NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2019 (March 27-April 7, 2019)

[Chris Knipp]

MARKUS SCHLEINZER: ANGELO (2018)


ANGE SAMUEL KOFFI D'AUILA AND ALBA ROHRWACHER IN ANGELO

Even when treated royally, an 18th-century slave remains alien

Based (but very loosely and impressionistically) on the actual life of a real person, Angelo Soliman, Angelo recounts the life history of an African sold into 18th-century Viennese court society at the age of ten, replaced by a similar boy when the original one soon dies of a fever, named for a court servant, enabled to become the beloved Court Moor of the Habsburg empire — before being banished (punished by being set free) for marrying his white mistress. At the end of a long life we see him meet in death the humiliating and revealing fate of being re-objectified and primitivized.

In a pointed early scene unlike the others, a row of similar-sized young black boys in identical rough muslin garb stand on a slave-market platform in a big modern chrome and neon room to be chosen, suggesting this is a process that's still contemporary. Thenceforth the settings and clothes are sophisticated and individualized eighteenth-century ones, often with special, more colorful garments for the boy, and later man.

This film is indeed particularly notable for its exquisite scenes and costumes and original sense of the "look" of the eighteenth century in Austria where a black slave is treated as an exquisite showpiece and pet. Angelo shows the cunning appeal of racial exoticism, the glow of black skin clad in handsome and colorful western garments chosen to set it off that make their inhabitant seem elegant and exotic. While still a child (Angelo is divided among five different actors and the life into three stages), Angelo learns to play the flute. He immediately appears remarkably talented, and civilized, but also a showpiece, someone/something to be exhibited and admired. In early scenes, he is addressed (first he learns French, later also German) but not expected to reply.

The style here, austere and elegant, is paramount. Markus Schleinzer is known mostly as the busiest Austrian casting director, responsible for that aspect of some of Michael Haneke's and Ulrich Seidl's most admired films, and he works in that cold Austrian mold. His own first feature was a shocker, Michael, about three months when a pedophile keeps a ten-year-old boy prisoner in his basement, told from the pedophile's point of view. It was this debut that caused the outspoken critic Mike D'Angelo to tweet "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE IN AUSTRIA?" Note that this second feature, seven years later, begins with an enslaved ten-year-old boy: it's been hypothesized that Schleinzer may be slowly completing an "imprisoned boy" trilogy.

The force of Schleinzer's tale and its bitter irony is that this man of Africa brought and sold as a slave to an Austrian countess, who had much honor and distinction, remained seen always as a curiosity, a savage, and an alien creature, despite his actual sophistication, grace, and numerous civilized accomplishments. (I suspect Schleinzer also unconsciously sees the eighteenth century as much the same kind of exotic oddity as his Europeans see in Angelo, but that contributes to the considerable visual pleasure of the film.)


The Wikipedia article about the real Angelo Soliman, based on historical accounts, shows that Schleinzer's version, apart its choppy structure (he's not the best storyteller) and fanciful mise-en-scène (where he excels) , despite its connecting with the historical figures's life at key points, still hasn't a lot to do with it. But the one key appalling fact is true. After his death Angelo's body was embalmed or stuffed for display in a feathered primitive costume such as he never wore in life. Whether it was actually displayed as shown in the film isn't known, but it was destroyed in a fire as shown here. This is where Schleinzer gets it right: in his striking and elegant scenes of objectification and distancing.

This film is described by Wendy Ide in Screen Daily as "a unnerving, austere counterpoint to Amma Asante’s Belle." But Belle is quite different, a Jane Austen-esque tale of a mulatto relative. One may contrast both the style and the story of Angelo with Abdellatif Kechiche's heavy-handed but by some admired Black Venus (NYFF 2010), but its African slave woman is treated as a cruder, more brutal curiosity, and meets a prolonged unpleasant fate. Compared to her, Angelo sure has it good. But that's the irony this film is about, that however posh the existence he is offered, he can never overcome the European conviction that as a black African he is basically not human. Maybe almost.

Angelo, 111 mins., debuted at Toronto; in half a dozen other festivals. It was reviewed at Toronto y Angelo Muredda for CinemaScope and at San Sebastián 25 Sept. 2018 by Guy Lodge for Variety. Nicholas Bell has a nice review in Ioncinema.

