During a time when most mainstream movies seem to run around thirty minutes too long, it’s refreshing to see features that can pack a full story into a brisk running time. Ted Fendt’s feature debut Short Stay clocks in at just over sixty minutes, and still manages to tell a complete—albeit somewhat lackadaisical—narrative about a generic guy living a generic life.

Similar to Kevin Smith’s famous debut Clerks, Short Stay is a slice-of-life character study about Mike (Mike MacCherone), a perpetually bored twentysomething whose job at a local pizzeria isn’t providing him with the excitement he desires out of life. When a friend of a friend offers him a job giving tours of Philadelphia, Mike reluctantly moves out of his Jersey apartment and takes the job, thus beginning a new chapter in his mundane life. Of course, the move doesn’t change the man’s outlook on life, and being a timid loser frequently results in Mike being walked all over by coworkers, roommates, and potential love interests. The feel-good movie of 2016 this certainly is not, but it’s still a film worth watching.

One of the more interesting plot points in the film revolves around Mike’s attraction to a girl who assures him that she’s in a relationship but values his friendship. It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out exactly what’s going to happen next, and while the film doesn’t offer any significant swerves on that end, watching the whole uncomfortable disaster play out is quite entertaining. Mike’s troubles with the ladies are somewhat relatable, but mostly just sad. The scenes in which the poor bastard tries to overcome the problems in his love life evoke secondhand embarrassment in ways that very few films can.

It’s all photographed on grainy 35mm, mirroring the haziness of Mike’s life. Opting for a documentary-like aesthetic, Fendt and cinematographer Sage Einarsen seem determined to capture aspects of real life, and they frequently do so. Reminiscent of mumblecore films from the mid-2000s, Short Stay is comprised of long takes, what appears to be improvised dialogue, and consistent naturalism. There are no action-packed set pieces or larger than life plot points but the film still entertains in spite of this.

Some members of the supporting cast aren’t exactly convincing, delivering lines with little believability and the charisma of a wet sock. This is somewhat routine in these kinds of films, but it still detracts from the experience. Naturalism simply doesn’t work when those performing it don’t come across as natural. MacCherone, however, portrays the mousy protagonist in successful fashion. He’s a total loser, admittedly, but Mike is a generally easy guy to root for. It seems as though his entire goal in life is to not be a complete and utter failure, but he just doesn’t know how to succeed. In that regard, Fendt’s feature debut is thoroughly depressing, but the tone is actually comedic. There aren’t any “jokes,” per say, but the strange manner in which Mike handles all of his problems is laughable in the right way.

Films like Short Stay are an acquired taste, and can justifiably be viewed as both brilliant and lazy, depending on individual perspective. Evoking shades of the early works of Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass Brothers, there should be little doubt as to what kind of cinematic experience Short Stay provides. The film does exactly what it sets out to do, and that’s always something to be appreciated.

In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, filmmaker and film historian Peter Bogdanovich recounted a conversation he once had with Golden Age Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart. In the conversation, Stewart, while speaking about making movies, said, “… then what you’re doing is, you’re giving people little … tiny … pieces, of time … that they never forget.” It’s a great quote that has stuck with me since I first read it, and I was reminded of it while watching the excellent new documentary Cameraperson.

The film comes from director Kirsten Johnson, who has been a cinematographer on more than 40 documentaries since 2001. The pieces of time she presents are truly pieces of time from her life: dozens and dozens of cinematic moments she has shot over the years. But these are not solely excerpts from the films she’s worked on; these are clips of when she rolled film to test lighting, scout locations, discuss shots with her directors, experiment with camera angles, and even just footage of her own family she shot at home, too. Assembled in no chronological order, there are no mentions of the original films the clips are associated with. It’s an effective tactic, as it takes the focus away from “Look where this scene is from,” and moves it to, “Look at this scene.” Johnson presents the clips only with title cards to indicate the geography of the moment, and what geography it covers, globetrotting from Bosnia to Brooklyn, Gitmo to Nodaway County, MO, and everywhere around and between.

At first, the presentation seems so random. There’s an early scene of a boxer in his Brooklyn locker room, preparing for a big fight. In the next scene, a midwife aids in the delivery of twins in Nigeria. These two worlds could not be further apart geographically or thematically, and yet they aren’t necessarily ripe for direct contrast, either. Johnson leaves those scenes where they are and moves onto others, and then patterns start to emerge.

Men in Herat, Afghanistan are connected to a troupe of young ballerinas in Colorado Springs, CO, who are both connected to Johnson’s own family in Beaux Arts, WA, all by a theme of religion. This segues into the theme of how death is approached by connecting another documentarian, a spokesperson for the Syrian Film Collective, and the prosecutors of a murder trial in Jasper, TX. Many other patterns take shape in this manner as the film progresses.

The scope of it all is what’s so amazing about Cameraperson: how themes of life, death, faith, crime, childhood, parenthood, government, joy, and sorrow intersect, overlap, and intertwine across time and around the globe.

This film isn’t the work of a director who has an idea for a documentary and decides to gather new footage or mine soundbites to make what they want. This isn’t someone, for example, who wants to showcase the looming specter of governmental distrust, and in doing so shoots scenes at Guantanamo Bay, adds a Washington, DC interview between a documentarian and a Marine willing to go to jail to avoid a second tour of duty in the Middle East, and caps it off with a shot of a mysterious thumb drive being entombed in fresh cement at an undisclosed location. This is a filmmaker who shot scenes at Gitmo in 2010 for one story (Laura Poitras’ The Oath), in DC in 2004 for another (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11), and at an undisclosed location in 2014 for a third (Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour).  Johnson then combines her pinpoint eye for filmmaking with her broad eye for history to illustrate how the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s breathtaking in both ambition and execution.

Edited with great skill by Nels Bangerter (whose work on Jason Osder’s Let the Fire Burn is must-see), Cameraperson has such a great variety of entries that everyone will surely have a favorite subject, even when that subject is taken on its own merits and not looked at as part of the greater whole. My favorite? Two, actually: the boxer and the midwife from the start of the picture. How Johnson concludes their individual stories is supercharged with raw, genuine emotion. How she connects the two tales is visionary.

Cameraperson is a dazzling example of storytelling in its purest form—being observed, not told—and every little piece of time she gives us is time well spent.

Cameraperson screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

Clocking it at well over five hours in length, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour isn’t so much a character study as it is an entire character course. Following four women in their late thirties as they attempt to deal with their individual relationship troubles, the film is filled with relatable struggles and honest, emotional performances, but ultimately becomes a victim of its own ambitions.

Having been best friends for many years, Jun (Rira Kawamura), Akari (Sachie Tanaka), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), and Fumi (Maiko Mihara) have formed a nearly unbreakable bond together. They meet up frequently to gossip about their lives and air their grievances about their currently living situations. Having all been married at one point, their ideas about a woman’s place in a marriage differ. After Jun reveals a shocking secret about her own marriage, her friends have mixed reactions, adding a strain to their friendship.

Above all, Happy Hour is a movie about infidelity and how it affects not only those in the relationship but their acquaintances as well. Knowing that your friend is committing adultery is a tough spot to be in because it leaves a choice between loyalty to a friend and a commitment to doing what’s right. Adding to the complexity is the discovery that the infidelity involves a mutual friend, which is a major issue explored in Happy Hour. The results aren’t over-the-top or cinematic in any way. Instead, they’re deeply rooted in reality. All of the events feel as though they could happen tomorrow, which has its pros and cons as a filmmaking technique. It certainly adds to the realistic tone of the film, but it prevents the movie from being particularly exciting. Happy Hour certainly isn’t boring, but it lacks a frenetic energy.

The defining aspect of the film is the almost unheard of running time, which wouldn’t feel nearly as gratuitous if many scenes didn’t come across as unnecessary filler. As human as it is, there are a significant amount of scenes that could be trimmed down—if not eliminated completely—without the film losing any effect. One early sequence finds the protagonists attending a pseudo-spiritual workshop where they participate in borderline cult-like team-building exercises. After ten minutes, the point is made—the women’s personal problems mirror the teacher’s lessons in a Boy Meets World kind of way, albeit much more mature and existential—but the scene continues on for much longer. Hamaguchi seems determined to beat certain ideas into viewers’ brains, despite establishing them successfully in the first attempt. In a way, it seems as though he isn’t completely confident in his ability to express certain ideas, even though his ideas are quite strong.

