New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

BASEL ADRA IN NO OTHER LAND

BASEL ADRA, HAMDAN BALLAL, YUVAL ABRAHAM, RACHEL SZOR: NO OTHER LAND (2024)

Nowhere to go

There have been many films about Israel and Palestine, but this one justifies inclusion in the selective New York Film Festival slate because it was made by a collective including both Palestinians and Israelis, and because it was shot over a period of years. It features the relationship between Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, two young men aiming to record Israel's constant assault on a patch of land in the West Bank, villages known collectively as Masafer Yatta, occupied by the same Arab families for generations. Again and again Israeli bulldozers come and destroy the Palestinians' modest houses. Finally the ultimate indignity: the big machines tear down a small school. Little by little the locals are forced to take up residence in nerby caves. This film records their steadfast resistence and refusal to leave the land.

Basel Adra has been photographed and recorded since he was five years old, we see. Mostly we see him as a vibrant but also weary young man puffing incessently on a shisha or taking too-deep drags on cigarettes while he sits with Yuval Abrahim, as the two of them contemplate the unchanging nature of things. In between is a lot of footage of the assaults, including the increasingly violent attacks of the Jewish settlers, whose illegal housing and vicious violence are tolerated by the Israeli government and constitute a nasty third arm to the IDF forces who are the ones who carry out the constant periodic destructions of Palestinian housing. The claim is that the land is needed for IDF training activities, but it comes out that this is just a pretext for displacing the inhabitants.

Sometimes I think of my years in Cairo when I learned that a common strong oath was الله يخرب بيتك (Ullah yashrib baytak!) - literally "God destroy your house." In this case God is reaplaced by Israelis. It's a cruel, vengeful, and lawless God.

Basel's uncle Hamdan gets shot when he tris to prevent the IDF from stealing the villagers' generator and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. His mother stays by him in this terrible state but she hopes that God will take him and relieve his sufferings. Hamdan inspires many demonstratons of the locals, which lead to arrests. Basel's father is arrested. And on and on it goes.

Sometimes over the years covered here there is a brief moment of Western awareness, a discomfort, even astonishment or outrage, but it passes. Nobody cares, or rather, nobody can go up against the US government, the perpetual main enabler of Israeli injustice. (This film is not concerned with analysis of these issues, however.)

It is always Yuval who is with Basel. The film informs us that there are two colors of car license plates in here. The yellow ones allow free travel, and the green ones go to Palestinians, whose movement is highly restricted. This is one illustration of why it's Yuval who comes to see Basel. Yuval expresses a dream that one day there will be a just and equal society and they will both be able to travel freely And Basel will come to see him. There's a certain charm and humor to this friendship of Yuval and Basel, who are so close (except for the inexorable separation of privilege) that one jokingly asks when their marriage is coming.

Most of the film and what might further convince the already committed - or inshallah wake up the unenlightened in the English speaking world - are the repeated images, year after year, of the home demolitions, and of the locals rebuilding. The school that gets destroyed was actually constructed clandestinely, partly by night, the only way there could be a school. The Israelis wish to deny Palestinians even literacy. The Palestinians in this patch of land repeatedly declare that they have "no other land" and they will not go away.

Eventually, after November 6, 2023 and what the West calls "the Israel-Hamas war," more properly Israel's war on Gaza, violence against the Palestinians in the West Bank also greatly increases and the population of the namesless village Basel belongs to must flee, as others have done. Basel and Yuval have had to stop filming what's happening or they would die like the 116+ journalists who have been killed in Gaza.

No Other Land, 92 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 17, 2024, and included in over 20 international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was sccreened for this review. Showing at the NYFF Sept. 29, Oct. 1, 5, and 6. For details see HERE.
Q&A with Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor in person on Sept. 29 & Oct. 1. Metacritic rating: 90%.
JANUARY 2025: OPENS FRIDAY, JANUARY 31 in the US. Now an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature.

