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

[Chris Knipp]

FERN SILVA: ROCK BOTTOM RISER (2021)


VOLCANO IMAGE FROM ROCK BOTTOM RISER

This short experimental documentary feature packs in a lot about Hawaii

Rock Bottom Riser, whose subject is Hawaii, is Portuguese American Fern Silva's first feature, an experimental documentary that it's been said Werner Herzog would be proud to have made - which seems quite true though this is in no way derivative work. It's a short film, only 70 minutes, but packed with information with many twists and turns that work fine because they're all part of the complexity of a subject that encompasses indigenous people, white colonialism, science vs. native craft and art, cluelessness, stoner nuttiness, spectacular lava from live volcanoes, and a surfer sailing in on a long easy wave. The natural scenes, especially the volcanoes, make this clearly a film designed to be spectacular on a very large screen though many will have to see it in the largely virtual New Directors/New Films this year. There are texts, there are speeches, there are scenes of deep unperceived absurdity, all this so concentrated that second viewings would be beneficial.

"...Silva catapults us through a fiery wormhole, runs us through a forest glimpsed in infrared (shades of Predator), and allows us to glide above the Earth as fiery magma belches out of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii and flows around a small village like a river of fire, as a burbling Carpenteresque synth score fills the soundtrack. And that’s just the first five minutes of this at once playful and serious avant-garde documentary, which offers a consistently unpredictable survey of Hawaiian history, culture, and political issues..." (Keith Watson in Slant)

From NotMattDamon on Letterboxd:
"this documentary has everything
cool nature shots
A Simon and Garfunkel deep-cut
hard to decipher science
vape tricks
Dwayne the rock Johnson
Dramatic monologues."

More from Keith Watson:
"The film puts particular emphasis on the tense interplay between Western notions of scientific inquiry and indigenous rights, with the battle over the proposed construction of an astronomical observatory on top of Mauna Kea—the most sacred site in native Hawaiian culture—serving as a focal point. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), as the project is known, is positioned as both a colonialist substitution of indigenous modes of inquiry and a Trojan horse for the further displacement and carceralization of native Hawaiians."

If it works, when you're done watching all these things are whirling around in your head: the sweet, clueless lady and her middle class white class sitting to learn about the "poetry" of Paul Simon's "I Am a Rock": we hear the song and watch the rapt listeners, but are spared the explanation. At the "Volcano" vape shop we watch a spectacular display of smoke vaping and smoke-ring making by a trio of regulars, and this comes after a lot of volcano footage so the overlap is doubly or triply trippy. The "cool nature shots" resonate strongly with the issue of indigenous sacred land that is particularly intense in Hawaii and Silva's underlying motivation.

As Watson hints, and the Letterboxd list notes, there is some pretty incomprehensible professorial blackboard-jotting talk about stars. But there is another talk with a heavy French accent that justifies space exploration and future colonization as well as I've ever heard it done. A seduction? Dwayne Johnson, also often seductive, we see here distanced, a shot of him on a TV screen on a wall, as he unconvincingly and repetitively claims objections to his upcoming playing of King Kamehameha are being nicely sorted out.

Which of these and the various other pungent sequences you will like best or find most significant will depend on you and may change on subsequent viewings. They are all there, they all fit, and there is an admirable avoidance of cliché in the choices. Even the final surfer sequence feels fresh because it's so simply shot. Werner Herzog, take note. This is a film that's both passionate and witty. Promising work.

A FSC-Harvard fellow, Fern Silva is a faculty member at Bennington College. He received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and MFA from Bard.

Rock Bottom Riser, 74 min., Color, 5.1 Sound, Super 16mm/35mm, debuted in Paris at Cinéma du réel in March 2021. It also showed at the Berlinale in March in the Encounters section, receiving special mention. Watched online at home as part of its US debut in New Directors/New Films.