The four leads deliver naturalistic performances that make their already empathetic characters all the more believable. Engaging in numerous, lengthy conversations about both nothing and everything, it’s almost impossible not to see aspects of your own friends in the women. They’re complex, generally likable, and extremely relatable. They discuss mundane aspects of everyday life with the same enthusiasm as more existential concepts involving their uncertain futures. Thankfully, these conversations are generally entertaining, considering the film is almost brutally dialogue-heavy. It’s not just a film with a lot of talking—it borders on being a film about talking.

At times, Happy Hour is a strenuous watch and a pretty tough sell, given the over five-hour commitment needed to experience it in full. However, if you do commit to viewing the film, the payoff is there. The characters are fully developed and fascinating, and their story arcs are engrossing in ways that few are. It lacks many of the qualifying themes to call it an “epic,” as there are no colossal set pieces or big action sequences—or action of any kind, really—but there is a strangely “big” feel to the film. It’s a heavy drama, thick with human emotion, that could benefit from being just a bit more brisk. Perhaps in the future, Hamaguchi will consider creating a similarly engaging feature that is much shorter in length.

When looking at a festival like New Directors New Films, a question comes to mind: what should be expected from a first film? There are plenty of cases where a director’s first outing can produce a stunning masterwork, but it would be absurd to put those expectations on every single debut. It might be best to look at first features, especially within the context of a festival like ND/NF, through a bigger scale rather than scrutinizing each title on its own merits. Sometimes a first film can establish a new, distinctive, and underdeveloped voice, showing off filmmakers brimming with a potential that might not be fully realized just yet.

From what I’ve seen at ND/NF this year, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits feels like an ideal film for this festival. It starts out with a shot of Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old girl doing push-ups in a boxing gym. She goes to the gym with her older brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor) every day after school so he can look after her, and while her tomboyish looks suggest she enjoys being surrounded by so much masculinity, it soon becomes apparent that she would rather be doing something else. One day, she discovers an all-girls dance crew practicing nearby and immediately gets hooked, signing up despite having no experience with dancing.

Holmer sets her film up as the story of an alienated youth but relies on form and texture to establish Toni’s feelings of isolation. The visuals and sound design represent Toni’s heightened perspective on the world, and without using much dialogue, Holmer lets viewers pick up on her protagonists’ internal issues through the film’s rigid and well-defined style. Using static shots, shallow focus and off-kilter framing (along with a great score from Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans), Holmer and cinematographer Paul Yee create a tone that reflects Toni’s detachment from both the world of the boxing gym and the dance crew (a personal favourite: the way Holmer frames a group of boys at the gym going to town on a pizza, making them look more like animals fighting over a meal).

And as beguiling as Holmer’s film might be, it isn’t always effective. The detached vibe sometimes makes Toni too vague and undefined to understand what she might be feeling within a specific scene, a feeling that can make The Fits seem like it’s missing something that can elevate it into something truly special. That almost comes when Holmer introduces a mysterious plague that starts causing girls in the dance group to suffer intense seizures, an affliction that Toni seems to be immune to (which only contributes further to her feelings of solitude). The tonal shift doesn’t do much to address the film’s more opaque qualities, but it does make some of Holmer’s themes—like the fear that comes with entering adolescence—more resonant.

Still, even if The Fits doesn’t coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, its flashes of greatness (of which there are many) certify Holmer as one to watch. On a moment-by-moment basis, The Fits remains compelling, and at several points Holmer achieves a synergy that combines form and content into something truly singular. It’s the sort of film that frustrates in a good way, making you wish it lived up to the immense amount of promise brewing just underneath each frame. Whether or not Holmer’s next project lives up to that promise remains to be seen, but I know that I’ll be eager to see whatever she does next.

Almost as long as there has been teen angst, there have been films about teen angst. From Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause  to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, and including many in between and since, the teen angst film has been a moviemaking staple for six decades, offering insight into what teens go through during each film’s point in time. In most cases only the details change, as higher level themes of disaffection, identity crisis, and peer pressure have been common teen problems for generations. But those details are important, and can drive just how good a film is.

Kill Me Please is set in an affluent section of present-day Rio de Janeiro, where a clique of bored teenage girls finds titillation in a series of murders—murders that happen to be of other teenage girls. Facts are at a minimum but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill from grinding out plenty to quench their morbid fascination. As the body count rises, 15-year-old Bia’s (Valentina Herszage) obsession with the crimes and their victims grows too. Teens are still teens, though, and there is plenty else for them to cope with as they go about their daily high school lives.

The opening scene of Kill Me Please is terrific, showcasing the harrowing demise of a teenage girl whose only crime was walking home alone at night. Panic leads to pursuit, which leads to the girl’s final, fearful gaze into the camera and her piercing, dying screams. Neither the killer nor the girl’s blood is ever shown. The sequence is all atmosphere and adrenaline, recalling the openings of slasher flicks from the 1980s, and it’s an opening that will grab viewers from frame one.

With the opening gambit established, the film settles in, introduces its players—Bia, her girlfriends, her slacker brother João (Bernardo Marinho), her boyfriend Pedro (Vitor Mayer), a few other students—and delves into the daily drama of the young, rich, and beautiful, with diversions into the darker side of life with every new victim.

There are several films that come to mind when considering Kill Me Please. Its horror strains invoke thoughts of Brian de Palma’s Carrie; its beautiful and privileged teens having their lives jolted by death, and how reactions to death vary from teen to teen, harkens to Michael Lehmann’s Heathers; and João Atala’s lush and colorful cinematography calls to mind Benoît Debie’s lens work in Spring Breakers. Unfortunately, this film is nowhere near the level of any of those.

The problems begin early on, when the film doesn’t know when to stop settling in and eventually becomes stuck in a rut. Writer/director da Silveira parts ways with the slasher film motif (and all its promise) to handle things like character development and plot, of which there is very little. The teens’ lives include the expected, like sexual awakening, competitiveness in the athletic arena (handball), petty jealousy, passive/aggressive body shaming, religion, and rival cliques. These are all part of creating, wrestling with, and solving teen angst. The problem is how lifeless the characters are. Kids meant to be regarded as soulful or introspective instead come across as apathetic bores. Even Bia’s growing obsession with the murders never takes on any kind of intensity; it’s only an increased interest.

Because the director never returns to the intensity of his opening sequence, subsequent victims are shown after their demise, not during, or they’re simply talked about (save for a montage of their faces late in the film, only proving the dead were just as beautiful as the living). Some might consider this to be a less is more approach, but that sense is never conveyed. The murders are cold, distant events that lose all gravitas because they are talking points about murders, not the actual murders. The fact that there are adult characters in the film is an interesting and gutsy choice, but it strains credulity as the body count grows since no police ever show up.

Kill Me Please is a gorgeous-looking film that ultimately falls victim to its own narcissism, relying on its aesthetic so heavily that the function of its story is mostly an afterthought. After squandering an excellent beginning, it never recovers to offer a satisfying finished product.

Kill Me Please screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

I love a good ghost story, so when I read the synopsis of first-time writer/director Zhang Hanyi’s Life After Life—a description that included the spirit of a deceased mother possessing her son—I was all in. While I didn’t quite get what I bargained for, what I got wasn’t bad. It’s a ghost story for sure, but one unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Mingchung (Zhang Minjun) and his son Leilei (Zhang Li) are walking through the forest gathering fallen sticks to use as kindling in the fireplace that warms their home. After a brief spat between the two, Leilei sees a hare race by and gives chase. He’s gone for several minutes and when he returns, he is Leilei only in body; his spirit has been replaced by that of his late mother, Xiuying. Using her own voice, Xiuying asks her widowed husband to return to their previous home, dig up the tree she planted in the front yard (a gift from her father), and replant it somewhere safe from the industrialization that is growing and will eventually lay waste to that old land. Mingchung dutifully obliges, at first attempting to recruit help but eventually doing it himself, with Leilei/Xiuying’s help.

The setting, which Hanyi and cinematographer Chang Mang magnificently capture in wide static shots with sharp details and an achingly muted palate, reflects a barebones Chinese countryside forever skirting the edges of industrial sprawl. The land is mostly dead, but the sense is that the death is not some hibernation demanded by the wintery season; instead, it’s the earth’s terminal state of complete surrender to the assault it is under.

