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

[Chris Knipp]

JANIS RAFA: KALA AZAR (2020)


PINELOPI TSILIKA, DIMITRIS LALOS IN KALA AZAR

Perhaps pre-apocalyptic world or spreading disease and roadkill, seen through a young couple making do

This film, by an art video maker, chronicles a Greek couple who work as professional pet cremators. or their delivery people, for a municipality. They go around gathering defunct pets, take their remains to be cremated, then return the ashes with a certificate to the owners for preservation. It's all done legally, or is supposed to. Sometimes they may break the rules. They are not allowed to retrieve roadkill but they do. Since the couple rarely say anything, we may not know a lot about them. Something about a father's dog's accident and severe facial injury. Formulas rehearsed and recited to pet owners. They have sex in their car. No conversation during or after that rough and tumble. Minor sub-themes: soothing the body with balms made from cactus juices and, yes, dogs. One man filmmaker Janis Rafa, or his cameraman Thodoros Minopouloss, has a fresh angle on point of view, and a gift for stillness and neutrality.

The couple, whose lives are not much explored, seem to like animals - perhaps trained as vets but out of work? Kala-azar is the name of a parasitic disease spread to humans by bits of sand flies; according to the Screen Daily review of this film, it is "wiping out swathes of the canine population of southern Europe," which would explain its inclusion here.

The couple is just working for the crematorium, but as a couple. Not a very good job really, so it's not a big surprise when they start not getting along so well. They should be considered between jobs - perhaps between relationships. I considered myself between films when I watched this. And while this is filmmaker (Janis Rafa's first feature, I'd see it as a possible stepping-stone to something more substantial and important, a glimpse of a willingness to take chances, but not quite there yet (New Directors/New Films discoveries are often like that).

Leonardo Goi, who reviewed the film for The Film Stage, extrapolates a bourgeoning worldview from this subject matter, seeing it as depicting a "disquieting, moribund universe" and a "wasteland of industrial debris and derelict houses frozen in a 1990s impasse" and notes that pets' level of "grieving" they may "aspire to" (as if pets aspired to grieving) depends on the level of their owners. All this may be reading too much into it. Probably Wendy Ide, who reviewed the film for Screen Daily, is closer to the mark in arguing that this isn't a film that "anthropomorphizes the beasts" and in fact is more intent on "finding the animal at the heart of the human characters." That's what the wordlessness and lack of background is probably consciously or unconsciously doing. But that may be doing too much. Penelopi and Dimitris may be somewhat marginal, but not that marginal.

Just for fun, at the end, a uniformed military drums and brass band plays in a large henhouse, and the hens really like it. Then they're packed off in crates, just the same.

This won top prize at Rotterdam, Europe's festival headquarters for edgy weirdness.

Kala azar, 75 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, where it won the KNF Award and was a nominee for the Tiger Award, which The Cloud in My Room won, showing also at Zerkalo Tarkovsky festival (internet version), Galway (internet), Thessaloniki, and in New Directors/New Films Dec. 2020virtual pandemic version, as part of which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

MAMADOU DIA: NEFI'S FATHER


ALASSANE SY IN NEFI'S FATHER

A family conflict with political resonance

From Senegal and set in a town among leading families, Mamadou Dia's NEfi's Father is a tale of almost Shakespearean complexity and moment. It centers around Tierno (Alassane Sy), the principle imam of the town. He becomes angry when he learns that his daughter Nafi (Aïcha Talla), without consulting with him, has agreed to marry the son of his older brother Ousmane (Saïkou Lo). Tierno determines to stop this event from taking place however he can, but without destroying Nefi's independence or her plans of going to university.

The two brothers represent opposite orientations toward the world. Tierno is local and democratic. He favors independence and moral behavior. Ousmane is linked up with Islamic fundamentalists who Tierno knows are part of a violent international terrorist movement. Ousmane is growing stronger locally and as his strength grows, his ideas become more extreme. Meanwhile, though Tierno is intensely determined, his hard-headed will doesn't work well in convincing his opponents, and he may not realize how much the conflict has a basis in personalities, rather than principles.

