NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2020 (March 25-April 5, 2020)

[Chris Knipp]

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

New Directors/New Films (March 25-April 5, 2020) ]

CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS
BABYTEETH (Shannon Murphy 2019)
BOYS STATE (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine 2020)
DWELLING IN THE FUCHUN MOUNTAINS ( Gu Xiaogang 2029)
THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS (Robert Machoian 2020)

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

All films are digitally projected unless otherwise noted


OPENING NIGHT FILM BOYS STATE

Opening Night
Boys State
Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, USA, 2020, 109m
New York Premiere
The sensational winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is a wildly entertaining and continually revealing immersion into a week-long annual program in which a thousand Texas high school seniors gather for an elaborate mock exercise: building their own state government. Filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine closely track the escalating tensions that arise within a particularly riveting gubernatorial race, training their cameras on unforgettable teenagers like Ben, a Reagan-loving arch-conservative who brims with confidence despite personal setbacks, and Steven, a progressive-minded child of Mexican immigrants who stands by his convictions amidst the sea of red. In the process, they have created a complex portrait of contemporary American masculinity, as well as a microcosm of our often dispiriting national political divisions that nevertheless manages to plant seeds of hope. An Apple release.

Closing Night
The Mole Agent
Maite Alberdi, Chile, 2020, 90m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This clever, entirely unexpected delight weds a spy movie conceit to an observational documentary framework: Sergio is a dapper widower in his early eighties who gets hired by a private detective to go undercover in a nursing home to investigate whether a woman who lives there is being abused and robbed. Initially, Sergio, with his spy glasses and lack of tech savvy, cuts a conspicuous and amusing figure as he reports back to his no-nonsense boss. But like any great detective story, the solution to the mystery isn’t as important as what’s learned along the way, and Sergio forges poignant, sometimes heartbreaking bonds with an array of fascinating elderly women. Director Maite Alberdi’s camera captures interactions with remarkable intimacy and compassion, resulting in a warm, funny work of nonfiction with an emotional power that sneaks up on you.

Anne at 13,000 Ft.
Kazik Radwanski, Canada, 2019, 75m
New York Premiere
Actress Deragh Campbell has been building a repertoire of idiosyncratic, lived-in performances (including last year’s ND/NF selection MS Slavic 7), but her rattling, interiorized portrait of a young woman in free-fall in Anne at 13,000 Feet sets new heights for her—as well as for its director, Kazik Radwanski (whose also tightly focused Tower was an ND/NF highlight in 2013). Here, the nimble Canadian filmmaker forces viewers to dive headlong into the daily struggles of Anne, a young daycare worker in Toronto whose seemingly steady life gives way to increasing anxiety and recklessness, her unpredictable behavior coinciding with a burgeoning romance with a well-meaning guy (Matt Johnson) wholly unprepared for her quarter-life crisis. Like John Cassavetes, Radwanski risks putting us in close proximity with a character we may bristle at, but the result is a cleansing emotional experience that coaxes our compassion. A Cinema Guild release.

Atlantis
Valentyn Vasyanovych, Ukraine, 2019, 106m
Ukrainian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A debut of remarkable formal precision, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis is an urgent yet highly controlled dispatch from the wartorn Donbass in Eastern Ukraine. Set five years into the future, this all-too-real dystopia uses a series of distanced, compositionally rigorous frames to follow Sergiy, a Ukrainian soldier suffering from PTSD as he tries to restart his life amidst these scourged, uninhabitable lands. Rather than foreground the in-the-moment battle between Russia and Ukraine, Vasyanovych instead powerfully depicts the inevitable aftermath, marked by economic and ecological degradation. Yet somehow, through a new volunteer job exhuming the dead, Sergey finds an unexpected path back to humanity.

Babyteeth
Shannon Murphy, Australia, 2019, 117m
New York Premiere
In a poignant and tersely funny domestic drama that moves to its own special rhythms, first-time feature filmmaker Shannon Murphy achieves an impressive tonal balancing act, distinctively capturing the wild ups and intense downs in the life of a teenage girl who knows she doesn’t have long to live. Eliza Scanlen—so memorable as Beth in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women—embodies both steely self-awareness and fragility as Milla, whose new romance with a troubled twenty-something (Toby Wallace) cast out of his family disturbs her supportive but confused parents (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn, unpredictable marvels from scene to scene), who are going through their own emotional difficulties. A film of delicate hairpin turns, Babyteeth refuses to feed its viewers bromides about family life, allowing its characters to reveal all their contradictory complexities. An IFC Films release.