[Chris Knipp]

MADIANO MARCHETI: MADALENA (2021)


PÂMELLA YULE IN MADALENA

Repercussions of the murder of a trans person in Brazil's Centro Oeste

Madiano Marcheti takes an overlooked issue and makes it more haunting by indirection. A body is "found" (by the camera) at the outset in a vast soya field where it's doubtless been dumped. It is the corpse of Madalena, a young trans woman. Brazil has more than twice the number of trans murders than the next Latin American country, Mexico. But while the film points out Brazil's terrible trans statistic in a closing caption, Marcheti isn't interested in the "issue" simply as such or the police procedural aspects of the narrative. The film doesn't explore the murder. Instead it quietly follows brief periods in the lives of three people indirectly touched by this event but unrelated to each other. The fluency of the filmmaking, the perfect pitch of the scenes, are what make this an impressive, memorable, and formally audacious debut. Unlike the proverbial pistol that must be used if it is introduced in the play, a corpse need not be explained but will nonetheless greatly heighten the focus and tension of what follows. And the apparent unconcern about this individual death is itself a pungent comment on a widespread and terrible problem.

The film establishes how vast the soy fields are. It turns out they have been consolidated in the hands of a single agribusiness family, but that's not explained. We see the plants waving in the wind and big agricultural machines to work them. But men have to go through doing something by hand (picking weeds?). Overseeing the whole thing is a veritable cloud of drones (to check on the men, perhaps?) and ironically looking, as if spying, groups of rheas, flightless birds with long waving necks and long beaks who seem to be scanning the horizon, enigmatically looking for trouble.

Marcheti doesn't have to connect the three parts because they're not connected; that's the point; but they have a rising and falling dramatic arc with sharp internal contrasts. They start out cheerily with a portrait of the local population with its poverty, pursuit of pleasure, and sexism; move on to a unique individual whose special connection to the event heightens tension to a high pitch; then taper off with a comrade of the deceased who is sad but philosophical, and, after all, pursuing her own pursuits, but by her nature more affected - and endangered - than others.

Luziane (Natália Mazarim) is a pretty young cis gender woman who works as hostess at a noisy club called Texas. Her primary concern about the disappearance of Madalena is that the latter owes her money, and she is struggling to pay for her new Vespa-style motorbike. Young men surround her and vaguely menace her. She has to get tough with a wise-ass young "bro" who tries to park his vehicle in front of the club, and she stands watching a group of showoff "bros" doing flashy wheelies with their bikes. She actually gets into Madalena's little pad and hunts for money. We learn the farm workers live in rows of tiny cement hovels.

Jump to the other economic extreme, Cristiano (Rafael de Bona), a tall, good looking, but not very secure young man whose father owns the whole vast farm and from whom he expects to inherit it, and whose mother is in politics with an election coming. It appears that he visits the farm every day and oversees what's going on, while he must field over-critical and over-demanding calls from his absent father. His discovery of the body puts him in a state of panic. This is bad for the farm and could be ruinous for is mother's election. It is his responsibility to hush it up but he doesn't know what to do. He can't tell anyone about it, not even his friend Gildo (Antonio Salvador), who he wants to have help him. His father's call demanding he start harvesting that night leads him to escape into vaping and drinking, and, thus fortified, he takes Gildo out to the fields but there is no understanding. There's excellent buildup of tension throughout this sequence and, if you are identifying, you are seeing how totally everything, for Cristiano, revolves around Cristiano.

Last we spend time with Bianca (Pâmella Yule), a young trans woman who revisits Madalena's abandoned house with younger trans friends and they each gather up some possessions as mementoes. Later Bianca goes on an outing with two friends. Does Madalena appear as a ghost to her? (She believes in flying saucers.) There is a feeling of homage or farewell, but also that they are not lost in sorrow. It's over. It happened. But the stream they bathe in has the air of being a place where you might meet up with crocodiles or snakes. It's a symbol of the danger trans people, particularly trans women of color, live in everywhere, not just in Brazil. But with Marcheti, what impresses is an ability to drop into lives with astonishing quickness and confidence, relating them effortlessly to a larger, and complex, situation. Use of the whole milieu, the unforced portraiture of the Centro Oeste region, is assured and impressive, too.

