New Directors/New Films 2016; Film Comments Selects

[Chris Knipp]

New Directors/New Films 2016
March 16-27

For updates and discussion go to the General Film Forum HERE


Under the Shadow (Babak Anvar 2016)

Links to the reviews

The Apostate/El apóstata (Federico Veiro 2015)
Behemoth/Beixi moshuo (Zhao Liang 2015)
Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson 2015)
Demon (Marcin Wrona 2015)
Donald Cried (Kris Avedisian 2015)
Eldorado XXI (Salomé Lamas 2015)
Evolution/Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović 2015)
The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer 2015)
Happy Hour (Ryusuke Hamaguchi 2015)
In the Last Days of the City/Akher Ayam El Madina (Tamer El Said 2016)
I Promise You Anarchy / Te prometo anarquía (Julio Hernández Cordón 2 2015)
Kaili Blues/Lu bian ye can (Bi Gan 2015)
Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta (Pietro Marcello 2015)
Kill Me Please/Mate-me por favor (Anita Rocha da Silveira 2015)
Life After Life/Zhi fan ye mao (Zhang Hanyi 2015)
Mountain/Ha'har (Yaelle Kayam 2015)
Nakom (T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris 2015)
Neither Heaven Nor Earth/Ni le ciel ni la terre (Clément Cogitore 2015)
Neon Bull/Boi neon (Gabriel Mascaro 2015)
Peter and the Farm (Tony Stone 2015)
Remainder (Omer Fast 2015)
Short Stay (Ted Fendt, 2015)
Shorts Program 1
Shorts Program 2
Suite Armoricaine (Pascale Breton 2015)
Thithi (Raam Reddy 2015)
Tikkun (Avishai Sivan 2015)
Under the Shadow (Babak Anvar 2016)
The Wakhan Front/Ni le ciel ni la terre (Clément Cogitoren2015)
Weiner (Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

BABAK ANVAR: UNDER THE SHADOW (2016)



Netflix's Iranian horror movie

Genre mashups are the rage now and so we get - what? A domestic drama-cum-political thriller-cum-horror movie, from Iran, set in Teheran in the middle of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980's. Repression is full-on, so doctor's wife Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is told in the opening scene (reminiscent of other Iranian film openings like A Separation) where a university bureaucrat tells her no, she can't belatedly come back to medical school, and her political activity during the revolution is the reason. So she's back to caring for her insecure daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), still wetting her bed and morbidly attached to her doll, Kiria. Slowly, very slowly, djinns (which Shideh doesn't believe in) take over, when daddy Iraj (Bobby Naderi) has been called to the front.

It's an unusual mix, and Under the Shadow qualifies as a novelty item. It may function better and be less morbidly pleased with itself than the Iranian vampire movie Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (ND/NF 2014). But as can happen with contempo, "realistic" horror, it gives rise to the suspicion that the real life around these characters would be more horrible by itself. In fact, the bangs and clangs of the djinns -- and a spectral woman, clothes with nothing inside, who begins stealing away Dorsa's affections -- have a hard time competing with the missiles and bombs going off all around. What seems really horrible, and also stupid, is that Shideh refuses to leave Teheran and stay with Iraj's parents in the country, safe from bombardments, and goes on living in an apartment building ever other resident has left, which is full of bomb holes, which people inexplicably mend with what looks like extra-wide Scotch tape. And when Iraj is really nasty to Shideh on the phone -- that's horrible.

This film has been compared to the routine, maybe, but much much better horror movie The Babadook (ND/NF 2014) because this too has mother and child relationship that goes south due to a possession of sorts. The way Iraj and Shideh quarrel in the early scenes has a nice realism that sets off the creepier events that follow, though they also have the feel of scenes from a telenovela. Nice details include a new neighbor boy who has gone must since his parents got killed, but suddenly talks to Dorsa; and a pious woman neighbor who, as Justin Chang says in his Variety review, helpfully points out the "mythology" of the film, that Dorsa's (or her doll's!) troubles are most likely due to a djinn's possessing them, which makes the disappearance of Kiria, the doll, and the medical book Shideh received from her late mother, the more ominious.