ND/NF Showtimes: April 6, 1:00 PM; April 7. 3:15 PM
New York Premiere · Q&As with Markus Schleinzer on April 6 & 7


ANGELO AT THE CENTER OF A COURT PERFORMANCE




STYLIZED 18TH-CENTURY PERFORMANCE WITH BLACKFACE, WITH ANGELO PERFORMING

[Chris Knipp]

ANDREA BUSSMANN: FAUSTO (2018)


A MAP OF CONSTELLATIONS WITH GALACTIC POSSIBILITIES?

A world of possibilities in storytelling and musing

The Canadian filmmaker Andrea Bussmann's debut feature, set near Oaxaca, in Mexico, is a philosophical and spiritual musing of words and pictures preoccupied with the spiritual, paraphysical, and inexplicable. Its running narration and sporadic interviews, most in Spanish, one in Lebanese Arabic, are to be taken with a grain of salt but also welcomed with open mind.

Fernando and Alberto, we're told, own this place. They're rarely seen at night. Ziad works for Alberto translating documents. Now he is working on a map that's very difficult because the coastline is constantly shifting. He won't say what it's for, but I know they're searching for a shadow. Of a charming young Frenchman who came to work in exchange for lodging, promising also to leave his shadow as an offering. When the moon is bright they look for it. In town they hear about a one-armed zookeeper who only comes at night because afraid of his shadow; all his animals are blind.

All animals are telepathic to a degree, the voiceover informs us, but blind ones more so. Messages from the future can be received even from stuffed ones, if one strokes them in a clockwise direction. One of the speakers, at nighttime, clad in singlet, meditatively smoking and sipping wine, tells of a local person, rich in academic lore, but bored with ordinary knowledge, who strikes a Faustian bargain. Another tale, told in English by a man with a big white beard, is of a woman who comes to talk to an untamable black panther, and learns why he's angry.

The beach here has a high iron content, which makes visitors' computers go dark. Once a year the sand is invaded by turtles that come to lay eggs. There is someone who has two graves. The secret is that she had two shadows, so it was decided to build one for each. The Homeric myth appears of men converted to beasts by a seacoast witch.

"On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply."-IMDB.

Featured in the [Toronto Film] festival’s Wavelengths selection, Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto shows audiences why this particular programme is so important for a well-rounded TIFF experience.

Part documentary, part avant-garde ghost story Canadian, Bussmann’s debut feature is mostly comprised of stories from the inhabitants of Mexico’s Oaxaca coast; stories of interactions with ghosts, spirits and other supernatural beings, creatures that haunted their ancestors as they staved off colonial powers. These stories are frequently fascinating while the narration holds a particularly powerful voice. Images of Mexico are also breathtaking, if not expertly shot. The film is a bit slow to start, but once the viewer realizes what they are in for, Fausto is smooth sailing from there.

My only complaint is that the stories are presented in an interview format. With such rich material, the filmmaker really should have considered a different approach. However, this will not hinder your enjoyment. - Wylie writes.

"These images are lovely; but what do they amount to?" - POV Magazine. Sometimes as I watched, I wondered what they had been smoking. But mostly it only seemed to be tobacco. Mysticism and folkloric imagination seem to be inhaled in the coastal air.

Fausto, 70 mins., debuted at Locano Aug. 2018; half a dozen other festivals, including New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review.

ND/NF Showtimes: April 6, 3:45 PM; April 7, 1:00 PM
New York Premiere · Q&As with Andrea Bussmann on April 6 & 7


ALBERTO NUÑEZ AND FERNANDO RENJIFO IN FAUSTO

[Chris Knipp]

TAMARA KOTEVSK, LJUBOMIR STEFANOV: HONEYLAND/ Медена Земја (2018)


HATIDZE MURATOVA IN HONEYLAND

No matter how remote, your environment is in danger

Austere but rich, Kotevsk and Stefanov's Honeyland is one of the most immersive and atmospheric documentaries you will see this year. No narration is necessary. This film has only the limitation of its restrictive life. At the center of it, living in an abandoned Macedonian village, is Hatidze or Atidze Muratova, a small, tough birdlike woman of 55 with an easy smile, lined face, and big crooked teeth who tends her bee colonies with expertise and respect and her mother, with whom she lives, out of love and duty. Her mother Nazife is 85, not planning on dying, "just making your life misery," she says, declaring she's become a tree. She is half blind and does not stretch or go outside.

Hatidze is busy. What she does is wild beekeeping, or bee hunting, in hives she finds behind slabs of stone. Her easy skill with bees is clear, her respect for the sustainability of her task. She removes the combs like books from a shelf, easily, gently. She is cooperative, non-invasive. Look how she is with her skinny graceful dog at the very end of the film. She has a knack for nature that's almost elegant. She is good also with people, trading fairly and confidently to shopkeepers in the market in the capital, Skopje, touting the healthy and medicinal quality of her honey. Hatidze is a good person.

