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2 years ago
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Inspired by true events, Tracey Deer’s Beans is a powerful and impassioned coming-of-age story set amid a recent violent chapter of Canadian history.
The 1990 Oka Crisis was a land dispute between the Mohawk community and the mostly white government of Oka, Quebec, over plans for a sacred burial ground to be turned into a golf course. An intense 78-day confrontation ensued, some of which is included in the film via archival footage. Deer, a Mohawk who was inspired by her own memories of the time, instills her film with scenes and emotions that are both tender and tough, which makes for a particularly engaging experience.
At the start of the film, smart, sensitive 12-year-old Tekahentakwa, nicknamed Beans (beautifully portrayed by Kiawentiio) and her mom Lily (Rainbow Dickerson, also excellent) travel from their home on the Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Reserve to apply to a fancy school in town. (In an uncomfortable moment, the white administrator tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to pronounce "Tekahentakwa.") Beans’ father is against the whole idea, but Lily is adamant that their daughter pursue an excellent education. The family is rounded out by young Ruby (Violah Beauvais), Beans’ frequent companion and a classic little sister sidekick.
Dad becomes involved in the protests against the golf course supporters, which soon becomes a standoff: In retaliation for the Mohawks’ blockade of a bridge that connects the community with Montreal, local authorities cut off [...]
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3 years ago
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Courtesy of Music Box Films
The subject of Sebastien Lifshitz’s sweet, sad documentary Little Girl, 8-year-old Sasha lives in rural France with her parents and siblings. We first see her carefully trying on various items of clothing and accessories, a popular pastime for most kids, but especially important to her.
Early in the film, we witness a conversation in which Sasha’s mother, Karine, tells a local doctor that at the age of two, her son insisted, “When I grow up I’ll be a girl,” and has never wavered from that certainty. The doctor asks Karine if she wished for a girl during her pregnancy, as if this might explain Sasha’s gender identification (!). Distraught, Karine admits that she did hope for a girl and that she has felt guilty ever since.
Thus begins Lifshitz’s poignant, pointed film. Shot in verité style without narration or identifying captions, Little Girl documents through conversations, interviews and fly-on-the-wall footage the struggles of a tirelessly devoted mother who wants nothing more than happiness and a semblance of normal childhood for her sensitive, intelligent child. Unfortunately, it’s a steep uphill battle for Karine, Sasha, and the rest of the family.
Courtesy of Music Box Films
Karine takes Sasha to a sympathetic psychologist in Paris, who assures her that the desire for a girl during pregnancy has nothing to do with Sasha’s gender identification, and that there are many children like her. Sasha, who stoically admits that “Secon[...]
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3 years ago
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The Macaluso Sisters, courtesy of Glass Half Full Media
Many of us are familiar with the horrific 2014 attacks by Islamic State fighters (ISIS) on the Yazidi Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, from various news stories. Especially reprehensible were the forced “marriages” of Yazidi girls and young women to ISIS soldiers, who basically used them as sex slaves. Now, MTV Documentary Films brings us right into that incomprehensible world with Sabaya (a term loosely translated as "sex slave"), a riveting documentary by Kurdish/Swedish director Hogir Hirori.
Guarded by Kurdish forces, 73,000 ISIS supporters are held in the Al-Hol Camp in Syria, along with many of the Yazidi women and girls they have abducted. Many of these women—several of whom witnessed their families being murdered by their captors—were taken in their early teens and have spent their entire adolescence enslaved. Sabaya follows an incredibly intrepid and determined group of volunteer Yazidis who repeatedly risk their lives trying to rescue as many women and girls as possible from Al-Hol, considered the most dangerous camp in the Middle East.
Sabaya, Courtesy of MTV Documentary Films
Mahmud and Ziyad of the Yazidi Home Center lead the rescue group, whose mission it is to bring the girls back home to their families, or whatever is left of them. Constantly monitoring their phones and almost as often losing cell service, the two men patiently plot nighttime raids on the camp, armed with guns and[...]