Is the ending, when Shideh and Dorsa finally leave in their little car with the lost doll finally found and repaired, hauntingly ambiguous, or deeply ironic? I'm afraid that it felt merely lame and anticlimactic. Under the Shadow obviously has many unique features qualifying it as one in a series of offbeat festival horror films, but if you want to be scared out of your wits, go elsewhere.

Under the Shadow, 84 mins., in Farsi, debuted at Sundance 22 Jan. 2016 and was acquired by Netflix. Screened as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center/Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films and scheduled as the opening night film.

[Chris Knipp]

FEDERICO VEIROJ: THE APOSTATE/EL APÓSTATA (2015)



Federico Veiroj's follow-up to 'A Useful LIfe'

In my review of Veiroj's quiet, charming previous film, A Useful Life, I note that it's "a short-short story rather than a novel." This is equally true of this third film, even if it runs a bit longer; it actually feels less substantial. Again a tall man (and Veiroj himself is tall) is at the center of it, with nice hair. Not pear-shaped and middle-aged this time, or the director of a Cinemateca, or in Uruguay either. We're in Madrid, where Gonzalo Tamayo (Álvaro Ogalla), a young, rather handsome man, in a dreamy way, is a philosophy student. But is he actually studying? The main thing, the Veiroj thing, is that again to make minorness interesting, and somehow significant.

The friend I watched the screening with didn't understand the title. What is an apostate? Can it even mean anything today to detach oneself from the Church? Given the strength of the Chruch in Spain, and particularly in Madrid, despite the city's worldliness and sophistication, it might, in some existential sense, mean something. But the main point is that it's so difficult, and also futile. It's important enough an effort for the various religious authorities Gonzalo meets with to try to dissuade or obstruct him. It's also a preoccupation for Gonzalo that may mask his inability to engage with the world. This focus of Gonzalo's throughout the film reflect's what Scott Tobias in his Variety review calls Veiroj's "instinct" for locating "moments of absurdist comedy within the throes of existential crisis." What he's doing seems Quixotic or pointless, but it is the focus Gonzalo has chosen for his personal crisis.

Veiroj's films meander, while being firmly rooted in their protagonists' preoccupations. In this case, there's a bug middle section occupied largely with dreams full of nudity. Gonzalo comes and goes. He tutors the bright young son (Kaiet Rodriguez) of his attractive neighbor Maite (Barbara Lennie), whom he will kiss. His cousin Pilar, he has flirted with all his life, and flirts with now: she gets angry; leaves; then is drawn to him again. He is attractive to women.

The most touching moment is when Gonzalo visits his mother (Vicky Pena), and it's clear that he doesn't want to hurt her, yet his apostasy project, for her, is a great embarrassment. There is a feel of discreet luxury and casual good taste about his mother's apartment. And the Madrid of the film as photographed by dp Arauco Hernandez is quietly classical and beautiful. The musical background suggests the light elegance of the Groupe des Six, at once classical and humorous, one of the various classy touches that helps pull together that balance of existential crisis and absurdity Tobias refers to. In the end, Veiroj has provided even less substance this time; and yet the film is satisfying.

The Apostate/El Apóstata, 80 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2015., limited theatrical release in Spain in Oct. Included in over a dozen international festivals including Hamburg, Warsaw, London, Vienna, Gothenburg, Miami, and New Directors/New Films. It was screened as part of the latter. FIPRESCI Award at San Sebastián.