The film’s characters are not much different. Repressed by dreadful socioeconomic conditions, Mingchung and those whom he attempts to recruit to relocate the tree are distant, unemotional, and devoid of personality or excitability. If no one is phased by the notion that Xiuying has returned in the form of her own son’s possessed body, then it comes as no surprise that no one is phased at the site of a man suffocating a goat. That’s a level of repression that borders on abused. It might also explain why Mingchung can’t get the help he wants since nobody cares.

And yet buried deep within these doldrums are sparks of hope. Xiuying, at least in spirit, is back with her husband, and she gets the opportunity to see her parents one last time. This offers hope for an afterlife and a way back for those so inclined. And at one point, Xiuying alerts Mingchung that his deceased parents have since been reincarnated—one as a dog and one as a bird. It’s absurd to the point of being funny, although the constant hum of misery stifles any laughter.

Then there is, of course, the love story. It isn’t overt or sappy, nor is it traditional, but it’s there in the form of Mingchung taking on this massive task rather than not rejoicing in his late wife’s temporary return. He didn’t have much of a life, but the life he had was put on old to make her happy one last time. He seals the deal with a devastating monologue late in the film, where the reason for her demise is revealed and his regret surrounding the circumstances and the aftermath come to light. It’s never elaborated on, but their meet-cute must have been something special.

Life After Life, with its foreign arthouse sensibilities, its glacial pace, and its chasms of silence between sparse lines of dialogue, is a film that dares you to dislike it. And yet I didn’t. In fact, I found it quite hypnotic. I also found it rather sentimental, given the task at hand for its protagonist and who’s responsible for sending them on their journey. It isn’t a perfect film, and it won’t be for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a shot.

Life After Life screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

The war in Afghanistan gets a supernatural twist with Clément Cogitore’s Neither Heaven Nor Earth, a military drama about soldiers confronting the unknown while stationed at the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s 2014 and the war is winding down, leaving Captain Antares (Jérémie Renier) and his men with little to do until they’re called back home. They’re stationed in a remote valley called Wakhan, where the villagers don’t like them and enemy soldiers hide in the surrounding desert. It all looks like business as usual for the soldiers, until one night when two men vanish without a trace. Antares launches a search, thinking they might have gotten lost or injured, but then another soldier disappears. And then another. And then the group of Taliban soldiers they’ve been fighting offer a ceasefire so they can look for their own men, who have also been disappearing one by one.

At a point where the plot should thicken, Cogitore decides to let things peter out instead, preferring to focus on Antares’ stubborn skepticism (when one soldier describes what’s happening as inexplicable, Antares says that they just haven’t found the explanation yet). Cogitore fails to convincingly portray Antares’ switch from skeptic to believer, and his refusal to provide any resolution about the mysterious disappearances becomes annoying as a result. If Cogitore doesn’t want to give any answers, then his questions should have enough substance to carry the film’s weight, which turns out not to be the case when watching Antares’ crisis play out in a dull, familiar fashion (at one point, Cogitore throws in a nod to Claire Denis’ Beau Travail that only serves as a reminder of better films already out there dealing with similar subject matter). And when hints of something more to the film pop up, like the vanishings acting as a symbol for the soldiers’ fears and anxieties, they get lost in Cogitore’s muddle. Despite its strong cast and impressive cinematography (courtesy of Sylvain Verdet, who makes good use out of the soldiers’ night-vision cameras), Neither Heaven Nor Earth only winds up squandering its great premise.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

In addition to faith, scandal, and fundraising, the Catholic church also knows its way around paperwork. To its credit, at least from my own experience, the church keeps excellent documentation in the area of who received what sacraments, where, and when. To its detriment, though, and again from my own experience, it can mire itself in so many forms and processes, it becomes an institution less about spirituality and more about bureaucracy. The frustrations of searching for baptismal records and being subject to the slog of pro forma processes are only the beginning for the protagonist in Federico Veiroj’s latest, The Apostate.

Gonzalo Tamayo (Álvaro Ogalla) is that protagonist. He is a philosophy major who decides he wants nothing to do with the Catholicism he was raised on (thus the term “apostate,” meaning one who renounces religious beliefs). Furthermore, because gave no consent to his baptism due to being a baby at the time, he wants his baptismal certificate—the key document that connects him to the Catholic church—expunged entirely. The church doesn’t necessarily see his side of things.

Between Gonzalo’s existential crisis and the arcane machinations of the church, The Apostate has a foundation ripe for comedy, and the film shows flashes of it where one might expect. There is some fairly direct humor when Gonzalo visits his church, learns about the ridiculousness of what it takes to apostatize, receives blowback from his family as a result of his decision, etc. There’s even the broader humorous notion that Gonzalo’s grand efforts to detach himself from the Church are nothing more than efforts to update paperwork. The reality is if Gonzalo wants nothing more to do with faith or religion, he only needs to stop participating.

But rather than explore and enrich these themes, maximize their deeper impact (either comedically or dramatically), and let Gonzalo’s decisions set other events into motion, The Apostate treats his desire to free himself from the Church as little more than the core situation in an underdeveloped comedic anthology. Throughout the film, Gonzalo moves among a collection of situations that, while mostly connectable in some way, offer no greater sense of cohesion or flow. This is particularly frustrating, as these situations each have enough of a base to build something upon, but they only get in the way of each other’s development.

The first facet of this concerns Gonzalo’s studies. He is one class away from earning his degree and yet he fails that class. The fact that his philosophical slant drives his apostasy and yet he can’t close that deal gives an opportunity to delve into some rich irony, but it’s treated as little more than one more thing Gonzalo’s overbearing mother can complain about (Her cliché reaches its zenith when she ultimately learns of his desire to leave the church).

On the amorous front, Gonzalo has eyes for his comely cousin Pilar (Marta Larralde). He has been attracted to her since childhood, and when she shows up at his place looking for a place to crash because her marriage is failing, he sees an opportunity to score. The tenor of this is difficult to reconcile. Yes, there is the triple-threat of incest, infidelity, and adultery (not to mention the fact Gonzalo’s first attempt to bed Pilar occurs while she is sleeping), but there is never the sense of taboo to the degree one would expect. Like his desire to be rid of the church, his desire to be with Pilar seems superficially situational. Gonzalo also engages in sex with an older stranger on a bus and has an attraction to his neighbor Maite (Barbara Lennie), and while these relationships’ perceived sinfulness might suggest Gonzalo is acting in defiance of the church, there is nothing earned to be defiant over; his position is philosophical, not spiteful nor vengeful. It isn’t as if he has been wronged by the church in any way, he simply wants to disassociate himself from it.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t have its moments of humor. Some moments in The Apostate are laugh-out-loud funny (including an ending that deserves a better film preceding it), but it’s all so slapdash. Perhaps this scattered offering of moments and ideas is a result of the collaborative screenwriting effort among four scribes: director Veiroj, star Ogalla, Gonzalo Delgado, and Nicolás Saad. It certainly feels like a lot of ideas were pitched and those that were considered good on their own merits weren’t considered for how they would fit within a collective.

In addition to those funny moments, Ogalla, in his first role, is quite enjoyable and something of an onscreen natural. It’s no surprise that the film’s core and hook—an apostasy—is something Ogalla experienced in real life; that sense of experience comes through. Still, these few virtues cannot compensate for the greater sins the film commits, and while it isn’t the worst way to pass 80 minutes, it isn’t the best cinematic option out there.

The Apostate screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

Kaili Blues, which has made a quiet name for itself on the festival circuit, has described by fans and critics as dreamlike, and it truly is, in so many senses. For some, this dream is an incoherent poet, stumbling through the last few drops of whiskey in a flask. For others, it is an otherworldly calling, a dizzying sense of realisation—or what some might even call enlightenment. The line between the two is probably a fine one.

Set in the rural province of Guizhou, China, even the film’s foggy, mystical location exudes a surreal quality, as though we are floating from scene to scene, character to character. This experience is only heightened by director Gan Bi’s use of long, uncut takes, which frequently disorient our sense of time. Gan Bi himself explains his preference of long takes by describing them as “liberating” and “close to poetry.” Somewhere between the art of poetry and the motif of time is where Kaili Blues lies, driven not by a narrative but by a feeling. As much as we cannot tell where the film is going, we cannot tell if it is going anywhere at all, or if it even needs to be.