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3 years ago
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Courtesy of Music Box Films
The 19th feature from acclaimed French filmmaker François Ozon, Summer of 85 is based on Aidan Chambers' 1982 novel Dance on my Grave, one of the first Young Adult books published by a major house to depict homosexuality. For many teens (including Ozon, apparently), it was a hugely influential part of adolescence. A beautifully shot film (the French seaside setting plays a big role), Summer of 85 feels like a throwback to that decade: colorful, dramatic, and a little obvious. That tone, however, might mainly be due to the POV of its protagonist, a 16-year-old in the throes of love.
Alexis (Felix Lefebvre)—or Alex, as he has begun calling himself)—a cherubic blonde teen who is casually obsessed with death, has recently moved to a seaside town in Normandy where his father is a dockworker. One day he takes out a friend’s boat and capsizes, only to be saved by a slightly older, much savvier teen, David (the perfectly cast Benjamin Voisin). Early in the film, Alex refers to this angular, charismatic stranger as a “future corpse,” so we know upfront that David is doomed. In a flash-forward, we see Alex being interviewed about his role in some unnamed crime, ostensibly related to David’s demise.
Courtesy of Music Box Films
After the boating incident, David takes Alex under his well-muscled wing, bringing him home to meet his widowed mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who makes him undress and take a hot bath. She's uncomfortably flirtatious, but[...]
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3 years ago
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Dekanalog Films
Two Lottery Tickets, a 2016 Romanian comedy directed by Paul Negoescu, is a diverting, enjoyable buddy caper about a trio of working-class guys who win the national lottery, lose the ticket when one them is mugged, and endure a string of adventures in an effort to collect their winnings. It’s a mostly lighthearted movie that sails along on the banter among the three friends, each of whom has an amusingly idiosyncratic personality.
Dinel (Dorian Boguță) is a fretful, sad-eyed mechanic whose wife is working in Italy for a shadowy boss. As we learn from a series of phone calls, she wants to come home, but her boss is demanding money to terminate her contract. Dinel's own life is no picnic either, as we see him browbeaten at the garage by an irate customer who doesn’t like his car's paint job. Sile (Dragoș Bucur) is a burly, big-talking gambler who is willing to bet on any sport, including the Tour de France. The trio is rounded out by Pompiliu (Alexandru Papadopol), a neatly groomed and tightly wound government functionary who is obsessed with conspiracy theories. Together they drink in a local bar and decide to purchase a lottery ticket with an eye on the big jackpot.
Dekanalog Films
Their amazing luck in actually winning is dampened by the fact that Dinel’s fannypack containing the ticket was stolen by two thugs in his own building. After knocking on several doors and encountering various characters and situations, including a clairvoyant and a cou[...]
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3 years ago
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Aliocha Merker/Zodiac Pictures Ltd.
Written and directed by Bettina Oberli, My Wonderful Wanda is a largely entertaining film about a wealthy Swiss family and its patriarch’s Polish caretaker. Although it starts off like a typical satire of class/culture divide, complete with victim and victimizers, the film soon becomes something else — a more complicated push and pull of family dynamics among two families. Though it may get overly complicated in the last half, My Wonderful Wanda’s twists and turns, as well as its strong performances, keep it watchable and emotionally engaging.
The film opens with Wanda (a sad-eyed Agnieszka Grochowska) arriving back in Switzerland after some time away from the prominent Wegmeister-Gloor family, whose patriarch, Josef (André Jung), is recuperating from a stroke. She is clearly a welcome presence in their spacious, lakeside house, judging from the reception she receives from son Gregi (Jacob Matschenz), matriarch Elsa (the elegant Marthe Keller), and especially Josef himself, who is delighted and relieved to see her. Though clearly an employee (who sleeps in a bare basement room), Wanda is no pushover, as we see her haggle successfully with Elsa over pay for taking on extra work in the kitchen. Still, all seems pretty typical until Josef calls out for her in the middle of the night. After he hands her cash, they proceed to have sex in a practiced, mechanical (at least for her) fashion that suggests this is far from the first time. As t[...]
