NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2020 (April 28-May 8, 2021)

[Chris Knipp]

JACQUELINE LENTZOU: MOON, 66 QUESTIONS (2020)


LAZAROS GEORGAKOPOULOS, SOFIA KOKKALI IN MOON, 66 QUESTIONS

Daughter reconciles with estranged dad by being his caregiver

This first feature by the young Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou (who already had eight shorts to her credit) is about a young woman called Artemis (Sofia Kokkali) who is called back from abroad to care for her suddenly disabled father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos). There seems to be nobody else to do it. She does this with a very ill will because she and her dad are estranged. One only wonders why she would do it at all. He himself is strange, inarticulate or at least willfully tight-lipped, not just with her. It seems he has MS, but has had a stroke, or something - nobody is sure what has happened, as the story is told.

This vagueness smooths things over as the film focuses closely on the man's disability as it must be performed by an actor, reportedly using some version of the Alexander Method as his preparation tfor a full-body recreation of tremors and general weakness. An attention-getting, risky business, which goes very well on the whole, though not entirely. There is an early scene where a physical therapist shows a group of family members, including Paris, how to help Artemis stand up and step forward. The actor, Lazaros Georgakopoulos (suggestive first name!) is so impressive I naively wondered at first if a real disabled person had been engaged for the role. However, the ease with which the actor later on fires up a cigarette with a lighter (when Paris spitefully refuses to do so), or eats, seems incompatible with his general shakiness and disability. He will not have to say much. Sofia Kokkali, who has been a frequent collaborator with the director, works too hard to show the difficult changes her character is going through.

Scenes alternate between being agonizing, and irrelevant. Why must so much time be devoted to ping pong? Like the unnecessary mythological names, other devices are added for framing - interpolations from "found" VHS family tapes from the nineties; tarot deck cards, from which the mysterious title comes - when more solid dramatic scenes might have helped, still winding up with a shorter and pithier film.

A "secret" about Artemis is revealed to Paris that, in a typically grating and molasses-slow sequence, she offers to tell him. Why bother? He knows. But he declines. Somehow this awkward discovery of hers, which we can't reveal, except to say there are rustles of interest in festival "queer" sections, makes Paris understand Artemis better. And at a restaurant meal - a difficult undertaking, one would think - he performs another feat of dexterity and slides over beside Paris and gives her a big hug. Problems solved.

Moon, 66 Questions 108 mins., had French internet release June 2020, debuted at the Berlinale Mar. 5, 2021, showed Mar. 25 at FICUNAM, Mexico, and was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). Last Chance to Rent May 11, 6:00 PM ET.

[Chris Knipp]

AINHOA RODRIGUEZ: DESTELLO BRAVÍO/MIGHTY FLASH (2021)



A town of old people

Beatrice Loayza in her New York Times preview of this year's New Directors/New Films series heralded Ainhoa Rodriguez's distinctive and surprisingly mature debut feature Destello Bravio as one of three good films in the 2021 series about older women. This one as she put it is about ladies of a certain age stuck in "a dead-end Spanish town" with their "idiot male components " with their "gloomy routine" periodically interrupted "by bursts of surreal eroticism, unsettling manifestations of their repressed desires." That is an overview of Destello Bravio. But that doesn't convey the style and the wit of it.

What I like about this film isn't just its distinctive grayish look, painterly in village landscapes and positively Vermeer-ish in the interiors, but the natural flowing rhythm of its dialogue, which contrasts with the awkward, self-conscious scripts of other ND/NF first films.

There is nobody young here and there's no escaping the men are burnt-out old birds and the women have lost their looks, though some of the latter cover that with the elegance of piled up hairdos you want to see, careful makeup, and lizard skin high heels. This is Spain, after all. There is a solemnity and quiet grandeur even about the bourgeois living rooms.

This is a town in the Estramadura, a remote region of Spain near Portugal. Letterboxd reviewer Michael Sicinski specifies Tierra de Barros, and says with cruel wit that Rodríguez's version of it is "a universe where all the young people have moved on, and seemingly taken narrative development with them." Definitely, the focus here is a state of mind and state of society, not an event. The director isn't concerned with philosophical pronouncements à la Roy Andersson or scary evocations of weirdness à la David Lynch. There are characters. Perhaps it's true they aren't threaded through the film quite as clearly as they might be, but there are some potent sequences, notably a woman taken out and humiliated by men, left all night naked in the countryside to come back next day weeping. There is the big banquet of ladies who get drunk and start writhing and making out. Admittedly stylistic and technical decisions wind up giving most scenes their distinctive feel.