However, Kaili Blues is intermittently concerned with a more tangible journey, depicting the travels of Chen (Chen Yongzhong) from his hometown of Kaili to Zhenyuan in order to find his nephew Weiwei. Chen’s brother—Weiwei’s father—is the unreliable Crazy Face (Xie Lixun), whose character is best represented by the knowledge that he may have sold his son. On his journey, Chen stops through the town of Dangmai, where space, time and reason all become unfathomable, and the film relies solely on our emotional connection to each character as they transiently pass into and beyond the lens. It’s a bold move, but one that forces the audience to question our understanding of reality as the discernable opposite of fantasy, interweaving the two until their distinction is not only obscured, but rendered unimportant.

One of the most interesting ways Bi achieves this is through the inclusion of actual poetry, both his own and that from the Diamond Sutra, a text of ancient Buddhist teachings. Read by the protagonist as a voiceover during several shots, the poems center our experience of the film, allowing and encouraging us to speculate on various moments whilst ensuring we never stray too far into the ethereal. Indeed, these sharp, contextual poems feel somewhat necessary, as though without them we would be adrift in a sea of memories with no sense of direction.

This exploration of time and memory is also wonderfully portrayed through music—both in the film’s traditionally inspired soundtrack and within the story itself. Chen’s search for a group of men who play the Lusheng, a traditional Miao instrument, leads instead to a group of young men about to play a pop concert. It is a clear but unobnoxious signifier of the inevitable modernisation of rural China, demonstrating both visually and aurally the meeting point of two generations. Yet Bi’s construction of this encounter is critical of neither the modern nor the traditional, preferring to hang, motionless, in a chasm of time where both can exist harmoniously. This lack of any linear motion through time is almost entirely what the town of Dangmai seems to represent; it is a place where memories can happen tomorrow, and passing trains can turn clocks backwards.

Kaili Blues has thoroughly impressed many as a directorial debut, and it’s perhaps the promise of more to come from Gan Bi that truly grips our interest. One technical feat in the film has been rightly praised—a single shot that lasts over 40 minutes long, and must have required an incredible amount of choreography in order to seamlessly flow through so many scenes. It cycles through a wide variety of characters, each of whom plays a small but significant role in our gradual understanding of the film, if that ever happens. But just like a dream, understanding what has happened is a far less meaningful goal than embracing the experience: in this case, one of a delicate, pastoral trance.

Kaili Blues screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

The title Christmas, Again says it all, really. In Charles Poekel’s directorial debut, Christmas is less of a joyous holiday and more of a hurdle to jump over. At least that’s what it’s like for Noel (Kentucker Audley), a Christmas tree salesman in New York City working the night shift. Poekel isn’t cheery or sentimental in his approach, but he also doesn’t make his film an exercise in misery. With a low-key, melancholy tone throughout, Christmas, Again pleasantly goes against expectations, winding up as a minor, well-observed character study.

Poekel, who also wrote and produced, actually spent several years working the same dead-end job as Noel, living in a trailer during the Christmas season in the middle of New York. Poekel’s own experiences add an autobiographical element to the film, giving it a specificity that picks up the narrative slack. Most of Christmas, Again unfolds with very little plot, opting to follow Noel around as he sells trees, goes swimming at the YMCA and makes tree deliveries across the city. Little is known about Noel aside from a few key details: he lives upstate, coming into the city every Christmas to work, and he’s still getting over a recent break-up (his ex-girlfriend would work with him every year, making this Christmas an especially lonely one). To make matters worse, a young couple works the day shift, their presence a constant reminder to Noel of what he used to have.

The monotony of Noel’s job takes a turn for him when he finds Lydia (Hannah Gross) passed out on a bench near his work. After letting her sleep in his trailer, she vanishes the next morning, only to return again days later. Noel and Lydia strike up a sort of casual friendship, one more out of necessity than by choice. Both of them have similar issues, and their isolation only draws them closer together. Poekel ends up taking their relationship in an unexpected direction by the end, one that’s surprisingly satisfying considering its lack of a clear resolution.

And while Poekel’s naturalistic, semi-adapted experiences help him get away with making such a plotless film (some scenes feel like they must have been lifted directly from Poekel’s life), it’s Kentucker Audley’s performance that keeps everything in place. Audley gives the kind of performance bound to get unfairly ignored. Noel barely says a word unless he has to, so Audley must express everything through mannerisms and expressions. Audley perfectly balances the distanced, solitary traits of Noel with the sense of a deep inner turmoil lurking right underneath the surface. It’s the kind of performance that never calls attention to itself, yet remains a captivating force throughout.

By the end of Christmas, Again’s brief runtime, Poekel’s preference of little to no narrative momentum begins to wear things down, but not enough to cause any serious damage. For the most part, the listless tone helps establish the film as a refreshing take on the Christmas movie. It doesn’t like to think big or provide a neat character arc, preferring to act as a brief snapshot into one person’s wistful existence during the holidays. It may not be the most exciting thing to watch, but it provides something unique, relatable and ultimately worthwhile.

This review was originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 New Directors/New Films festival.

Perhaps appropriate for a film called The Great Man, director Sarah Leonor’s sophomore effort focuses on the transition from adolescence to manhood. The film, ultimately a tale of two soldiers as they transition from serving in the French Foreign Legion to civilian life, opens with a voiceover by the preteen son of one of these men. Khadji (Ramzan Idiev) unfolds the tale of his father, Markov (Surho Sugaipov), and his father’s best friend, Hamilton (Jeremie Renier), as they chase a fierce leopard during their time in service in Afghanistan. They get caught in enemy fire, and Markov must abandon his weapons and the hunt in order to carry his injured friend through the sweltering desert to save his life.

It sounds gruesome and traumatic, but the tone set by Khadji’s narration is a far cry from the abrupt assaults that might open a war film like Saving Private Ryan. Khadji’s retelling is dreamlike and a bit larger than life, capturing a spirit similar to the heroes of great legends like Beowulf or The Odyssey. Perhaps due to his age (he’s 11), there’s less of a focus on the why and more of a focus on the heroic characteristics of each man (“If one drank, the other wasn’t thirsty”). Martin Wheeler’s score, with its slow, careful guitar plucking, seems to reverberate for days, giving us a feeling of warmth (and maybe longing), but definitely not fear or anger. This mood of the nostalgic, though we don’t quite know what for, continues throughout this slow-paced character film.

But after 10 minutes, the poetry of the initial voiceover ends, and we’re transported to present-day France. Markov, despite saving his friend, gets dishonorably discharged for disobeying orders. Leaving the barracks, Markov, a Chechen immigrant without papers, reunites with his son and undergoes the impossible task of finding work in a country with strict anti-immigration laws. Screenwriters Leonor and Emmanuelle Jacob cleverly leave any social criticism up to the viewer—this is a film that whispers, not yells. Showing the film’s love for slow-moving tracking shots, Markov spends his first night with his son (who he hasn’t seen in five years) on a tour boat gently gliding along the river. Khadji, feeling a bit abandoned, isn’t terribly interested in hearing what his dad has to say. But Markov persists, retelling the story of how the boy’s mother was hit by shrapnel during a Russian raid. It won’t be the first time people are surprisingly upfront with the boy, whose silent acceptance of everything is hopefully a sign of maturity and not despondency. But as Khadji shows great maturity in accepting the whirlwind information of the day, Markov still ends the night putting his coat on the boy. Khadji is brave, but he still needs a protector.

Despite the film’s lack of action and outward intensity (even when the situation warrants it), it’s impossible not to feel entirely invested in the budding relationship between father and son, which becomes something of a triangle after an injured Hamilton is reintroduced. The war stories, which first Markov and later Hamilton tell to Khadji, are the most thrilling moments of the film. Unexpectedly, given the film’s opening sequence, these retellings are sparse—maybe three in total. It’s almost like their sparsity makes us thirst for them even more, as certainly Khadji does, since they’re the surest way he has of growing close to his father.