[Chris Knipp]

KIERAN CULKIN, JESSE EISENBERG IN A REAL PAIN

JESSE EISENBERG: A REAL PAIN (2024)

Two Jewish cousins revisit their family origins in Poland

Jesse Eisenberg costars in his sophormore directorial outing here. After playing a great variety of roles and receiving acclaim as an actor, he draws on his own background, playing a man called David Kaplan who is an American Jew with a grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and at her demise has left money to pay for a trip with his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) to visit the house where she lived in Lublin, as well as Majdanek, nearby, the concentration camp she survived. We must survive the outlandish performance of Culkin, which ramps up several notches his (justiably) award-winning shtick as Roman Roy on HBO's addictivre series, "Succession."

Most people love Kieran Culkin's work as Benji here, but it's so obtrusive (and borderline offensive, especially for his use of F-words in every line) that it steals the picture, which seems a shame. There was a place for gentle humor here, especially considering the solemn subject matter. Nonetheless it has to be confessed that this movie is vivid and works and is a great improvement over Jesse's directing debut, When You Finish Saving the World.

There is no disputing that Kieran Culkin is a remarkable actor. His Benji, as fluently written by Eisenberg, is a bold, complex character, penetrating and outrageous in his remarks and observations, funny, charming. He frequently undercuts his own charm by causing offense to people the pair encounters. These notably include members ofthe little Polish Holocaust tour David and Benji join, then depart from. It includes a tight-lipped older couple, a recently single woman from California, an even quieter couple, an African-born Jewish convert, and the non-Jewish, occasionally droll British tour guide, James (Will Sharpe).

It's made clear both from things explicitly stated by David and from sad bookending shots of him sitting alone pre and post trip in the New York airort that Benji is in transition, or simply adrift, and things have gone very badly earlier in the year, and he lives in his mom's basement. In contrast David has what appears a very lucrative job selling digital advertising and lives comfortably in New York City with his wife and small child. Benji debunks the job as the lowest thing you could do; David defends it as essential to the very existence of the internet.

Benji may have been fun for Eisenberg to write because he can go anywhere at any time he wants with the character. For instance, when the cousins and the tour members are on a a posh train in Poland, Benji suddenly thinks of how Jews were shipped to their deaths in cattle cars and insists on running out of the first class compartment. Then later when David falls asleep next to Benji (a recurrant theme) in another car and they have to jump another train to get back to their meeting point, Benji insists they do this without paying, and when they sneak into a first class car he says they've "earned it."

Eisenberg is seeking to convince us that a neuro-divergent type like Benji deserves our sympathy and respect and can provide us with insight. David puts up with him, despite apologizing to the tour members. They tolerate, even like him, and James thanks him for his ruthless criticisms of his performance as a guide for being too weighed down by "facts" and not enough "reality," and pledges to reshape his methods accordingly.

This is a movie that amuses, provokes, and teaches, and Eisenberg carries off the teaching part without ever seeming pedantic or stodgy. As wild as some moments get, we are still always firmly in the "reality" of a Polish Holocaust tour. We get to see relevant cities and sites (including the concentration camp) exactly as they look today. What swings my views toward approval of the film are David's speeches, in which Eisenberg unobtrusively provides sane balance so that somehow it all works and you may think maybe Culkin's outrageous turn was after all actually more amusing than offensive.