The Cloud in Her Room
Zheng Lu Xinyuan, China, 2020, 101m
Mandarin with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Winner of the top prize at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, this mesmerizing debut feature from Chinese filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan is an autobiographically tinged portrait of 22-year-old Muzi (Jin Jing), a young woman drifting through her days and nights after returning to her hometown to celebrate the New Year with her parents, and unable to let go of her past. With gorgeously monochrome photography, the director finds seemingly endless new ways to capture the dawns and twilights, the familiar pleasures and urban estrangement of the city of Hangzhou, where the director is from. Alternating between realist conversations between Muzi, family, and lovers; dreamlike interludes; and intermittent documentary sequences with local young people who are floating through their own discombobulating twenties, The Cloud in Her Room is an expressive depiction of the feeling of being transitory in one’s time and place.

Collective
Alexander Nanau, Romania, 2019, 109m
Romanian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
What begins as a seeming exposé into a tragic accident gradually turns into something deeper and more shocking in this heartrending and revelatory documentary about state neglect and corruption. In October 2015, a devastating fire broke out at the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv, killing 27 people that night; in the following weeks, while the country was still reeling, nearly 40 more people who had suffered burns and other injuries died in hospital. As the film begins, newspaper journalists are investigating the suspicious reasons how this could possibly have happened—the beginning of a search for truth that uncovers an increasing litany of misappropriations, malfeasance, and lies, from medical officials to corrupt pharmaceutical company owners. With astonishing access, director Alexander Nanau follows the trail of evidence along with the film’s journalists and the newly installed Minister of Health, creating a universally relatable nonfiction thriller that uncovers the depths of governmental rot. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Los conductos
Camilo Restrepo, France/Colombia/Brazil, 2020, 70m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A former criminal and cult member living under cloak of night in the crevices and corners of the Colombian city of Medellín makes his way back into civilization, yet is gripped by a shadowy past, in this fragmented first feature from Camilo Restrepo. After his memorable shorts Cilaos and La bouche, the director proves his mastery at economical yet expansive storytelling here, taking a complex narrative about the possibility of regeneration within a society all too willing to discard its outcasts and boiling it down to a series of precise shots, sounds, and gestures of off-handed beauty.

Days of Cannibalism
Teboho Edkins, France/South Africa/Netherlands, 2020, 78m
Sesotho, Fujianese, and Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere
South Africa-raised filmmaker Teboho Edkins’s remarkable documentary begins in the Chinese port city of Guangzhou, following the daily movements of a young African man trying to make a living working in a hotel; soon the film moves to Lesotho, a mountainous, landlocked region in the middle of South Africa, where a group of Chinese migrants have recently settled seeking their own economic stability and are living uneasily beside the rural community’s cattle ranchers. Edkins situates his subjects as though in a fictional narrative, privileging us to bear witness to their lives and minute interactions even as they become players in a story of an emerging and competitive global trade relationship. This expansive and immersive work of nonfiction redefines the rules of the “western” genre.

The Dove and the Wolf
Carlos Lenin, Mexico, 2019, 106m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The terrors of the past haunt the present in the astonishing debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Carlos Lenin, in which trauma lurks beneath every meticulously composed shot. Factory workers Paloma (Paloma Petra) and Lobo (Armando Hernandez) share a tender, loving relationship, though as their story unfolds it grows ever clearer that something from long ago is obstructing their happiness, and that for their romance to survive they must confront it. Setting the memory of unspeakable violence against hushed tones and deceptively placid imagery, Lenin gradually reveals the source of their pain, constructing an essential drama of the people who become collateral to the rampant gang and cartel violence in contemporary Mexican society.

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
Gu Xiaogang, China, 2019, 150m
Fuyang dialect and Mandarin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Taking its title from a renowned 14th Chinese scroll painting by Huang Gongwang, this debut feature from Gu Xiaogang is a panoramic evocation of one year in the life of a provincial family. In tribute to its artistic inspiration, the film often presents its action from a quiet distance, the camera lyrically moving across the frame as its central characters—the members of the sprawling Yu family, overseen by an aging matriarch (Du Hongjun), whose birthday celebration opens the film—deal with business and romantic entanglements, financial debts and work struggles. All the while the seasons inexorably change. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains was shot over the course of two years, and is the first in a declared trilogy of films about life along the Yangtze River—a first-time filmmaker’s labor of love that’s as accomplished as it is ambitious.