Hamilton’s relationship with the boy is a lot less straightforward—partially because Hamilton has some growing up to do himself. He must at first seem nothing like the brave soldier depicted in Markov’s stories, the type of man who can hear the silent encroachment of a snake and with godlike reflexes. After a medical leave, he’s just like any other 20-something, immature and without commitments, set on partying and sleeping with girls he can barely hold a conversation with. But this is his story too, and without hitting us over the head with melodrama, The Great Man portrays how bureaucracy and circumstances can destroy men—or allow them to rise to the occasion. The performances by the three lead men (including Idiev here) are both believable and affecting. That’s why we’re willing to take silent journeys on trains; long, windy motorcycle rides through the streets of Paris; and observe serene but uneventful scuba diving scenes. The film’s sense of spacious, meandering time makes the moments of true intimate conversation feel intense and lasting. Like they may just as quickly be lost. And when we learn why Khadji has taken up the task of remembering the two men, we crave every detail just as much as he does.

The childlike lens Khadji’s narration provides allows for the film to hint at larger sociological issues while still prioritizing the immediacy of relationships. For more than just Khadji, The Great Man is a film about how empowering it can be when one man treats another with dignity and compassion, even when a cold world may not. And in capturing that bond, The Great Man more than succeeds.

A version of this review was first published as part of our ND/NF 2015 coverage. 

In late 2012 saw Love, Marilyn, a documentary about the life of Marilyn Monroe. While so much had already been written about the iconic actress, what made that doc unique was how the narrative was presented. Rather than follow a traditional documentary structure, the actress’ life was instead presented in a series of her own personal writings—and the writings of those who knew her—as read by a parade of modern Hollywood stars.

After successful debuts at both Sundance and New Directors/New Films festival, this week sees the limited release of Listen to Me Marlon, a documentary about another iconic celebrity, Marlon Brando. Like Marilyn’s doc, the story is told in a unique way, but instead of using the voices of others to tell Marlon’s tale, director Stevan Riley uses Brando’s own voice as the narrator.

As lifetime highlight reels go, Listen to Me Marlon does a very good job. Riley covers the actor’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, his studies at The New School under the legendary Stella Adler, his film career (with plenty of clips), his children, his activism, the decline of his career, the rebirth of his career, and the tumult and tragedy that filled so much of his later life. Riley also pivots deftly from subject to subject, routinely veering away from a linear telling but never losing the viewer in the process. He hits key moments in Brando’s past not according to a calendar but when they need to be hit to make the right point about the actor’s life or career. As a bonus, the director is not afraid to return to people from Brando’s past, like his parents or Adler, as the narrative warrants it.

Given the breadth of Brando’s career, his devastating charisma, and his real-life drama, this highlight reel (with its endless trove of remarkable still photographs, movie clips, news footage, and other source audio/video) and the way it is structured would have made for a compelling—or at least entertaining—biography. It’s Riley’s narrative approach that puts the doc on another level, and the opening title card says it all:

“Throughout his lifetime Marlon Brando made hundreds of hours of private audio recordings none of which have been heard by the public until now.”

“Until now.” This is what makes Listen to Me Marlon such a hypnotic film: every narrated word is in Brando’s own voice, culled from tapes and assembled in an incredible marriage of image and voice. But even “narrated word” is misleading because Brando doesn’t truly narrate the film. The late actor reflects and ruminates and espouses and regrets and mourns and more, all through a collection of stream-of-consciousness moments that are paired with perfect visual accompaniment. This is Brando opening up, not reading a script.

Or is it?

Of course he’s not literally reading a script, but there is something to raise an eyebrow about here. Riley, in an effort to present “Brando on Brando” with all of this terrific source material, doesn’t consider that a two-time Oscar winner (Best Actor for both 1954’s On the Waterfront and 1972’s The Godfather) and one of the greatest actors Hollywood has ever produced might just be acting on tape for an audience of one: himself.

He is enamored by his own profession, his place in its history, and his persona. He even takes time to name-check a few actors from 1930s/1940s Hollywood and compare them to breakfast cereal in the sense that the audience knows what it’s going to get with every role (like a box of cereal each morning, the same thing over and over).

Since Brando is not without ego, there’s something to be said for his collection of hours of himself on tape (a collection that includes recordings of self-hypnosis sessions). To what end did he do it? Is part of it a symptom of OCD? Maybe. But he must have considered the tapes would one day be heard, so surely it’s not impossible that Brando might have embellished or dramatized some of his free-form stories. This is never explored, so we are left to take Brando at his word that what he is saying is not just for the sake of putting on a show.

(And even if it is, it’s a damn good show.)

As I am not well-versed in the history of Marlon Brando, I cannot say what, if any, of this documentary offers anything in terms of substance beyond what has already been published or produced. Regardless, Listen to Me Marlon is a spellbinding watch, a great exercise in alternative story presentation, and a terrific collection of clips and pics of a Hollywood legend.

A version of this review was first published as part of our ND/NF 2015 coverage. The film releases in NYC July 29 and LA July 31, 2015.

The Tribe begins with a brief notice about the subsequent film, one that could be easily interpreted as a warning. The text states that the film is entirely in sign language; there will be no subtitles, translations, or narration. From that point, first-time feature filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky allows his story to unfold without any spoken dialog (tough luck unless you’re versed in Ukrainian sign language). That’s not to say The Tribe is a silent movie. The atmospheric noise and limited vocalizations from its cast of deaf actors provides a subdued, ominous soundtrack that instills a sense of impending disaster.

The Ukrainian film takes place at a boarding school for the deaf, following Sergei (Grigory Fesenko) as he adjusts to life at the new school. One of The Tribe’s first scenes involves a student being disruptive in class, and as the he and the teacher sign towards one another, the dynamics of their interaction become clear. The uneasiness created by the inability to “understand” what the characters are communicating starts to wane. After all, just because this is a school for the deaf doesn’t mean there won’t be a class clown, and a teacher tired of his antics. Likewise, as the new kid, Sergei begins The Tribe as a social outcast who is quickly befriended by another boy at the school.

However, Sergei’s new friend group aren’t ordinary teenage boys, they’re part of an organized crime syndicate that runs through the school. After some hazing Sergei gains acceptance into the crew, becoming an underling to the kingpin along with his dorm mates. Sergei eventually graduates to truck stop pimp, facilitating transactions for the young prostitutes Anya and Svetka (the film’s primary two female roles). Sergei eventually falls for Anya, but the story surrounding their teenage love affair becomes increasingly brutal and excessively violent by the movie’s end.

Each scene within The Tribe is shot in a single, often stunning long take. Cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych’s camera glides alongside the actors with beautifully framed images. Writer/director Slaboshpitsky weaves the story within a structure that follows dramatic but puzzling scenes, with scenes that explains the earlier sequence’s significance. It’s a clever construct, but one that’s utilized to a frustrating degree over the course of The Tribe’s 132-minute runtime.

The framework of The Tribe is fascinating; yet, the story contained within it is not quite as compelling as its central narrative hook. Still, there’s plenty of admirable film craft on display in Slaboshpitsky’s film and watching the rich world portrayed in The Tribe slowly reveal itself is a mostly gripping experience. Though it ultimately feels overlong, the sheer boldness of the endeavor makes The Tribe all the more notable. Slaboshpitsky’s debut movie is a strange, dark, wholly unique coming-of-age journey.

The financial crisis that struck several short years ago feels like a thing of the past, despite the several sectors still recovering. And despite the continued recovery, movies and TV have steered well clear of the territory for the most part, with some notable exceptions (the excellent Margin Call, the upcoming 99 Homes, and several documentaries). Even fewer of these films focus in on a single family during their struggles. All of this makes the Georgian film, Line Of Credit, all the more surprising.

The film centers around Nino (Nino Kasradze), a woman in her 40s trying her best to keep her family afloat. Decades ago her father provided for the family by doing some shady deals with Russia. Now, the cafe below their massive apartment is a ghost town, the money for the children’s private school tuition is nearly tapped, and Nino has knotted herself into a complex hurricane of debt. Week by week she calls on friends for loans, pawns jewelry, and sells everything she can get her hands on, all while trying to keep up the illusion of comfort and stability, urging everyone she borrows from to keep the matters hush-hush.