A Real Pain, 90 mins., debuted at Sundance; shown also at Aspen, Zurich, BFI London, and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review for an Oct. 5, 2024 showing. Release in ten countries scheduled for early 2025; in the US, Nov. 1, 2024. Metacritic rating: 84% (based on 19 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

PAYAL KAPADIA: ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (2024)

A dreamlike Indian film that was a first at Cannes

In Competition-Grand Prix at Cannes. India's first Cannes Competition film in 30 years, says S.M Kaufman in INDIEWIRE, 'is a sensual triumph." "Dreamlike and gentle," says Bradshaw in the GUARDIAN, finally giving a film here 5/5 stars. The film is the story of three Mumbai hospital employees in monsoon season, two nurses and a cook, all originally from small towns, two of whom are roommates, the younger one causing scandal by having an ill-concealed Muslim boyfriend, an action on her part in rejection of arranged marriage. The eldest of the women is threatened with eviction due to an oversight of her late husband. Jessica Kiang in VARIETY says with just two features (this is the second, the first fiction) Kapadia "has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life." The eldest decides to quit the hospital and go back to her home village and the other two women accompany her. DP Ranabir Das gives all sorts of light, Kiang says, a "gorgeous glamor." The portrait of the city is "unusually rich," so it's "almost a wrench" when the second half moves to the country but the new setting focuses more on the women's developed "bonds of mutual support" that burn brighter. And the Muslim boyfriend has secretly followed.

Kapadia won the documentary award at Cannes in 2021 for her film in Directors' Fortnight, A Night of Knowing Nothing. Fionnuala Halligan of SCREEN DAILY, who also uses the word "gentle" as well as for the latter part "mystical," says there's "a strong romantic streak" in the depiction of Mumbai that "calls to mind Wong Kar-wai's great love affair with the city of Hong Kong." (I can feel that too, but this world is more somber and less sophisticated.) Bradshaw notes up front a "languorous eroticism" and "something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments." All We Imagine As Light jumped to the top of the Cannes SCREEN DAILY jury grid with a 3.3 rating, on a par with Sean Baker's Anora. - From my vicarious remote Cannes coverage.

The film has a cumulative effect. Early on, it may seem like merely an excerpt from a daytime serial, till you notice how compelling the actors are, how graceful the cinematography. The deep beauty especially of Kani Kusruti as Prabha, the nurse, impresses from the start, and grows on you. It is also effective that the film is divided into the city and country segments, evoking country and city tales told by Satyajit Ray, and taking you though a whole history of India (and Indian cinema) and whole lifetimes. Through her focus on the three women hospital workers, their dreams and frustrations, young Payal Kapadia, who is still in her thirties, has patiently woven movie magic.

All We Imagine As LIght, 118 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 2024, winning the Grand Prix, showing afterward at many, many international festivals including the NYFF where it was screened for this review (For an oct. 7, 2024 showing). US theatrical release begins mid-Nov., 2024. Metacritic rating: 93% (based on 12 critic reviews). Now 91%.

[Chris Knipp]

MIKEY MADISON IN ANORA

SEAN BAKER: ANORA (2024)

The most fun at Cannes comes to New York

VIDEO CLIP

In Competition at Cannes it won the top award, the Palme d'Or. Remember Baker scored high there with Tangerine about two "working girls" in 2015. Anora could be seen as a much more realistic version of Pretty Woman, spinning out a "whirlwind sex-work romance," says Peter Debruge in his VARIETY review, that "sparkles like the tinsel in its leading lady's hair." She's a New York stripper and he's the "reckless son of a Russian oligarch." The film that has a Safdie brothers flavor Debruge calls "compulsively entertaining, 80-proof emotional ride." Anora or "Ani" (MIkey Madison) is part Russian and speaks a bit of the language learned from her grandma, and shares a small house in Brighton Beach with her sister.

It's at the Manhattan strip club, HQ, where she's an escort and lap dancer that she gets sent to the table of young big spender Ivan, aka Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), and Ivan and Ani, close in age, click at once. The next day he brings her to his nearby mansion; she negotiates for $15K up front when he wants her to stay. 138 minutes "race by" (though a few could be lost) in a "full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal," Peter Bradshaw says in his 4/5 star GUARDIAN review, A "a non-love story which finds its apex in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in the middle of the night, "slaloms downwards into the most extraordinary, cacophonous uproar of recrimination unfolding in what is more or less real time." David Rooney in Hollywood Reporter says "Sex workers have been a big part of Baker's gallery of outsiders" (as they have), and this makes Anora "a fine addition to his terrific body of work."

