New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

ALEX ROSS PERRY: VIDEOHEAVEN (2025)

The rise and decline of the video store, as told in film clips

This is a film about video stores, which has been done before. But this one is notable for its many amazing film clips. The phenomenon of video stores, Maya Hawke's narration says, began in the seventies and ended in the 2010's. The narration sees this as a kind of heyday, and when we think of, say, Quentin Tarantino, we can only agree. Didn't work in such a store give birth to this marvellous film-buff filmmaker in a special way, providing a library and a film school? The narration points out the video store era was a time when getting a movie to watch at home was a "face-to-face, hand-to-hand process," a person-to-person social transaction (and imagine talking to Tarantino in choosing and taking out your pick). There is a nostalgic cult of the VHS among film buffs, with a place for the video store in it.

Why did video stores predominate in America more than Europe? The film doesn't give a good explanation, but assumes it's because they were places mostly for Hollywood products. Does that matter, and is it even true? My favorite video stores were all ones where lots of foreign films were on offer. And yes, I watched this film because of strong memories of a dazzed, blissful period when I myself rented, brought home, and watched videos in one format or another nearly every day.

The film concentrates on showing and talkling about clips of video stores from movies, starting with Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, where a hertbreakngly young Hawke wanders wide-eyed and pale-skinned through a videos store in knitted cap and plunging neckline whilst a soft voice-over of his voice recites the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. We see a richly decorated store in the 1989 Speaking Parts. There will be many, many more.

Next comes a focus on the topic of VCR's, which, starting in the late 1970's, quickly becme a staple in Ameican homes: video cassette recorders, used primarily for playing videotapes. Some of us had two machines, one for playing the rented videotape, the other for copying it while watching it, fof future re-watching, which rarely happened, after the tape was returned to the rental store. There were those of us who accumulated thus hundreds of putatively illegal copies, in one's own private library. Who watches them now? But there still are a few video stores, which mostly might have the DVD's that replaced the tapes, but the tapes too. I find from a search that "Seattle's Scarecrow Video is one of the world's largest physical media collections, with over 130,000 film titles available to the public to rent on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VHS. The institution's VHS collection is comprised of around 15,000 items." And it's current. The importance of this survival is that, as with 78 rpm to LP, and LP to CD, many titles in one format never get transferred to the new one.

VHS tapes first appeared in the US in 1976 (in Japan a year before) and interest in the wonder of independent home viewing (not relying on what came over your TV channels) rapidly grew. Over the course of the 1980's, the narration tells us, there was "a profound change in American movie culture," signalled by the growing dominance of home video-watching over movie-theater-going. Not a happy development, I might say; but then, it meant people could watch lots more films. Videos and video stores were the main conduit through which new movies got seen. The chain stores like Blockbuster took over from the little, dark, ideosyncratic stores with their film buff staffs. They instead were "family-friendly," large, brightly-lit, uniformly laid out, organized, but lacking that je-ne-sais-quoi that made the little video stores places with a vibe and more of a cult feeling and following. Those of us who were video fiends and buffs never really warmed to the big chain video stores, but we had to resort to them as the cool ones were overwhelmed or gave up - though a few powerhouse indie stores remained like the famous Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Beyond Video in Baltimore or Movie Madness in Portland. The force of change of course was technology. This film doesn't much go into that, but people continue to watch videos at home, ideally on blu-ray, probably on much bigger and nicer screens than were common in the heyday of VHS. But they must have to buy them rather than rent them.

I remember videotapes. They coild let you down, as when you got stuck with a bad copy or a broken or damaged tape. But with a high quality VCR it was possible to watch segments of a film in slow-mo, and even frame by frame, to pick apart how a sequence was made. Apparently this is still possible with high-quality players. It is I who have fallen off. Though over the past 20 years I have watched a lot of new films in the Walter Reade Theater at New York's Lincoln Center, which is as good a sound system and big screen as you can find, I've also myself to become largely reduced to watchiing online screeners on a laptop.

That way, something is lost - the physicality of the movie-viewing experience. When we are no longer getting access to the thing in a physical form, and it's robbed of its thing-ness, it also loses an essential element of its value. Think of the difference between wearing a diamond necklace and looking at a picture of one. An online screener, a blu-ray DVD, or a VHS tape all provide an image on a screen, but the disc and tape deliveries have a physical, artisial quality.

Alex Ross Perry's film, as I've suggested, is most notable for its many short clips of movie scenes set in video stores. A brief one from Juice (1992) simply shows the behind of a very fetching female video cleark in rolled up denim short shorts - and long black stockings. Next there immediately comes Hélas pour moi (1993), where another female cleark proffers a video of Cannibal Man to a tall blond young French guy with a top knot, who sets the video aside and says, "Pour que le mal existe, il faut justement la créature" (For evil to exist, the creature is necessary).

The rapid, entertaining onrush of clips throughout is sometimes ironic; repetitive; not always selective. Some quirky or violent moments occurring in video stores appear after the statement that they had become a dull and ordinary feature of ordinary life. But the point is made that, in the 2010's, video stores in movies became routine, "unremarked-upon." And meanwhile a big format shift had come, from videotape to DVD (laster disc isn't mentioned, and true, it's only a blip, though I had them), which further downgraded the indie stores that might not have had the funds to lay in a full stock of DVD's. Partly this is a history not just of video stores so much, but of video stores on film, and the point is repeatedly (rather reduntantly) made that now, such images are historical only, because despite a few lingering stores, they have vanished from daily life.