It’s easy to forget that the rest of the world was hit just as hard, if not harder, by the financial crisis. And while Line Of Credit, writer/director Salome Alexi’s debut feature, serves as a reminder, it unfortunately does little else. The plot is both wildly intricate and exceptionally dull in its narrative trajectory. To pay for a party, Nino pawns a ring. To keep the gas turned on, she borrows from a friend. To get the ring back she sells a tea set. And so goes the movie. Everyone is willing to loan Nino whatever she needs. Some friends go so far as to take out massive loans in their own name for her. This ease with which Nino passes through the world serves to keep the conflict to a lazy-Sunday-morning minimum. And not once do we get to see her doing anything else. Nino is either borrowing or being asked to repay. Simple as that.

But while the film becomes predictable from a mile off, the 84 minute run time keeps it manageable. That, and the beautiful cinematography. Shot by Jean-Louis Padis, Line Of Credit is thick with matte pastels and gorgeously framed shots of the small Georgian town. But while it looks beautiful, the camera never moves and claustrophobia sets in, sucking the life from many scenes–especially those few where Nino is allowed a good time, keeping us glued in place a mile away.

Line Of Credit is a harmless film about a very important and overlooked subject—roughly 14% of Georgian families lost their houses to the mortgage crisis—but it could use something, anything aside of a payout or a payment.

The purpose of the New Directors/New Films festival is to profile exciting new works by emerging talent across the world, a perfect description for Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan. Crotty, an American artist based in Paris, crafts a film that’s the sign of something fresh and distinct. Taking place on a French army base, Fort Buchanan follows Roger (Andy Gillet) as he stays behind while his soldier husband Frank (David Baiot) goes to work in Djibouti. Roger has little to do at the fort, aside from interacting with his abusive teenage daughter Roxy and the army wives waiting for their husbands to return.

In just over an hour, Crotty creates his own bizarre little world with Fort Buchanan. The fort itself is an area of sexual frustration, with the women eager to sleep with anyone they can find on the fort (including each other). Crotty also imbues his film with an off-kilter tone and sense of humour defying almost all conventions. There’s a sense of complete sincerity for every character, but Crotty regularly veers off into the realm of slapstick and surrealism. It’s a strange clash that feels like a direct mash-up between French arthouse and American indie.

Crotty’s balancing act doesn’t always work out in his favour, like when he tries shifting the narrative to a new character in the final act. But when it does work the results are hilarious and truly singular, a mishmash of styles and genres that work effortlessly. Fort Buchanan is the kind of debut that should get people excited; it’s original, strange, flawed, and brimming with potential. Most films have a hard time being this entertaining in two hours; Crotty does that and more in less than 65 minutes.

Filming can be considered a form of poetry, visual of course. Otherwise, as a written medium and highly subjective art form I’ve most often found the use of poetry in film to be unmoving. In Nadav Lapid’s Israeli film The Kindergarten Teacher a middle-aged woman, Nira (Sarit Larry), has recently discovered a love of poetry and begun to practice it, reciting to her husband who responds encouragingly but indifferently. One day a student in her Kindergarten class, a small five-year-old named Yoav (Avi Shnaidman) announces to his nanny in the school yard that he has a poem. She runs to grab paper and Nira watches as the boy paces back and forth, trance like, reciting a simple but beautiful poem about emotions and experiences he can’t possibly understand. She’s moved and inspired.

She recites his poem in her poetry class later and is delighted and affirmed to hear that it’s considered excellent by her peers. Though, they don’t know the poem isn’t hers. When Yoav’s nanny is rather flippant about the boy’s genius, and she learns his single-parent father cares nothing for nurturing this element of his son, her instincts kick into high gear to protect and encourage the boy’s talent. But after pushing the boy to perform publicly, things spiral and Nira becomes unhinged, obsessed as she is with Yoav and his abilities.

The performances of The Kindergarten Teacher are what safeguard the film from being maudlin or even psychotic, two extremes the film could have fallen into. Lapid’s decision to treat the camera casually, allowing actors to touch, run into, and even stare directly into it, providing a jarring self-aware element that isn’t always understood but certainly grounds the film from becoming lost in the head-in-the-clouds behavior of Nira. Poetry is still quite subjective, but the young Shnaidman’s straight forward youthful recitations cause even this dispassionate viewer to pay attention and appreciate. The film is an excellent first feature and touches on the need in creatives to find beauty and art in life and help it to flourish, even if it stands as a reminder of one’s own inability.

In the first 30 minutes of Ow, Yohei Suzuki’s debut feature, I was prepared to consider it one of my favourites of ND/NF so far. It’s hard to find a direct comparison to the tonal juggling act Suzuki pulls off, but think of it as the sort of set-up you would see in an episode of Doctor Who. The film opens with jobless, 26-year-old Tetsuo ambling about his family home until his girlfriend shows up to have sex with him. Shortly after doing the deed, both of them get stuck in some sort of trance when they stare at a giant, floating orb that suddenly appears in Tetsuo’s bedroom. And when I say stuck, I mean it literally; the moment they lay eyes on the orb, both of them stay frozen in place. Tetsuo’s father comes home later, barging into his son’s bedroom to make a tearful confession: he was laid off from his job weeks ago, and every morning he’s been pretending to go to work. The reveal gets cut short though, as Tetsuo’s dad also winds up staring at the orb.

From there, Suzuki frantically goes back and forth between thriller and comedy mode as the police get involved. One by one, police officers go upstairs to investigate, only to get transfixed by the orb once they set their eyes on it. This entire first act with the orb is highly entertaining to watch, a kind of fantastically strange and funny sci-fi/mystery that quickly escalates into a morbid comedy of errors. Unfortunately, once the orb goes away and everyone comes of their trance, Suzuki doesn’t really know where to take the story. The police, having no clue how to explain what happened, make up a story for the public, and Suzuki shifts the focus to an amateur reporter trying to expose the cover-up. The problem with this change-up is that Suzuki already showed everything that happened in the first half hour; watching the reporter spend the rest of the film playing catch-up gets pretty tedious to watch by the end. And the ending itself is a bit of a mess, a Shinya Tsukamoto inspired bit of insanity––including one character flat-out referencing Tetsuo: The Iron Man—that doesn’t feel earned compared to the relatively low-key material beforehand.

At least Suzuki never loses the off-kilter tone he establishes from the outset. The strange quirks he employs at the beginning—on-screen captions describing basic stats for each character as they’re introduced, a strange, percussive score, and a bonkers police detective—help set up the bizarre atmosphere permeating the rest of the film. After the orb leaves the picture, everyone unlucky enough to look at it winds up having a side effect where their bodies randomly go catatonic. There’s a point where Tetsuo’s mother and grandmother push the frozen bodies of Tetsuo and his girlfriend around town in wheelchairs, gleefully commenting on how cute the two look together. It’s those kinds of surreal moments that make Ow a film that’s hard to forget, bad story or no.

The first feature from director Naji Abu Nowar, Theeb is a classically-minded refresher compared to the more arty material playing at ND/NF this year. The film, which picked up an Orizzonti award for Best Director at last year’s Venice Film Festival, puts a human story within an epic, historical context. Theeb (Jacir Eid) is a young member of a Bedouin tribe in the Arabian Desert. One night, a British soldier (Jack Fox) arrives at the camp requesting help, and the tribe gives him Theeb’s brother Hussein (Hussein Salameh) as a guide to help him get where he needs to go (it’s Bedouin custom to protect any guest requesting their help). Theeb joins Hussein and the soldier on their journey, but by doing so the two brothers soon find themselves thrown headfirst into a war they never wanted to be part of.

Nowar used non-actors in most of the roles for his film, using members of one of the last Bedouin tribes to make up his cast. That choice, combined with Nowar’s refusal to provide any sense of establishment for the audience, throwing them directly into Theeb’s world, adds a feeling of authenticity to the proceedings. That helps especially when Nowar suddenly changes things up partway through, introducing a tragic set of circumstances pushing Theeb into truly unexpected areas. The sudden change of plot, done through a breathlessly intense sequence, never threatens to veer things off course due to Nowar’s patient, measured camerawork.