It's also clear that Rodríguez is concerned to bring out the hypocrisy of Catholicism and the deeply entrenched differences in genders, as she does by setting the action around Holy Week and switching back and forth between all-male and all-female gatherings. She is also more focused on a mood than on individual stories, an imminence of something dire that hovers over the near-nothingness. Leonardo Goi in The Film Stage notes the unnamed, unspecified town "juts into being from a fable, a land of almost biblical desolation and solitude." "The old folks marooned here." he writes, are the "last surviving members of an old species, but the film is so committed to its oneiric and sepulchral fabric that they may as well be dead already. Ghosts in a ghost town." They are half dead - someone even says so. Or they may be on the edge of an apocalypse, the sudden "mighty flash" of the title that a strange woman predicts, in one of her pronouncements to herself into a tape recorder, will one day suddenly possess the valley. Sound effects constantly predict something mad and strange - but it may just as well be only a collective desire for such a thing to relieve the boredom.

Maybe not everything comes together here. But this is work that makes you sit up and take notice. Forced to watch it at home, I switched to my big screen and turned up the sound. I wanted to hear the full resonance ofr those pungent voices and savor those colors and that fancy makeup of the vain ladies well past their prime. It would be very interesting to know how Rodríguez cast this film and how she got these balls-out performances from all these old people.

Mighty Flasy/Destello bravio, 98 mins., debuted at Rotterdam, showing also at FICUNAM (Mexico) and it was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). Last Chance to Rent May 11, 6:00 PM ET.

[Chris Knipp]

KIM MI-JO: GULL (2020)


JEONG AE-HWA AS O-BOK IN GULL

A tough debut film about a Korean rape

This is a youthful South Korean film about a Seoul fish market vender who becomes the victim of rape. In various ways this is not your usual rape movie. O-bok (a powerful Jeong Aehwa) is 61 and petite and feisty, which may make her not seem a likely victim. though her energy may make her youthful and attractive. The audience never sees the rape, only events leading up to it and away from it. You might feel this way is more from the victim's point of view, since O-bok cannot "observe" what is happening to her when she's assaulted. But this might be considered the public's point of view, because no one wants to think about rape.

There is the freshness and boldness of the newcomer about this film made as a graduation feature for the film school of Danking University. The school is also the producer. A relentless little movie, it's made up of many small naturalistic scenes made so the action and shifts of locale never let up. Kim decided on few closeup shots and an avoidance of camera movement: a calm, placid lens, an ironic contrast to the protagonist's turbulent state. There's a relentlessly unfun, style-less quality, but one might have said that about Italian neorealist films that are now classics. Director Kim is taking on society - which, despite #MeToo and changing attitudes, is a tough decision to make. The title she has said is an homage to Chekhov's The Seagull but doesn't relate specifically to the play; she thinks of her protagonist as a bird who can't fly away, and also was reminded of the sound, to her, of the English word "girl."

The director planned to focus on a mother-daughter relationship in a sexual assault but later chose to make the mother the victim, which surely adds to the resonance, or lack of it, in the society beyond, since this woman is the breadwinner of the family whose lack of education makes her daughters tempted to distance themselves. This is a film about class as well as male power, and a film about the dangerous role of alcohol in Korean culture. O-bok's three daughters have gotten college educations thanks to her hard work and she is left seeming to them rude and uneducated. A fishmonger, she can talk like one. In a rather overly explicit one-way phone conversation O-bok remonstrates with her own mother, who now has dementia, for not assuring her an education with the many benefits it would have brought her in life.

The market is waiting for government-aided improvements. Getting all the venders on board for this requires bonding which, in Korean culture, requires getting drunk together. O-bok is assaulted by Gi-taek, a fellow vender and the powerful chairman of the redevelopment committee. We don't glimpse him till later. He can't be made vulnerable.

It's after a stiff dressup restaurant dinner where O-tek, her husband and the betrothed eldest daughter sit down with the groom and his parents, that O-tek goes and hangs out with coworkers to unwind by getting drunk herself. When she's drunk the others leave her, thinking her "safe," and the assault - which we don't see - occurs. She is bleeding as she comes out of the subway on the way home. The moment of shock and realization this causes for the reader is a potent one.

Things are never the same. Though O-tek never wilts, she can't focus on her shop, on anything but what has happened, which she can't talk about at first. She tries medical help, then complaining to the police, seeking supporting witnesses from the market, and first her eldest daughter and then the youngest one come along to help her. O-bok ultimately has to absorb, without imploding, the rage she must experience at her assault and at living in a culture dominated by males and tolerant of violence. When her husband finds out he drunkenly recites the saying that when a woman is raped, she has wanted it.