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3 years ago
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Busca Vida Filmes
Êxtase (Ecstasy), a beautiful, unsettling pseudo-documentary from Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, is the semi-autobiographical story of a young woman with anorexia, set in the tumultuous political climate of 1990s Brazil. Eating disorders are often a young person’s extreme method of exerting control over her life, and young protagonist Clara is no exception. She traces the origins of her sensitive psyche to a photo of her activist mother standing up to police during a protest, her pregnant body flooded with adrenaline. As Clara notes when her mother is elected to Congress at a time when politicians were often physically attacked, “As long as I kept an eye on my mom, nothing would happen to her.” The wary girl finds not only control, but ecstasy through starvation.
The film’s narrative is just part of the experience of Êxtase, an inventive, impressionistic work that casts its strange spell using photo stills, old news footage, beautifully framed reenactments, and sound designer Cécile Chagnaud's dramatic, disquieting soundtrack. The latter, which includes Ismael Pinkler's original score and a collaboration by David Lynch and Lykke Li, is full of classical music snippets, animal sounds, strange mechanical noises and a lot of whispering. Scenes are narrated by Clara as both child and adolescent.
Busca Vida Filmes
She describes her family's move to the country’s federal capital, Brasilia, its sleek, modern architecture adding to her culture shock[...]
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3 years ago
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Kino Lorber
Test Pattern, the debut feature from filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, is a tense, intense film that grabs one’s attention from the start and doesn’t let go for its entire 82-minute duration. That's quite a feat during these distracting times. I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched a film at home and did not pause it at some point for a snack or some other mental or physical interruption, but I was too caught up in Test Pattern to stop it. A well-crafted, nicely paced movie that weaves in a variety of current themes—racial and sexual dynamics, flawed healthcare, #MeToo—yet is never obvious or predictable, the film is impressive on many levels.
From the introductory scene—what looks and feels like a non-consensual sexual encounter—a creeping unease sets in. (This will undoubtedly be more severe for anyone who's experienced such an encounter.) We then watch the development of a relationship between the film’s black protagonist, Renesha (a wonderful Brittany S. Hall) and Evan (Will Brill, also excellent), a white tattoo artist who seems completely smitten with her. Despite her corporate background and his looser lifestyle, they clearly click and he seems to be a supportive boyfriend, cooking breakfast and encouraging her on the morning of the first day at a new job. Their conversations, especially as they get to know each other, have a raw, unpolished realness.
Kino Lorber
After work, Renesha’s friend Amber (Gail Bean) talks her into going out [...]
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3 years ago
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Photo: Radu Ciorniciuc
Acasă, My Home, Radu Ciorniciuc’s debut feature documentary, is an incredibly intimate look at a family living (literally) on the fringes of Romanian society. Maybe his background as an investigative reporter enabled Ciorniciuc to become so deeply embedded in the daily lives of the Enache family -- father Gică, mother Niculina and their nine children – who inhabit, and eventually leave, an abandoned water reservoir outside Bucharest. The resulting film is a sometimes troubling, always fascinating, portrait of a close, impoverished family forced to become part of a civilization they rejected two decades ago, for better and for worse.
From the start, the camera is right in the midst of the Enache kids, several of whom are paddling on a lake as older son Vali catches fish bare-handed. They’re a lively, rough-and-tumble bunch who may be acting out a little for the camera, but generally seem pretty happy. We’re then introduced to their shack-like home and compound, where pigeons, dogs, kittens, chickens and pigs roam around and eat together in peaceful, if messy, co-existence.
Photo: Mircea Topoleanu
The first sign of trouble comes with a call to Gică’s cell phone (the only electronic device in sight) from someone giving him a heads-up about the imminent arrival of Social Services. The kids immediately run into the wilderness to hide, clearly something they’ve done before, as Niculina threatens to kill the authorities in various colorful ways i[...]