For the sake of spoilers, I won’t reveal much about what happens in Theeb. What I can say is that it turns into a fascinating coming-of-age tale, along with a story about two unlikely people coming together out of the need for survival. For a cast comprised of non-professionals, Nowar gets remarkable performances from the cast, with Jacir Eid easily carrying the film’s weight on his young shoulders. Theeb is a mature, well-realized effort that brings to mind some of Hollywood’s old westerns and epics (anyone watching this will inevitably think of Lawrence of Arabia at some point). And by taking the perspective of the Bedouin tribe, a voice rarely heard or listened to anywhere (and dwindling fast from existence), Nowar subtly provides a refreshing spin on a classic story.

It’s the end of the world in Lukas Valenta Rinner’s Parabellum, or at least it appears that way. A lengthy opening sequence has the camera slowly panning from the sky to the ground where a comet suddenly hits down. After that unsettling opener, the film cuts to Buenos Aires, where Hernán (Pablo Seijo, a completely wordless performance) leaves his job, cancels his phone and brings his cat to a shelter. Rinner, always keeping a fair distance from the characters, slowly reveals one piece of information after another.

It turns out Hernán has joined some sort of training camp in the middle of nowhere as preparation for a doomsday scenario. Other than the opening shot and overheard news reports of violent crimes in the city, Rinner prefers to keep mum on whether or not Hernán is actually prepared or just paranoid. Joined by a group of other people from the city, Hernán begins an intensive survival training program teaching a variety of classes on topics like botany, politics and homemade explosives. The training section feels directly inspired by the likes of Giorgos Lanthimos and the Greek New Wave, with precise framing and bone dry humour (comparisons to Dogtooth and Melancholia have already been invoked by others).

But those aren’t the only influences floating around Rinner’s film, with different scenes bringing to mind arthouse favourites like Ulrich Seidl and Carlos Reygadas. The limited dialogue and location around what seems like dozens of rivers also invites comparisons to Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, which followed someone around a similar area of Argentina. But while a filmmaker like Alonso knows how to create a truly mysterious and enigmatic film, Rinner feels lacking in these areas. The influences shine through, although it feels more like Rinner lifting from better sources instead of doing anything interesting with them. Long, static shots, lengthy passages of time without dialogue, and a camera that prefers to stay removed from the action are a few of the arthouse 101 tricks employed. And while Rinner certainly does a fine job—it’s quite assured for a directorial debut—the material doesn’t drum up enough interest to justify his approach.

It might be because of Rinner’s commentary on upper-class privilege, which starts taking a more prominent role the moment things take a surprisingly morbid turn in the last act. The resort itself suggests a service offered only to those who can afford the high price, and once Hernán goes through the bulk of his training, he and his classmates seem to think they can use their skills to get whatever they want. Periodic titles quoting from a fictional “Book of Disasters” subtly hint at Hernán and his classmates getting a head start on a murderous, post-apocalyptic lifestyle, but it still comes as a shock once they slaughter an entire family just to stay at their home for a few days. It’s a shock tactic that falls flat, as Rinner’s inert buildup doesn’t make the sudden shift in tone feel earned. Films keeping action at arm’s length do better when there are more ways to interpret what’s going on; when it’s applied to something more straightforward, the results can get pretty dull.

That’s a big problem in Parabellum, one that winds up dampening the large amount of potential shown in the film’s first half. What does work throughout is Roman Kasseroller’s cinematography, taking full advantage of the film’s gorgeous locale, and Dino Spiluttini’s sparse, off-kilter score. For a debut feature, Parabellum definitely establishes Rinner as someone to watch—the final shot alone guarantees I’ll keep an eye out for whatever he does next—but his film is too inconsistent and flawed to wholeheartedly recommend.

It’s disappointing to see White God’s marketing put so much emphasis on the climax, where canine protagonist Hagen (played by brothers Luke and Bodie Miller) rallies hundreds of other dogs into an uprising against humans. While I can’t blame the need to show off director Kornel Mundruczo’s incredible feat (I don’t think anyone has achieved what he’s done here), it’s obvious from the beginning that the epic conclusion is meant to be a surprise. White God starts off as a family drama of sorts, when 13-year-old Lili (Zsofia Psotta) gets sent to live with her father (Sandor Zsostar) after her mom leaves the country. Lili brings Hagen along to her father’s apartment, only to have him abandon her dog on the streets after he loses his patience with the mutt.

Mundruczo focuses on Hagen after he gets abandoned, crosscutting between his attempts to survive as a stray and Lili’s efforts to find her beloved pet. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Hagen’s scenes are far more engrossing to watch than the by-the-numbers father/daughter drama going on, but Mundruczo has a point (I guess). Both Hagen and Lili are going through rough times, facing oppression from superiors around them, and Mundruczo parallels their stories before eventually bringing them back together. As an allegory for society’s underprivileged fighting back, White God isn’t especially great; Lili and Hagen’s relationship is too specific, making any extensions to the real world easily fall apart. In fact, it’s the humans that wind up hurting things, as any scene without Hagen makes the pace slow to a crawl. But once Hagen begins his grand scale attack on Budapest, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the elaborately prepared chaos on display (animal trainer Teresa Miller deserves just as much credit as Mundruczo for pulling everything off with hundreds of shelter dogs). White God’s attempts to merge arthouse sensibilities with B-movie fun tends to be hit or miss, but while Mundruczo may falter on the arthouse side, he certainly knows how to make an entertaining genre film.

A nautical thriller with a surprisingly nasty mean streak, Shim Sung-Bo’s Haemoo is an impressive debut feature for the South Korean screenwriter. Shim, who has a working relationship with director Bong Joon-Ho—Shim co-wrote Memories of Murder, and Bong shares a writing credit on Haemoo with Shim—doesn’t reach the same levels as his masterful collaborator, but Haemoo shows Shim has plenty of potential to reach those same heights one day.

Taking place in the late ’90s, shortly after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Haemoo immediately establishes a tone of desperation with its characters. On the old, rundown fishing ship “Junjin,” Captain Kang (Kim Yoon-seok) finds himself in a bit of trouble. With his crew not catching enough fish on their most recent trip, and his boss trying to sell off the boat to earn some quick cash, it won’t be long before he’s out of a job. With little to no options left for Kang and his coworkers, he takes a deal to smuggle Chinese-Korean immigrants on “Junjin” in order to stay afloat.

With that relatively brief set-up, Kang and his crew head off to pick up their illegal cargo. Kang’s crew is where Shim has the most trouble with his film, reducing the majority of the supporting cast to annoying, one-note characters. The only exceptions would be Dong-sik (Park Yu-chun), a young crew member who doesn’t seem to fit in too well, and Wan-ho (Moon Sung-keun), the ship’s elder and chief engineer. The rest of the crew is reduced to childish horndogs, excited about the trip for the chance to hook up with some of the female immigrants on board.

After an intense sequence showing the immigrants trying to jump on Kang’s boat during a storm, a small romance begins blossoming between Dong-sik and Hong-mae (Han Ye-ri), a young woman Dong-sik rescues from the sea after she falls in during the transfer. Chemistry between the two feels forced, but that’s kind of the point; Dong-sik’s feelings for Hong-mae resemble those of a high school crush, and Hong-mae certainly isn’t having any of it. Shim begins profiling some of the immigrants on board—including an agitator trying to cause a mutiny, and a woman sleeping with crew members in order to get better treatment—setting up what looks like an odd couple story between the ship’s hard-nosed crew and their wily cargo.

But anyone familiar with South Korea’s recent cinematic output, or any of Bong Joon-Ho’s films, knows that subverting expectations is this country’s bread and butter. Things take a shocking turn around the halfway mark, and suddenly Haemoo becomes a whole other film. As a sea fog rolls in—“Haemoo” literally translates to “sea fog”—the foggy haze covering the boat becomes symbolic. What was once clear is now hard to see, and under the cover of the fog, Kang and his crew succumb to their immoral, selfish survival instincts.

Surprisingly, given Shim and Bong’s previous writing credits, the biggest issues with Haemoo come from the screenplay. Both writers have an excellent handle on pacing, with the second half steadily ratcheting up the tension as things continue to take a turn for the worst, but their handling of characters leaves a lot to be desired. The forced romance between Dong-sik and Hong-mae transitions into a real one rather suddenly, leading to an incredibly awkward sex scene after one character is murdered in cold blood right in front of them. The underdeveloped supporting cast only get more grating once the stakes get higher, functioning as nothing more than barriers preventing the protagonists from reaching a happy ending. The poor characterizations wind up clashing with the mostly excellent structure and plotting of the screenplay, producing a final result that’s frustratingly flawed.