Nefi's Father is a strong example of filmmaking that uses authentic local settings and people all the way. The look and feel of the scenes is wonderfully African, with a simple beauty and directness that pleases the eye. As the Variety review notes, the visuals are "marked by handsome compositions and a sensitivity to color and shadow," rooted in "location and character" and never an "exoticized locale" that is "designed for foreigners." The languages are local with a mixture of French words. The dignity and confidence of the actors never falter. The theme is both timely and universal. However, I found the machinations of the plot difficult to follow and over elaborate ("the script could use tightening" - Variety), and some of the line readings tend to falter and the dialogue stutters and loses its forward rhythm from time to time as well.

Nefi's Father/ , 107 mins., debuted at Locarno (winning the Golden Leopard and best first feature awards there; three other awards and more nominations) , and showed in the festivals at Rotterdam, Göteborg, Atlanta, and Raindance. Included in the virtual pandemic delayed Dec. edition of the 2020 New Directors/New Films series, in which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

ARUN KARTHICK: NASIR (2020)



Death of a sari salesman

This little film is a poetic, observational gem with a shock finale. Young Indian director Arun Karthick's short feature was shot in Coimbatore or Kovai, a city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on the banks of the Noyyal River and surrounded by the Western Ghats. Based on Dilip Kumar's diaristic 2012 short story, "A Clerk's Tale," it freely incorporates details that give it a semi-documentary realism at times.

It also implicitly refers to Coimbatore's September 2016 anti-Muslim riots, evidence of recent sectarian violence in the country including fatal lynchings. It's clear throughout that Nasir, the protagonist, is part of a 10% Muslim minority in a Hundu town and there is prejudice. We awaken in a Muslim neighborhood to the sound of a superb, probably recorded, call to prayer. But things are peaceful up to near the end, where a journalistic, poetic voiceover (for Nasir is an accomplished, unsung poet) is abruptly interrupted by the onrush of a rioting angry racist crowd pouring through the narrow streets.

Karthick frames his film in 4:3 TV ratio for intimacy and perhaps a sense of crowding, and the corners are curved. Nasir lives with his wife (Sudha Ragunathan) and mentally handicapped nephew Iqbal ("Sabari") in a cramped apartment in a crowded ghetto of the city. Everything about this film is intimate, sometimes intimiste; it's almost like a highly colored miniature: the first shots are up close on Nasir's face, showing only parts of his body or the room as he gets up, shaves, showers, dresses, and so on. There's a sense that this may be minute-by-minute through the day.

Of course it is not that. Nasir sees off his wife on a trip to help relatives with a wedding for a few days. He refers to her throughout the day, addressing letters and poems to her (and reciting a poem also to his coworkers at the sari shop where he works). The action is decentralized, collective. There are so many saris in rows and rows of colors and so many other employees, it's hard to keep track.

What stands out in this film is its sense of the colorful quotidian of life in India in the poorest shopkeeper class. Let's not forget that we don't know how they relieve themselves, that there is no running water, but water gathered in contemporary plastic replicas of the old jars carried to and from wells. A meeting with someone gives a glimpse that Nasir might be able to get a temporary job in f Abu Dhabi, and could be in a Muslim environment and make money.

The sari shop is Hindu-owned, and even the mannequins have bindi dots on their foreheads. But everyone seems friendly, as noted in the respect for Nasir's ability as a poet. At day's end Nasir is sent on an errant, which he may never conclude.

The film excels in its sense of specificity, and in service of that, a strong narrative line is allowed to slide a bit. The point is to observe a string of little ordinary harmless detials that unreel with no awareness that they may be one's last. The recreation of a world is remarkable, highlighted by the skillful wrangling of non-actors and negotiating of cramped and crowded spaces heightened by the compact aspect ratio and the intimate cinematography.