The Fever
Maya Da-Rin, Brazil, 2019, 98m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In her spellbinding first feature, Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin takes a delicate, metaphorical look at the fragile political state of her country from a perspective most moviegoers haven’t seen. Da-Rin centers on the working and home lives of a father and daughter of indigenous Desana descent—middle-aged Justinio (a splendid, quietly expressive Regis Myrupu, who won Best Actor at the Locarno Film Festival) and Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto)—who have moved from their community to the northwestern city of Manaus. There, he works as a security guard in a massive warehouse; she has a position in a hospital and has recently been accepted to study medicine in Brasilia University. Trying to support his family, all the while dreaming of a soul-sustaining return to the Amazonian rainforest, Justinio must contend with encroaching obstacles, including casual racism, reports of a wild animal on the loose, and a mysterious malaria-like illness. Da-Rin keeps the film at once realist and mythic, modern and spiritual, leading to a symbolic, emotional conclusion.

Giraffe
Anna Sofie Hartmann, Germany/Denmark, 2019, 87m
English, Norwegian, Danish, German, and Polish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A finely observed burgeoning romance is set against a rapidly changing landscape in Anna Sofie Hartmann’s spare and humane portrait of the dissolving boundaries of our ever more globalized world. Giraffe follows an ethnologist in her late thirties (Lisa Loven Kongsli) who has come to the remote island of Lolland in the south of Denmark. She’s here to study its inhabitants and record their traditions and objects before their homes are demolished to make way for a tunnel linking to Germany. Unexpectedly, she meets an attractive younger man (Jakub Gierszal), a laborer who’s been hired from Poland. Their beautifully etched love affair functions as the fictional centerpiece of an otherwise documentary-like exploration of belonging, memory, and work, featuring the island’s real inhabitants, whose way of life is about to change forever.

Identifying Features
Fernanda Valadez, Mexico/Spain, 2020, 94m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Middle-aged Magdalena (Mercedes Hernandez) has lost contact with her son after he took off with a friend from their town of Guanajuato to cross the border into the U.S., hopeful to find work. Desperate to find out what happened to him—and to know whether or not he’s even alive—she embarks on an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous journey to discover the truth. At the same time, a young man named Miguel (David Illescas) has returned to Mexico after being deported from the U.S., and eventually his path converges with Magdalena’s. From this simple but urgent premise, director Fernanda Valadez has crafted a lyrical, suspenseful slow burn, equally constructed of moments of beauty and horror, and which leads to a startling, shattering conclusion. Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Audience and Screenplay Awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A Kino Lorber release.

Kala azar
Janis Rafa, Netherlands/Greece, 2020, 91m
Greek with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Appropriately for a film about the unspoken connection between humans and animals, Kala azar seems to invent a new cinematic language. Set in a desolate, perhaps post-apocalyptic landscape in which people and their dogs, cats, and fish live together in a kind of liminal state, Greek director Janis Rafa’s first film, a top prizewinner at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival, surveys the grim but matter-of-fact day-to-day lives of a young, unfettered couple who work for a crematorium service. As they pay house calls to people who have lost their pets, helping to give their animals respectful send-offs, their own relationship begins to fracture. Rafa focuses on tactile surfaces and bodies rather than conventional narrative beats; her film is a sobering, poignant vision of the cohabitation of different species on our endangered planet.

The Killing of Two Lovers
Robert Machoian, USA, 2020, 84m
New York Premiere
After a startling opening image of extreme tension, first-time solo director Robert Machoian’s stark, slow-burn drama never quite goes where you expect. An evocative and atmospheric transmission from wintry Utah, The Killing of Two Lovers is a compact, economical portrait of a husband and father trying to keep it together while seething with rage during a trial separation from his wife. An interior drama set mostly outside, on the vast, lonely street where David (a knockout Clayne Crawford) stays with his ailing father just a few doors up from his wife Niki (Sepideh Moafi) and their four kids, Machoian’s film compassionately depicts a family in crisis, while moving at the ominous pace of a thriller. A complex, brooding soundscape from Peter Albrechtsen that seems to emanate directly from the head of its disturbed protagonist, and a claustrophobic aspect ratio contribute to the powerful emotional register of this impressive new work of American independent cinema.

The Metamorphosis of Birds
Catarina Vasconcelos, Portugal, 2020, 101m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A highly unorthodox documentary that has the feel of a precious heirloom, this impressionistic yet emotionally rich film finds Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifting through the memories and dreams of her ancestors. In prismatic images, richly shot on 16mm film, we get the sense of a family’s entire lineage, starting with her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday; he then spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with an expanding brood of children. This is the beginning of a generational saga, told in shards of memory and voiceover. The Metamorphosis of Birds achingly evokes the natural world—the changing seasons, the play of sunlight, the ever-flowing tides, and the plant and animal life—that counterbalances and nurtures human life cycles.