The same can’t be said for Shim’s direction, as he shows a remarkably assured hand behind the camera. He handles the film’s sharp tonal shifts with ease, and with the help of cinematographer Hong Kyeong-pyo sustains an eerie mood once the thick sea fog envelops the boat and its surroundings. Park does a serviceable job as the young Dong-sik, but Kim Yoon-seok is the cast’s MVP as Captain Kang. Kim, who some fans of South Korean’s new wave might recognize from The Chaser, makes Kang a likable yet intimidating force, a man fueled purely by his need to survive. And while the film has more than a few issues with its screenplay, Haemoo is still a fun ride for the most part. It’s yet another example of how South Korea continues to beat Hollywood at its own game, combining different genre elements into something appealing, entertaining and refreshingly mature.

On this week’s episode of the Way Too Indiecast, Bernard is joined by Zach and Aaron to talk about this week’s New Directors/New Films festival in NYC, some noteworthy movies they’ve seen recently, and what blockbusters they’re most excited for on the horizon. Plus, the boys share their ideas of the ideal movie-watching environment. Afternoon or night time? Theater or home? Center or aisle seat? All this and more on this bi-coastal edition of the Way Too Indiecast.

Topics

• ND/NF Coverage (1:55)
• Recent Gems (13:30)
• Anticipated Mainstream (27:05)
• Ideal Watching Environments (33:10)

WTI Articles Referenced in the Podcast

ND/NF coverage

’71 review

It Follows review

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I didn’t think it was possible to make a more enigmatic version of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, but Bas Devos has gone and done exactly that with Violet. The film, Devos’ debut, is drop-dead gorgeous, mainly due to the incredible cinematography by Nicolas Karakatsanis. Shot on digital and 65mm in Academy ratio, Violet is an experience almost entirely about mood and aesthetics. It opens with the major event kicking off the narrative: 15-year-old Jesse (Cesar De Sutter) and his friend Jonas are hanging out in the mall when two men stab Jonas to death. Devos shoots the stabbing sequence from the perspective of the mall security guard, sitting in another room, watching the action unfold on different security cameras. It’s a distinctive opening sequence, getting to the heart of what Devos and Karakatsanis are trying to do.

The fact that the murder is seen through such a limited and removed point of view ends up putting the viewer in the same mindset as Jesse. While Jonas lies on the ground bleeding out, Jesse stands by him in complete shock. The rest of Violet uses its cinematography to evoke Jesse’s feelings as he tries to comprehend and grieve the loss of his friend. Very little is said throughout Violet, but Devos and Karakatsanis find plenty to talk about through their images. Jesse is only a teen, spending most of his days riding his BMX bike with friends or hanging out at the skate park if his mom will let him. He hasn’t even started figuring out what he’ll do with his life, and through one tragic action he’s suddenly faced with one of life’s cruel injustices. It’s a shattering experience for Jesse, and Devos understands how hard it is to encompass the resulting emotions through words.

The camera repeatedly pushes images into the abstract to show the new, unknown terrain Jesse explores in the wake of his friend’s murder. Shallow depth of field gets used repeatedly, turning everything around Jesse into a blur; frequent cut-aways to low quality digital video rendered images into streaks of pixelated colours and lights. The visuals and sound design produce some of the most evocative things I’ve seen this year, and their sensorial pleasures lead to several knockout moments. One in particular comes when Jesse spies on Jonas’ family arriving home after the funeral. The house is shrouded in complete darkness, with the indoor lights on the first floor providing the only source of illumination. It’s a surreal image, with each lit up room looking like it’s floating in a dark void, and it’s a perfect representation of Jonas’ family’s grief.

Not every moment in Violet provides that sort of perfect visual harmony with Devos’ subject matter, but it doesn’t have to. Each shot could stand out on its own as a striking short, but together they can have a surprisingly overwhelming effect. And while the aesthetics take precedence over almost everything else, little moments like Jesse watching television with his mother or meeting Jonas’ father lead to some surprisingly moving scenes. Violet establishes Devos as a filmmaker more interested in representing emotional states through showing rather than telling. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to pull off, but when it works—like when Jesse attends a metal concert, or the stunning long take that closes the film—it achieves something only great films can pull off, a representation of feelings that comes as close as possible to the way we experience them ourselves. Devos still has a way to go before solidifying himself as a great filmmaker, but Violet shows he’s certainly on the right path.

Yuriy Bykov’s The Fool is a scathing, immediate film, a vicious screed against political corruption aimed directly at the rotten heart of Russia’s government. The opening sequence, where a man living in a run down apartment bursts a bathroom pipe while brutally beating his wife, doesn’t waste a nanosecond in letting viewers know they’re in for an intense experience.

After the shocking opening, the film cuts to Dima (Artyom Bystrov), a city plumber and engineering student. He lives at home with his wife, child and parents, barely scraping by as he tries to earn enough qualifications to take over his current boss’ job once he graduates. A riveting dinner sequence with Dima and his family quickly reveals the film’s major themes. It turns out the titular fool happens to be Dima himself, except Dima isn’t a dumb person. What makes him foolish, according to his cynical mother, is his morality. Trying to be an honourable person in a world without honour is a fool’s errand, so there’s no point holding on to ethics if it gets you nowhere. When Dima’s mother complains about their apartment’s bad pipes, pointing out that their neighbours have new ones, Dima’s father tells her that’s only because the neighbours stole them. “So drown here in your righteousness, then,” she responds. It’s a cutting scene, and only a hint of what’s to come.

The opening with the burst pipe is the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. Dima gets called to go fix the pipe late at night, as it’s in a low-income apartment owned by the government. He checks out the damage, but upon arriving discovers an even bigger problem; a giant crack in the building’s load-bearing wall and a crumbling foundation. He goes home, hoping to assess the problem the next day, but finds himself jolting out of sleep once he realizes the problem is bigger than he imagined. After making some calculations, he comes to a horrifying conclusion: it’s almost certain that the building will collapse in less than 24 hours.

The crisis kicks the film into high-gear, as Dima frantically tries to find a way to save the 800+ people residing in the building. He tries his boss, only to find out he’s been pocketing the money meant for renovating the place for years. He decides to go straight to the mayor, but his wife pleads for him not to go. “If they didn’t care about that building for 30 years, why would they start now?” she asks, but Dima doesn’t heed her warning. He heads out to see Nina Galaganova (Natalya Surkova), the town’s mayor, who’s coincidentally celebrating her 50th birthday on the same night. Dima crashes the party, alerting her about the issue and prompting the mayor to gather her staff in a private room at her birthday party.

It’s in this meeting that Dima realizes his wife and mother have been right all along. The entire city council is corrupt, and now their hands are tied. They don’t have the money to replace the current building, and relocating the tenants is impossible considering the city already has a housing shortage. Bykov’s script and direction are flawless in this sequence, as with each passing moment the severity of the situation ramps up the intensity. Bykov achieves this by making his film a view from the bottom up, taking Dima’s morally righteous perspective and watching it quickly crumble as the cruel, selfish nature of those in power begin scheming for a solution that will maintain their status quo.

Watching Dima’s attempt to do good, knowing how things will probably turn out, becomes incredibly involving and tragic as the film continues into its last act. Bystrov does an amazing job as the noble protagonist, giving him an everyman quality making it impossible to not root for him to succeed. But it might just be Surkova who steals the show as Mayor Galaganova; she adds plenty of depth to what could have been a one-note villain, portraying Nina as someone seriously conflicted about weighing her own survival against those below her social status (Bykov throws in several hints of Nina coming from a low-class family herself, a suggestion that Surkova runs with in her performance). It doesn’t come as a big surprise once Nina makes her choice, but that doesn’t make watching it all unfold any less powerful. Bykov’s penchant for having his characters to spout off about his themes of greed, corruption and politics with no sense of nuance does grate at times – especially when it’s combined with the sometimes heavy-handed score – but it’s forgivable given the urgency of the situation. It also benefits the film in some ways, since allowing the characters the ability to speak so directly gives Bykov’s work a much stronger bite. The Fool isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel here with its story of a just man against an unjust world, but it’s a damn good example of a familiar tale that hasn’t lost an ounce of its power.