Madalena, 85 mins., first showed, in progress, at San Sebastiàn Sept. 2019, and debuted at Rotterdam Feb. 3, 2021 (virtual). 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]

Firouzeh Khosrovani: RADIOGRAPH OF A FAMILY (2021)



A life in Iran told with reinvented photographs and dialogue

This is certainly an interesting and, for a non-Iranian, surprising family. Basically the older father of the filmmaker marries his younger wife from a distance, because, he says, he can't take the time away from his medical studies in Switzerland, where he's been for years training as a radiologist. The future mother's marriage ceremony is performed with a portrait photo standing in for the groom. The bride then comes from Iran to Geneva to live with her husband. He is liberal and secular and she is a hijab-wearing devout muslim. Maybe his commitment to liberalism wasn't 100%. Maybe he has a tendency for self-sabotage.

She is never happy with living in the secular, western environment, though she does apparently learn French, calls her husband "misyew," and for a while gives up the veil. After she gets pregnant and then suffers a severe back injury while skiing (to please her husband), she prevails upon him to return to Iran. (X-rays of the mother's damaged back further carry out the radiology theme.)

As little Firouzeh grows up, mom takes charge. She becomes a follower of a radical Islamist leader and this empowers her. When her husband asks to return to Switzerland because it's too dangerous in the chaos of revolutionary Iran, mom refuses. She takes over the school teaching job of a teacher expelled by the Islamists, and is so successful she becomes the principal.

To fit revolutionary ideals, the spacious house is stripped of silver, glassware, paintings, and lampshades. We don't actually see this, of course. The filmmaker uses a big living room throughout like a stage set, moving things around in it to suggest how the family lifestyle changes. This is only one way the film is fanciful, not literal, in its presentation of information. But more of that later. It gets weirder. The house is used for religious banquets. Mother gets military training and goes off to the front during the Iraq-Iran war. She makes sure father silences his Bach (western classical music is not approved, never was, for her) and listens to it on headphones. Somehow they seem to remain in the same house. One day the father dies, in his last time still listening to Bach on his headphones.

In his Hollywood Reporter review, Stephen Dalton calls this a"stylized documentary," and "an elegantly composed mosaic of real events and artfully restaged memories." The trouble with this method, for me, is that after a while one doesn't know which photos are authentic and which ones are artfully faked. Is the elderly lady at the end, sitting in that symbolic room and frailly reciting with a Qur'an, the filmmaker's mother? There is no way of knowing. At that point it would hardly matter. She is used symbolically. Unlike factual documentaries of lives, this one does not interrogate living people or in any way allow them to speak for themselves. Firouzeh's mother and father speak almost entirely in invented dialogue read by actors.

Another problem is that there are never ages of people given or dates for events. By looking up on Google, I found out that the funeral in London of the Islamist revolutionary that the mother goes to by herself was in 1977, but we don't know how old Firouzeh was then. It would certainly have been nice to know how old the mother and father were when they married. Probably the disparity was dramatic and the mother was a teenager. More importantly one would like to learn a little more that's specific about events in Iran.

And finally, this film tells us almost nothing about the filmmaker growing up at the time when this story is happening. What did she feel? Apparently she sided with her father and was largely ignored by her mom. What kind of school did she go to? What was her life like? What were her sorrows and joys? Where does she live now and what is her life like today? It turns out all those stylishly recreated or invented films and snapshots leave big gaps in a story that remains very impressionistic. Perhaps this reflects Firouzeh's remoteness from both parents, growing up.

In contrast one thinks of Persepolis, the four-volume series of Bande dessinées (French comics) published 2000-2004 by Marjane Satrapi and the lively film version (NYFF 2007) made in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud with the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux for the main women. Satrapi lived through the Iranian revolution and left Iran for good, for France, in 1994, at twenty-four. Her focus is on her own constantly changing ideas, growing up, spurred by the waves of Islamism and a Marxist-Leninist uncle. She is lively and outspoken, goes to French school in Vienna for a while, has sex and experiences the double lives the bourgeois Iranians were living. There is more about external events and when things are happening. Firouzeh's film weaves its own magic, I suppose, but it leaves me feeling hungry and makes me feel uncomfortable, even depressed. Persepolis is meatier stuff. It's fanciful too - it's a graphic novel, after all - but you feel the presence of real people.