Nasir, 95 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, continuing in the We Are One (pandemic YouTube) festival, Internet Mirror Andrey Tarkovsky International Film Festival and several other virtual festivals including the Dec. New Directors/New films, within which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

MAYA DA-RIN: THE FEVER (2019)



Tristes tropiques

The focus of this low keyed film about Amazonian indigenous people is Justino (Regis Myrupu), an impassive Desana man who has long lived and worked in Manaus, the Brazilian port city often in the news for Amazonian forest fires and gang violence. He works as an industrial site security guard - like a hunter with nothing to hunt, he says, showing he still has the old mindsets. He lives with his grown daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), who works in a hospital but has received a scholarship to medical school in Brasilia and will go there on her own for six years, leaving Justino alone. Whether it's this prospect causing the mysterious fever that now infects Justino or a deeper malaise of jungle longing years in the making we don't know. Nor does he, but he has strange dreams and, like Freud, he believes in them.

There are also hints sent out from the news that some mysterious beast is on the prowl; Justino sees it stirring when he returns from work one evening. and later it chews through the industrial wire fence. Justino and Vanessa discuss it with his older brother, who lives back in the territories but comes to visit and urges Justino to visit him, to breathe. But Justino is under the thumb of his controlling industrial employer, who apparently won't even let him have a few days of sick leave. His only visible coworker is a white man in the locker room who drops racist anti-Indian hints.

Justino seems a man bereft of good cheer. Myrupu's performance, impressive enough to get him a festival acting award, is an example of the ineloquent in art. His impassiveness suggests a strained stoicism. The isolation of indigenous people, the underlying theme, has been bluntly hinted in the film early on by the appearance of a woman who turns up in Vanessa's hospital, speaking an indigenous language nobody knows and knowing no other.

In his brief Now Toronto review of this film Kevin Ritchie notes its emphasis on repetition, "the banality of industry" (actually somewhat aestheticized), the "intense sound design and darkness/shadow" (noises, whether of machinery or dogs, always turned up), and the messages delivered of "cultural and environmental erosion" pointedly delivered. Ritchie points out that since "the conceit all hinges on Justino’s stoicism" he tends to "seem like a blank canvas for the filmmaker" - one that most of the time simply remains blank. ("Bressonian" perhaps, since Bresson called his actors "models.")

For a while, The Fever builds suspense. What is this fever, we would like to know. But when no answer is forthcoming, the action turns anticlimactic and blank. "Primarily a mood piece," as Ritchie says. The suspense turns out to have been a red herring. A subtler actor and a richer script could have delivered more on this important theme.

The Fever/A Febre, 98 mins., debuted at Locarno, where Regis Myrupu won the best actor award; in at least a dozen other festivals, including the delayed Dec. 2020 pandemic virtual New Directors/New Films, as part of which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CAMILO RESTREPO: LOS CONDUCTOS (2020)


LUIS FELIPE LOZANO IN LOS CONDUCTOS

TRAILER

Led by a fugitive

"A challenge to decipher," wrote Deborah Young in Hollywood Reporter after seeing Camilo Restrepo's Los conductos in Berlin this year. (It won the best first feature award there; it also won prizes at Mar del Plata and San Sebastián.) John Hopewell of Variety says it appeals "to a variety of visual styles [sic]," and "can be read as a portrait of the difficulties of reinsertion in a post civil conflict Colombia, or the enduring devastation of any kind of fanaticism, even when an individual has renounced its creed." More specifically, Carlos Aguilar explains in The Film Stage the basic thing: that the movie's based, but not literally or linearly, on the actual experiences of the main actor, Luis Felipe Lozano, who was involved in a cult with a young leader known as "Father" that committed crimes and induced its members to participate in them, and he escaped from it to reenter society. Restrepo himself finishes in an interview with Michael O'Keefe by adding that, on doing so, he realizes he is not going to be able to reenter society exactly, but will have to live on its margins in the corners of the Colombian city of Medellín (whose expansive cityscape is admired). We follow him, listening to his eloquent voiceover commentaries in deliciously swishy, sibilant Spanish, as he hides out in a succession of empty warehouses and makes his way through various encounters.