Videoheaven's history shows that at first in movies video stores were shown a lot as associated with violence or porn. In the later 1980's they started to become more routine background with no special associations. The narrator also recounts how the stores themselves changed, as has been mentioned already, but also with the addition of small video rental sections in electronics stores or supermarkeets, etc. Again the dizzying number of short clips continue, showing how often video stores appeared in movies, in their day. We also see a dizzying array of bad male hairstyles.

In fact video stores were partly associated with violence and porn in real life, because one thing at least some of them did was make available movies that couldn't be shown in movie theaters or on television, B movies, slasher movies. Some of them actually had a little room with porn curtained off from the rest. But now the internet has no curtains.

Sometimes Videoheaven seems more like a doggedly thorough academic paper than a thoughtful documentary film. It doesn't seem to care about the quality of most of the films it shows clips from, which becomes obvious when it shows clips from Nicole Holofcener's 1996 Walking and Talking, where the passing affair of a female character, Amelia (a young Catherine Keener) and a "scruffy video clerk named Bill" (Kevin Corrigan), even if only a subplot of the film, seems more interesting than any of the films briefly glipsed so far. Were there no interesting movies involving video stores before 1996? This film goes back and forth in time, attaching immportance to the difference between the 1980's and 1990's, and then seeming to merge them together.

A point of interest arises when video clerks (finally!) come up as a topic, and the two clerks who became famous directors, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. A clip of Tarantino himself shows he revisited the store where he worked for five years to clelbrate his film's coming out on video, while Smith's Clerks is described because he alone of the two made a film set in a video store. Obviusly clerks are the human element in the video store, and important in movie representations of these places, and they play lots of different roles: potential date, mean S.O.B., smart guy, know-it-all snob, or "sympathetic outsider."

The film goes a bit overboard when it calls negociating a film rental from a clerk "a sacred transaction." Transaction, yes; but sacred? An interesting twist is scenes from bigger, more mainstream video stores where the clerks aren't so much rude, like Randal, in Kevin Smith's classic Clerks, as super-dumb about movies, like the one in Terry Zwigoff's 2001 Ghost World, who doesn't even know 8 1/2 from 9 1/2 Weeks. Basically, compared to small or independent video stores, the big chain ones in real life sucked, even if they had a lot of videos, because they lacked the individual touch or clerks who knew and cared.

It's nice, and logical, that this film gives special attention to Michel Gondry's 2008 Be Kind Rewind, with its fanciful tale of a video store that becomes, however implausibly, a center of interactive community creativity by fostering artisinal local remakes of Hollywood films. The narrator cites as the last film to be set in a video store is Marianna Palka's 2008 Good Dick, about a store clerk (Jason Ritter) who falls for an unnamed woman played by the director. The narrator is only interested in the fact that this was shot in a real video store that actually survives today, L.A.'s Cinephile Viideo. Is it a good movie? This documentary doesn't care. Tim Grierson concluded his review of iGood Dick in the Village Voice: "It feels provocative but inconclusive—brimming with intriguing ideas about love’s dark underbelly, but not quite confident enough to pull them off." Notes like that, about which of thsse movies featuring video stores are actually worth watching, would have made this a better, more useful film. It is interesting to be reminded tht Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend (2007) has a video store Will Smith visits after the apocalypse, shot in a store thatf actually went out of business shortly thereafter.

It's not germane to this film specifically perhaps, but in my mind I find the images of video stores are now replaced by videos of Criterion Closet Picks (I love the one by Mark Ryance, whose "perhaps" favorite is mine too, and what he says about it is beautiful) and the French counerpart, where ten-best picks in a similar cube packed with DVD's can be found on YouTube.

Videoheaven provides much more detail than can be mentioned here. I've left out dozens of films that are briefly cited with an identifying clip showing a video store glimpse. Indeed, the seeming comprehensiveness of this documentary - in its discssions of films, in its slightly repetitive orgnization - is a feature that can tend to make it seem at times more wearying than entertining. We deserved for the filmmakers to show us a more interesting, clearer path through all this detail. Perhaps Perry's taking ten years, as reported, to make this film contributed to a loss of perspective. Nonetheless, a feast and a record for VCR fans.

Videoheaven, 182 mins., was watched for this review on an online screener: the way a lot of us watch movies at home today. It premiered Feb. 5, 2025 at Rotterdam, according to Deadline, as part of "a Focus strand entitled 'Hold Video in Your Hand', celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture," which included other films. It was also featured at Groningen, Nyon, Jeonju, Sydney, Tribeca and Oak Cliff. US release July 2, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

MEL IN T

LANE MICHAEL STANLEY: T (2024)

Filmed over lead actor Mel Glickman’s real-life first year taking testosterone, T is a
fictionalized, never-before-seen journey of transmasculine discovery, portraying the struggles and joys encountered in friendships, family, and romantic relationships over this period of time as the changes take place due to the male sex hormone. This is a minimalist doc-fiction hybrid in which people involved partially act out what they are going throush as they are going through it. No frills here, but authentic feelings.

Interview with the director.