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3 years ago
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Oscilloscope Laboratories
It’s a common belief that people look for fantasy entertainment during stressful, depressing times, but Matthew Rankin’s deeply surreal film The Twentieth Century would probably be satisfying to watch at any time. Well, satisfying to anyone who can appreciate an absurd, hilarious, heavily stylized “bio-pic” based on the century-year-old diaries of a Canadian prime minister.
As most Americans probably don’t know, William Lyon McKenzie King served as Canada’s PM for three non-consecutive terms in the 1920s and 30s, and is known for being a solid, if dull, statesman. For his audacious debut feature, Rankin created a film very loosely based on King’s private journal musings. Many critics have compared the result to the dark, fantastical work of fellow Winnipeg native Guy Maddin and to Monty Python, which makes sense. I'd add that The Twentieth Century is a little like a visually stunning episode of Drunk History, if the narrators dropped acid instead of drinking alcohol and Wes Anderson (also on acid) were the cinematographer. It’s full of references to historical Canadian figures and events, which invite multiple visits to Wikipedia. Or not, if viewers just want to let the film wash over them in hallucinatory waves. It obvious to anyone, though, that Rankin repeatedly pokes at Canadian traits and identity throughout the film, often its funniest bits.
Oscilloscope Laboratories
The action begins in Toronto in 1899, as young candidate King (D[...]
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3 years ago
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This may be the craziest, most emotionally disruptive fall in recent history, but the annual DOC NYC film festival is right on schedule. Like many other events these days, the country’s largest all-documentary fest, now in its 11th year, is completely virtual, making it available nationwide for the first time. Running online from November 11 through 19, and accessible to viewers across the U.S., this year’s edition includes 107 feature-length documentaries among over 200 films and dozens of events. There’s an emphasis on diversity with 57 features (53% of the lineup) directed or co-directed by women and 36 by Black, indigenous and people of color (34% of the feature program).
As always, there’s a lot of docs to choose from, many of
which are world or U.S. premieres. Aside from the films themselves, there will
be conversations with filmmakers taking place daily in “DOC NYC Live” events,
and pre-recorded filmmaker Q&As after film screenings.
Among the festival’s many worthy entries:
Duty Free, directed by Sian-Pierre Regis (making his feature debut), a film about Rebecca Danigelis, Regis’s 70-something mother, who is fired from her hotel housekeeping job. When she is unable to land another position, her son raises money through Kickstarter to fund Rebecca’s bucket list, which includes desires both humble (milk a cow) and expansive (a visit to England to her sister’s grave and reunite with the daughter she gave up). Many themes are woven throughout, in[...]
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4 years ago
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Dark Star Pictures
Orçun Behram’s feature debut The Antenna will probably be most meaningful for those living in Turkey, the Istanbul-based filmmaker’s birthplace. His stylish horror movie portrays a dystopian world in which a broadcasting system installed in apartment complexes turns out to be a monstrous presence, a clear (sometimes too clear) metaphor for life under the current regime. Beautifully shot in sickly, muted tones, the action takes place in a bleak-looking neighborhood of drab high-rises and is experienced mainly through the eyes of the soulful put-upon building attendant Mehmed (Ihsan Önal).
We first learn about the new government initiative through cheerful news bulletins, followed by the arrival of a technician who sets up a satellite dish on the roof of Mehmet’s building. When the guy abruptly meets a bad end, Mehmet’s supervisor Cihan (Levent Ünsal), a classic mid-level bureaucrat, is suspiciously nonchalant about the whole business.
Things around the apartment complex soon become very weird and threatening, as an oozing black liquid begins seeping into every apartment and scene. We see how three different tenants (a single woman, a couple with a young son, and the family of Mehmet’s friend Yasemin) fare as something inexplicable takes over.
Dark Star Pictures
The Antenna starts out quietly, but its soundtrack gradually becomes ominous and intrusive, featuring the magnification of seemingly benign sounds. Visually, ther[...]
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