Los conductos is indeed hard to parse but it nonetheless satisfies for its splendidly cinematic qualities. Restrepo chose to shoot on 16mm film, for many reasons, he says, and he finds a new reason every time he is asked why. One of them is that film makes filmmaking more existential. You haven't dozens of chances to get it right. Another is that he is also a painter, with an affinity for American color field abstraction, and 16mm film's layers of color he finds satisfyingly painterly. The point is, Los Conductos is intensely visual. The protagonist, Pinky (Luis Felipe Lozano) spends a period working in a T shirt factory (a documentary passage, for Lozano-Pinky really did work at such a place) and then a small factory where film fabric is hand printed with large screens - with what appear to be graphically simplified flames of hell. From the opening titles one senses that this is a film with its own personal sense of visual design.

As Pinky, Luis Felipe Lozano is in some sense playing himself. He is a small, wiry, muscular man with bushy flowing hair and beard, Christlike in appearance and with a dare-devil madness and calm about him. He is one of the film's highest concepts.

The action begins with an electrifyingly scary motorcycle ride, with Pinky the rider: it's an amphetamine rush of energy. Los Consuctos also regularly shifts to other styles. There is a semi music video scene, showing Pinky on drugs; a comic sketch of an underground show with Pinky and one of Father's sons; expansive visual passages of devastated landscape; and a meeting with the re-embodiment of "El Desquite," the fifties Colombian criminal, bandit, sex offender and selective killer (as Spanish Wikipiedia describes him). There are parables, like that of the Lame Devil.

All this best conforms to Restrepo's sense that depictions of Latin American social and political dysfunction should unfold an "audiovisual collage," never being too specific, lest their respective countries be tied to the literal details of them forever. (I admit that I was expecting a flick about a gangster on the lam, and when I saw it wan'st going to be that, or anything very clearly definable, I was at first disappointed. But I got with the program after a while, and went with the flow. It sweeps you up.)

i]Los conductos[/i] is also another recent first feature shot effectively in dramatically boxy aspect ratio ( 1:33). This time the format very much helps make everything feel more hallucinatory, intense, and hyper-focused, with the surrounding scene mysterious. Restrepo avowedly doesn't work from a script or "in a narrow, linear way." Obviously he is comfortable doing that, and it's a method that allows him to throw out multiple meanings as well as change gears rapidly without losing momentum.

This is also another new independent film with great sound, which helps convey a hallucinatory intensity and sense of the outside world impinging upon Pinky as he escapes back into it, with uneven success.

Restrepo is a filmmaker whose promise was clear from three vigorous recent shorts, La impresión de una guerra (2015), a series of images of the country's state of continual conflict; Cilaos (2016), about a woman in search of her father; and La bouche (2017), about a man oscillating between appeasement and vengeance over the murder of his daughter. Vengeance is a theme of Los conductos too.

Los conductos ("The Conduits"), 70 mins. debuted at the Berlinale, where it won the best first feature award and was nominated for the Encounters award. It has played in at least 8 other festivals including San Sebastián, Mar del Plata, and theDec. 2020 delayed virtual pandemic edition of New Directors/New Films, as part of which it was screened for this review. .

