horrors too neatly into beautiful images."

Kill Me Please/Mata me por favor 101 mins., in Portuguese, debuted in the Orizzonti section at Venice Sept. 2015, and went on to win prizes at Rio, with three other festivals including Gothenburg and New Directors/New Films in New York. Watched at the latter for this review Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHANG HANYI: LIFE AFTER LIFE/ZHI FAN YE MAO (2016)


ZHANG MINGJUN AND ZHANG LI IN LIFE AFTER LIFE

A returning soul visits a ravaged land

In the story, which is pursued with quiet obsessiveness, a youth, Leilei (Zhang Li), becomes possessed by his late mother, Xiuying, whose spirit has wandered the Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. With the help of Leilei’s father Ming Chun (Zhang Mingjun), whose reception of his late wife’s return is deadpan (Buster Keaton has nothing on these two guys), they undertake the Sisyphean process, to please Xiuying, of moving a tree from her family's courtyard higher up in the desolate dust-covered mountains that surround them. Panoramic shots show a valley spanned by modern mining apparatus, while up close beyond the man and possessed boy plod around a depressing, desolate village where nobody is friendly, not even their relatives.

The film was reviewed at the Berlinale by Clarence Tsui in Hollywood Reporter. It was produced by Jia Zhang-ke, whose deadpan sarcasm Tsui detects in this film; she also sees links with Kafka, Camus, and the camera style of Pedro Costa. The festival blurb sees a link with "the gentle supernaturalism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul." Actually, this is a very Chinese film, and is suffused with the spirit and style of Jia.

The sad, fatalistic mood of Life After Life made me think of Arthur Waley's translation of the old Chinese poem The Chrysanthemums in the Eastern Garden: "With what thoughts of sadness and loneliness/I walk again in this cold, deserted place!/In the midst of the garden long I stand alone;/The sunshine, faint; the wind and dew chill/The autumn lettuce is tangled and turned to seed;/The fair trees are blighted and withered away." And so on. But in Zhang Hanyi's film, nothing blooms. It is probable that Zhang means the moving of the leafless tree as a gesture toward the destroyed earth of modern China.

There aren't any closeups other than the staring face of Leilei/Xiuying facing backward as they forge ahead on his father's curious vehicle, in which a small pickup truck appears to have mated with a motorcycle. The task of getting the tree into this contraption is truly Sisyphean: following a method they've seen applied to a very large rock, they work the tree onto the truck along a long plank. Leilei pulls a rope lassoed around the bulky bottom of the tree wherein its roots are wrapped, while his dad, holding its thin trunk, rocks it side to side. Up a plank they go, but just before entering the truck, it falls down, do they must work it all the way back to the beginning of the plank, to start anew.

People encountered in the village are sullen and unattractive. Xiuying's family are not welcoming, but don't expel the pair from a grim outdoor meal.

Looking for Xiuying's father's spirit, they believe they've found it in an unruly, highly sexed dog. The New Directors series of which this was a part has included more than its share of animals slaughtered onscreen. This one can boast the most morbid and prolonged animal execution, which we're forced to watch all of. It involves strangling a sheep held to the ground. It takes an age for the sheep to die.

When the task is done, as promised Xiuying leaves, and Leili's body goes limp. We see Ming Chun carrying it on his back -- another Sisyphean task? -- and calling to Leilei's spirit to return. But it does not return.

While we are making sophisticated western references, we might mention Beckett. The meaning of the film's title in Chinese is "labyrinthine branches with plentiful of leaves," obviously deeply ironic as applied to the scrawny tree that's moved. It's a tree off the set of Waiting for Godot, and the words recall Clov's when he looks toward the audience and Hamm asks him to report and he says, "I see a multitude in transports of joy."

Life After Life/Zhi fan ye mao, 80 min., debuted at Berlin's Forum section Feb. 2016. It's listed on IMDb as being "in development." Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (FSLC/MoMA), New York, Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ANNA ROSE HOLMER: THE FITS (2015)


ROYALTY HIGHTOWER IN THE FITS

Black girls at a rec center in Cincinnati; a girl torn between two worlds

In this engaging but frustrating debut feature -- another one in 2016 New Directors (like the Brazilian Kill Me Please) that's more like an extended short than a feature -- tomboyish 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower) moves from boxer training, which she shares with her older brother, to a dance-marching band group across the way that is all girls. And some of these girls start having epileptic-like fits, which are initially attributed to the water -- a timely reference in view of the recent scandal about the water supply of Flint, Michigan.