What a bare life this is. Comforts are dye for Hatidze's hair, tying it up with a nice scarf with rocky village chic, favoring yellow and green, a fan for her mother, and a little transistor radio hooked up once to a small speaker atop a pole she tries to broadcast music, but she gets only snatches of a song here or there. Herself, she sings. She cries and calls and sings to the bees when when she is working them.

The film is the result of three years of shooting by this team. As will happen with diligent documentarians, the reward of a significant event arrives: new neighbors appear with a dinky, antique trailer, seven unruly kids, and a bunch of calves. The man, Hussein Sam, takes up bee keeping too, but despite Hatidze's advice, never learns the way of it, or will not, because he is greedy for instant rewards and has not the necessary patience and respect that nature requires. We learn from Hatidze that you take half the honey and leave the other half to the bees. This maintains the balance. Take too much, and the bees will die, or attack Hatidze's bees. Sam takes too much, and both things happen.

One of the boys bonds with Hatidze. He understand them and respects her way with them. "If I had had a son like you. . . " she says. But his family doesn't understand the balance. But the neighbors are a nightmare. They are lazy and quarrelsome and the do serious damage. Their rampages cause the destruction of a lot of Hatidze's bees, their own, and, finally many of their young calves die due to the fat wife's carelessness. All goes wrong, angering even Hatidze's quiet mother. "May God burn their livers" is one of her last declarations. And then, after all their damage, they pick up and leave. Perhaps nature will regain its equilibrium again somehow. At the end, Hatidze's seen looking forward, alone, hopeful, strong.

This simple film is nonetheless superb and hard to improve upon. Kudos to the cinematography of Fejmi Daut and Samir Ljuma with its naturally gorgeous compositions of rocky hillside, animals, and ruined village architecture, the deep color of the clothes and gnarly skin in the market, the clear natural light. Much respect also to the filmmakers Tamara Kotevsk and Ljubomir Stefanov for their personal human sense of the observational documentary style, which makes this film so memorable.

Honeyland, 85 mins., debuted at Sundance (reviewed there by Guy Lodge for Variety and by Shiri Linden for Hollywood Reporter). It was screened for this review as part of the Mar.-Apr. 2019 MoMA-Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series.

ND/NF Showtimes: April 3, 6:15 PM; April 5, 6:30 PM
New York Premiere · Q&As with Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov on April 3 & 5


HATIDZE MURATOVA IN HONEYLAND

[Chris Knipp]

SUDABEH MORTAZAI: JOY (2018)



A staggering work of compassionate realism, Sudabeh Mortezai’s second fiction feature follows a young Nigerian sex worker living in Vienna as she struggles to simultaneously create a better life for her family and pay off her madame. - Festival blurb.

Joy, 99 mins., debuted at Venice (reviewed there by Guy Lodge for Variety). It won won Best Film at the BFI London Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2019 MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series.

ND/NF Showtimes: March 28, 8:45 PM; April 3, 8:45 PM - New York Premiere

[Chris Knipp]

OGNJEN GLAVONIĆ: THE LOAD/TERET (2018)


LEON LUČEV IN THE LOAD/TERET

A Serbian trucker's grim ride: a stoical look at an ambiguous journey

This atmospheric, wintry road movie by Ognjen Glavonić concentrates on a truck driver who must convey sensitive cargo along a treacherous path, from Kosovo to Belgrade during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Reference to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic Wages of Fear of Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer is obvious but so is the difference: this driver has an unknown load, and papers permitting him to pass without opening it up to authorities. This is not a high tension journey with deliciously unbearable suspense, but rather one of slow, brooding, tedious nerve-wracking-ness and the growing sense that Vlada (Croatian actor Leon Lučev), the driver, has gotten involved in some unspecified but considerable evil. The oblique but insistent reference is to an atrocity, a late Kosovo war massacre, that Glavonić meticulously documented earlier in his 2016 non fiction film, Depth Two. Ognjen Glavonić is a person in intense pursuit of secrets his countrymen want to forget.The director has said "every country is built on crimes that they don’t want to talk about." The load: the very burden Vlado carries is weighted down with metaphorical conceit that, despite the minimalism of the style, feels lugubrious and heavy-handed.