[Chris Knipp]

CATARINA VASCONCESLOS: THE METAMOPHOSIS OF BIRDS/A METAMORPHOSE DOS PÁSSAROS (2020)


IMAGE FROM THE METAMORPHOSIS OF BIRDS

A gemlike family essay-memoir from Portugal

This film, whose London-trained first time director has expressed admiration for Manoel de Oliveira and Agnès Varda, is a fanciful memoir that's a cinematic evocation of family and a hymn to motherhood with a literary feel. The technique is unique and impressive, more magic realist visual essay than conventional family narrative, with oddball images and the voices of the director, her father and other family members alternating as voiceovers. What unfold aren't conventional dramatized scenes but a string of moments, illustrations. Odd facts stand out more than sense of family. What seems like a masterpiece at first comes to feel a bit thin and sentimental, despite fine technique and high-culture references like Bach's violin chaconne, Liszt, Rossini, and Schubert's piano sonata in A major, the opening page of Moby Dick and staged homages to Dutch still lives.

Vasconcelos' parental origins were, on one side, special and mother-centric. Six children were raised by their mother while the father, a naval officer, was off at sea. The mother, the filmmaker's grandmother, left those six siblings perpetually bereaved by dying early, at the age of 57. Vasconcelos' own mother, one of those siblings, also died young, when the director was 17, perhaps the first inspiration for this film. Another one is implied by the grandfather's (voiceover, reconstructed) decision to sell the house and dispose of its contents to move into a home, forcing the siblings to burn his love letters exchanged with his wife, so they will never read them.

Vasconcelos establishes a distinctive viewpoint and and visual style at once both by using academy ratio 16mm images (by dp Paulo Menezes) that are jewellike and intimate, and by displaying a penchant for arcane conceits. A boy's birth is referred to and he is seen, age nine or ten, fully dressed, emerging neatly from a cabinet, as if he was playing hide and seek. Young actors "represent" siblings momentarily, like commedia dell'arte figures, rather than in dramatic scenes. There is a kind of detachment. Vasconcelos evokes her parents' generation, who grew up under the dictatoroship, as a world of posh European quietude.

A lonely young seaman on board ship comforts himself by staring long at his legs, on which are tattooed matching images of his two parents. (We don't see the seaman, only his legs with the tattoos.) The kids mourn the death of a bird, and are granted permission to give it a respectful burial. We see it neatly folded in a linen napkin, and covered with a delicate layer of soil. We see only hands, not the children. This is the work of an exquisite miniaurist, and reflects a new generation of emerging art filmmakers with a penchant for the intimacy of academy ratio and 16mm.

The director has said that there were many "blank spaces" in the family history, which she welcomed because they allowed her to "invent." But she is not a conventional, storytelling, family-narrative inventor. She tells some, but talks about a lot - through dramatized multiple family narrators, young and old, male and female. There are still blank spaces. How often did the naval officer come home and for how long? What were the various siblings' lives like? There are big gaps.

Vasconcelos is too clever for herself sometimes, as when she shows the maid Zulmira's arms chopping off the head of a goose, then a shot of her wearing a full mask of a wooden bird head. What's the title mean? One of the narrators (voices of mother, father, and children are heard) recounts that originally humans didn't know about the existence of avian migrations and simply believed that when large flocks of different species arrived they were the disappeared birds newly metamorphosed into a different form. There's talk of the naval officer father sending a seahorse, which the mother playfully wears on her ear - a telling symbol, perhaps, of surviving without a spouse.

There is much reference early on to the eldest son, Jacinto, who is reported to have dreamed of becoming a bird. One emerges from this film with many fascinating little facts and memories of clever devices, like a succession of pretty closeups of old Portuguese stamps to symbolize the country's history of colonialism. (Yes, stamps are a good record of that.) It reminds me of when I was a kid and memorized entries in Ripley's Believe It Or Not. But this is more the work of a collector, a bit detached, a viewpoint imaged in the grid shown of identical cigar boxes containing seashells. It's family history as a cabinet of curiosities that almost refines itself out of existence at times.

At the end, she throws in a few pieces of material that's more raw: a shot of a live whole gathering of the actual graying siblings, not actors or models for them, but as they are now, in their sixties or seventies. And then at the end, as a vivid little touch, a recording the director's grandmother made to send to her naval officer husband, with the voice of each of their little children, starting with the eldest, chiming in to send their love and wish he'll be safe and come back soon.