Radiograph of a Family, 82 mins., debuted at Amsterdam Nov. 2020 (two awards) and has been included in over half a dozen other international festivals including Goteborg, Sofia, Hon Kong and Jeonju. 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]

KWON MIN-PYO & SEO HAN-SOL: SHORT VACATION (2021)



Snapping the world's end with a plastic camera

Jake Cole describes Short Vacation in his review for Slant as "an austere, poignant reverie about life's promise." You might see it that way, but on the face of it, this little film focused on four teenage girls is not so much "about" anything. The young filmmakers have made a film about four Korean junior high girls. Their names are not changed; they are just "being themselves" in a constructed, improvised slice of life. Early sequences show them with their teacher, Mr. Kang, who heads their photography club. It hasn't yet led to any photography. Seeking to remedy this, before school lets out for the summer he gives them each a throwaway 35mm. film camera loaded with a roll of film and tells them their summer vacation assignment is to use these to take pictures of "the end of the world." It's a challenge to find a symbolic scene or image that leads to a day and night together when the girls get to know each other better, have some quiet fun, and take some pictures.

These scenes are largely improvised. What do the the girls learn? You'd have to ask them. This is a movie about nothing - the hardest kind to describe. It is the sum total of many little non-events that add up to a feeling of hanging out with four Korean teen girls, all in the same class, three who knew each other and one newbie who fits quickly in. Its extremely low key naturalism is what it has to offer. In that improvisational, hanging out style it may capture what it would really be like in the company of these four girls. . . hanging out.

They get along together very well, forming two compatible pairs in a harmonious quartet. Their "end of the world" project resolves, somehow, into the decision to try to take the Seoul subway to the end of the line. Maybe that will have an "end of the world" quality This is what leads to their adventure, which is to get a little lost and wind up, in the rain, too far from home to go back that evening. They decide reluctantly to sleep at an empty senior center. It becomes a sort of pajama party where they sit up talking much of the night, especially about their grandparents.

There is no "end of the world" - no setting that gives off that aura for the girls. The end of the line has turned out to look a lot like every other station, so they take a hike further in search of a more remote one. They find restaurants, old folks, dogs, and a cat and after trying to escape the rain but then, it being a hot summer day, give up and enjoy getting wet. There is no epiphany, no tragedy. The worst thing that happens is that one of the girls disappears for a while (she is feeding a cat) and their smartphone batteries run out and they can't recharge them. When they realize it's too far and too complicated from the subway main line to get back in the dark and rain, they show some concern about the building they are going to stay in. Will somebody come in? Is it too "gross"? But they don't show much concern about their parents worrying. They think they can just be "pitiful" and say they were lost and they'll be forgiven for being out all night.

Thus is this film structured to avoid all drama even when drama might loom. The aim seems to be simply to put the four girls together, away from other influences and people so we can hear them interact. Their silly, trivial conversation becomes a stream of young consciousness, a dial tone of placid adolescence. You must learn to praise this film for being so uninteresting, so uneventful. Because anything else would have distracted from its aim.

Short Vacation/Jong chak yeok79 mins., debuted Mar. 2021 in the Berlinale's Generation section, also in festivals at Busan and Seoul. 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).

Somewhat surprisingly but gratifyingly, in a private review Mike D'Angelo rates this a for him enthusiastic 71/100 (May 26, 2021) and hopes it gets US distribution. That would be nice.

[Chris Knipp]

JANE SCHOENBRUN: WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR (2021)



Perhaps a calmer look at online obsessions

Focused on a lonely young woman stuck in her attic room playing an internet game, Jane Schoenbrun's film seeks to depict the way in which for some, mostly of the younger generation, obsession with the online world can seem to veritably suck away the soul - figuratively speaking, I hasten to say. That this is a frightening, disturbing prospect is an impression augmented by focusing on an online game developed out of horror movies. The actress playing this person, the voluntary victim, whose name is Casey, Anna Cobb, has a sort of deep involvement in her role and an open, childlike face that many reviewers have commented on favorably, predicting a future for Cobb. Unfortunately there is no escape from the fact that the film itself is stultifyingly boring, dreary and uneventful. Some have noted that it makes 85 minutes seem like quite a long time.

The use of webcams and smartphone cameras for the images offers a new direction for variety in film images, appropriate for depicting this kind of world. Use of these media in film seems not very hopeful for those who value sophisticated visual technique and aesthetics; but you never know what an inventive new eye can do with a different medium. Sean Baker's debut of Tangerine, six years ago, was a sterling example. It sparkles, the look enhancing the lively personalities depicted. And it was shot with no professional or even quality amateur lenses but nothing but three iPhone 5s cameras.