SYNOPSIS
Filmed over lead actor Mel Glickman’s real-life first year taking testosterone, T is a
fictionalized, never-before-seen journey of transmasculine discovery, authentically portraying
the moving struggles and joys encountered in friendships, family, and romantic relationships.
After being out as non-binary for four years, Em decides to take charge of their body and life
and begin testosterone therapy. Their fiancé Spencer reacts badly - though he is bisexual, he
can’t imagine coming out to his family and publicly dating someone who isn’t a woman. Em
leaves him, gets their prescription, and does their first testosterone shot with their friend
Rose, a trans woman navigating how to get back onstage after quitting music when she
transitioned.
Em starts dating Ana, a non-binary performance artist who shows Em how to let loose - and
inspires a sexual awakening in Em. But when Ana stops taking her bipolar medication, she
starts acting erratically - and Em falls back into the comfort of their relationship with Spencer.
Throughout the film, Em grows into themself, all while balancing their romantic relationships,
friendships, and how to tell their loving but conflicted mother who they truly are.

[Chris Knipp]

JOEL POTRYKUS, JOSHUA BURGE IN VULCANIZADORA

JOEL POTRYKUS: VULCANIZADORA (2024)

Sad friend

In this interesting, strange film from indie auteur Joel Potrykus, two men go on a camping trip in the Michigan woods. We begin with low-quality video of fire and arson. That lures us into the handsome 16mm shots of a rural trail. There is a lot of bickering, a lot of nervous monologuing by the leader of the trek. After an overnight, they come out overlooking a sandy beach. There, a climactic event occurs. There seems to be a joint ritual planned that goes awry. Only one of the pair comes back. He has a rendez-Vous with the law that does not turn out at all as he expected. He visits the young son of his friend. It's all like a loser bagatelle, a play with an underlying strain of sad sack gallows comedy.

Samuel Beckett might approve. In the interplay of the pair in the woods it's easy to recognize something of the humor of desperation Beckett explored in his novels and then built into the iconic tragicomedy of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Here again there is a pair fumbling through something, on the edge at least of their own apocalypse.

Derek Skiba (played by Potrykus himself, who wrote, directed, edited, and costars) is a balding man with a goatee. He first appears weighed down with camping gear and plans. His spiky hair evokes the image of the classic clown. He keeps a line of running patter going. He is accompanied by his friend, Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), unincumbrered, younger, without enthusiasm. Derek has all these plans, all this foolish cheer. But Marty is the one who has the ultimate plan. He looks gloomy, hopeless, and we start to learn why.

When low-res, mini-budget filmmaking is in the hands of an experienced practitioner, as here, there is no end of how its implications may spiral. Siddhant Adlakha attempts to suggest this in his Variety review when he says "These are men at the end of their ropes, who have now forced themselves into a symbolic purgatory. They exist, now, at the precipice of oblivion, but the result is unexpectedly funny despite this probing spiritual lens — or perhaps because of it."

There is a nice interplay of dimensions between the trek through the woods and what happens to Marty in the reckonings he faces back in town afterwards. It gives you something to think about. Ultimately Potrykus' dialogue hasn't the rich resonance the great Irishman, with his love of "the old questions, the old answers" achived. But Potrykus finds his own kind of thought-provoking tragicomedy here too nonetheless.

Musical moments achieve a considerable resonance. They range from the 20th-century European sophistication of Francis Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine" to the heavy metal violence of Christian Cooney's Vulcantera to the transcendence of "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma as sung by the immortal Maria Callas. See, do-it-yourselfers, what you can achieve with minimal means.

(I reviewed Joel Potrykus' Buzzard in New Directors/New Films in 2014.)

Vulcanizadora, 85 mins., debuted at Tribeca Jun. 8, 2024 and played also at two dozen other American and international festivals. Released by Oscilloscope, it opens in New York May 2, 2025 at IFC Center and the filmmaker will be present for the opening weekend.

[Chris Knipp]

JAMES MCDOWELL IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

PETER MCDOWELL: JIMMY IN SAIGON (2024)

TEASER
TRAILER

Exploring the mysterious life and tragic early death of the filmmaker's elder brother, in Saigon

In this very personal debut feature-length documentary, which Peter McDowell completed in his late forties, he explores the mysterious past of his eldest brother, James Austin McDowell, who died at 24 in 1972 in Saigon when Peter was five years old, and whose life seems to have been swept under the carpet by the family. Peter McDowell worked over the space of a decade making this film to find out the story, whose personal significance he also explores here.

Jimmy was a very young soldier drafted into the Vietnam war. "SP4 HHC 20 ENGR BGE VIETNAM," his tombstone reads. The twentieth engineers was a combat division. "The battalion was attached to the 18th Engineer Brigade for most of the war," an online site explains. "With its organic and attached special companies, the battalion constructed airfields and basecamps, conducted land clearing and route clearance operations, built roads and bridges, and supported Special Forces operations." It sounds intense and challenging, not to mention dangerous, but this film doesn't delve into that aspect of Jimmy's Vietnam experience. Vietnam came to mean much more to him than that.