At the screening it was preceded by a ten-minute short, Kasra Farahani's Concerning the Bodyguard, a reading of a story by Donald Barthelme by Salman Rushdie, which must have had special significance, given the decade of Rushdie's life under fatwa when he had a continual bodyguard, whom he reportedly did not like. The film seeks, with considerable success, to realize every phrase in the story's series of questions describing the bodyguard's life, using staged scenes ingeniously (and elegantly) interlinked with stock images, mostly from Russia and Iran to invent a sort of homogenized absolutist state like the one in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.

[Chris Knipp]

RAAM REDY: THITHI (2015)


Abhishek H.N., Channegowda in Thithi

A midsummer Indian rural comedy

A very old man dies. His grandson tries to sell land he owned. His father gets in the way. A handsome young man falls in love with a pretty woman traveling through with shepherds. This provides the substance of Raam Redy's triumph of villager-wrangling, shot at an oddly named South Indian village in Karnataka, where they speak the Kannada language. I'd never heard of it. It's Dravidian, and between 38 and 50 million people speak it.

The art of Redy's film, as with all festive comedy, is to keep various balls in the air. The abrupt death of "Century Gowda," the foul-mouthed, hateful centenarian family patriarch, touches off the action in the first scene. We see his ritual immolation. The body is carried not stretched out the way we expect corpses to be but sitting up in a square frame, held high, and then planted on the funeral pyre of wood sticks. Eleven days later the eponymous Thithi farewell ceremony is held.

Meanwhile Thamanna, Gowda's grandson, sets out to sell the five acres of land nominally in Gowda's name. To do this his father, the wayward, eighty-something Gadappa, a tall, thin, bearded, distinguished looking bum who roams around swilling liquor from little bottles and smoking cigarettes, must give his permission. Or, the potential buyer suggests, he must be dead, or appear to be. We follow Thamanna pursuing his machinations, which among other things lead him to pay Gadappa to get lost, for six months at least. But instead Gadappa joins a group of migratory shepherds who are presently camped nearby, among whom is the pretty young woman a young, handsome member of the family has fallen for. The courtship weaves in and out of Gadappa's and Thamanna's stories.

That's all there is too it, really, but the action is so bustling and constant that the viewer's sense of emersion is intense. Certainly Reddy's film is closer to Satyajit Ray than to Bollywood, but it quite lacks the profundity and intelligence of Ray, even as it uses some of the neorealist methods Ray employed in the first of his sublime Apu trilogy. But however rough an impression South India makes here, the action is vibrant and alive.

Thithi, 132 mins., debuted at Locarno, where it won two awards, and was in three other festivals, Mumbai, Palm Springs, and New Directors/New Films. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors, at Lincoln Center, NYC. The series is a collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA and the films are shown at both locations.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHAO LIANG: BEHEMOTH/BEIXI MOSHUO (2015



[Art film + documentary]

Zhao Liang acts as a modern-day Dante exploring Inner Mongolia’s environmental destruction by toxic coal mining

Jay Weissberg sums up this film in his review for Variety:

Maverick indie helmer Zhao Liang continues his muckraking tour of China’s social and environmental woes with the stunningly lensed, cumulatively moving Behemoth. Acting as a modern-day Dante on a tour through Inner Mongolia’s coal mines and iron works, Zhao (Together, Petition) eschews narrative for an impressively self-shot poetic exercise in controlled righteous outrage, emphasizing the contrasts between rapidly dwindling green pastures and dead landscapes disemboweled by toxic mining. The human toll is also here in the final sections, making starkly clear the price impoverished workers pay for back-breaking labor. Zhao’s quiet yet powerful indignation will play to the arthouse crowd, and his striking visuals should ensure that Behemoth receives berths beyond environmental fests.

