My Favorite Movies of 2016 (so far)

[oscar jubis]

FROM AFAR won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2015 and received an extremely limited theatrical run by Strand Releasing in 2016. The film had a US box office of $30 thousand. That's it. It's a Venezuelan film about the relationship between a middle-class 50 year old guy and a 20 year old hoodlum. The film presents a challenge to the spectator because of distancing devices, an elliptical and fragmentary narrative structure, and a dearth of dialogue that explains behavioral motivations. Divisiveness is a typical effect of films that defy conventions about filling information gaps in the plot in order to provide resolution closure. No matter how brilliantly executed and performed, there is a segment of the critics and audiences who reject art that is challenging to consume conventionally (as we have been socialized to do). Director Lorenzo Vigas can now join other directors who practice a cinema often regarded pejoratively as "minimalist": Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Julia Loktev, Lisandro Alonso, Albert Serra, Pedro Costa, and others. FROM AFAR is fascinatingly open-ended; engagingly partial and on the verge of becoming something else with every cut. It's one of the Top 10 Films of 2016, but few have seen it.