On the journey not much happens but each small incident is magnified. Vlada picks up a young hitchhiker (Pavle Čemerikić) on his way to Munich. He stops to rest several times. He telephones to his wife, who's having hospital tests. He gets his cigarettes and what turns out to be a historic lighter stolen during a brief absence from the truck. The camera briefly leaves Vlada, following the hitchhiker to an abandoned playground where his name is painted (a goodbye to his youth, perhaps?) watched two young petty thieves examine the stolen lighter.

At the end of the film, Vlada meets with his son, Ivan, and tells him a wartime grandfather Leka cigarette lighter story that's less colorful, but may remind you of the gold watch story told by Captain Koons (Chris Walken) in Pulp Fiction. In a Film Comment interview with Eric Hynes, Glavonić says everything must lead up to the father's opening up to his son in this sequence. A nice touch, the walnut tree that grew out of the fallen Leka's pocket. There was actually a medal, a watch and a lighter awarded posthumously to Leka after WWII.

The ending is hopeful, with the teenage Ivan liking his dad's "friend's" band tape and sharing with his sister the thought that he needs to form a band of his own. But he won't escape the burden of these days he doesn't yet know about - not if Ognjen Glavonić has anything to say about it.

The Load/Teret 98 mins., debuted at Cannes in Directors Fortnight May 2018; over 1 5 other festivals including Toronto, Vancouver and Rotterdam. Reviewed at Cannes by Jessica Kiang for Variety (she calls this feature debut "harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare"), and by Stephen Dalton for Hollywood Reporter. Dalton comments pointedly that this film "should find a keen audience among the the misery-porn masochists who program and attend film festivals," but will be only "very niche commercial prospect, especially for non-Balkan viewers." A pessimistic view of a well-crafted film in which, indeed, not enough finally happens. Screened for this review as part of the 2019 MoMA-FSLC New Directors/New Films Series.

ND/NF ]Showtimes: April 3, 8:45 PM; April 4, 6:30 PM
U.S. Premiere · Q&As with Ognjen Glavonić on April 3 & 4

[Chris Knipp]

ANDRÉ NOVIAS OLIVEIRA: LONG WAY HOME/TEMPORADA (2018)


SCENE FROM LONG WAY HOME/TEMPORADA ("A SEASON")

A woman of no means making her way alone

Juliana (Grace Passô) has moved from Itaúnas to a new region, Contagem (a municipality located near Belo Horizonte) to work as a public health inspector seeking dangers of dengue fever. Her husband Carlos has not come along yet. Actually relations between Juliana and her mate are not too good after a pregnancy disaster. Butt André Novias Oliveira isn't concerned with drama so much as feasting on the quotidian, as disaster creeps into it, vaguly glimpsed, extracting beauty from the banal.

Juliana works in a team, and there are friendly relations right away, especially with the big corpulent Russão (rapper Russo Apr) and the tall thin Hélio (Hélio Ricardo). She has to bang on the metal gates a lot to get people to answer, but mostly they're friendly about being inspected, except for one bitchy lady. An easygoing mood prevails. Underneath, things are complicated.

Eesential to the success of this second feature by Novias Oliveira is Grace Passô, who draws us into the quiet depth of a middle-aged woman of color in suburban Brazil patiently making her way. One writer at Brazilia saod the filmmaker "achieved something reserved for artists: making a film that can interest the viewer for nearly two hours without broaching any subject, no character, no landscape, nothing particularly special." This is an affectionate and attentive look at nondescript, "invisible" people. The subtitles, at the risk of incongruity with phrases like "What up, bro?", "For real," "She's so fucking hot," do their best to convey the strong colloquial flavor of the dialogue. Where the film and its cinematographer excel is in conveying all the different kinds of colorful spaces its characters occupy in the course of a day, including cluttered shops, tiny dwellings with Playstation, and a downmarket hairdressing school.

Juliana isn't a tragic figure, a comic figure, or a heroic one, just a person of good will and courage with an ability to enjoy life, and as the film progresses she becomes more and more real and the film becomes more and more engaging, rich, and unpredictable. A remarkable little film that embodies many of the qualities of small indie Latin American films but has a quality of its own.

Long Way Home/Temporada ("Season"), 113 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 2018, and was included in at least five other international festivals including Torino, Rotterdam and Gothenburg; awarded Best Film prize at Brazilia. Limited release in Brazil. Jan. 2019. Screened for this review as part of the 2019 MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films.