Zhao Liang draws inspiration from Dante, regarding horrific deep-dug mines in rural China as analogous to the deeper bolgias of the great Italian poet's Inferno. The quality of this film varies. Outdoor widescreen landscapes, even those of ravaged, hideously exploited land, are strikingly beautiful. But when he moves into workers' hutches or mine shafts, with poor light, the image quality drops sharply. Nonetheless, this film earns a place among the growing literature of ethnographic documentary; and films documenting environmental destruction. The region he chose to explore in this film, the Wuhai area of Inner Mongolia, was black on the satellite map. The thing is, not only has coal mining -- and China is the biggest miner of cola and polluter with coal -- turned this place into the earth equivalent of a festering sore, but it used to be an area of particularly pretty, blissfully green wide grasslands, some of which are still to be seen and shown for comparison. Zhao makes ample use of this contrast in his highly visual and pointedly, if mostly silently, editorial film.

We look at young workers in the mines wearing heavy masks and we know somehow no masks will be enough here. A New York Times article reports an interview with the filmmaker.

Behemoth/Bei xi mo shou, 91 mins., debuted at Venice 11 Sept. 2015, winning the environmental Green Drop Award, and has been included in at least seven other international festivals including Stockholm, Dubai, Hong Kong, and New Directors/New Films, as part of which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CLÉMENT COGITORE: NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH/NI LE CIEL NI LA TERRE (2015)


JÉRÉMIE RENIER IN NI LE CIEL NI LA TERRE

Metaphysical thriller set in the Afghan front starring Jérémie Renier

A Cannes review by Guy Lodge in Variety of this new film starring the durable Belgian actor Jérémie Renier suggests that the French director Clément Cogitore's original debut revives the already seemingly exhausted Afghan soldier portrait genre. Cogitore describes it as "a blend of John Ford and M. Knight Shyamalan." But Lodge also thought of Antonioni's L'Avventura, because it's the mysterious disappearance of some of his men that causes the protagonist, Capitaine Antarès Bonassieu, to gradually lose his authority and his mental grip.

We are in the same realm as Tobials Lindstrom's current Oscar nominated A War, though that film has more vivid and extended battle sequences. We're in similar territory to the twin Afghan war documentaries Restrepo and Korengal -- the western soldiers high up in the rocky hillsides, isolated, bored, working out, calling home, having periodic meetings with village men, armed with an interpreter (this one, played by Sâm Mirhosseini, is particularly strong and essential); the quarrels over sheep; the clashes with Afghans; the ever-present danger of the Taliban.

And I always want to ask: Why? What are these western soldiers doing here, constantly at risk? What makes authorities think they're essential? But those questions rarely come up in these films. In any case, here the NATO-led troops are being withdrawn, so they're basically waiting around and trying, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to stay out of trouble. Here the question isn't Why? but What the hell is going on? And there's never a very good answer. One of the themes is how macho men may go haywire long confined together, a theme memorably treated in Claire Denis's classic Beau Travail. Another is the union of enemies, since it turns out that not only the French unit but the local Taliban have been mysteriously losing men -- and they wind up involved in a strange collaboration. As the Captain grows unhinged by his disappearing men, he begins to think the answer lies in dreams.

I didn't find Neither Heaven Nor Earth fully satisfying, because it doesn't explore either war or metaphysics enough, but Cogitore uses the Moroccan locations and appropriate mise-en-scène well, and the fine cast includes Swann Arlaud of de Pallières' Michael Kohlhass, the lean, intense young Kévin Azaïs of Love at First Fight, and the recently ubiquitous Finnegan Oldfield, a "Meilleur Espoir" César nominee this year featured in Bang Gang and Les Cowboys -- the latter the directorial debut of Jacque Audiard script collaborator Thomas Bidegain, who performed similar duties here.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth/Ni le ciel ni la terre, aka The Wakhan Front, 100 mins., debuted in Cannes Critics' Week May 2015 and has been included in eight other festivals, including New Directors/New Films in New York, where it was screened for this review 1 Mar. 2016. Released in Sept. 2015 in France it received enthusiastic reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8 averaged from 28 reviews). Cahiers concluded that Cogitoren is a director worth watching, and several reviewers said the film was captivating "from beginning to end."