The phone images were enhanced, though, using a small battery of cool modern tools: the FiLMIC Pro app, a video app to control focus, aperture and color temperature and capture video clips at higher bit-rates; and, importantly, an anamorphic adapter for widescreen imagery. The digital tools underfunded, minimalist filmmakers have at their disposal today are a main way that they can produce attractive results with economic means. Schoenbrun isn't interested in that however but in suggesting the dreary, limited technology unsophisticated online geeks are satisfied with.

At the outset the film takes eight minutes of us in effect staring through a webcam disturbingly alone with Casey - who would want to be such a person? Who would want to be stuck with her? The effect is "real" in having no feeling of being edited or being a real film made for an audience. But this is the kind of "realism" that is achieved at the terrible cost of boring the pants off of us. The saving grace: it's creepy. And the "point" is that Casey is announcing her signing up, though whatever that means exactly wasn't clear to me, for the "World's Fair Challenge," which is billed as the internet's "scariest horror game."

This game is further depicted as altering participants in frightening ways, such as making one guy unable to feel his own body. But though Casey seems creepy and sad in her isolation from human, live society and her lack of apparent affect, she appears relatively bright and cheery describing what she's about, going out in the snow with her webcam (leaving her room a potentially hopeful sign) and declaring, matter-of-factly, "I love horror movies and thought it might be cool to try living in one."

I fell asleep after that, figuratively, as the leaden pace continues, though it is clear Casey dons some kind of horror mask, and connects with an older man who creepily follows her, directing her to film herself sleeping and then obsessively watches her, though in the end he seems concerned for her well being. Reviewers have commented favorably on the fact that all this does not lead to some kind of gruesome apocalypse; that the film depicts an internet-obsessed life as more routine than outsiders might think, and less harmful, if not ideal for developing young minds and bodies. But as the film concludes, it seems this world - not so different from the online chat rooms of the eighties, by the way - can easily become a hiding place for a young person in need of psychological help, and not getting it this way.

I asked myself if this could constitute a viable "High Maintenance" episode and I had to say not.

We Are All Going to the World's Fair, 85 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2021. 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]

NINO MARTINEZ SOSA: LIBORIO (2021)


KARINA VALDES (RIGHT) IN LIBORIO

Revisiting a popular Dominican legend

This new film from the Dominican Republic starts out on the wrong foot for me. It's always risky to begin a movie at top speed because the audience isn't ready; and where can you go from there? A hurricane is something you need to build up to, but Nino Martinez Sosa, the maker of LIborio,, opens with his protagonist in shirtsleeves battling the hurricane that is going to temper him, somehow, into a man with healing and forgiving powers. But this remarkable event is allowed only four minutes to unroll. It's violent and noisy, but it's only a big man in a damp shirt roiling around. It seems both too much and not enough.

Sosa sets out to tell the 'true' story of Olivorio Mateo, a peasant who according to legend returned from a battle with a hurricane transformed also into a leader of local people. He acquires a following and moves around the countryside directing spiritual gatherings, doing good, and so forth. (He doesn't always heal. When a woman comes asking her lost son to be brought back to life, he disappoints her.) The actors and rural settings are attractive, though sometimes the filmmaking seems as naive as the characters. The whole thing seems rather like a ballet, and like a ballet, it shows generic figures and does not delve beyond the surface.

The seven sections of the story - Liborio, Returns from heaven, To move the people, And raise the dead, Of this land of ours, Tearful, Blessed, present events from changing points of view toward the emerging but always somewhat mysterious "Papá Liborio." There’s his grown son, who is happy to find his father alive and becomes his chief follower. There is Matilde (Karina Valdes), the woman in who attaches herself to him as a follower and second in command and becomes the mother of his child. There is an outsider and recent convert who remains suspicious to others. And so on. This multifaceted approach doesn't hide the fact that the film unquestioningly believes in Father Liborio - until the US invasion comes.

At that point it soon turns out to be a pet project of the local Marine commanding officer, Captain Williams (Jeffrey Holsman), to destroy Liborio, whose independent authority is seen as an obstacle to American colonial interests.