For her next project, Kim is planning a mother and daughter revenge story. "I’m expecting to make a Korean-style film, a mixture of action, thriller and comedy," she said in a Variety interview. Let's hope that will be more fun.

Gull, 74 mins., won the Grand Prize for the Korean Competition at the 2021 Jeonju Film Festival and showed in San Sebastian’s New Directors sidebar, also released in Switzerland, French-speaking region, and shown at the London Korean Film Festival and Filmfest Hamburg. It was screened at home for this review as part of the MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).

[Chris Knipp]

ARIE & CHUKO ESIRI: EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE) (2020)


JUDE AKUWUDIKE IN EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE)

Ah, Lagos

The Esiri brothers, Arie and Chukko, spent most of their early life in England going to school. As they returned periodically to their native Nigeria they report overcoming initial distrust and concern and gradually coming to appreciate and even love the place. Now they have made a first feature there, teeming with its energy - and its frustrations and heartbreaks.

When I lived in Cairo in the sixties it was the largest city in Africa. Lagos has since gotten the jump on Cairo by half a million (Lagos 21 million, Cairo 20.4 by a recent estimate), and Lagos is growing by half a million a year.

This first feature the Esiris have made, set in Lagos, is clearly impatient to show their concern and affection for the place and simply reveal to us as much as they can at one time of this world partly strange to them and yet theirs. (This is much the way my young self would have wanted to film sixties Cairo.) Eyimofe is cast in the form of two halves focused separately on two people, a man and a woman struggling to survive in the city at multiple jobs, as many do. Alive, specific, and vibrant, this film is a complete and invigorating (but also exhausting) contrast to the country's usual myriad hastily produced "Nollywood" film industry products which have little interest or value for outsiders.

Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) teems, like the city where it's set. The successive scenes, whether focused first on Mofe (the appealing Jude Akuwudike), then on Rosa (the arresting Temi Ami-Williams) are shot by skilled Beginning cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan largely in busy locations that show off the city - in many specific situations - as well as the protagonists; and it reminds me, in its crowded energy, of that Cairo I once knew and loved so well and have periodically revisited, finding it always larger, more overwhelming, more a nightmare, yet the spirit of its people as vigorous and charming as before. One imagines the Esiri brothers feeling the same.

But while Eyimofe has unquestionable festival appeal and is an energetic and accomplished production, it sprawls like the city and doesn't quite hang together, primarily because the two protagonists who divide the action between them have only the sketchiest narrative connection - except that both are making expensive but seemingly futile efforts to leave the country, he for Spain, she for Italy.

The struggles of Mofe are almost unbearably pathetic and intense. He is the "engineer" at a printing firm where the machinery is continually breaking down and the electrical system is dangerous. The Esiris have said "Nigeria is a third world country, so it's more difficult than other places." That's for sure. When Mofe and his new young electrician, Wisdom, handle fuses or connections they get continual shocks. The young female boss is imperious, queenly, disdainful toward Mofe when he quietly insists equipment must be replaced.

At home where Mofe lives with his sister and her young kids, a tragedy occurs. As he deals with the aftermath, he encounters impossible expenses and Kafkaesque red tape. A visit to his estranged father in the country to appeal for help is chilly and surreal. He keeps pursuing a visa, passport, other emigration arrangements, only to encounter continual additional tangled obstacles and requirements. Nonetheless he strives on. The tragedy does not deter him. At night he works at his secondary job, a street repair stand where he fixes little appliances. And so on and on. There is no poetry here, save the poetry of a human spirit that doesn't falter - not that he has not lashed out in anger at the broken wiring and fuses and incurred his lady boss's ire. This can't be Dante's Purgatory: there are too many different levels of struggle.

Rosa's life has different problems, pertaining to her young pregnant sister and men. Her two jobs are hairdresser and bartender, and she is responsible for her school age sister Grace (Cynthia Ebijie). Grace's pregnancy is problematic; she is not taking her unspecified meds, which she is warned endangers the pregnancy. Then there is the sharply dressed landlord, Mr. Vincent, who loves Rosa madly but whom she keeps at arms length, while accepting his favors because she is so needy. She's short for the rent, for medical fees for Grace, and for the travel "arrangements," which will include numerous fake documents. For this she falls under the control of unscrupulous broker Mama Esther (Nigerian comedian Chioma Omeruah in a pungent cameo), who wants the baby or, barring that, to have both women as her wage-slaves.