Holmer blends scenes back and forth between Toni and her brother at the boxing gym, the dance workouts, a couple older boys and girlfriends, the fits, an empty swimming pool, and walks home with Toni and her brother. There is a lot of well-filmed physical activity, especially exercises like pull-ups and sit-ups, repetitious dance routines (standing in place, body and arm movement, not leg), and byplay between Toni and her brother. The best things are the warm and playful interactions between Toni and her brother. They play so naturally together. Royalty Hightower is a poised, versatile charmer.

Though she's presented as a tomboy, Toni's ear-piercing and nail-painting moments show she's not un-feminine; but she is simply a little detached from the others at times.

In a Variety review from Sundance Nick Schrager describes this film as "An abstract portrait of adolescent emotional dynamics," and says Holmer "crafts a meticulous mood of psychological isolation and beguiling mystery through her metaphorical tale, which exhibits less interest in traditional dramatic conventions than in situating viewers in its protagonist’s particular headspace." This is accurate in the way it suggests The Fits is more like an art piece, or at moments a music video, than a conventional feature film, but it's not so clear how Toni's "headspace" is being simulated, since that's all wordless and inarticulate. Suppose she had had a voiceover or a diary? Clearly Toni and her brother live in the projects. But the camera never follows them all the way home. And though Holmer conveys a vivid sense of the youth community at the rec center, the other characters are visited only fleetingly. There is a lot of staccato, natural dialogue. But it doesn't gain much narrative purchase.

Schrader explains that the film was developed through a "micro-budget program at the Venice Biennale institute that stipulates all projects be completed in under a year." It does indeed show promise, for its vividness and energy. But Holmer needs to work more on story and delve deeper into her characters.

The Fits, 72 mins., debuted at Venice, and showed also at Sundance and New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. Picked up for US distribution by Oscilloscope. Opens in Theaters on June 3rd 2016. (Well received: Metacritic rating 77%.)

[Chris Knipp]

TED FENDT: SHORT STAY (2015)


MIKE MACCHERONE (RIGHT) IN SHORT STAY

Mumblecore schlub's abortive summer sojourn in Philly

Mike MacCherone is a towering nerdy guy, and he gives phatic nerd utterance an almost epic level of inexpressiveness.

According to the festival blurb, in Short Stay the director, Ted Fendt, "delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor." Really? The "singular charm" is a bit hard to perceive. Whose? Certainly not the protagonist's; he has none. Short Stay reads like a rudimentary "mumblecore" film, with no progress beyond the minimalist genre's early days -- depicting, as the first halting examples of the genre often did, the unremarkable everyday doings of an unappealing thirty-something going nowhere very slowly. Mike (Mike MacCherone, who presents as height and bulk almost without personality), whose job delivering pizzas has few career opportunities, is offered a chance to sublet a friend's room in Philadelphia. He also gets to do the guy's city walking tours.

The blurb author says the film shows "economy of expression." That's easy: not much is happening: a few parties, a few uneventful dates, the room, the job. And also, we're told, Fendt has an "incomparable nose for the tragicomic dimension of the everyday." Actually, the events are drab and ordinary. They are neither tragic nor comic.

And then there are the tech aspects of the film, its nonexistent artistry. The images are 16mm blown up to 35mm, but a very far cry from the gorgeous look such formatting can have as exemplified by the Oscar-nominated work of Edward Lachman for Todd Haynes'd Carol last year. This looks like a movie shot in home video, but it isn't ironic or period, as in mumble "godfather" Andrew Bujalski's strange, fascinating Computer Chess. While Lachman has shot on super 16 for "grain," a rich human texture, in Short Stay the images just look rudimentary and blurry. There is no visual sense here. The shooting gets us through the scenes, just barely, and that's it. The déjeuner sur l'herbe still (shown above) is a rarity. Most shots are medium closeups you might see in a telenovela.

As for Fendt's moving up from shorts without loss, the problem is that he has only barely moved up. Short Stay, with its repetitious incidents and scenes, reads simply a short film in need of editing. It makes 61 minutes seem like a long time. It is a bore. However, Fendt may grow, as a few "mumblecore" directors (notably Bujalski) and actors (notably Greta Gerwig) have done. Miracles can happen. But this audition isn't very promising.

Short Stay, 61 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 12 Feb. 2016. It shows again 20 Feb. as part of New Directors/New Films in New York, where it was screened for this review.

Reviewed in Hollywood Reporter at the Berlinale by Jordon Mintzer. It debuted in the Forum section there. Shot in 16mm. and blown up to 35 mm. film. The director and his project are sympathetically described by Caroline Marques in an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer.