New Directors/New Films 2016; Film Comments Selects

[Chris Knipp]

New Directors/New Films 2016
March 16-27

For updates and discussion go to the General Film Forum HERE (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4100-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34312#post34312)

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Under the Shadow (Babak Anvar 2016)

Links to the reviews

The Apostate/El apóstata (Federico Veiro 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34471#post34471)
Behemoth/Beixi moshuo (Zhao Liang 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34473#post34473)
Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34503#post34503)
Demon (Marcin Wrona 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34500#post34500)
Donald Cried (Kris Avedisian 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34495#post34495)
Eldorado XXI (Salomé Lamas 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34494#post34494)
Evolution/Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34484#post34484)
The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34480#post34480)
Happy Hour (Ryusuke Hamaguchi 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34501#post34501)
In the Last Days of the City/Akher Ayam El Madina (Tamer El Said 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34502#post34502)
I Promise You Anarchy / Te prometo anarquía (Julio Hernández Cordón 2 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34486#post34486)
Kaili Blues/Lu bian ye can (Bi Gan 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34482#post34482)
Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta (Pietro Marcello 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34485#post34485)
Kill Me Please/Mate-me por favor (Anita Rocha da Silveira 2015 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34478#post34478))
Life After Life/Zhi fan ye mao (Zhang Hanyi 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34479#post34479)
Mountain/Ha'har (Yaelle Kayam 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34493#post34493)
Nakom (T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34476#post34476)
Neither Heaven Nor Earth/Ni le ciel ni la terre (Clément Cogitore 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34474#post34474)
Neon Bull/Boi neon (Gabriel Mascaro 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34498#post34498)
Peter and the Farm (Tony Stone 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34497#post34497)
Remainder (Omer Fast 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34477#post34477)
Short Stay (Ted Fendt, 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34481#post34481)
Shorts Program 1 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34475#post34475)
Shorts Program 2 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34483#post34483)
Suite Armoricaine (Pascale Breton 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34492#post34492)
Thithi (Raam Reddy 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34472#post34472)
Tikkun (Avishai Sivan 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34496#post34496)
Under the Shadow (Babak Anvar 2016) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34470#post34470)
The Wakhan Front/Ni le ciel ni la terre (Clément Cogitoren2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34474#post34474)
Weiner (Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg 2015) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34499#post34499)

[Chris Knipp]

BABAK ANVAR: UNDER THE SHADOW (2016)

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Netflix's Iranian horror movie

Genre mashups are the rage now and so we get - what? A domestic drama-cum-political thriller-cum-horror movie, from Iran, set in Teheran in the middle of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980's. Repression is full-on, so doctor's wife Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is told in the opening scene (reminiscent of other Iranian film openings like A Separation) where a university bureaucrat tells her no, she can't belatedly come back to medical school, and her political activity during the revolution is the reason. So she's back to caring for her insecure daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), still wetting her bed and morbidly attached to her doll, Kiria. Slowly, very slowly, djinns (which Shideh doesn't believe in) take over, when daddy Iraj (Bobby Naderi) has been called to the front.

It's an unusual mix, and Under the Shadow qualifies as a novelty item. It may function better and be less morbidly pleased with itself than the Iranian vampire movie Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (ND/NF 2014 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31871#post31871)). But as can happen with contempo, "realistic" horror, it gives rise to the suspicion that the real life around these characters would be more horrible by itself. In fact, the bangs and clangs of the djinns -- and a spectral woman, clothes with nothing inside, who begins stealing away Dorsa's affections -- have a hard time competing with the missiles and bombs going off all around. What seems really horrible, and also stupid, is that Shideh refuses to leave Teheran and stay with Iraj's parents in the country, safe from bombardments, and goes on living in an apartment building ever other resident has left, which is full of bomb holes, which people inexplicably mend with what looks like extra-wide Scotch tape. And when Iraj is really nasty to Shideh on the phone -- that's horrible.

This film has been compared to the routine, maybe, but much much better horror movie The Babadook (ND/NF 2014 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31877#post31877)) because this too has mother and child relationship that goes south due to a possession of sorts. The way Iraj and Shideh quarrel in the early scenes has a nice realism that sets off the creepier events that follow, though they also have the feel of scenes from a telenovela. Nice details include a new neighbor boy who has gone must since his parents got killed, but suddenly talks to Dorsa; and a pious woman neighbor who, as Justin Chang says in his Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/under-the-shadow-review-sundance-1201686919/) review, helpfully points out the "mythology" of the film, that Dorsa's (or her doll's!) troubles are most likely due to a djinn's possessing them, which makes the disappearance of Kiria, the doll, and the medical book Shideh received from her late mother, the more ominious.

Is the ending, when Shideh and Dorsa finally leave in their little car with the lost doll finally found and repaired, hauntingly ambiguous, or deeply ironic? I'm afraid that it felt merely lame and anticlimactic. Under the Shadow obviously has many unique features qualifying it as one in a series of offbeat festival horror films, but if you want to be scared out of your wits, go elsewhere.

Under the Shadow, 84 mins., in Farsi, debuted at Sundance 22 Jan. 2016 and was acquired by Netflix. Screened as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center/Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films and scheduled as the opening night film.

[Chris Knipp]

FEDERICO VEIROJ: THE APOSTATE/EL APÓSTATA (2015)

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Federico Veiroj's follow-up to 'A Useful LIfe'

In my review (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1759) of Veiroj's quiet, charming previous film, A Useful Life, I note that it's "a short-short story rather than a novel." This is equally true of this third film, even if it runs a bit longer; it actually feels less substantial. Again a tall man (and Veiroj himself is tall) is at the center of it, with nice hair. Not pear-shaped and middle-aged this time, or the director of a Cinemateca, or in Uruguay either. We're in Madrid, where Gonzalo Tamayo (Álvaro Ogalla), a young, rather handsome man, in a dreamy way, is a philosophy student. But is he actually studying? The main thing, the Veiroj thing, is that again to make minorness interesting, and somehow significant.

The friend I watched the screening with didn't understand the title. What is an apostate? Can it even mean anything today to detach oneself from the Church? Given the strength of the Chruch in Spain, and particularly in Madrid, despite the city's worldliness and sophistication, it might, in some existential sense, mean something. But the main point is that it's so difficult, and also futile. It's important enough an effort for the various religious authorities Gonzalo meets with to try to dissuade or obstruct him. It's also a preoccupation for Gonzalo that may mask his inability to engage with the world. This focus of Gonzalo's throughout the film reflect's what Scott Tobias in his Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/the-apostate-film-review-1201597833/) review calls Veiroj's "instinct" for locating "moments of absurdist comedy within the throes of existential crisis." What he's doing seems Quixotic or pointless, but it is the focus Gonzalo has chosen for his personal crisis.

Veiroj's films meander, while being firmly rooted in their protagonists' preoccupations. In this case, there's a bug middle section occupied largely with dreams full of nudity. Gonzalo comes and goes. He tutors the bright young son (Kaiet Rodriguez) of his attractive neighbor Maite (Barbara Lennie), whom he will kiss. His cousin Pilar, he has flirted with all his life, and flirts with now: she gets angry; leaves; then is drawn to him again. He is attractive to women.

The most touching moment is when Gonzalo visits his mother (Vicky Pena), and it's clear that he doesn't want to hurt her, yet his apostasy project, for her, is a great embarrassment. There is a feel of discreet luxury and casual good taste about his mother's apartment. And the Madrid of the film as photographed by dp Arauco Hernandez is quietly classical and beautiful. The musical background suggests the light elegance of the Groupe des Six, at once classical and humorous, one of the various classy touches that helps pull together that balance of existential crisis and absurdity Tobias refers to. In the end, Veiroj has provided even less substance this time; and yet the film is satisfying.

The Apostate/El Apóstata, 80 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2015., limited theatrical release in Spain in Oct. Included in over a dozen international festivals including Hamburg, Warsaw, London, Vienna, Gothenburg, Miami, and New Directors/New Films. It was screened as part of the latter. FIPRESCI Award at San Sebastián.

At the screening it was preceded by a ten-minute short, Kasra Farahani's Concerning the Bodyguard, a reading of a story by Donald Barthelme by Salman Rushdie, which must have had special significance, given the decade of Rushdie's life under fatwa when he had a continual bodyguard, whom he reportedly did not like. The film seeks, with considerable success, to realize every phrase in the story's series of questions describing the bodyguard's life, using staged scenes ingeniously (and elegantly) interlinked with stock images, mostly from Russia and Iran to invent a sort of homogenized absolutist state like the one in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.