Mr. Vincent, courtly, generous, but needy, must take second place to Peter (Jacob Alexander), an American expatriate, who has greater means and is generous with this attractive young woman who comes to bed with him. But she goes back and forth, not wanting to be too obliged to the landlord or too overly demanding with Peter. At one point the ladies' fridge breaks (again) and thus one evening Grace meets Mofe.

The Rosa half of this picture has a gentler pace, but it has its own rhythm, and its own dire situations. It also has more interiors, and whether indoors or out, every shot has a different set of eye-candy coordinated colors in Khachaturan's increasingly ravishing images. In the maternity clinic, the walls are dark blue and the attendants' uniforms are bright red, which is prettier than it sounds. Rosa and Grace have a succession of different hairdos and outfits. But this though less turbulent and more aesthetic nightmare is still a nightmare. It's also of course a picture of ways big city urban third world problems are complicated by being unattached and female. At the end, Rosa finds a big compromise solution. In an Epilogue, things for Mofe are looking up. But nobody's going anywhere.

And that's your story, which artistically is a bit shapeless. But as the Variety review from the 2020 Berlinale says this "low key charmer" really shines, which shows from the start, as "a clear-eyed portrait of a vibrant city, informed by the unfakeable love and well-earned exasperation of two talented native sons."

Eyomofe ((This Is My Desire), 116 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 2020; also IndieLisboa, Hamburg, London, Rome, Nantes (internet), San Francisco and Seattle. Screened at home for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021).



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[Chris Knipp]

JESSICA BESHIR: FAYA-DAYI (2021)



A dreamy doc about khat is perhaps better than it deserves

Faya-Dayi, a poetic and sometimes beautiful black and white film weaving documentary material about people in Ethiopia and the khat industry (and the addictive stimulant leaves' ever-present consumption) is "hypnotic" in its effect but also numbing and much less informative than it might be if it provided sociological facts and personal information. It's set ostensibly in Harar, Ethiopia, which is considered by some authorities to be where the thousand-year-old custom of khat chewing was born. The filmmaker Jessica Beshir was forced to leave Harar when very young due to political unrest. In her poetic, dreamlike film composed through visual-conscious editing and the use of live and diegetic music and a new age score to bind images together and give some moments an edge of magic, she's made a film that may have "mythical undercurrents" and suggest the spiritual lives of some of its subjects. But over and over we come back to the gangs of hopped-up men and boys stripping khat plants and arranging them in bunches in a large warehouse, bagging them, loading them on a truck to be shipped.

A Variety reviewer describes the film as a mix of "observational vérité" and "esoteric myth-building" that "suggests an in-and-out grasp on reality." Younger boys air the legend (clearly there is a lore that surrounds the plant) that heavy khat-chewers enter into their own private reality, though the Wikipedia article suggests its use is not much different from amphetamines, strong coffee, or lots of green tea. But the reviewer adds that this "seductive device" eventually palls as it "unfurls across two calculatedly low-energy hours." We meet people, though we admire their faces, only superficially, even if the film is "an immersive success, as the languid rhythms of the filmmaking mirror the woozy impact of the drug..."

What is the woozy impact of the drug? It doesn't seem one of the many that William Burroughs thought worth trying. It's usually described as chewed for hours to make dreary routine work palatable. If it is like an upper, it doubtless may leave its heavy users drained between uses. Young men sorting or arranging the khat branches are obviously speeded up on the leaf-chewing; an older, bearded long-time user, with his head scarf and thick, dog-eared Qur'an, often looks either drained or blissed-out.

The final message, not a message because nothing is spelled out, is that many dead-end lives are lived here, and youngsters are notably seen discussing whether they are going to take off on a boat presumably crossing the treacherous route to Lampedusa. No magic there. This film is cunningly edited. It may make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. But Jessica Beshir will go on to do good things.

Faya Dayi, 120 mins., debuted at Sundance. Also shown at Seattle, three prestigious documentary festivals, Nyon, Switzerland (Visions du réel), Hot Docs (Toronto), and True/False (Columbia, MI), and it was screened at home for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021 NYC and virtual).

[Chris Knipp]

THEO ANTHONY: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (2021)



("A far-ranging look at the biases in how we see things, focusing on the use of police body cameras")

Anthony began his career as a filmmaker with Chop My Money (2014), a 13-minute film that was a day in the life of three street kids in the Eastern Congo. Next came Rat Film (2016), 82 minutes, a documentary that uses a study of the rat and its habitations in walls, fences and alleys to explore the history of Baltimore. He did a short documentary not long ago about sports record photography, the 37-minute 2019 Subject to Review.