Nafi’s Father
Mamadou Dia, Senegal, 2019, 109m
Fula with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A personal conflict between brothers escalates into a political, religious, and moral crisis in the gripping debut from Senegalese filmmaker Mamadou Dia, winner of the Best First Feature award at the Locarno Film Festival. When Tierno (Alassane Sy), the acting imam of a small town, discovers that his daughter, Nafi (Aïcha Talla), has agreed to marry the son of his older brother, Ousmane (Saïkou Lo), he becomes desperate to find a way to stop the wedding, without getting in the way of his daughter’s independence. The source of his alarm is Ousmane’s growing affiliation with a fundamentalist form of Islam that believes in employing any means to prevail, even violence. As Ousmane’s power in the town strengthens, his relationship with his more moderate brother becomes ever more fractured. Dia’s compellingly told tragic drama brims with detail and is an eye-opening portrayal of a man trying to hold fast to his principles in a world of intolerance and greed.

Nasir
Arun Karthick, India, 2020, 80m
Tamil with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A day-in-the-life portrait expands into something else entirely in this patient yet ultimately startling sophomore breakthrough from Tamil filmmaker Arun Karthick. Based on a short story by Dilip Kumar, Nasir takes place in Coimbatore, a town in Tamil Nadu, where a small Muslim community lives alongside the Hindu population. Nasir (Koumarane Valavane) is a Muslim family man struggling to make ends meet for his wife and their mentally challenged nephew who lives with them. He makes a small wage working at a Hindu sari shop, and is also a poetry lover whose verses we hear in lyrical passages. With placid, beautiful imagery of the everyday, Karthick brings us fully into Nasir’s mundane world, but off-screen news reports and casual conversations remind us of the violence that hangs in the peripheries.

Red Moon Tide
Lois Patiño, Spain, 2020, 84m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
As he proved in his previous works, including Coast of Death and Night Without Distance, films that take place on borders between countries, or between life and death, Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño is singularly brilliant at creating transfixing, ghostly images of enormous power. With Red Moon Tide, he has made his most haunting film yet, a journey into a phantom world, set on Spain’s Galician coast, where Rubio, a diver who retrieved bodies from shipwrecks, has gone missing. The small seaside community, made up of both the living and the long deceased, mourn his absence, in a series of exquisitely composed tableaux that turn images of everyday lives into the mythical.

Servants
Ivan Ostrochovský, Slovakia/Romania/Czech Republic/Ireland, 2020, 80m
Slovak with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Slovak filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovský turns a politically fraught moment in his nation’s history into a spare, tense morality tale that moves like a thriller. Set in totalitarian Czechoslovakia in 1980, Servants takes place at a Catholic seminary that is being put under increasing pressure by the ruling Communist party to fall in line and for its students to essentially act as informants for any nonconformist behavior; meanwhile its head priest has become an easy target for blackmail. Ostrochovský tells his story of mounting anxiety through the eyes of two conflicted novitiates just arrived at school, Michal (Samuel Polakovic) and Juraj (Samuel Skyva), and shoots in a pristine, high-contrast black-and-white that gives his film the sense of a constant waking nightmare.

The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs
Pushpendra Singh, India, 2020, 98m
Gujari and Hindi with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A visually entrancing fable with a core of steel, Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs centers on the unforgettable Laila, a ferociously independent young Bakarwal woman from the politically fraught Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. She movies with her new husband, the shepherd Tanvir, to a home in the forest, where her beauty and strength make her the obsession of a befuddled local police officer and the forest guard Mushtaq, whose attention she constantly, cleverly thwarts. All the while she tries to figure out her own, new identity. Structured around a series of local folk songs and poetic interludes, which function as Laila’s interior monologues, this humorous and meditative feminist tale observes a woman who wants to be free to make her own decisions in a modernizing world, despite her connection to age-old traditions.

Surge
Aneil Karia, UK, 2020, 99m
New York Premiere
Ben Whishaw commands the center of every frame in the propulsive feature debut of British filmmaker Aneil Karia, a drama about a young man’s mental breakdown that takes off as if from a slingshot and never lets up. Joseph is an airport security worker who’s increasingly affected by the daily pressures of his high-stress job and seems disconnected from everyone around him, including his parents. Finally, something inside him seems to snap, and, over the course of one day, Joseph devolves into anarchy, rebelling against his surroundings, and lashing out at all propriety and social codes. Karia captures Whishaw’s intense dissolution/liberation with a visceral visual approach that speaks to a deeper contemporary rage.

The Trouble with Being Born
Sandra Wollner, Austria/Germany, 2020, 94m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
This eerily placid work of science fiction begins as though a summer idyll in an isolated house in the forest between a middle-aged man (Dominik Warta) and what appears to be his adolescent daughter (Lena Watson). As the languorous days wear on, instances of a stranger, more intimate relationship between the two emerge, and we discover not all is what it seems in this otherworldly yet earthy environment. The film then takes a turn when the girl drifts away into the woods. Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s disturbing, unsentimental vision of the fracturing effects of technology on human life and memory is both compassionate and unsparing, and vivid in its hard-to-shake imagery.

Twelve Thousand
Nadège Trebal, France, 2019, 111m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In her fiction debut, which she also wrote and co-stars in, French documentary filmmaker Nadège Trebal masters a series of radical tonal shifts for a wildly entertaining, sexually unapologetic portrait of a couple contending with economic instability and the fight to maintain equality in their relationship. In a star-is-born performance, the magnetic Arieh Worthalter is down-on-his-luck charmer Frank, who, after being fired from his black-market scrapyard job, enters into an agreement with his partner, Maroussia (Trebal), to earn exactly 12,000 euros, the amount that would equal her annual income. Throughout Frank’s journey, which is occasionally absurdist and fraught with perilous seductions, both financial and sexual, Trebal never loses sight of the very real pressures that capital puts on contemporary lives.

Two of Us
Filippo Meneghetti, France/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2019, 95m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In his intensely moving middle-aged queer romance, first-time feature filmmaker Filippo Meneghetti casts Martine Chevallier and the legendary Barbara Sukowa as Madeleine and Nina, two women who live in the same apartment building and have been carrying on a love affair in secret for decades. Now that Madeleine’s husband has died, Nina encourages her to tell the truth about their relationship to her meddlesome, selfish grown children, hoping they can move to Rome together. As in any great melodrama (Sukowa’s work with Fassbinder is here never far out of mind), the cruel vicissitudes of society and fate get in the way; yet as their romantic dreams become more distant, their desperate love grows ever stronger. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine
Alex Piperno, Uruguay/Argentina/Brazil/Netherlands/Philippines, 2019, 85m
Spanish and Tuwali with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Enter a world of the unexpected in this exceptional surrealist debut from Uruguayan poet and filmmaker Alex Piperno in which doors never lead to where they’re supposed to and the world is a lot smaller than it appears. Melding together two inexplicably interconnected stories from wildly different settings, Piperno’s vividly drawn dream movie initially follows a group of rural farmers in a Filipino village who come to believe a shack that has mysteriously appeared in a valley clearing contains evil properties they must exorcise; at the same time, a young janitor working on a bougie cruise ship discovers a portal that opens to somewhere else entirely. Touching upon ideas of global connectivity and economic inequality with a lightly fantastical touch, Piperno has made a delightful fantasia for our moment.

SHORTS PROGRAMS
Program 1

Exam
Sonia K. Hadad, Iran, 2019, 15m
Persian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This precisely calibrated nail-biter from Iranian filmmaker Sonia Hadad follows a teenage girl who reluctantly transports her father’s cocaine on a school day. Enlivened by a gripping performance by Sadaf Asgari (who picked up the Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival), Exam delivers genre thrills and serious social commentary.

Monster God
Agustina San Martin, Argentina, 2019, 10m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Glowing red, an all-seeing power plant looms above a foggy town and seems to anticipate an unknown cataclysm while a punk teen longs to escape.

Wong Ping’s Fables 2
Wong Ping, Hong Kong, 2019, 14m
Cantonese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Hong Kong animator Wong Ping renders social dynamics and economic anxieties through intersecting moral tales of an anthropomorphized cow and three sibling rabbits. Something like Memphis Design as envisioned through a video game, this candy-colored continuation of the award-winning Wong Ping’s Fables 1 builds upon the self-taught animator’s bizarrely funny observations of contemporary society.

The Eyes of Summer
Rajee Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka/USA, 2020, 15m
New York Premiere
A young girl communes with the spirit world around her in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War in this dialogue-free movie about ghosts and the pain of memory.