On the one hand this sleepy production finally gets a slight jolt past midway with the arrival of the odious Capt. Williams. On the other hand this development only further highlights the simplistic nature and naiveté of a film that never seems confident of its storytelling or distinctive in its cinematic style. While Oscar Duran’s cinematography is handsome, it needs a further edge to convey the sort of numinous magic we believe to be experienced by the Father's followers who come to accept him as a reincarnation of Jesus.

Liborio is an admirable stab at recreating local legend and reviving national culture. But it seems too much of a stretch to compare this film as some have done to Lucrecia Martel's complex, historically precise Zama. It lacks that kind of stylistic flair.

Liborio, 95 mins., 99 mins., debuted Feb. 2021 at Rotterdam, also showing at Göteborg, Tertio Millennio (Rome), FICUNAM (Mexico), and San José (Costa Rica). 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]

SALOMÉ JASHI: TAMING THE GARDEN (2021)


TREE MOVED ON BARGE IN TAMING THE GARDEN

TRAILER

Collecting trees in rural Georgia

Taming the Garden tells about this extremely, obscenely rich Georgian guy called Ivanishvili, the former Prime Minister who loves trees - big, old ones, hundred-year-old trees, and buys them from farmers here and there in Georgia, and, at enormous expense, his own expense but also some public inconvenience and sometimes shock to the locals, moves them to his own private compound park on his estate in Shekvetili. There are articles about Ivanishvili's tree collecting hobby here and there. Large trees are regularly moved as a way of preserving them. It's not such an eccentric practice as some may think, and moving a full-grown tree may not be prohibitively expensive. But this is the Guinness Book of Records of tree moving.

It has caused power lines to be taken down temporarily, and whole main roads into a town to be shut down for a day at times. For the trees to be taken down the road to the coast where they're ferried across the water slowly on a barge to the park, some tress may have to be chopped down along the road. How do you lift a big tree with its roots out of the ground? Well, it's a bit of a mystery but we see long pipes with drills being inserted in the ground alongside each other under a couple of trees, and then we see the large section containing the roots contained by planks. And all along we have heard the sound of metal and saws.

Jashi, the filmmaker, is often most interested, as we are, in the people. For a while she hangs out watching experienced tree men and hearing their chatter. More often she watches oldsters around a farm watching when a tree gets taken away. A 75-year-old lady remembers planting some trees when she was twenty-five. When she was that age a now 100-year-old tree was relatively young. All kinds of family histories are tied in with the old trees. Rumor has it that some old tree or trees got severely damaged in this process, or had some limbs lopped off, and lost some of their looks. A tree, though, is a being that grows more beautiful in old age. When these trees are removed, there is compensation, but no filling is provided for the empty space that is left behind. Houses may be hotter in summer. Foliage may be sorely missed.

There is a lot of complaining. Some farm family members say they felt coerced. But they don't claim that the have been cheated. Some say they will miss the tree; others say it always made a mess, it got in the way of the orchard, or they wanted to get rid of it but couldn't. Certainly Ivanishvili has the power here, the power of money, plus the power of political influence.

Ivanishvili gets the last word, though, and some objections may be stilled by what they see at the end. The final ten minutes or so of the film are taken at his park of very old trees. It's amazingly beautiful. The trees look like they belong together; this seems an over-tended but extraordinarily rich forest. Grounds are being cared for by little crawling green machines operated by two men. Wide but unobtrusive paths wander through. A watering system also wanders this way and that. Even the way it sprays is graceful. The place is in its way a masterpiece. The trees by their nature are very individual; they don't look posed or organized. One can only hope that some day this will be open to the public - but not too many at a time.

I was seduced, at least. Others simply find this whole film "surreal," and Allan Hunter of Screen Daily thinks the park looks like "the secluded lair of a Bond villain." Yes, perhaps so; but didn't you ever want to be a Bond Villain? This is a billionaire who has made a natural fantasy real. If the choice is between Bolsonaro tearing down the Amazonian rain forest and this guy, I'll go for this guy. And I liked this filmmaker's quiet observational approach and subtle use of music.

Taming the Garden, 86 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2021; it was also shown at the Berlinale, Cinéma du réel (Paris), FICUNAM (Rome), Docudays UA International (Ukraine), and Hong Kong. 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).