Here, in New Directors/New Films' 2021 Closing Film, Anthony moves on to meatier matter, still taking off from recorded images and considering, as the blurb for Subject to Review said, "how the technology exposes deeper questions of spectacle, justice, and imperfect human knowledge." Anthony's researches took him to Arizona as well as his native Baltimore.

Axon, formerly TASER International in Scottsdale, provides a main focus. This booming business, proudly shown off by the company boss, Steve Tuttle, in shirtsleeves, now produces a panoply of devices, starting off with the Taser electroshock stun gun weapon and moving on (rebranding itself to do so) to the body camera - both used by police. That the company started off with Taser weapons and moved on to police body cameras is telling in itself; the owner sees these as two sides of the same function, the Taser to disable citizens/offenders "harmlessly" (but they have been known to result in death), the body camera to protect the police from charges of abuse. It's all computerized, tied in with a high tech system, and activated when the cops pull out their weapon.

Anthony also had access to the Baltimore police department where the Axon body camera was being explained to some police, and to a community meeting where Ross McNutt, President and CEO of Persistent Surveillance Systems, is trying to sell a group of Baltimore citizens of color on the advantages of another aerial surveillance camera system, strenuously objected to by some, particularly a citizen originally from Haiti. Eventually the system was assumed by the City of Baltimore, whose crime problems have been well known.

Underlying these specific highlights, and a neuroscience focus group wearing far-fetched looking tracking devices to analyze their visual responses, there are narrations and music linking them together under general themes of: the camera as an all-seeing eye that is flawed, and earlier surveillance systems; carrier pigeons with cameras on them used by the Germans in WWI; early systems of recording data (photos and measurements) on "criminals" and things like facial types and "pictorial statistics." These narratives and images, accompanied by droning music, are attractive and may be thought-provoking. Basic flaws in the historic "criminal composite" system are pointed out and the fact that it never led to apprehension of any criminals. A wealth of archival imagery, old photos, drawings, diagrams, and sketches make this section attractive and reflect Anthony's extensive related research into the subject matter his film broadly broaches.

It probably wouldn't be enough just to focus on the Axon body cameras - which of course are linked to whole computer systems to detect, record, and analyze. How all these hypertrophied and outsourced to private industry systems are growing by the day is troubling indeed. But the other information and images and the narration and Dan Deacon's musical score are all part of the package. This is entertainment, after all. Anthony's team makes the end result both entrancing and disturbing. "From what picture does the future dream?" Whatever that means.

What somebody said in Baltimore is, turn the camera around: that's what the people want. They want the Big Brother overhead lens on the cops, not the citizens.

What astonished me is that it's an essential part of the police body cam system that cops can choose to turn it on or off. It apparently only records permanently when they choose. Before we get there, moreover, it's already designed to show only what the cops see, so in court, the body camera information won't show when the cop saw something that wasn't there or missed things that were there. In all the Axon devices, the scale is weighted in favor of the police.

A whole segment of black filmmaking students at Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore working on a related project is sampled toward the end, but it's explained that it was decided to cut most of it out. This somehow isn't so bad, because it's part of Anthony showing the complexity of his process and its openendedness. (The students made their own film.)

This is, then, another version of an experimental doc (like, also in ND/NF 2021, Fern Silva's Rock Bottom Riser) that is interestingly made to bring us into the filmmaker's thought process so it's both beautiful and stimulating to watch. It is food for thought, a starting point, perhaps, left with pieces we have to put together for ourselves. While some citizen reviewers found it "pretentious at times" or felt it "tries too hard to be deep," its evident energy and invention is one obvious reason why the ND/NF organizers honored it by selection as their Closing Night Film. It comes out with all barrels blazing. It shows off a bit without ceasing to be serious and informative. A documentary that was less "experimental," that focused a little more clearly on one central issue, as Alex Gibney would have done, might also have wound up not being as much fun. But you have to be open minded to enjoy and be stimulated by this kind of film.

For fuller details of the multiple threads woven into this complex film see Sheri Linden's review in Hollywood Reporter.

All Light, Everywhere, 115 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 31 (special jury prize in nonfiction experimentation), 2021, showed at Copenhagen's CPH DOX Apr. 24; Toronto's Hot Docs Apr. 29; at Jeonju (virtual) Apr. 29; in Columbia, MI's True/False May 7. It was screened at home May 13 for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021 NYC and virtual).