What was Jimmy like when he returned to the US? We don't learn much about that either. Afer his military service ended Jimmy soon returned to Vietnam to live as a civilian. Why? For multiple reasons, apparently. As a youth in Champaign, Illinois he made a homemade movie that we glimpse called Archangel Blues, with other kids as the actors. He was also known as the source of humor in the family, it turned out from letters revealed now that he had not felt he belonged where he grew up, or perhaps the US in general. "I hate the fat, stupid, bourgeois people and the materialism," he said in one letter.

But there obviously was more to it than that in Jimmy's decision to go back to Vietnam. It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, he had secrets. The telegram informing the family of his death gave infection and heroin addiction as causes.

Brother Peter went back to Saigon a long time after that. Without knowing Vietnamese. He went back again later, knowing much more, including some of the language.

But before we learn much about that venture, Peter describes family dynamics, then his own gay sexuality, whose central relevance gradually emerges. The McDowells were a large, comfortable middle-class Catholic family (their big suburban house is often shown) in Champaign, Illinois. There were six kids. Their mother, who is much a part of this film, as are at times the remaining grownup sisters and brothers, and she speaks very comfortably on camera at two different times of her life (wearing stylish thin red glasses frames). Jimmy, the eldest, she says probably thought there were too many, so he didn't get the attention he wanted.

Jimmy just laughed when she asked him as a teenager if he liked girls or boys. Maybe he didn't know, she says. But Peter explains here that he himself was well aware early on of his own gayness. He came out to his mother when he was only sixteen, and describes the sweet, intimate moment. She rejected the idea. She thought it impossible Peter could be gay, believing such people were alcoholic, miserable losers (a not unusual image of the fifties, when she grew up). Peter being "president of his class" and a happy, smiling individual as shown in photos of that time, couldn't be "like that," she thought. But he was sure he was. He didn't need therapy, she did, he says he told her. (Their father, who died of Alzheimer's and is not heard from here, was a music teacher who knew gay people and got it.). "To her credit," he says, his mother did go to therapy, and over time became "a really loving ally and a vocal gay rights advocate."

This is the framework Peter chooses for moving into his investigation of his brother's story. And this framework is a valid one, though arguably, since he takes nearly a quarter of the film's runtime to get here, he has been, in cinematic terms, a bit coy about it. But Jimmy too obviously was coy, or, as his mother says, "protective of his privacy." He told them in letters some things, not others. He said he was working for a law firm that defended American soldiers in trouble, while writing some columns for the Overseas Weekly.

Pages of typed letters home, not reported on in full detail, suggest that Jimmy was a literate and articulate young man. Though he conceals a lot, he does report that he has "the shits," for which he says opium was "the only cure," and that now he's addicted. Describing a predicted future lifetime of wide international travel, he says he expects to return at the end to Vietnam, that letter ends, "to die with my opium pipe and harem of concubines."

On his first trip, Peter goes to Paris to meet Yves Bletzacker, a journalist who we are told was a good friend of Jim's in Saigon. AS an example of the film's adept blend of live and archival materials, we see both Peter talking to Yves, in English and in French, and the detailed letter Yves penned in French to the family after his young friend's death. He had lived in a Saigon loft with a panoramic city view that his American friend later breifly moved into, then moving out to a remote, poor neighborhood to live with a big Vietnamese family. In that family was "Lily," Luyen, who he had suggested was a romantic interest. But she, in a letter (in Vietnamese) later denied that, explaining Jimmy's friend was not she but her brother Dũng (pronounced "Dyung"), who was heartbroken when Jim died and shattered to be forbidden to visit his body in the Saigon American hospital, which, with breathtaking wisdom, forbad Vietnamese visitors. That is all Yves knows... Peter also goes to a small town in France to see Diep, Yves' Vietnamese ex-wife, who also knew Jim, and tells more. She speaks a lot about how "fragile" he was; you wanted to protect him, she says, but Vietnam was a hard place to protect people.

At last Peter goes to Saigon, 44 years after his elder brother's death there. He likes it right away, but, going around with an interpreter, winds up having a very hard time at this remove of time finding anyone who knew Luyen or Dũng. But he does find where Jim lived with them, and the very house, desite a different numbering system. Later he visits the beach where Jim posed for a photo with the one who may have been the love of his life. The American was 24, the Vietnamese guy 18. That photo appears again and again. It's enshrined by Peter and Jim's mother, as later multiple photos of Jim are enshrined next to ones of Dũng by the latter's sister "so he will not be alone."At

In the US Peter sees Dr. Robert Carolan, Jim's doctor in Vietnam, who says his death of a staph infection from a boil on his backside was tragic because it could have been prevented, had it been treated earlier. He doesn't even think his heroin use had been heavy. A friend of that time says it was.

After eight years' search on the internet, Peter finds Luyen, who immigrated to the US in the nineties, and comes to see her in Des Moines. At last she explains that yes, Jim and Dyung were in love and lived together (not with her), and they had already met when Jim was in the Army and Dyung was a moto driver. But they denied being gay because of prejudices in the country. Dyung died very young, at 40, a heavy drinker and smoker, perhaps sent into a tailspin by Jim's untimely death. And perhaps by the repression. Luyen has said the Vietnamese spit on gays. It turns out her letters to the McDowell family after Jim's death were really written by Dyung and signed with her name, as cover.