There is immense talent, imagination, and intelligence here. One hopes Vasconcelos will go on to do something less refined and with more punch. This is readymade for, maybe even a little too good for, the mature arthouse audience (perhaps even more accessible currently online), but it lacks the gutsiness and humanity and specificity one looks for in more mainstream family portraits. One wishes the affirmation of motherhood were more subtle and internalized: the lengthy list of all the languages whose word for "mother" has an "m" in it and how "motherhood is the only religion with no non-believers" is cloying and unnecessary, as is the run-on time-lapsed sequence of blooming single flowers.

The Metamorphosis of Birds/A Metamorfose dos Pássaros, 101 mins., debuted Feb. 2020 at the Berlinale and won the FIPRESCI Award for best feature in the festival's new Encounters section. It has been included in over 15 international festivals since, many virtual due to the pandemic, including the delayed Dec. 2020 New Directors/New Films, as part of which it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CARLOS LENIN: THE DOVE AND THE WOLF/LA PALOMA Y EL LOBO (2019)



A downbeat ballet of working class life doomed by cartel violence

The Dove and the Wolf is set in a grimy small town assailed by cartel violence where those on the fringes must be contented with low-level urban labor, factory work. The main characters have little education and no prospects and live in primitive, run-down projects.

This situation dominates everything. Personalities barely emerge, and seem muffled. This is primarily a mood piece. One should not take too seriously the film's actions. The original, very self conscious young director, Carlos Lenin, hasn't gotten that far. He has a location and a situation and a sense of style and mission. This whole film could be seen as a ballet - albeit a static one: the fixed-position, low-lit, distinctly toned cinematography by Diego Tenorio is actually pretty striking. The two principle "dancers," circle around each other, approaching and avoiding. Soon it becomes clear that the boyfriend, Lobo (Armando Hernandez), feels deeply guilty about something unspeakable he's implicated in that indirectly involves his girlfriend, Paloma ((Paloma Petra). It will not be a surprise to learn later that it's something to do with gang violence. Little by little it comes out. That's all we've got for action.

The misery Lenin steeps his "story" in is so intense and stylized as to almost cross over to the other side into a kind of beauty. Grime, graffiti, miserable rooms, depressing low-life factories, shabby clothes are so extreme as to appear the self-conscious set for that same ballet. Figures in the foreground are often in darkness and become silhouettes, set off attractively by figures or objects behind and around them, and always the framing is symmetrical. The camera is static, and sometimes far off. Scenes are framed by the walls of a room or a building, centered, narrowing down the sphere of the action and heightening its sense of confinement but also making it more pictorial. There is a distinctive color scheme too: turquoise and pink and pale earth colors predominate, with brown. Everything is self-conscious. It's an aestheticizing of poverty and hopelessness, artistic miserabilism.

There is a catch in the ballet analogy, because this Paloma and Lobo are not handsome, fit, and energetic like ballet dancers but like typical working class Mexican types are a bit chubby and carry themselves in a stoop-shouldered and downcast manner. In a job interview Paloma appears a shy, innocent, hesitant girl. Here she timidly smiles. Lobo, whose supervisor, seen off in the distance, refuses to pay him for the next two weeks, seems so depressed and humiliated in every single scene it seems exaggerated. But Lenin's debut film and Hernandez's performance show intense conviction and artistic control. The look of the film is unique and original. There is much to be endured and little to be enjoyed here, but someone is doing exactly what they wanted to do.

The Dove and the Wolf/La paloma y el lobo debuted at Locarno in Aug. 2020 in the Filmmakers of the Present section winning the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Award; it also showed at Los Cabos, and in the delayed pandemic virtual New Directors/New Films series, where it was screened for this review. At the Ariels, Mexico's "Oscars," the film won best actor, best cinematography and best first film.