Ani has "a sweetness that humanizes even the most transactional situations" as well as "a defensiveness that makes her dangerous when threatened" - i.e., like when Ivan's dad sends goons to break up this mismatch, Ivan bolts, and Ani does a stand-off. Vegas is for the wedding, but they spend a lot of time at Brighten Beach-adjacent locales with Vanya and his "retinue of Russian-speaking locals," in Coney Island, "a pool hall, a video game arcade, Tatiana Grill on the boardwalk," etc. shot in 35mm with anamorphic lenses thus a messy but "satisfying watch." The images are blurry and bleary, ample and wintry. The leads are "terrific" (Madison) and "watchable" (Eydelshteyn) and " Baker’s film-making is muscular and fluent," wrote Bradshaw. In an enthusiastic Oscar Expert YouTube review Brother Bro (Mason Jaeger) called Anora, which he gave 9 out of 10, the best film he'd seen at Cannes, and predicted it would go on to collect many laurels in the US awards season with multiple Oscar noms including Best Actor and Best Actress for the leads.

All the attention has been on Mikey Madison, perhaps because she is so authentically needy. I give a strong vote for Mark Eydelshteyn because I haven't ever seen a type like that, both delicate and unbridled, and he's a genuine young Russian actor. This kind of story may not be so unusual, even a cliché, but Sean Baker makes it so rich, mainly through setting it in a Russian context, and carrying that through very solidly, with lots of Russian-speaking characters whose English may not even be that great, including Vanya.

The story is rich also because of its ambiguity. Vanya's parents laugh and sneer, saying this is not a marriage and this is not a love. But in a brief interview Mark Eidelshtein says he thinks this is Vanya's first love, "and maybe his last." He tells Ani he's 21 but he's really much younger, and when the goons and then his parents come to pop the bubble an illusion is shattered; Mark thinks he grows up instantly. Let's admit in their juvenile way Vanya and Ani did instantly fall in love with each other, so this is a "crime" and a bit of big misbehavior but also a romance. For all the crudity and humor, this is Sean Baker's sweetest (and then disillusioned) film as well as its most mainstream and multigenerational in appeal. The Sean Baker part is also in the long slow process of dismantling the dream. This is a tremendously fun film that also gives you a lot to chew on.

And the chewing doesn't stop. When it's all "over," the marriage is broken up, Vanya is gone, Ani is still left with the assistant Igor (Yura Borisov), and between Mikey and Yura what happens is very interesting.

Anora, 139 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 21, 2024, winning the top prize, the Palme d'Or. Shown in at least two dozen international festivals including Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastien, Vancouver, New York, Mumbai, Hamburg, Zurich, Busan and London. Limited US theatrical (Neon) release Oct. 18. Metacritic rating: 91%.


MARK EDELSHTEIN AND MIKEY MADISON IN ANORA

[Chris Knipp]

IMAGE FROM MINERVINI'S THE DAMNED

ROBERTO MINERVINI: THE DAMNED (2024)

The documentarian tries his hand at an atmospheric Civil war drama

The Italian has lived in the US for two decades chronicling marginal people. I've reviewed Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) and What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? (2020). His Cannes release this year continues that process in his first period piece, set in the Civil War period when the U.S. Army sends a volunteer company to patrol the uncharted Western territories. See Peter Debruge's Variety review: he makes the film sound thin in story to put it mildly, but an "atmospheric and unscripted" depiction of young men in the war, mostly not in combat, and a "welcome extension" of the filmmaker's documentary work. Jordan Mintzer in his*Hollywood Reporter review says that in its "aesthetic" here Minervini suggests Terence Malick’s The New World and Alejandro Iñarritu’s The Revenant. Amusingly he suggests this is a low-keyed, laconic version of those movies. In particular this can seem an uninspired version of Malick's spiritual musings when the soldiers talk about whether or not they believe in anything.