Jimmy in Saigon is at once an elegy to the lost brother and the record of a patient exploration that reveals the filmmaker's own identity, not only his gayness, but his love of family and his dedication to the task of exploring it and recording the esploration on film., The film leaves one with a sad feeling of the short life, the tragic bereived lover, and the doctor has called Jim's death "tragic." But did Jim not live his dream and his love to the hilt, leaving behind the country he found unsympathetic for one whose sensuous pleasures he embraced? "One can do a lot of living in a short time," Jim ends one letter.

For himself, Peter says he feels lightened by his research because it has removed dark secrets, casting a purifying light on them. Their mother might not agree so easily, but the impressive work of discovery around a close blood tie reminded me of that great, and personallyl healing 2003 film of family exploration by Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect: A Son's Journey, the "bastard" son's posthumous discovery of, and connection with, his famous father, the great architect Louis Kahn. In Peter McDowell's case, the filmmaker has sought to lift a cloud that hovered over his whole family, while as a gay man he has searched for lost kinship with his mysterous brother. This is a worthy effort that will resonate also with queer people wishing to understand repressive social attitudes toward sexuality that hopefully are fading, but still leave their traces everywhere. In learning about the fraught, semi-hidden gay love, I even thought of Brokeback Mountain.

Jimmy in Saigon, 89 mins., debuted as mentioned at BFI Flare Mar. 19, 2022, showing also in over a dozen LGBTQ+ festivals in 2022 the US and abroad including Frameline (San Francisco) and Newfest (New York). Theatrical release in New York April 25, 2025 and in Los Angeles May 8, 2025.


JAMES MCDOWELL AND TRAN KHANH DUNG IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

[Chris Knipp]

CAAMFEST May 8-11, 2025 Berkeley Three Muslim and Palestinian related films

PALESTINIAN LANDSCAPES
Palestinian Landscapes brings together two powerful films exploring empire, ecology, and resistance. Razan Alsalah’s A Stone’s Throw evokes dreamlike cycles of displacement and return across fragmented geographies shaped by resource and labor economies. In Foragers, Jumana Manna traces the criminalization of foraging in Palestine, revealing how colonial legal systems regulate access to land and tradition.

A Stone’s Throw, directed by Razan AlSalah
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A Stone’s Throw rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.

Director Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher
*Screener available
Foragers, directed by Jumana Manna
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Elderly Palestinians are caught between their right to forage their own land and the harsh restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the basis of preservation.
Director/Producer/Co-Editor Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist

AGAINST AMNESIA: Screening & Seminar
This program, in partnership with the Berkeley-based Islamic Scholarship Fund, explores the intertwined histories and ongoing realities of displacement, colonial violence, and resistance in Palestine and Bangladesh. Through a narrative short about a Palestinian grandmother uprooted from her home and a documentary on the forgotten 1970s genocide in Bangladesh, the program highlights the the ways in which historical violence shapes mundane aspects of everyday life. A facilitated discussion will follow.

Bengal Memory, directed by Fahim Hamid
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
A Bangladeshi American explores his father’s memories of a forgotten genocide in their
native country and uncovers the controversial role the U.S. played in it.
Director/Producer/Editor Fahim Hamid was born in Bangladesh
*Screener available

Maqluba, directed by Mike Elsherif
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
Laila, a Palestinian-American drummer, visits her grandmother in her new apartment during a powerful storm under the guise of helping her unpack. But her nefarious goals slowly unfold as they delve deeper into the mystical fateful night.
Writer/Director/Producer Mike Elsherif is a Palestinian-American filmmaker
*Screener available


SHORT
Billo Rani, directed by Angbeen Saleem
Part of the Shorts Program: Centerpiece Shorts
Sunday, May 11, 12:00pm | Roxie
When Hafsa, a sparkly and impulsive 12-year-old girl, is made aware of her unibrow at Islamic Sunday School in a lesson on “cleanliness”, her eyebrows come alive and begin to speak to her.
The film is set in an Islamic Sunday School and centers around a South Asian Muslim girl
Director/Writer/Producer Angbeen Saleem is a Pakistani Muslim artist
*Screener Available


A Stone's Throw
https://vimeo.com/868181676
pw: 7aifa

Bengal Memory
https://gumlet.tv/watch/67dc1999982f3b096493d238
pw: DOC1971!

Maqluba
https://vimeo.com/998772961?ts=0&share=copy
pw: teta

Billo Rani
https://vimeo.com/1019601428?share=copy
pw: threaded
--

[Chris Knipp]

DANIEL MINAHAN: ON SWIFT HORSES (2024)

A feast that leeaves one a little hungry

This glamorous, bold, and almost-wonderful novel adaptation blends dual romance with film noir. One of the most favorable reviews (Hollywood Reporter)) starts with saying they don't make movies like this any more. And this is one way of approaching the experience of watching it. You imagine entering a dark movie house, sitting through a couple of hours of drama, color, glamour, emotion. And then you walk out into the afternoon feeling hung-over, and vaguely let down.

The music, the photography, the scenery, the five main actors are enough to sweep you away. But something goes a little wrong. Not too much, because those rewards keep paying off. The trouble is these two storylines. This is a bold mainstream gay movie that takes place at a time when it wasn't safe to be gay. This is a movie you couldn't make till Brokeback Mountain came along twenty years ago. But On Swift Horses throws that possibility away. It catches the physicality of homosexuality but not the emotion.

