NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2020 (April 28-May 9, 2021)

[Chris Knipp]

WOOD AND WATER (Jonas Bak 2021)


ANKE BAK IN HONG KONG IN WOOD AND WATER

German director Jonas Bak's first feature, which got its debut at ND/NF, will be released theatrically in New York at MoMA March 24, 2022 with Los Angeles and national releases to follow, I have recently learned. My original review is linked to above.

Shown at many festivals, starting with ND/NF, at the Berlinale it won the Compass-Perspektive Award - Special Mention and was nominated for Best First Feature; numerous nominations and a few wins at other fests.

Rewatching it now a year later, the framing and some of the images struck me as quite beautiful and distinctive, and a few of the encounters - with the fortune teller and his retired artist schoolmate and the apartment house receptionist - remained vivid memories, but a lot of it had faded away. Despite the meditative slow-film beauty of the whole, this is not a deeply memorable film, perhaps because it doesn't carry much emotion. But the meditative quality impresses, as well as the consistently distinctive eye, and there are moments that strongly evoke the strangeness of solitary travel like hardly any other film I've ever seen.

All fans of minimalist slow films should be interested. Beatrice Loayza, in her NYTimes comment, noted that it's a film "which pairs wonderfully with Chantal Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna," which was in the retrospective section of last year's New Directors/New Films series, where this film had its debut.

MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (Apr. 28-May 8, 2021). It will be presented at the Berlinale in June. h will be released theatrically in New York at MoMA on March 24, 2022, Los Angeles on Fry, Apr 15 at the Lumiere Music Hall.with a national release to follow.

[Chris Knipp]

French documentary opening theatrically in the US starting with June 22, 2022 at MoMA in New York. PREMIERES STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON MUBI, JUNE 29:

NOUS (US) (Alice Diop 2021)

Despite her Senegalese parents, documentary filmmaker Alice Diop identifies as French. Filming the varieties of population along the RER B line that goes through and beyond Paris, she questions the idea of multicultural union, but is hopeful, saying, "'We' is what happens when 'I' opens up" and finding commonality with an older white French writer.

WE
(NOUS)
Directed by Alice Diop

Winner - Best Film - Encounters Section, 2021 Berlinale

Winner - 2021 Berlinale Documentary Award

"A powerfully political film that offers a subtle response to arguments for exclusion."
- Sophie Joubert, L'Humanité.

“Fascinating... builds cleverly into an epic intellectual interrogation of France's multicultural project.”
– Jessica Kiang, Variety