When one absolutely doesn't believe, and you notice how much they say words like "OK," if not before, you realize these men are talking in their own modern vernacular. In this, the film is in and out of time, also like Terrence Malick.

They are Union soldiers on the periphery, sent to investigate western lands and seen in Montana. (One is from California and one from Virginia, so they come from afar.) A man brings his two young sons, or the sons rather chose to come with him. Some of them have no experience; one is sixteen and says his facial hair doesn't yet grow and he does not yet know what it is to be a man. His knowledge of riflery is shooting rabbits and a few squirrels.

The interest of this film is also its limitation for some, that it has virtually no plot (not unlike Minervini's documentary films). They are just there. But this is life, and especially military life. At one point there is a skirmish, with shots fired and men endangered. It's not clear what it really comes from. There is a sergeant, but nobody knows what they're doing. At one point the older of the two boys, who expresses religious convictions, says he no longer knows why he is there. "Becoming a hero" no longer seems a likelihood.

The boys and men, the latter longhaired and bearded, talk and these non-actors seem to be improvising on their own. It's pretty dilatory and sometimes empty or repetitious, but that again is the way people are.

I like plot and story as much as anyone. They are the lifeblood of fiction. But we know how much plot and story can run away with a film. We also know that in the hands of Samuel Beckett fiction can compel with minimal plot. Toward the end of the film four of the men go off on their own to scout for a pathway through the mountains in the snow, abandoning the rest of the men. An image of the starting point shows back at base camp many have died.

Horses play an important part in this film with their presence. At one point a dark mare is tethered on a wire line and pulling at it, complaining. Another example of aimlessness and the waiting that is an essential part of army life.

Admire the caps and the big blue capes, and drink in the helplessness of soldiery, Union Army style. This could be a good new direction for Minervini.

The Damned/I dannati, 89 mins., debuted in the 2024 Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in which it won the Best Director award. Also shown at Toronto and the NYFF, screened at the latter for this review. Metacritic rating: 63%.

[Chris Knipp]

MATI DIOP: DAHOMEY (2024)

David Rooney's Hollywood Reporter Berlinale review
(Feb. 18, 2024):

With her mesmerizing 2019 debut feature, the lyrical Senegalese ghost story Atlantics, as well as the nonfiction project that preceded it, A Thousand Suns, Mati Diop jumped to the forefront of diasporic Black European directors reclaiming their ancestral African roots. The director’s own path as a cultural revenant continues to be inextricably woven through her work, alongside a contemplative consideration of repatriation and reparations, in her multifaceted medium-length docu-fictional essay Dahomey.

The film is both a response to Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 1953 inquiry into African art and colonialism, Statues Also Die, and an ongoing debate on the significance of returned artifacts and the responsibility of new generations to continue the vital work of conservation and cultural reclamation.

[Chris Knipp]

PIA MARAIS: TRANSAMAZONIA (2024)

Guy Lodge (Variety, at Locarno: "'News of the World' star Helena Zengel anchors the first film in over a decade from South African director Pia Marais, which is humidly atmospheric but narratively hard to pin down."

Premiering in Locarno’s main competition, with a New York Film Festival slot to come, this is a formally muscular and typically searching fourth feature from South African-born writer-director Marais: Her last film — 2013’s simmering character study “Layla Fourie” — may have been set in her homeland, but her career has otherwise been built on a thoroughly international perspective. Postcolonial questions of belonging and displacement play heavily into “Transamazonia,” which is at pains to avoid overly exoticizing the little-portrayed region of Brazil in which it unfolds, securing the collaboration of the Assurini people of the country’s Trocará Indigenous Territory. (They are collectively credited as associate producers.) Still, there’s an opacity to this ambitious, conscientious film’s characterization on all fronts that hinders our emotional involvement, even as it holds our interest.