Of course you can't really say they don't make them like this anymore, because they never made glamorous starry stories where beautiful main characters had secret, intense gay lives. That did not happen.

There are five main characters. There are two brothers and a woman. She marries one of the brothers, who is back from the Korean war. The other, a wild, mysterious type the woman is plainly attracted to, wanders off, teasing her and his brother with a promise of coming back to share there new life in California. She goes on to have a secret lesbian affair and the wayward brother acquires a male latin lover. They have another secret: he gambles and she plays the horses. He just gets into a lot of danger, but she plays the game very, very well. She begins working at a lunchroom heavily patronized by racetrack insiders with big mouths, and she takes notes, which pays off, big time.

The two brothers are Lee, played by Will Poulter, and Julius, played by Jacob Elordi. The lady is Muriel: that's Daisy Edgar Jones, who one critic claims is a ringer for Elizabeth Taylor. She doesn't have Liz's lush beauty, or her presence and acting skill, but she is very good and is done up to look nice. She looks in the mirror and likes what she sees. These are great roles for all three. Will Poulter has never looked so sexy, or so astonishingly elegant. When he is sitting on the floor, desolated by what he has learned about Muriel, his slacks and shirt are just so. His brown suede shoes and shining white socks make you long for a return to Fifties men's styles. (This is a great looking mnovie.). Did men have bleach-blushed hair back then? Never mind: Will was meant to wear that pompadour and to speak in that American accent. The long, tall, dark, riply-chested Elordi always looks good, but here there is a mixture of risk and sadness that is truly touching. When Diego Calva told old Variety that he and Jacob Elordi have some "pretty hot scenes" he wasn't exaggerating.

The trouble is that once Julius (I never quite bought into that name) goes off on his own, the movie splits (desite the literary device of their secret correspondence) into two plotlines, his and Muriel's. It's quite fun in the first third of the movie when he is gambling, then working in a casino, while she is sneaking off all dolled up to win at the racetrack. The racetracks themselves are filmed to look bright and stylish. In Vegas Julius meets Henry, played by Diego Calva (of Narcos: Mexico and Babylon). Henry goes for Julius in a big way and Julius responds completely. In fact he is the one who wants to stay and have Henry as his anchor, a surprise coming from this rakish actor. The note Henry eventually leaves when he runs off is "Couldn't wait."

Meanwhile Muriel is having a fun time of her own, namely Sandra (Sasha Calle). (I should have known about Sasha Calle but I just didn't remember her from The Flash.). It all starts with a jar of olives. If a girl teaches a girl how to eat an olive ("It has a pit."), well, the rest just follows, doesn't it? There is somthing feisty and self-contained in Sasha Calle that sets off Daisy Edgar-Jones' doe-eyed innocence-in-love look. (Tough at the racetrack, she's a softie at the girl-love.)

These two secret lovers, Calva and Calle, are fine. I'd like to try Sasha Calle's olives, and maybe her eggs too. It's good that Diego Calva has an authentically heavy Mexican accent, even if it's hard to understand at times. The trouble is that the filmmakers don't manage well the part in the end when Shannon Pufahl's 2019 source novel teasingly almost-reunites Julius and Muriel.

Even this soft failure is almost covered up by an unsually pleasing, lush, sonorous score so warm and comforting it makes you more than willing to sit through the credits to the end. The composer Mark Orton is a master at putting classical-quality music to cinematic use. This is not a film that drags. It keeps the attention by the eventually unsatisfying flips from Muriel-world to Julius-world, with the transitions sliding seamlessly from Daisy in bed with her lover to Jacob in bed with his, and back again, or so it seems.

On Swift Horses is a beautiful movie and one that really ought to be seen on a big screen. The sixth glamorous star is the director of photography, Luc Montpellier. This is a great looking film that's fun to watch, a treat for queer audiences, and a fine showpiece for its actors that isn't doing very well with the critics and with this timing hasn't got much chance at the Oscars, but see it anyway; there's not much out there to see as good as this right now.

On Swift Horses, 117 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2024, showing also at SXSW , Sonoma, Martha's Vinyard, Phoenix, Miami and a handful of other US festivals, and it opens theatrically in the US by Sony Pictures Classics on Apr. 25, 2025. Metacritic rating: 66%.


WILL AND DAISY IN ON SWIFT HORSES. BUT THIS CLIP CUTS OFF HIS SHOES AND SOCKS!

[Chris Knipp]

DÉSIRÉ MIA IN ABSOLUTE DOMINION

LEXI ALEXANDER: ABSOLUTE DOMINION (2025)

TRAILER

Abs dom

This tale of a contest to end a future state of global religous conflict draws on Star Wars and perhaps The Hunger Games and has some nice ideas and a cool new young star. With a director who is part Palestinian, we get some conversation in Aabic and more awareness of other languages and cultures than usual for an American film, and that's a good thing. Isn't it nice also to think world conflict might be resolved with a single hand-to-hand combat encounter? This is billed as "a radical new form of diplomacy."

It's the future and many of the world's major cities have been trashed in what has become a global holy war, multiple religions fighting for dominance. A jokey, F-word-talking Patton Oswalt character called Fix Huntley, talking on a cheap camera in a van somehow gets worldwide attention when he proposes a martial arts competition, in which the winner's religion will become the dominant one, to resolve this chaos. A competition Fix Huntley proposes, known as The Battle of Absolute Dominion, will be held and the winner's religion will be the dominant one.