[Chris Knipp]

RAAM REDY: THITHI (2015)

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Abhishek H.N., Channegowda in Thithi

A midsummer Indian rural comedy

A very old man dies. His grandson tries to sell land he owned. His father gets in the way. A handsome young man falls in love with a pretty woman traveling through with shepherds. This provides the substance of Raam Redy's triumph of villager-wrangling, shot at an oddly named South Indian village in Karnataka, where they speak the Kannada language. I'd never heard of it. It's Dravidian, and between 38 and 50 million people speak it.

The art of Redy's film, as with all festive comedy, is to keep various balls in the air. The abrupt death of "Century Gowda," the foul-mouthed, hateful centenarian family patriarch, touches off the action in the first scene. We see his ritual immolation. The body is carried not stretched out the way we expect corpses to be but sitting up in a square frame, held high, and then planted on the funeral pyre of wood sticks. Eleven days later the eponymous Thithi farewell ceremony is held.

Meanwhile Thamanna, Gowda's grandson, sets out to sell the five acres of land nominally in Gowda's name. To do this his father, the wayward, eighty-something Gadappa, a tall, thin, bearded, distinguished looking bum who roams around swilling liquor from little bottles and smoking cigarettes, must give his permission. Or, the potential buyer suggests, he must be dead, or appear to be. We follow Thamanna pursuing his machinations, which among other things lead him to pay Gadappa to get lost, for six months at least. But instead Gadappa joins a group of migratory shepherds who are presently camped nearby, among whom is the pretty young woman a young, handsome member of the family has fallen for. The courtship weaves in and out of Gadappa's and Thamanna's stories.

That's all there is too it, really, but the action is so bustling and constant that the viewer's sense of emersion is intense. Certainly Reddy's film is closer to Satyajit Ray than to Bollywood, but it quite lacks the profundity and intelligence of Ray, even as it uses some of the neorealist methods Ray employed in the first of his sublime Apu trilogy. But however rough an impression South India makes here, the action is vibrant and alive.

Thithi, 132 mins., debuted at Locarno, where it won two awards, and was in three other festivals, Mumbai, Palm Springs, and New Directors/New Films. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors, at Lincoln Center, NYC. The series is a collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA and the films are shown at both locations.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHAO LIANG: BEHEMOTH/BEIXI MOSHUO (2015

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[Art film + documentary]

Zhao Liang acts as a modern-day Dante exploring Inner Mongolia’s environmental destruction by toxic coal mining

Jay Weissberg sums up this film in his review for Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/behemoth-review-1201625962/):
Maverick indie helmer Zhao Liang continues his muckraking tour of China’s social and environmental woes with the stunningly lensed, cumulatively moving Behemoth. Acting as a modern-day Dante on a tour through Inner Mongolia’s coal mines and iron works, Zhao (Together, Petition) eschews narrative for an impressively self-shot poetic exercise in controlled righteous outrage, emphasizing the contrasts between rapidly dwindling green pastures and dead landscapes disemboweled by toxic mining. The human toll is also here in the final sections, making starkly clear the price impoverished workers pay for back-breaking labor. Zhao’s quiet yet powerful indignation will play to the arthouse crowd, and his striking visuals should ensure that Behemoth receives berths beyond environmental fests.

Zhao Liang draws inspiration from Dante, regarding horrific deep-dug mines in rural China as analogous to the deeper bolgias of the great Italian poet's Inferno. The quality of this film varies. Outdoor widescreen landscapes, even those of ravaged, hideously exploited land, are strikingly beautiful. But when he moves into workers' hutches or mine shafts, with poor light, the image quality drops sharply. Nonetheless, this film earns a place among the growing literature of ethnographic documentary; and films documenting environmental destruction. The region he chose to explore in this film, the Wuhai area of Inner Mongolia, was black on the satellite map. The thing is, not only has coal mining -- and China is the biggest miner of cola and polluter with coal -- turned this place into the earth equivalent of a festering sore, but it used to be an area of particularly pretty, blissfully green wide grasslands, some of which are still to be seen and shown for comparison. Zhao makes ample use of this contrast in his highly visual and pointedly, if mostly silently, editorial film.

We look at young workers in the mines wearing heavy masks and we know somehow no masks will be enough here. A New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/world/asia/china-film-zhao-liang-inner-mongolia-coal-behemoth.html) reports an interview with the filmmaker.

Behemoth/Bei xi mo shou, 91 mins., debuted at Venice 11 Sept. 2015, winning the environmental Green Drop Award, and has been included in at least seven other international festivals including Stockholm, Dubai, Hong Kong, and New Directors/New Films, as part of which it was screened for this review.

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[Chris Knipp]

CLÉMENT COGITORE: NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH/NI LE CIEL NI LA TERRE (2015)

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JÉRÉMIE RENIER IN NI LE CIEL NI LA TERRE

Metaphysical thriller set in the Afghan front starring Jérémie Renier

A Cannes review by Guy Lodge in Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/the-wakhan-front-review-1201498733/) of this new film starring the durable Belgian actor Jérémie Renier suggests that the French director Clément Cogitore's original debut revives the already seemingly exhausted Afghan soldier portrait genre. Cogitore describes it as "a blend of John Ford and M. Knight Shyamalan." But Lodge also thought of Antonioni's L'Avventura, because it's the mysterious disappearance of some of his men that causes the protagonist, Capitaine Antarès Bonassieu, to gradually lose his authority and his mental grip.

We are in the same realm as Tobials Lindstrom's current Oscar nominated A War, though that film has more vivid and extended battle sequences. We're in similar territory to the twin Afghan war documentaries Restrepo and Korengal -- the western soldiers high up in the rocky hillsides, isolated, bored, working out, calling home, having periodic meetings with village men, armed with an interpreter (this one, played by Sâm Mirhosseini, is particularly strong and essential); the quarrels over sheep; the clashes with Afghans; the ever-present danger of the Taliban.

And I always want to ask: Why? What are these western soldiers doing here, constantly at risk? What makes authorities think they're essential? But those questions rarely come up in these films. In any case, here the NATO-led troops are being withdrawn, so they're basically waiting around and trying, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to stay out of trouble. Here the question isn't Why? but What the hell is going on? And there's never a very good answer. One of the themes is how macho men may go haywire long confined together, a theme memorably treated in Claire Denis's classic Beau Travail. Another is the union of enemies, since it turns out that not only the French unit but the local Taliban have been mysteriously losing men -- and they wind up involved in a strange collaboration. As the Captain grows unhinged by his disappearing men, he begins to think the answer lies in dreams.

I didn't find Neither Heaven Nor Earth fully satisfying, because it doesn't explore either war or metaphysics enough, but Cogitore uses the Moroccan locations and appropriate mise-en-scène well, and the fine cast includes Swann Arlaud of de Pallières' Michael Kohlhass, the lean, intense young Kévin Azaïs of Love at First Fight, and the recently ubiquitous Finnegan Oldfield, a "Meilleur Espoir" César nominee this year featured in Bang Gang and Les Cowboys -- the latter the directorial debut of Jacque Audiard script collaborator Thomas Bidegain, who performed similar duties here.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth/Ni le ciel ni la terre, aka The Wakhan Front, 100 mins., debuted in Cannes Critics' Week May 2015 and has been included in eight other festivals, including New Directors/New Films in New York, where it was screened for this review 1 Mar. 2016. Released in Sept. 2015 in France it received enthusiastic reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8 averaged from 28 reviews). Cahiers concluded that Cogitoren is a director worth watching, and several reviewers said the film was captivating "from beginning to end."

[Chris Knipp]

SHORTS PROGRAM 1

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UNDER THE SUN

Shorts Program One
Under the Sun / Ri Guang Zhi Xia
Yang Qiu, China, 2015, 19m
Chinese with English subtitles
An incident of random nature entangles two families and brings their plights into sharp focus.

We are in strong ironic Jia Zhang-ke territory here, with the cool, distant camera placement, the grim urban backgrounds, and the slow buildup through dialogue of a picture of backbiting, corruption, and cynicism in he face of China's economic explosion and eco-nightmare. The story focuses, crabwise, onn a young man who helped an old lady in an accident, and has been persecuted and threatened with a lawsuit ever since by police and greedy relatives. The best and most significant film in this set. Made under the aegis of Australia's Melbourne University film school, it was an official selection at Cannes 2015 and has received best short nominations at nine different international festivals.

Dirt
Darius Clark Monroe, USA, 2014, 7m
With an unsettling lyricism all his own, Darius Clark Monroe traces an evocative and elliptical portrait of a dirty deed.

Strong, vivid filmmaking doesn't mean this makes much sense or grabs much purchase on its narrative, but may be promise of something powerful to come. Monroe directed the autobiographical 2014 documentary feature Evolution of a Criminal (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3825-NEW-YORK-MOVIE-JOURNAL-(Sept-Oct-2014)&p=32852#post32852), which I saw and reported on from IFC Center. Dirt was shown and nominated for best short at Sundance. It shows former jailed bank robber Monroe is still making films and it has more polish than his debut.

Totem
Marte Vold, Norway, 2015, 20m
Norwegian with English subtitles
In seemingly idyllic Oslo, a couple demonstrates the discontents of intimacy with wit and biting honesty. U.S. Premiere

This meandering series of domestic incidents is a bore. A few touches of humor aren't enough to make it memorable.

Reluctantly Queer
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana/USA, 2016, 8m
In a letter home to his beloved mother, a young Ghanaian man attempts to unpack his queerness in light of her love. North American Premiere

Simple and sincere, this doesn't get very ambitious with its discreetly homoerotic images focused on collaborator on the writing, Kwame Edwin Otu, sitting around, taking a shower, and in bed with a white lover. The evidently autobiographical narration is touching. Most tellingly, he explains to his mother in Ghana that while in America he faces the legacy of slavery every day and is surveilled, still there is the advantage over back home where he cannot show his "secret" nature, his gayness as he can here. Shown in six festivals in early 2016.

Isabella Morra
Isabel Pagliai, France, 2015, 22m
French with English subtitles
The courtyards of a housing project become a de facto stage on which unsupervised children perform, spreading rumors and shouting insults in an imitation of adulthood. North American Premiere

It's astonishing to see the large number of people involved in making this uninteresting film of kids in the banlieu talking about nothing, playing with a doll, or sitting around. The aim is to show how much time is wasted here. But there have been so many exciting, imaginative, important films made about life in the cités. Matthieu Kasovitz's La Haine and Abdellatif Kechiche's early Games of Love and Chance come to mind. This simply seems lazy. A waste of time.

[Chris Knipp]

T.W. PITTMAN, KELLY DANIELA NORRIS: NAKOM (2015)

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A choice between traditional culture and individual service

In Nakom,a talented Ghana medical student, Iddrisu (the splendid Jacob Ayanaba) is forced by his father's death to return to his tiny, primitive farming village and has choose between returning to finish his education and pursue an urban medical career and remaining to for his family's survival.

There is something splendidly open and bright about this film from the start, with its wide aspect ratio, teeming images of the urban Kumasi, university campus, city streets, and then the wide flat landscapes of the farm. Once Iddrisu is back home, he's immediately plunged into family problems His mother (Justina Kulidu) isn't speaking to his father's second wife (Shetu Musah); his sister Damata (Grace Ayariga) resents that there's not enough family money to continue her own studies. His younger brother Kamal (Abdul Aziz) is lazy and has gotten a relative pregnant. The family property may fall into the hands Iddrisu's better off, more prestigious o Uncle Napoleon (Thomas Kulidu), whom his father borrowed money from after a bad crop year.

Iddrisu handles everything justly, wielding authority with sureness and tact. He arranges to have his scholarship suspended so he can spend a year away from his studies, and we follow as he takes change -- but always with the recurring question: Is this role more important than the life he led studying medicine (which he goes on studying in his spare time)? Is he indispensable now? These questions give urgency to events that are fascinating in themselves. (This story is a little like the middle panel of Satyagit Ray's Apu Trilogy.)

Reviewing the film at the time of its Berlinale premiere in Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/nakom-review-1201712289/), Dennis Harvey noted that this second feature for U.S.-based co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and TW Pittman (following their 2013 Sombras de Azul, shot in Cuba) fortunately lacks the outside-looking-in feel of similar international co-productions. "There's an air of authenticity" he wrote, "as well as a pleasingly laid-back yet substantive narrative engagement to this polished effort." That says it all. The action in another New Directors film, Raam Redy's Thithi, makes equally fluent use of a primitive rural setting and a large cast of non-actors, but there is more polish here, and a unifying focus on the tall, lean Jacob Ayanaba, whose face can go from old to young, infinitely sad to bright and happy.

Nakom, 90 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 15 Feb. 2016; it's US debut is in the New Directors/New Films series in NYC put on by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, where it shows 18 Mar. Viewed for this review at a press screening at Lincoln Center 1 Mar.

[Chris Knipp]

OMER FAST: REMAINDER (2015)

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An adaptation of Tom McCarthy's cult debut novel by a prolific Israeli video artist; his first feature

As Rudge says in Alan Bennett's The History Boys, "History is just one fuckin' thing after another," and life as seen in Tom McCarthy's 2006 novel Remainder, handsomely condensed in Israeli video artist Omer Faast's feature, is but a concatenation of events, which the protagonist, Tom (Tom Sturridge), is at pains to reconstruct. He has been smashed down on a London street by falling debris, and, after a period in hospital, struggling back to life, finds himself robbed of much of his memory. This includes his early life, and what he was doing on that street.

As Catherine Bray wrote in Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/remainder-review-london-film-festival-1201615107/) at the film's October 2015 London debut, Remainder is above all "a beguilement of memory like its predecessors Memento and Mulholland Drive." But it's also a detective story, a "sporadically playful psychological thriller," and an obsessive thriller. Because it's so condensed, McCarhy's story is (as Bray says) "harder to follow for the uninitiated" than the book. With his alabaster skin and bee-sting lips, Sturridge has a face the camera loves. Tom's recovery time is illustrated with many shaky extreme closeups. Fast lets one enjoy simply contemplating the actor's languid impersonation of the lead and the video artist's slick recreation of Tom's explorations of memory and events, a few of which are constantly revisited. In the increasingly obsessive varied versions, scenes from Tom's present and past, a sense of urgency and dirty business arises.

We can't reveal all but there's this. When Tom comes to, heavily bearded, he can't remember anything after the thing falling on him, and not much before. Of the traumatic event anyway he is not supposed to speak, a condition of the £8.5 million settlement a lawyer has arranged for him. He's been in a coma for months, and has to relearn how to move, and take constant pills for pain and to sleep. But a crack seen at a party reawakens memories of his youth, and he starts reconstructing events, using his new wealth and a hired fixer, a tidy, bearded, bespectacled man called Naz (Arsher Ali), sort of like a film director, to do it. He stages a house, several houses, keeps hired actors on call, a woman frying liver, cats on a roof, a whole string of people and things. And all along, people Tom finds who may have a sinister significance. Perhaps the ending, involving protracted reenactments of a robbery, is too much like a thriller. But it is thrilling. Perhaps in this form, we may have too much trouble connecting the dots. We're obviously not meant to always separate real from dreamed, even know if any of this is happening; it's still fun. I haven't read the novel -- yet. But this is material for re-watching and discussion.

Remainder, 97 mins., debuted Oct. 2015 at London, where it was filmed; also at Berlin Feb. 2016. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (FSLC/MoMA), Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ANITA ROCHA DA SILVEIRA: KILL ME PLEASE/MATA-ME POR FAVOR (2015)

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VALENTINA HERSZAGE IN KILL ME PLEASE

Vile, beautiful girls make out and dream of death in a posh soulless suburb of Rio

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s bright-colored debut feature wallows adoringly among pretty young Brazilian girls, and a few pretty young Brazilian boys. it is not a "slasher flick," and there is no "teenage angst." There is a lot of kissing, and some dancing, and a background of murders of young women in the wasteland surrounding large new suburban housing estates in Rio de Janeiro’s Barra da Tijuca. The girls, who belong to a competitive clan, are morbidly fascinated with the idea of being murdered, presumably after being raped, by a man. Particularly the pale, pretty, faintly ghoulish Bia (Valentina Herszage).

Bia wants to have sex with her boyfriend, the cute, sweet Pedro, but he follows a Christian agenda. One of the films' more successful outrages are scenes of a heavily made up young female "priest" who delivers trendy sermons and hip Christian songs to a small young audience including Bia and Pedro.

Filmmaker Anita Rocha da Silveira delivers on the exhibitionistic formal eye candy in every scene, with quite a succession of pretty young people. What she cannot seem to deliver on is story. Possible nods to to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, and the atmospheres of David Lynch cannot make up for the fact that there is no narrative structure to speak of. Kill Me Please is more like a music video than a feature film. In his Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/kill-me-please-mate-me-831237) review, Jonathan Holland says the film "packages its horrors too neatly into beautiful images."

Kill Me Please/Mata me por favor 101 mins., in Portuguese, debuted in the Orizzonti section at Venice Sept. 2015, and went on to win prizes at Rio, with three other festivals including Gothenburg and New Directors/New Films in New York. Watched at the latter for this review Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHANG HANYI: LIFE AFTER LIFE/ZHI FAN YE MAO (2016)

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ZHANG MINGJUN AND ZHANG LI IN LIFE AFTER LIFE

A returning soul visits a ravaged land

In the story, which is pursued with quiet obsessiveness, a youth, Leilei (Zhang Li), becomes possessed by his late mother, Xiuying, whose spirit has wandered the Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. With the help of Leilei’s father Ming Chun (Zhang Mingjun), whose reception of his late wife’s return is deadpan (Buster Keaton has nothing on these two guys), they undertake the Sisyphean process, to please Xiuying, of moving a tree from her family's courtyard higher up in the desolate dust-covered mountains that surround them. Panoramic shots show a valley spanned by modern mining apparatus, while up close beyond the man and possessed boy plod around a depressing, desolate village where nobody is friendly, not even their relatives.

The film was reviewed at the Berlinale by Clarence Tsui in Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/life-life-zhi-fan-ye-866913). It was produced by Jia Zhang-ke, whose deadpan sarcasm Tsui detects in this film; she also sees links with Kafka, Camus, and the camera style of Pedro Costa. The festival blurb sees a link with "the gentle supernaturalism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul." Actually, this is a very Chinese film, and is suffused with the spirit and style of Jia.

The sad, fatalistic mood of Life After Life made me think of Arthur Waley's translation of the old Chinese poem The Chrysanthemums in the Eastern Garden: "With what thoughts of sadness and loneliness/I walk again in this cold, deserted place!/In the midst of the garden long I stand alone;/The sunshine, faint; the wind and dew chill/The autumn lettuce is tangled and turned to seed;/The fair trees are blighted and withered away." And so on. But in Zhang Hanyi's film, nothing blooms. It is probable that Zhang means the moving of the leafless tree as a gesture toward the destroyed earth of modern China.

There aren't any closeups other than the staring face of Leilei/Xiuying facing backward as they forge ahead on his father's curious vehicle, in which a small pickup truck appears to have mated with a motorcycle. The task of getting the tree into this contraption is truly Sisyphean: following a method they've seen applied to a very large rock, they work the tree onto the truck along a long plank. Leilei pulls a rope lassoed around the bulky bottom of the tree wherein its roots are wrapped, while his dad, holding its thin trunk, rocks it side to side. Up a plank they go, but just before entering the truck, it falls down, do they must work it all the way back to the beginning of the plank, to start anew.

People encountered in the village are sullen and unattractive. Xiuying's family are not welcoming, but don't expel the pair from a grim outdoor meal.

Looking for Xiuying's father's spirit, they believe they've found it in an unruly, highly sexed dog. The New Directors series of which this was a part has included more than its share of animals slaughtered onscreen. This one can boast the most morbid and prolonged animal execution, which we're forced to watch all of. It involves strangling a sheep held to the ground. It takes an age for the sheep to die.

When the task is done, as promised Xiuying leaves, and Leili's body goes limp. We see Ming Chun carrying it on his back -- another Sisyphean task? -- and calling to Leilei's spirit to return. But it does not return.

While we are making sophisticated western references, we might mention Beckett. The meaning of the film's title in Chinese is "labyrinthine branches with plentiful of leaves," obviously deeply ironic as applied to the scrawny tree that's moved. It's a tree off the set of Waiting for Godot, and the words recall Clov's when he looks toward the audience and Hamm asks him to report and he says, "I see a multitude in transports of joy."

Life After Life/Zhi fan ye mao, 80 min., debuted at Berlin's Forum section Feb. 2016. It's listed on IMDb as being "in development." Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (FSLC/MoMA), New York, Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

ANNA ROSE HOLMER: THE FITS (2015)

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ROYALTY HIGHTOWER IN THE FITS

Black girls at a rec center in Cincinnati; a girl torn between two worlds

In this engaging but frustrating debut feature -- another one in 2016 New Directors (like the Brazilian Kill Me Please) that's more like an extended short than a feature -- tomboyish 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower) moves from boxer training, which she shares with her older brother, to a dance-marching band group across the way that is all girls. And some of these girls start having epileptic-like fits, which are initially attributed to the water -- a timely reference in view of the recent scandal about the water supply of Flint, Michigan.

Holmer blends scenes back and forth between Toni and her brother at the boxing gym, the dance workouts, a couple older boys and girlfriends, the fits, an empty swimming pool, and walks home with Toni and her brother. There is a lot of well-filmed physical activity, especially exercises like pull-ups and sit-ups, repetitious dance routines (standing in place, body and arm movement, not leg), and byplay between Toni and her brother. The best things are the warm and playful interactions between Toni and her brother. They play so naturally together. Royalty Hightower is a poised, versatile charmer.

Though she's presented as a tomboy, Toni's ear-piercing and nail-painting moments show she's not un-feminine; but she is simply a little detached from the others at times.

In a Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/features/the-fits-review-sundance-1201683106/) review from Sundance Nick Schrager describes this film as "An abstract portrait of adolescent emotional dynamics," and says Holmer "crafts a meticulous mood of psychological isolation and beguiling mystery through her metaphorical tale, which exhibits less interest in traditional dramatic conventions than in situating viewers in its protagonist’s particular headspace." This is accurate in the way it suggests The Fits is more like an art piece, or at moments a music video, than a conventional feature film, but it's not so clear how Toni's "headspace" is being simulated, since that's all wordless and inarticulate. Suppose she had had a voiceover or a diary? Clearly Toni and her brother live in the projects. But the camera never follows them all the way home. And though Holmer conveys a vivid sense of the youth community at the rec center, the other characters are visited only fleetingly. There is a lot of staccato, natural dialogue. But it doesn't gain much narrative purchase.

Schrader explains that the film was developed through a "micro-budget program at the Venice Biennale institute that stipulates all projects be completed in under a year." It does indeed show promise, for its vividness and energy. But Holmer needs to work more on story and delve deeper into her characters.

The Fits, 72 mins., debuted at Venice, and showed also at Sundance and New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. Picked up for US distribution by Oscilloscope. Opens in Theaters on June 3rd 2016. (Well received: Metacritic rating 77%.)

[Chris Knipp]

TED FENDT: SHORT STAY (2015)

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MIKE MACCHERONE (RIGHT) IN SHORT STAY

Mumblecore schlub's abortive summer sojourn in Philly

Mike MacCherone is a towering nerdy guy, and he gives phatic nerd utterance an almost epic level of inexpressiveness.

According to the festival blurb, in Short Stay the director, Ted Fendt, "delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor." Really? The "singular charm" is a bit hard to perceive. Whose? Certainly not the protagonist's; he has none. Short Stay reads like a rudimentary "mumblecore" film, with no progress beyond the minimalist genre's early days -- depicting, as the first halting examples of the genre often did, the unremarkable everyday doings of an unappealing thirty-something going nowhere very slowly. Mike (Mike MacCherone, who presents as height and bulk almost without personality), whose job delivering pizzas has few career opportunities, is offered a chance to sublet a friend's room in Philadelphia. He also gets to do the guy's city walking tours.

The blurb author says the film shows "economy of expression." That's easy: not much is happening: a few parties, a few uneventful dates, the room, the job. And also, we're told, Fendt has an "incomparable nose for the tragicomic dimension of the everyday." Actually, the events are drab and ordinary. They are neither tragic nor comic.

And then there are the tech aspects of the film, its nonexistent artistry. The images are 16mm blown up to 35mm, but a very far cry from the gorgeous look such formatting can have as exemplified by the Oscar-nominated work of Edward Lachman for Todd Haynes'd Carol last year. This looks like a movie shot in home video, but it isn't ironic or period, as in mumble "godfather" Andrew Bujalski's strange, fascinating Computer Chess (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2449). While Lachman has shot on super 16 for "grain," a rich human texture, in Short Stay the images just look rudimentary and blurry. There is no visual sense here. The shooting gets us through the scenes, just barely, and that's it. The déjeuner sur l'herbe still (shown above) is a rarity. Most shots are medium closeups you might see in a telenovela.

As for Fendt's moving up from shorts without loss, the problem is that he has only barely moved up. Short Stay, with its repetitious incidents and scenes, reads simply a short film in need of editing. It makes 61 minutes seem like a long time. It is a bore. However, Fendt may grow, as a few "mumblecore" directors (notably Bujalski) and actors (notably Greta Gerwig) have done. Miracles can happen. But this audition isn't very promising.

Short Stay, 61 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 12 Feb. 2016. It shows again 20 Feb. as part of New Directors/New Films in New York, where it was screened for this review.

Reviewed in Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/short-stay-berlin-review-864635) at the Berlinale by Jordon Mintzer. It debuted in the Forum section there. Shot in 16mm. and blown up to 35 mm. film. The director and his project are sympathetically described by Caroline Marques in an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer (http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/20160225_S__Jersey_filmmaker_screens_his_Philly-shot_film_at_Berlin_Film_Fest.html).

[Chris Knipp]

BI GAN: KAILI BLUES/LU BIAN YE CAN (2015)

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A dreamy Chinese road picture that's a visual tour-de-force -- and an impressive debut

Chen Sheng (Chen Yongzhong), the protagonist of Bi Gan's complex and breathtakingly enthusiastic exploration of cinematic possibility, has for some time now been a country doctor, working in a small clinic with an an older woman doctor, Guang Lian (Zhao Daqing), in the subtropical province of Guizhou. In time through hints and finally his own crabwise confession in a barber shop, we learn that he previously spent nine years in prison, taking the rap for others. In the long dreamy sequence that makes up most of the latter part of the film Chen is on the road, initially at least in search of his nephew, Weiwei. He has believed that his gangster half brother, Weiwei's cruel father Crazy Face (Xie Lixun), had sold the boy. There are other differences with Crazy Face -- over inheritance of a house, and his mother's tombstone. On his trip Chen hopes not only to visit Weiwei but a former gangster associate known as Monk who now runs a watch shop and an old friend of Guang Lian's she's been dreaming of lately and wants to send a gift to; she says she's too old to travel.

So this is a road picture, one with elaborate motives and back stories, concepts and commentary with built-in homages to great Chinese filmmakers of the previous generations. But it's also simply a demonstration of the joy of filmmaking. From the outset Bi Gan shows a passionate awareness of the aesthetic possibilities of his rural Chinese milieu, of everything the eye of the camera encounters. The lens of his cinematographer Wang Tianxing, remarkably debuting here, seems to gobble up the diverse scenes, whether they be a sweeping verdant hill landscape, a jumble of rundown buildings and debris, a mobile crane performing a nimble maneuver off a truck, a bunch of motorcycles mounted by young men acting as rudimentary cabbies, or young toughs -- in classic scenes right out of iconic Hou Hsiau-hsien films -- hanging out, striking poses, and playing pool. Whether the material filmed is superficially "ugly" or "beautiful" or simply drab, it's arranged on screen in ways that show a sure eye and a keen sense of composition. But the scene is what matters, not some arbitrary arrangement.

And then, along Chen's journey by train, bus, truck, and motorcycle, the camera takes flight, following people around and weaving in and out the hillside town for a 40-minute unbroken long take in the virtuoso tour-de-force manner of Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, but focused not on period costumes and museum art works but humid landscape, scruffy men, pretty women, roads, motorcycles, interiors with decaying walls.

The search, which is also a memorial journey, taking Chen to the riverside city of Kaili and town of Dang Mai, has seemed primarily motivated by concern for the well-being of Weiwei (Luo Fengyang as a youth, Yu Shixue older), whom he meets magically by chance. But voiceovers of poetry, the mesmerizing camera movements, begin to suspend us in a magical present time, like a drug high, where plans and goals are suspended and nothing matters but everything is hyperreal. We are there. China, this awesome, terrifying, destroyed and destroying country, seems magical again. One is brought back to the early films of Wong Kar-wai, Hou, and Jia Zhang-ke. (Others have seen a link with the Thai Cannes darling and explorer of magic and ghosts, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but that seems more of a stretch. The director, barely thirty, has mentioned Andrei Tarkovski as an influence.

Reviewed by Derek Elley for Film Business Asia (http://www.filmbiz.asia/reviews/kaili-blues) in his typical meticulous but not infrequently grumpy manner, Kaili Blues doesn't fare so well. Obviously, more is going on than we can possibly gather in one or even many viewings, and we need a guide. Elley helpfully points out that the Chinese title means "Roadside Picnic," and is the name of the main character's anthology of poems. Elley grants that the filming is a tour-de-force: "In sheer planning — as the camera follows the doctor on a motorbike, up and down stairs, into people's homes, on a river ferry, and across a bridge — it's a considerable achievement, with hardly a glitch." But Elly is unmoved. He doesn't see this as a meaningful explication of the narrative or character, or as having the mystical quality that is desired, as suggested by the voiceover "foggy poems" (as he condescendingly calls them) attributed to the main character (and actually by Bi Gan, who is a published poet).

But I was thrilled, and found the latter sequences of Kaili Blues made me feel high -- high on this exotic world, on the joy of filmmaking and film-watching. I remembered the excitement when a tip in the San Francisco paper led me to a hitherto unknown movie house in Chinatown (or so I remember it) and I saw the first two films of Wong Kar-wai. I didn't make much sense of them then. But I had entered a new world, and was hooked. What Elly calls "a conventional Mainland indie" is dense with ethnographic detail (indlucing visits to the Miau people from whom Bi Gan comes, the locations being his native region), a Diamond Sutra epigraph, intricate motives and backstories (with possibilities for future development) and it's not at all out of place for John DeFore to say in his Hollywood Reporter review that Kaili Blues "invites academic thesis-level dissection." But he is also right to add -- we feel the freshness of the energy and enthusiasm -- that "thanks in part to Chen's unforced performance, it never feels pretentious." Whoever wrote in the ND/NF blub calling this "one of the most audacious and innovative debuts of recent years" was certainly on the right track (despite a surprising lack of buzz since Locarno). There could be a glorious future here.

Kaili Blues/Lu bian ye can/ 路邊野餐, 113 mins. debuted at Locarno, where it won Best Emerging Director and Special Mention awards.It also won the Montgolfière d'or award at the Nantes Festival of the Three Continents and also has been in the Vancouver festival, where one blogger noted (http://nextprojection.com/2015/10/05/viff-kaili-blues-conveys-tiny-moments-found-everyday/) technical flaws in the long hillside take camerawork. Shelly Kraicer provides loving details in a piece reprinted in Cinemascope (http://cinema-scope.com/spotlight/kaili-blues-bi-gan-china/). It has been hailed by French critics ("of an unheard of virtuosity," Liberation; "a splendor," Les Inrocks) and it's coming out in France 23 March. Screened for this review as part of the 2016 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Director/New Films. It will show Mon. 21 Mar. at 6:30 p.m. at MoMA and Wed. 23 Mar. at 6 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.

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[Chris Knipp]

SHORTS PROGRAM 2

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THE DIGGER

Shorts Program Two
The Digger
Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France/UAE, 2015, 24m
Arabic and Pashto with English subtitles
With ritualistic serenity, a lone caretaker maintains ancient graves in the Sharjah Desert long after the bodies are gone. North American Premiere

This is a beautiful, dignified visual poem, with no voiceover. The only text is printed literary Arabic. It's probably the best and most memorable of the program, but what can you say about it?

We All Love the Seashore / Tout le Monde Aime le Bord de la Mer
Keina Espiñeira, Spain, 2016, 16m
French and Pulaar with English subtitles
A poetic distillation of the liminal space of refugees and migrants, developed collaboratively through encounters on the African coast of the Mediterranean. North American Premiere

"Poetic distillation" means that while actual refugees are used, this like the rest is an art piece. The are highly scripted, arranged, and poeticized. Which given the global refugee crisis at present seems a bit out of touch with reality.

Of a Few Days
Timothy Fryett, USA, 2016, 14m
On the South Side of Chicago, final touches on one’s
journey on Earth are meticulously made in a decades-old community funeral home. North American Premiere

A close look at a few details of how a funeral home is run and the preparing of the dead. Not really quite a documentary though, because like the other films here, it is highly selective.

The Park / Le Park
Randa Maroufi, France, 2015, 14m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
A series of tableaux vivants mesmerizingly locate the intersection of public space, inner lives, and social media within an abandoned Casablanca amusement park. U.S. Premiere

The strangest and most interesting short in this set because I haven't seen anything like it before. Very suggestive. But I had no idea what this was about, and I'm not sure if we're expected to know. There may be some reference to recent crimes or gang battles or something. The "dialogue" in French and/or Moroccan Arabic is fragmentary, and comes and goes before you can make it out. The "tableaux vivants" are really that. Groups of nice looking young people, mostly men, are frozen in place, some with knives raised as if about to strike, though they have pleasant expressions. The camera moves around among them. They really don't move. At most one guy's eye moves. But what could it possibly mean? A good art piece to show in a museum. No feature film potential imaginable. Hence the New Directors jury in this section have chosen to marginalize the festival.

[Chris Knipp]

LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ: EVOLUTION/ÉVOLUTION (2015)

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MAX BRABANT IN EVOLUTION

Boys, water, and women

Her name is a nightmare to spell, though a non-accented version is also accepted and seems preferred by French Wikipedia, Hadzihalilovic. She won admiration from cinephiles for her exquisitely arcane, disturbing 2004 feature, Innocence. She's taken a long time to get around to another feature, but in 2009 she collaborated with spouse Gaspar Noë on his Enter the Void. Her debut was the 52-minute 1996 film La bouche de Jean-Pierre , in Un Certain Regard at Cannes -- not reviewed on AlloCiné, but viewers' comments on it there are favorable.

Anyway, Evolution is her second strange take on childhood and sexual development, and while the first focused exclusively on young girls, in this one it's young boys being giving creepy raising/treatment by women, who may or may not be their moms. Innocence was the (by report ) faithful adaptation of a boarding school-set novella by Frank Wedekind (the German 1880's author of Spring Awakening), this one is all hers. It focuses on the experiences of 11-year-old Nicolas (Max Brebant, a good swimmer who glows with health), a boy who wonders if he is sick and why strange things are happening to the other boys, notably their being sent to a hospital for mysterious treatments.

Like its predecessor an elaborately staged and beautifully photographed film with everyone in coordinated costumes, like a ballet, Evolution is a kind of Jungian science fiction of reversed sexual roles and amphibious birth. It all happens in a little town of primitive white houses by a rocky coast where the sear roars up onto volcanic-looking surfaces. (The scenes were shot at Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands.) It is populated only by women and boys, both of whom often return to the sea and swim, and there are constant references to red starfish. Nicolas is swimming underwater in the first human scene (before that we see a glorious wide under-waterscape of flowing seaweed and coral, all the cinematography by Manu Dacosse, who shot The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears), and tells his mother he has seen a dead boy under water with a starfish on his belly. She says he's wrong.

Nicolas and the other boys are given dark liquid medicine every day, fed a diet of what looks like seaweed mixed with white worms, and given injections. Eventually it develops that roles are reversed, and they, instead of the women, are to have babies. What they give birth to we don't know, but it may be small fetuses, amphibious, perhaps? Nicolas draws -- though why this is important, we don't know -- and is increasingly disgusted and uneasy, as are we.

There is material for a hundred film student theses here, but nothing a viewer can come away with. This, like Innocence, is nothing more than an exquisite art film for a cult audience that will leave more mainstream audiences puzzled and indifferent if not actively repelled. I did not expect to like it, and I did not, though I was impressed by the beauty and distinctiveness of the images.

I don't think Hadzihalilovic knows how to tell a story, or is going to learn. And that's a shame, because she comes so close. She makes beautiful films. But they are stifling and airless. Their festival and cinephile cult potential is bright, their theatrical release future, relatively dim. In his excellent Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/evolution-toronto-film-review-1201586080/) review Peter Debruge classifies Evolution as a "yet another stunning, squirm-inducing contribution to the New French Extremity movement, as practiced by her husband Gaspar Noë and others."

Evolution/Évolution, 81 mins., debuted at Toronto. Many international festival showings, including Fantastic Fest, London, San Sebastian (Special Jury Prize and Best Cinematography), and Dublin (Best Director). Screened for this review as part of the 2016 New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York. Scheduled for theatrical release in France 16 Mar. 2016.

Opening theatrically 25 Nov. 2016 in the US at the IFC Center, Film Society of Lincoln Center (NYC) and on VOD.

[Chris Knipp]

PIETRO MARCELLO: LOST AND BEAUTIFUL/BELLA E PERDUTA (2015)

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Gesuino Pittalis in Lost and Beautiful

A docu-fiction fable of preservation set in its maker's native Capania, in southern Italy

In a kind of documentary turned art film, Pietro Marcello offers in Lost and Beautiful a whimsical, goofy, touching, ultimately overlong and irritating mythical tale spun out of a real event. He was called l'angelo del Carditello. Marcello filmed the poor shepherd Tommaso Cestrone, famous in the local Campania region for voluntarily, and in spite of Camorra threats, caring for the Bourbon palace of Carditello, which the government was neglecting. But during the shooting, on Christmas Eve, Tommaso died of a heart attack, and Marcello rethought his film. He chose to turn his focus on a baby buffalo Tommaso had taken as a special pet and named Sarchiapone, and spun out a fable about Sarchipone's fate.

Marcello brings in the Commedia dell'Arte figure Pulcinella (Sergio Vitolo), coming to save Sarchiapone from the slaughterhouse, and there is a running voiceover spoken by Sarchiapone (the voice of Elio Germano, of My Brother Is an Only Child), recounting his poor beast's life. Writing a review on the Italian website MyMovies (http://www.mymovies.it/film/2015/bellaperduta/), Emilio Sacchi says Marcello is describing here the "growing gap between Italy and the Italians." A raft of liberal Italian newspapers linked to on MyMovies -- L'Espresso, La Stampa, Il Mattino and La Repubblica -- all sing the praises of this film by the maker of The Mouth of the Wolf (2009) and Crossing the Line (2007). But it seemed to me rough looking, overly whimsical, visually repetitious, and meandering, and I do not think it will appeal much to a wider theatrical audience outside of Italy, despite its references to Italian tradition, government indifference, and mafia exploitation, common to most films and literature coming from this region.

It was co-written by Maurizio Braucci, a screenwriter on Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra.

Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta, 87 mins., it won the Youth Jury Prize and the international competition prize when it debuted at Locarno, where reportedly it got a long round of applause. So that's Locarno. It was released in Italy 19 Nov. 2015.

[Chris Knipp]

JULIO HERNÁNDEZ CORDÓN: I PROMISE YOU ANARCHY/TE PROMETO ANARQUÍA (2015)

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DIEGO CALVA (RIGHT) IN I PROMISE YOU ANARCHY


"Arty mash-up of crime thriller and full-frontal bromance"

Stephen Dalton's Toronto review in Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/i-promise-you-anarchy-te-822075) isn't flattering ("Skaters battle haters in this muddled, misfiring Mexican melodrama"), but admits the action is vivid and the film sometimes stylish. Playing with urban Mexico City atmosphere and its scruffy gathering of marginal young men whose every other word is a chinga or a pendejo or a cabrón, Guatemalan-born director Julio Hernández Cordón doesn't really generate enough heat or tell a compelling enough story. He lacks the storytelling skills to juggle or coordinate bromance (or bisexual relationship), generational angst, blood trafficking deal gone wrong, and confused lifestyle and come up with a movie that makes sense.

Miguel (Diego Calva) and Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martinez) are two young skateboarders who like to have sex, do drugs, skateboard naked, and make money giving blood sold to gangsters and getting others to do so, so Cordón would have us believe. Starting out with a party where there are hints of gay sex, the film suggests a degree of wildness that's not followed up upon.

Though Calva is tall and handsome, nobody, not even he really, has much style or charisma. His best mate Johnny, with whom he has a running quarrel, turns out to be the son of his family's maid -- a social difference that may faintly echo the relationship between Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna in Alfonso Cuarón's debut feature Y tu mamá también, but the filmmaking here is not of that caliber. Cordón relies on documentary elements that rarely bear full fruit. The greatest success is a gathering at which an intense young man take s hit of a hash pipe and launches into an impassioned, powerful rap poem about his country and his generation. It is the high point of the film. If only anything else here were as intense, intelligent and real -- but nothing is.

Later, Johnny and Miguel's confused and confusing blood sale scam (it's never quite clear how it works, or why their encounter with a gangster is such a surprise to them), which leads to a large group of their friends and street people who agreed to participate are loaded into a truck -- and kidnapped. This was not what Johnny and Miguel intended, and in the process Miguel has also lost his father's Jeep station wagon. After this there is a murder and the existing conflicts between the feckless Johnny and the more ambitious but weak Migues grow more and more intense. But there's no adequate response to the disaster of the mass kidnapping they're responsible for: they just get high and play about and have sex; there's no follow-up. The movie feels thrown together. There are periodic intense musical moments, described by Dalton as ranging from "vintage alt-rockers Galaxie 500 to a terrific Spanish-language version of the pop standard 'Sunny' by Mexican guitar-twangers Los Iracundos."

The best Mexican film I have seen recently is Alonso Ruizpalacios' Güeros (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4078-NEW-YORK-MOVIE-JOURNAL-(Dec-2015-Jan-2016)&p=34201#post34201), an delightfully atmospheric road movie about the search for a musical idol at the time of the year-long 1999 university strike. It is full of visual wit, profound in its sense of the period, rich in cinematic style, and intelligent. So that's possible.

I Promised You Anarchy/Te prometo el anarchía, 89 mins., debuted at Locarno, showing in over a dozen other festivals including Vancouver, Rio, Havana and Miami. Five prizes and four nominations. Screened for this review as part of the 2016 New Directors/New Films series (FSLC/MoMA) in New York, Mar. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

PASCALE BRETON: SUITE ARMORICAINE (2015)

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KAOU LANGOËT AND ELINA LÖWENSOHN (CENTER) IN SUITE ARMORICANIE

A coming-of-age story and exploration of memory and place

Pascale Breton's fascinating and satisfying new film, her first feature since her distinctive 2004 debut, Illumination (SFIFF 2005 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1742-Sfiff-Reviews-By-Travis-Kirby&p=15167#post15167)), dramatizes her autobiographical protagonist's return to her native Brittany. A festival blurb calls this a "rapturous ensemble film about the persistence of the past in the present." It is that, and despite its nearly two-and--half-hour length, I found it a continual pleasure for its handsome use of digital imagery, its layered screenplay, and its interesting characters. The plot revolves around Françoise (Valérie Dréville), a gifted art historian who leaves Paris and her longtime companion, with whom she's lived for fifteen years, to teach at her alma mater in Rennes. She says she has begun to find Paris "stifling." In Rennes she encounters former schoolmates, many of whom have never left. As she arrives at the university so does a tall, poetic and slightly wild geography student with exploding hair called Ion (Kaou Langoët), who quickly falls in love with a beautiful and assured blind girl called Lydie (Manon Evenat). Ion has issues, for good reason, with his wayward mother, ex-hyppie Moon (Elina Löwensohn), to whom Françoise used to be very close. The separate threads -- though we guess that sooner or later Françoise and Ion will come together -- allow Breton to explore Françoise's past and present, even, toward the end, her childhood, when she used to fetch plants for her grandfather, a Breton healer. Through Ion, Breton explores the development of a youth in the present moment.

Geography and art history are important themes. So are meetings and reconnections. It's not surprising that eventually Proust is mentioned and there's something Proustian about the way Lydie can identify Ion by his smell. "Armorica" is an ancient geographical designation to a region roughly comprising Brittany and a bit more. In one of their first geography classes Ion and Lydie are shown how to use a stereopticon device to look at a topographical photograph. Of course she can't see it, just as one can't recapture one's past. Françoise has a black and white photograph of revelers from the early Eighties in which she and others appear. They include Moon, and John Le Scieller (Laurent Sauvage), now a successful musician, whom "everyone was in love with then" because he was "super-handsome," but Françoise barely know. Now, John seeks her out. There is also the slightly crazy "La Grande Catherine" (Catherine Riaux) whom Françoise drinks wine and dances with in her swaying tower apartment at what was to have been a party where her former lovers would appear, but without her knowledge it was cancelled.

Ion is a bit of a wild and wayward boy, like Ildut Le Du (Clet Beyer), the disturbed protagonist of Breton's first film Illumination, who hears voices, becomes cut off from the world, and is only motivated to get better after he becomes obsessed with a young woman. Ion denies that Moon is his mother. When she turns up and meets him for the first time in four years, invading his dorm room with her seedy boyfriend Dav (Tangi Daniel) and two cronies, he lets them stay, but flees and begins to live like a homeless person himself, though somehow still pursuing his studies. There is a thread of wildness that runs through the film, somehow balanced by Françoise's intelligence and her impressive, soothing performances in the classroom. But she has a dream (handsomely realized) in which a large sphinx blocks every roadway, and the ATM machine is only in the Breton language. Her grandparents spoke it fluently, her parents only a little; she knows only a few words. But two young men from the university's department of Breton and Celtic Studies interview her, and she recovers "frozen" memories of her grandfather that make her weep.

The film brings art history to life, not only with Françoise's lectures but her visits to the Rennes Museum of Fine Arts, where she goes repeatedly but notes to her class she has seen none of them -- except that she unknowingly crosses paths there with Ion, sitting on a bench contemplating George de la Tour's (typically) striking painting, "Newborn Infant." The way painting interpretation appears reminded me of John Schlesinger's A Question of Attribution, and the memorable use of an art museum brought to mind Jem Cohen's subtle docudrama Museum Hours (SFIFF 2013 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3470-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2013&p=30019#post30019)).

Françoise's lectures are interesting. Perhaps a bit obvious but nonetheless touching is her first one (even previewed in her sound test of her mike) when she shows a blowup of Poussin's painting "Les Bergers d'Arcadie" which contains the Latin phrase "Et in Arcadia ego," "I too was once in Arcadia," a reference to her having been where her students now are, and that theirs is an idyllic age. In her final lecture she offers the notion that the Romantics were not so much in harmony and in love with Nature but frightened of its alien power -- an idea that somehow resonates with the geography theme.

Suite Armoricaine has some repeats of scenes from another point of view, slipping from Françoise's to Ion's, and brief flashback images of Françoise's memories, and her meetings with former associates are explorations of the past. But an equally important focus is the "forever youthful" Armorican Arcadia of the university of Rennes, and a handsome use of digital shows in first green landscapes, then wide nighttime panoramas of the built up campus, as the film moves through the months of the scholastic year, from Françoise's adjustment to memories and fear of the new place, the first lectures, and Ion's wild winter time haunted by Moon, losing touch with Lydie, to the pleasant arrival of summer, with promise of sunny travels -- to the town of Françoise's childhood and, for a healthier, happier Ion, to Greece with Lydie.

Suite Armoricaine might have benefitted from being tightened up and made more focused on a few important scenes. Some critics at least seem to think so. But it's nonetheless a wonderfully complex, rich, and intelligent film. It's a pity Pascale Breton doesn't make more and one can only hope it won't be so long till her next one.

Suite Armoricaine, 148 mins., debuted 13 Aug. 2015 at Locarno. One other festival, and Lincoln Center-MoMA's New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. Pascale Breton has made many shorts and worked for TV, but not directed any other feature but this since Illumination. Suite Américaine comes out in France 9 March 2016. It has so far gotten only four reviews, adding up to a very mediocre 3.0 press raint on AlloCiné. It got raves from Cahiers du Cinéma and Transfuge and pans from two other publications that found it too self-regarding and lengthy. Illumination would up with a 3.3 but Cahiers and Les Inrocks were very favorable.