ND/NF Showtimes; March 31, 3:15 PM; April 2, 8:45 PM
New York Premiere · Q&As with André Novais Oliveira on March 31 & April 2


GRACE PASSÔ in [I]LONG WAY HOME/TEMPORADA[/I ("A SEASON")]

[Chris Knipp]

LUKE LORENTZEN: MIDNIGHT FAMILY (2019)


FERNANDO, JOSOÉ AND JUAN ALEXIS OCHOA IN MIDNIGHT FAMILY

Breaking the rules to help people in Mexico City

Partly inspired, Lorentzen says by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Sweetgrass, Foreign Parts, Leviathan, Manakamana), this documentary is an observational and humanistic up close and personal glimpse at people coping with a health care system far worse than that of the US. The place is Mexico City:. The population is nine-million-plus. To serve them the city provides only forty-five ambulances. Private, for profit seat-of-the-pants ambulance services now work competitively to try to fill the gap. Director Luke Lorentzen discovered documentary gold by following one of these. Midnight Family is the prizewinning result.

Lorentzen moved to Mexico City after college with an idea for a film and shifted to this one when he met the Ochoas and they let him ride with them for one night. He spent nearly eighty days filming from two in the afternoon to six or eight in the morning embedded night after night in the private ambulance run by the Ochoa family. He speaks Spanish and worked as a one-man crew using two two Sony FS cameras, one mounted on the roof focusing on the crew in the front window, the other hand held by himself. He shot over a three year period, out with them for a hundred days, though he says that seventy percent of the best material came in the last few days of the shooting.

Lorentzen respects the patients' privacy, but hangs closely with the Ochoas, gaining their confidence for intimate moments. Little, chubby Josoé is lazy and makes excuses not to go to school. Juan is only seventeen, but he drives the vehicle and in all ways is the grownup (though he sleeps in the vehicle curled up with a big fluffy doll). Fer, their father, has a heart condition and sometimes cannot cope. Along with them is Manuel Hernández. There are long waits with nothing happening. There are frantic races to accident sites, speeding through the night streets and crazy Mexico City traffic not only to save the injured but also to beat other private ambulances to the job and the money. But there is not always money even when they get the job. Sometimes their clients are too poor to pay, or just refuse to, and they wind up with an evening's work and no profits, only losses. It's hard at times to see how the Ochoas can even do this job, or afford the equipment. And then there are the cops, who harass them and demand constant bribes, and paperwork, "protocols," a joke since it's all outside the law.

But for Juan, who's muscular and sharp but still wears braces on his teeth, and who enjoys playing to the camera and mouths off with a warm sense of humor, this work is the pleasure of doing good and helping people but also the adrenaline rush of the excitement and struggle to succeed.

This is a human document, but like other good observational films, also a visual treat. Lorenten makes excellent use of the striking night light of the city, the neon glare, the blur, the flashing signals that can make what be drab in daytime into magic. When Midnight Family is operating full-tilt, it's intoxicating to the senses, with the blur and rush of the vehicle, the scream of sirens, and Fer's amplified voice as he uses a loudspeaker to urge people to get out of the way so the ambulance can push through. This is where the Sony cameras pay off with their exceptional capacity to capture in low light. Everything comes together for the filmmaker when he gets dramatic (and beautiful) coverage when the Ochoas rush a girl with a traumatic brain injury and her mother to a private hospital knowing every minute counts to save her, and he captures Juan pacing around and talking to his girlfriend Jessica on the phone later about how this turned out.

The film, which Lorentzen edited as well as shot as a one-man crew, ends beautifully with Fer and Juan picking up Josoé at the schoolyard in the afternoon, then heading out together in the ambulance into the maelstrom of Mexico City traffic at twilight, with the cars' taillights just beginning to glow.

At an appearance in the Guadalajara Festival, Lorentzen said he wanted to show how a good family is forced eventually into corrupt practices because of a broken system and "the corruption is gradually playing with the lives of people, and the Ochoa family is hostage to the police and the health system." But it's a fun watch too - as Lorry Kikta of Film Threat says, "a very exciting, sad, yet extremely funny film."

Midnight Family, 91 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2019 where it won the documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematography. Four other festivals, including the 2019 MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series, where it was screened for this review. Many reviews: Metacritic (Metascore 85%), including Nich Schager for Variety. See also a Mexican article about this film.

ND/NF Showtimes: April 4, 8:30 PM; April 5, 9:00 PM
New York Premiere · Q&As with Luke Lorentzen on April 4 & 5




JUAN ALEXIS OCHOA IN MIDNIGHT FAMILY