Sagan Bruno (newcomer Désiré Mia) emerges as the unknown top dog in the tournament. If he indeed wins, his religion will be the dominant one. He is 6'3", 190 lbs., has a reach of 80", fights "transvait" style, and easily wins his 12 prelims for qualifiers who are unranked, each of which we rapidly glimpse. He comes from IHS, the Institute of Humanism and Science, so, not a religion at all.

Star Désiré Mia is a tall, loose-limbed fashion model with a German mother and an Ivorian father. He is a 25-year-old social media creator with 220,000 Instagram followers whose parents wish he had finished school. What works about him is that, apart from the smooth, lithe way he fights, with those looks it makes sense when it emerges that Sagan was genetically engineered from donors with this kind of competition in mind. Sagan reportedy has an IQ of 180 and speaks eight languages. He doesn't have to write down phone numbers he needs to remember, just glance at them. His fighting style is balletic: he seems more like a dancer than pugilist and all the "pro" fighters who are matched with him look clunky by comparison, like they'e trying too hard. There is a calm, pleasant air about him that is appealing, perhaps a little otherworldly.

As the movie gets talkier, one of the genetic donors comes in, Sagan's scientist "mother" Satara (Oluniké Adeliyi), a Rhodes Scholar and former world champion gymnast who's also a srhink. This emerges in a chat between the tall, bearded coach and the short female security specialist assigned to Sagan. The father is there too and the picture develops these relationships so that despite being genetically modified, Sagan is loving and loved, like anybody else. The screenplay delves interestingly into a subplot about maintaining security for Sagan in this violent, hostile world, which becomes much riskier after he emerges as a potential winner.

Beside the jokey Patton Oswalt character, the frontal figure for the world's communication is also comedic, a very campy one with heavy eye makeup, a dark five-o'clock-shadow beard, pink hair, a succession of wild outfits, and talk that is in the "Miss Thing" style.

They hash over the fact that Sagan's toughest opponent so far in the Shalom Stadium prelims, a Dari (perhaps meaning Zoroastrian) person, wants to fight to the death even when pinned, and Sagan won't kill him. He eventually "taps out," and competition officials want to figure out by studying tapes how Sagan accomplished this.

Another opponent is a giant Sumo type Sagan beats by climbing around on him like an acrobat. He concludes: "when your opponent is a bull, be a muleta. If he is a muleta, be a bull. Just don't be a matador." Certainly an original metaphor.

When in the midst of finally fighting his first official top-50 opponent, Sagan appears to produce a weapon, and proceedings are halted. It's a misunderstanding, which is frequent with Sagan because his special skills are so unexpected. Eventuallly he becomes justified and recognized and goes on to win a decisive victory when badly injured. But the drama of this is lessened because he doesn't seem to feel the pain. The other combatants have by now begun to see him as a "prophet" because everyone now knows that he hears God talking to him, a development that changes his status as the "athiest" fighter, though this interesting development isn't fully resolved.

This is a different, intelligent kind of martial arts picture even if it fall short of top ranking in both the intellectual and the martial arts categories and doesn't quite achieve the powerful and suspenseful finale the genre demands. Deesiré Mia is an interesting new entry into the martial arts movie roster. At one point it appears that he speaks fluent Portuguese. On an Instagram self-interview he says he has no hidden talents but in this movie he already reveals abilities that are unusual, so that statement seems over-modest.

Other important cast members, somewhat hard to pin to character names, are Alex Winter (Bill and Ted Face the Music), Julie Ann Emery (Preacher), June Carryl (Helstrom), Oluniké Adeliyi (The Expanse), Regan Gomez (Queen Sugar) and Andy Allo (Upload). Also included are Andy Allo, Mario D’Leon, Alex Winter, Junes Zahdi, Alok Vaid-Menon, and John Siciliano. Philip Tan, who’s had a long stunt career that includes work in Inception and Minority Report, oversaw fight choreography, which is not too shabby. According to a Las Vegas Review Journal piece from earlier this month, as a setting the filmmakers used a closed casino called Terrible’s in a small town in Nevada, and a lot of the tournament action appears to be at a hotel. The film makes good use of its very minimal production design with music, sound effects, and a lively cast. People of color are well represented.

During post-production Netflix and Blumhouse departed from the project ( Variety reported), but it was picked up for US and internatonal distribution by Giant Pictures and is available online in the US now.

Director and writer Lexi Alexander is a German-Palestinian filmmaker and martial artist who is known for her work on films such as Johnny Flynton (2002), Green Street Hooligans (2005), Punisher: War Zone (2008) and Lifted (2010).

Absolute Dominion, 100 mins., opens in theaters and online starting May 9, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)


TILDA SWINTON IN THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

A trip north

The Eternal Daughter may be categorized as a film of horror or the supernatural, but devotees of either will doubtless be disappointed. Numerous critics describe it as "a distinctly minor work" by the director, whose 2019 The Souvenir brought her to wide attention, and to mine. It's worth going back and watching all her three earlier features, Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition: they're not fun watches, but the unfun-ness is distinctly her own, uppermiddleclass British constraints and torments that will seem to grow out of, not lead into, the autobiographical film student with the unfortunate posh boyfriend of The Souvenir. The underimpressed critics also say The Eternal Daughter, which serves as a sequel to The Souvenir II, the end of a trilogy, that it is "slooow."