Sun Dog
Dorian Jespers, Belgium/Russia, 2020, 21m
English and Russian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
“The everlasting night is unbearable,” laments the client of a young locksmith in a frozen city in northern Russia. He stumbles through the inky darkness, captured by a floating, roving camera evoking the delirium of deep winter. Will the sun ever rise?

Program 2

Playback
Agustina Comedi, Argentina, 2019, 14m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
This fiction-documentary hybrid is a tenderly crafted love letter to a group of Argentine drag queens and trans women as they lose their community to AIDS against the backdrop of an oppressive regime.

After Two Hours, Ten Minutes Had Passed
Steffen Goldkamp, Germany, 2019, 19m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Anonymous male inmates go about their daily routines in Germany’s Hahnöfersand juvenile detention center. Questions of time, identity, and the realities of space convene in this quietly devastating documentary from Steffen Goldkamp, who captures a simultaneous sense of inertia and restless longing as it permeates the prison.

Happy Valley
Simon Liu, Hong Kong/USA, 2020, 13m
World Premiere
In Hong Kong, echoes of resistance and turmoil are sensitively captured on 16mm in this poetic rumination of public spaces and everyday life in a metropolis in upheaval.

Black Sun
Arda Çiltepe, Turkey/Germany, 2019, 20m
Turkish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A death in the family occasions a man’s return to an Aegean Turkish island, where an impending storm puts his trip on a circuitous route. Winner of the Locarno Film Festival’s Pardino d’Oro for Best International Short Film, Arda Ciltepe’s Black Sun is a laconic, 16mm-shot road movie where fleeting encounters and the indefinite hold of grief take shape in vivid sensory detail.

Keisha Rae Witherspoon, USA, 2019, 14m
New York Premiere
Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s sui generis quasi-fiction follows three grieving participants of Miami’s annual T Ball, a fabricated event where community members honor their dead by modeling wildly imaginative R.I.P. t-shirts. Combining elements of Afrofuturism and cinéma vérité, T is a powerful examination of mourning through the seen and unseen forces that influence our w

[Chris Knipp]

JESSE MOSS, AMANDA MCBAINE: BOYS STATE 2020)


STEVEN GARZA BOYS STATE

Politics in action in a riveting new documentary

This fascinating, exciting documentary focuses on one of the American Legion's longtime annual summer events for high school juniors (mostly 17, but 16 to 18), 1200 of them at the Texas state capitol. This is a training ground of future leaders. Alumni the film mentions include Samuel Alito, Cory Booker, Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton. It's artificial - two invented competing parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, electing officials and then a governor from one of the two parties, legislating on invented issues - but also realistic. It provides some stunning lessons in practical politics, for them and for us. The filmmakers follow four boys. Two become their separate party's managers and become embroiled in some cutthroat political maneuvers. Two run for governor, both unsuccessfully, but one is the runner-up. There are also boy journalists covering events (and social media playing a big role at some points), and ancillary events like a talent show.

The top position is governor, and the winner of this post has parents who emigrated from Italy. Of the two elected early on as the party managers, one Ben Feinstein, is handicapped, having a withered arm and two artificial legs due to childhood meningitis. He is a fierce and articulate party infighter, a politics junkie and a conservative. The other, tall, skinny Rene Otero, is black and hispanic, originally from Chicago, and a gifted public speaker who knows how to galvanize an audience. The gov candidate who washed out, Rob, has an Irish last name and looks like young Matt Dillon. He's confident, good-looking, and a charmer, and might have done well had he planned his campaign better. Each of them has private time for the camera, and Rob admits his pro-life stand (perhaps his pro-gun one as well) was adopted to appeal to the predominantly conservative group. He also takes a somewhat jokey, collegiate humor tone in his candidate speech that he later admits was wrong: he thought that was what the boys wanted, he realized they wanted serious. The other governor finalist, perhaps the most memorable of the four, is Steven Garza, the son of poor Mexican immigrants, whose mother was illegal for a while.

Cynically we may assume people go into politics to become famous or assume power and wealth, and they do. We may also assume that high schoolers chosen by American Legionnaires in Texas would be pro-gun and anti-abortion. But this is not true of Steven Garza, and it turns out he led an anti-gun march a while back. But he too like Ben has always cared about politics, and his appeal to the thirty he has to get to sign to get on the ballot is that he wants to know what they want, and serve their needs and wishes. Whether this shows the makings of a dedicated public servant or a chameleon ready, like Rob, to shift stands to get elected may not be wholly certain. But his dedication impresses many, and when he loses, he is vervently thanked and congratulated by supporters. When he calls his mother weeping he says it's not because he lost, but because of those faithful supporters, and he is proud.