Well, The Eternal Daughter is unique, and while I'd agree it has its longeurs, and is almost Beckettian in its uneventfulness. It's also subtle and beautiful, and the performance at the center of it by Tilda Swinton as both Julie Hart, a filmmaker, and Rosalind Hart, her mother, whom the hyper-attentive Julie takes to a big old, apparently empty hotel for her birthday, is remarkable. The double performance is not just a stunt. It's also a brilliant idea central to the film's themes and ideas, which magnify and unfold over time like the old Japanese paper flowers that grew when you dipped them in water. And all this isn't just cleverness. It serves to deliver hard emotional honesty that characterizes Hogg's best moments in the other films. After the slow passages, as I watched, the emotion grew, and at the end I was devastated with a still unfolding sense of sorrow too deep for tears.

Hogg makes much use of the horror vibe and genre ticks throughout - a pale face in a window; knocks in the night; Rosalind's setter Louis (the canine companion an important character in many a family), brought along, disappearing and then popping up back in the room; the odd, unfriendly "staff;" the confounding corridors and rooms; the fog outside - and all these events and things allow for the general feeling we have that something strange is going on. Many will doubtless guess the film's secret early on. That's unimportant. It's all in the very distinctive nuance of the film and the interchanges between Julie and Rosalind. It's very important that until the end, a two-shot doesn't occur. You see Julie saying something, then you see - or will you see? You never know - Rosalind. And yes, you're very aware that both are Tilda Swinton in two different sorts of drag. The Rosalind drag includes peculiarly subtle aging makeup. She's not made to look very old. (A very old woman is seen toward the end, in a kind of coda and subtly spooky jolt.) You're marveling at the costumer's and makeup artist's art and the acting, but you're very aware that you're watching Tilda Swinton.

And all this is kind of creepy, if not what you'd call "horrible." Or maybe it is; maybe you can anticipate a Hitchcockian shock coming. It's not like that. It's more like the air goes out of the tire. (Or tyre.) The more overt horror-supernatural vibe comes from the great aristocratic house in Wales that Julie and Rosalind are staying at. It is a place, then in private hands, where Rosalind, as a young girl, was sent with other family members to escape the bombing during the War. But Julie doesn't know much about this. She has devoted much of her life to caring about and loving her mother - she has a husband, but no children - but her mother remains largely a mystery to her. Other later visits to the house turn out to have occurred later, and things happened, not happy memories, that Julie didn't know about. The place is beautiful, in a mournful way. The accoutrements of the rooms, even the keys at the front desk, are handsome. the ornate, formal landscaping outside, shrouded often in cinematic fog, is beautiful in its layers of green. The exterior shots look like subtle color lithographs.

The place isn't particularly friendly. Julie and Rosalind are greeted by a grumpy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), who also reappears as the waitress at the dining room (and there are only four dishes on the menu). Is Harold Pinter an influence? This is in some ways like a magnificently visually expanded play, a chamber drama, a drama in the head. A warmer character is a groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell) who talks to Julie a few times and comforts and shares an understanding of loss. He says his wife died a year ago.

Julie is here to celebrate Rosalind's birthday - or is she? The birthday celebration turns out to be grotesque and sad, family happiness gone wrong, though a a bottle of champagne is uncorked and poured from and a birthday cake is brought in. Julie chooses to bring it in herself. But whenever Julie and Rosalind are seated talking together at meals, Julie surreptitiously sets her smartphone out to record the conversation. Early on she's said she's here to work, on a new film presumably, and she goes to a special place to do so, but she can't sleep, she's uncomfortable, and she goes day after day without getting any work done. The other use of the smartphone is to try to talk to her husband. This she has to do out in front of the hotel pacing about near a hedge trying to get reception, which isn't good. And the wi-fi is patchy in the building as well.

These descriptions sound ordinary enough. But in Joanna Hogg's skilled hands and the meticulous, complicated interchanges of Tilda and Tilda, they resonate with meanings you go on pondering long after the film is over. The heart of the matter is the confrontation of lives and family relationships, the permanent, difficult, mysterious, inescapable ones. The daughter is "eternal" because filial relationships never end. Imagine making a movie about your mother and its turning out to be a sort of horror film. Others would make a story that's joyous and celebratory. But where is the truth? I remember the priest who Malraux talks about in his Anti-Memoirs who, questioned on what he had learned about people from thirty years of hearing confession, gave two ideas; there is no such thing as a grownup person; and people are much less happy than they appear. But the scenes we have watched have been an expiation. And the end Julie has come thorough and is typing away on her laptop: the new film has come to her. This one.

If any of this sounds intriguing, you are urged to see The Eternal Daughter. It's a marvelous film, a study of grief, memory and family relationships that cuts to the bone. A minor work? Remember the little Fragonard painting in the Wallace Collection in The Souvenir. That whole film grows out of it.

The Eternal Daughter, 96 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2022 at Venice, showing at nine or more other international festivals, including Toronto, Zurich, London, New York (Main Slate), Vienna, Seville, AFI, Thessaloniki and Marrakech. Limited US theatrical release and on itnernet Dec. 2, 2022. Metacritic rating: 79%.