As he must be. And we can wonder how conservative these thousand mostly white boys are if the governor and runner up are sons of immigrants, one hispanic, and if the two party managers elected were also minorities.

What may disturb viewers is how some incidents get manipulated by boy-politicians, especially in a public conflict between the two party managers that may swing the gubernatorial party vote when Rene steps in to block the winning candidate from taking questions from the assembled boys as part of his final speech, and Ben objects. Was it racist earlier that there was a move within his party to impeach Rene? But when it comes to a vote finally few dare to vote for his ouster after all.

We see how hard Rene is willing to fight to hold onto his hard won position, and how tough Ben is in his realpolitik. We see Rob frankly say in politics you have to lie sometimes to get elected. And we wonder if Steven isn't being cagey about his real progressive politics so he can get elected by a more conservative group. It's all American politics in action.

This film has aroused great interest and high praise, yet its Metascore is only 73, mainly it appears because of a bad review in Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore. His main criticism should be considered: that the few boys chosen for the doc may be interesting, but they are too few to be considered representative of the group or the event. A few of the rank and file - the boys who aren't very active - are heard from but more personalities would have provided a richer mix. But this is a tough event to cover in an under two-hour film. Maybe Frederick Wiseman might have provided more detail. But Moss and McBaine provide exciting action in compact form, and the admiration is warranted.

Boys State, 109 mins, debuted at Sundance Jan. 2020, where it won the Grand Prize for Documentary; five other festivals including New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA, where it was screened for this review, and San Francisco, which has announced it too will make it the opening night film. Distribution rights belong to Apple and A24 .

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERT MACHOIAN: THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS (2020)



Repressed violence

Repressed violence is the underlying theme of this interesting new film from Robert Machoian, which focuses on a couple in a trial separation. Some of his opportunities he has missed. There is a long dialogue between and estranged wife in a truck that's bold, and most of the scenes with kids are remarkably specific and natural. The hammering sound throughout (the obtrusive "soundscape" of Peter Albrechtsen), more suitable to a horror film, continues at the end to undermine the seemingly happy ending. Is worse violence afoot? Subtlety is one thing, confusion is another. And I'm not sure I quite believe the premise. But I have to admit the twist and its positive outcome worked for me.

David (Clayne Crawford) seems like a doormat, but he seethes inside, moved in with his dad nearby leaving his wife Nike (Sepideh Moafi) in the house with the four kids, three bouncy young ones who plainly adore him, and the teenage (but isn't the actress too old-looking?) daughter who is miserable with what's going on and wants it to stop. His wife seemed to want this, a separation that's "open," so either person can be with somebody else. There's no indication David wanted this. Why did he agree to it? This film is all in the dialogue, which pops with energy and realism, but doesn't quite define a conceivable situation.

A "compact, economical portrait," yes; a nice grayish yet colorful palette in the mostly Academy ratio images. Rural Utah landscapes that don't look at all clichéd. "An interior drama set mostly outside."

ND/NF blurb:
After a startling opening image of extreme tension, first-time solo director Robert Machoian’s stark, slow-burn drama never quite goes where you expect. An evocative and atmospheric transmission from wintry Utah, The Killing of Two Lovers is a compact, economical portrait of a husband and father trying to keep it together while seething with rage during a trial separation from his wife. An interior drama set mostly outside, on the vast, lonely street where David (a knockout Clayne Crawford) stays with his ailing father just a few doors up from his wife Niki (Sepideh Moafi) and their four kids, Machoian’s film compassionately depicts a family in crisis, while moving at the ominous pace of a thriller. A complex, brooding soundscape from Peter Albrechtsen that seems to emanate directly from the head of its disturbed protagonist, and a claustrophobic aspect ratio contribute to the powerful emotional register of this impressive new work of American independent cinema.

The Killing of Two Lovers, 84 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2020; three other US festivals including New Direcdtors/New Films Mar. 2020, where it was screened for this review. US theatrical release slated for Sept. 2020.

[Chris Knipp]

SHANNON MURPHY: BABYTEETH (2019)


ELIZA SCANLON IN BABYTEETH

Cancer requires new rules for parenting

This is a fresh and original Australian feature. It's just a bit hard to know how to take it. Is it serious? Or is it all a lark? And if it's a lark, is not taking a teenager with fatal cancer lightly not shockingly frivolous?

Milla (Eliza Scanlen of Little Women) is the teenager in question, and she's sixteen. Her meet-cute with Moses (Toby Wallace) happens at a train station where she has a nose bleed and collapses. Moses immediately takes charge, with an intimacy and charm (and closeups by a camera that loves him) that belies his battered-looking face because its lines are good. Wallace has the manner of a homeless kid, but an older one - he answers to 23 - and one that's blooming with health and sexiness. He's of an age when drugs and shifty living haven't caught up with him yet. We later learn he's kind of a bourgeois hoodlum. He immediately establishes a voluptuous intimacy with Milla, with a sense that he's got problems too (like drugs, using and dealing). He's got a mother, who breeds fancy dogs and has a younger son, and a nice house. She inexplicably hates Moses and keeps chasing him away (his backstory is never clear), but he keeps going back there. His father he admits he knows little of, and hasn't gotten on well with. Yet there is a gentleness about him and love of life, a sweet smile, and an eagerness to care for Milla though she isn't sure he loves her.

About Milla there seems little to learn, not even about her disease, which is never specified, and there is only one hospital scene, though she gets chemo and spends more than half the film shaven-headed, with multiple wigs - an opportunity for giddy playacting and charming Moses. We learn more about her parents. Her mother Anna (Essie Davis) is highly-strung and chronically self-centered and a gifted pianist, who has a connection with the quirky, offhandedly passionate man with a heavy accent who teaches Milla violin (Eugene Gilfedder), also to a little Asian boy he insists is in love with Milla. Her father Henry (the great Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist, and works out of a wing of their bright, airy modern house. Anna and Henry have a mock appointment, a regular thing, the inter-title tells us, where (we find out, to our embarrassment) he very casually screws her. He is listening, later, to a patient who is having a major breakthrough (she says) which he abruptly interrupts to go and screw in a lightbulb for the very pregnant neighbor he encounters regularly, a kind of running joke. He is in running midlife crisis but he's pretty sexy too.

The whole movie seems a running joke signaled by the oddball running titles of segments that may be deemed necessary to order the episodic structure, or cutesy, or borderline twee.

Again, the question: is it a good idea to run a funny undercurrent to a film about cancer? Well yes, maybe it is. We need humor to help us get through the heartache. And this film is at least half about youth, that's beautiful even in disaster and resilient enough to make light of the heaviest things, to get through them.

Henry and Anna are a running melodrama. Moses is a disaster that can laugh itself off and turn it into sweetness. Milla is a tragedy that can be fragile and angry but also steely.

Milla invites Moses to her school's formal dance, and prepares for it with a dress her mother brings her that matches her current wild blue wig, but in the event it doesn't matter. All that matters are the moments. Anna has strong objections to bringing Moses into the house, but she and Henry can deny her daughter nothing because she may have no time. "This is the worst possible parenting I can imagine," she declares to Henry, wisely, as they see Moses climbing on top of Milla out on the lawn. Her first love is possibly her only love and he's not the nice boy with a promising future but he's what they'e got even if he's fleecing his underage girlfriend for money and drugs.

Babyteeth earns the unfortunate classification "dramedy," but it avoids sentimentality despite having a trajectory that links it with the weepie. Its quirks are at least its own. This is Shannon Murphy's third feature, adapted from her own play by Rita Kalnejais. She is talented and original and is slated to direct the third season of the much-discussed BBC series "Killing Eve."

Babyteeth, 11Babyteeth, 117 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2019, showing at a dozen other international festivals, including New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review (except the press screenings were stopped midway and the series was cancelled, due to the coronavirus pandemic). An IFC Films release in the US with a planned release date of June 19 - in theaters (originally) and available on demand. (It can now be rented on Amazon Prime - 6/29/2020.)

[Chris Knipp]

GU XIAOGANG: DWELLING IN THE FUCHUN MOUNTAINS (2019)



[Watched; not reviewed]

Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
Gu Xiaogang, China, 2019, 150m
Fuyang dialect and Mandarin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Taking its title from a renowned 14th Chinese scroll painting by Huang Gongwang, this debut feature from Gu Xiaogang is a panoramic evocation of one year in the life of a provincial family. In tribute to its artistic inspiration, the film often presents its action from a quiet distance, the camera lyrically moving across the frame as its central characters—the members of the sprawling Yu family, overseen by an aging matriarch (Du Hongjun), whose birthday celebration opens the film—deal with business and romantic entanglements, financial debts and work struggles. All the while the seasons inexorably change. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains was shot over the course of two years, and is the first in a declared trilogy of films about life along the Yangtze River—a first-time filmmaker’s labor of love that’s as accomplished as it is ambitious.