[Chris Knipp]

YAELLE KAYAM: MOUNTAIN/HA'HAR (2015)

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SHANI KLEIN IN MOUNTAIN

Ignored Jewish Orthodox wife in Jerusalem takes a walk on the wild side

Tzvia (Shani Klein) is a housewife and proper Orthodox mother of four and wife of Yeshiva teacher Reuven (Avshalom Pollak, who is often out after dinnertime and pays little attention to her. They live in a cave-like dwelling embedded along the edge of a Jewish cemetery on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. In her frustration Tiva makes it a habit of going out to the cemetery at night, sometimes in the daytime, for a smoke. More often than her husband would approve, she has conversations and shares smokes with the Hebrew-speaking Arab maintenance man of the cemetery. After a while she discovers that whores have sex with johns by the tombs, and their pimps or handlers are there too, at night. She starts hanging around there and bringing home-cooked meals to build some sort of relationship with these people. They regard her as pathetic or a freak but she nonetheless has conversations with them. The failure of her marital life and her frustration with her children lead her to increasing desperation. She seems literally entombed. The film ends with a violent action whose exact outcome is left unclear.

The film develops slowly. As Jay Wissberg explains in his detailed Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/mountain-review-yaelle-kayam-venice-film-festival-1201587334/) review, initially outside of her family Tzvia's only contact is with Abed (Haitham Ibrahem Omari), the Palestinian caretaker of the cemetery. Relations with him are formal and polite but she's detached from him because he's a man and probably also because he's a Palestinian. When she encounters a drunken prostitute, she feels more at ease, even though she's "disrespected." Actually, Tzvia's relationship with the seedy characters at the edge of the cemetery at night remains limited, and repeated scenes show little development. Kayam clearly is seeking a slow burn, but almost winds up with a fizzle.

I found it difficult to warm to this film, which lacks the force or the brilliance of other recent films featuring Orthodox Jews, such as the beautiful (if questionable: it's like an ad for female enslavement) marriage film Fill the Void (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3341-New-York-Film-Festival-2012&p=28572#post28572) (NYFF 2012)and the stunningly powerful, grim tale of a doomed gay love affair between Orthodox butchers, Eyes Wide Open (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2796-EYES-WIDE-OPEN-(Haim-Tabackman-2009)). I liked the Orthodox drug mule story (based on fact), an unusual role for Jesse Eisenberg, Holy Rollers (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2854-HOLY-ROLLERS-(Kevin-Asch-2010)). Also notable for rich detail, despite initial stiffness, is the French Canadian film about an ultra Orthodox woman's affair with a secular man Felix and Meira (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3045), with its detailed portrait of a relationship. Mountain also lacks the vividness and complexity of Nadav Lapid's films, especially his latest, The Kindergarten Teacher (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3920-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2015&p=33406#post33406) (ND/NF 2015). Yaelle Kayam's method seems blunt and simplistic here, the material more like a short story than a feature film. Nonetheless as Tzvia, Shani Klein has a strange mixture of plainness and luminosity that is memorable, and some of the bleached-out images of the cemetery are rather unique. Besides which this is another not-so-subtle suggestion that Orthodox Jewish life is too stifling to bear -- at least for women.

Mountain/Ha'ar, 83 mins., debuted at Venice in the Orizzonti section, and showed at half a dozen other festivals, including Toronto; and New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

SALOMÉ LAMAS: ELDORADO XXI (2015)

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Ethnographic documentary on a Peruvian mountain goldmine region

By a Portuguese filmmaker, this ethnographic documentary seeks to present the dangerous, exploited lives of Peruvian Andes gold miners. They chew coca to struggle on and work for weeks without pay under the cachorreo lottery system, betting on their survival and eventual payoff.Hallucinatory filmmaking featuring a long shot of miners endlessly trekking up and down the mountains as there is a background of radio reports and stories of the miners' lives, some presented as interviews.

This is a very long slog indeed and represents a pretty lazy effort visually, if not aurally: planting the camera for an hour on one spot and splicing together recorded material as background shows minimal effort, while requiring exceptional patience from the viewer. While this shot may dramatize the monotony and difficulty of the miners' working lives, we get the point after ten or fifteen minutes, and the continuation for fifty simply suggests the filmmakers' failed as video-journalists, if they were unable to gain access to further aspects of the mining scene. As Young suggests, Lamas has chosen to waste dp xxLuis Armando Arteaga's talents for half the film probably betting on festival juries' proven tendency to be impressed by material that's grueling and tedious. The Inferno of Peruvian goldmines is a topic hat has been richly chronicled in the photographs of Sebastião Salgado. Looking at them is painfully enlightening, but not punishing.

The second half is more conventional, consisting as Neil Young describes it in a Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/eldorado-xxi-berlin-review-865117) review as "an informative and engagingly varied panorama of life in and around 'La Rinconada' (the name of the mine), "culminating in a noisy and colorful religious celebration that finally brings the whole community together in front of Arteaga's lens. Having shot Berlinale 2015 prize-winner Ixcanul Volcano in the damply fecund wilds of Guatemala, the cinematographer now brings his astute eye to a very different mountainous region of Latin America, where blocky habitations cling to hillsides like ice-grey outcrops of nature." Too late, I had lost interest in this film. It is inconsistent, and not up to the sometimes numbing, but rigorous and rich efforts of the Sensory Ethnography Lab based at Harvard, whose efforts I've reported on elsewhere.

Eldorado XXI, 125 mins., debuted at the Forum section of the Berlinale. Not listed on IMDB. Screened for this review at the 2016 New York FSLC/MoMA New Directors/New Films series.

[Chris Knipp]

KRIS AVEDISIAN: DONALD CRIED (2016)

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Dramady of financier who revisits his New England home town after 20-year absence only to be waylaid by an old buddy

It seems as if Kris Avedisian made this little movie just to showcase his own talents playing a tiresome loser buddy. But he does it so well, this is okay. To set things up, he sends Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman) back to his hometown of Warwick, Rhode Island to settle his grandmother's affiars. She has just died in a nursing home. Peter hasn't been back in twenty years and he hates the place. On the way to town, he has lost his wallet, and though he's now a hotshot in finance in New York, he's stuck. So after meeting a real estate agent who's a former flame he goes to see his old pal, Donald Treebeck (Avedisian) to borrow money. And this is where the fun begins. Peter is essentially a straight man for Donald. Wakeman's main job is not to get in Avedisian's way.

What follows is a depiction of what it might be like for someone who has become grown up and uptight and turned into a high achiever to revisit a place where he spent his time doing drugs, wearing eye liner, and listening to Heavy Metal -- in the company of someone who has not moved on from that earlier time. Avedisian's Donald is a hilarious, cringeworthy portrait. Partly he is pathetic, particularly his decades-long desire to have is best buddy back, to get stoned, stock up on munchies, and go to a movie. When he learns Peter would rather meet up with the real estate agent -- by himself -- he's devastated. But Donald is no cliché. He's as good as or better than any Kevin Smith or Judd Apatow creation. That includes the abusive TV wrestling fan bowling alley owner Donald works for, who turns out to be his mom's boyfriend. And the complexity of the dual portrait is enhanced by the way Donald and Peter's interactions turn violent at times.

We feel keenly Peter's dilemma. He has been out of touch with Donald because he has no use for his former life, but Donald is a necessity now, and gradually also an obligation, because he brings out the decency in Peter as he humors Donald's whims, and also takes Peter back to when getting stoned with slackers was good fun. Avedisian's performance and character creation is the main event, but it is given three dimensionality by the character Wakeman creates as Peter. Donald develops as Peter does, morphing from absurd obnoxious bore to sympathetic fool when his essential sweetness gradually emerges, even as he never ceases to be cloying and embarrassing.

Kris Avedisian has wrung vibrant changes on a conventional Amerindie trope, the homecoming movie, which becomes realer and funnier in this version through the brilliance of his improvisational skills. A new talent is born, whose invention could develop equally richly in comedic or purely dramatic directions.

Donald Cried, 85 mins., its making and distribution funded through Kickstarter, debuted at SXSW 12, 13 and 16 March 2016, reviewed there in Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/donald-cried-review-sxsw-film-festival-1201725730/) by Nick Schrader and in Indiewire (http://www.indiewire.com/article/sxsw-2016-review-donald-cried-is-a-hilarious-look-at-arrested-development-20160313) by Eric Kohn. It was screened for this review at New Directors/New Films, where it was shown 19 and 20 March.

[Chris Knipp]

AVISHAI SIWAN: TIKKUN (2015)

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Another provocation for the Hasids

With Tikkun we have another movie focused on ultra-Orthodox Jews, this time a conceptual puzzler in black and white, without scored music, full of surreal elements and with shocking moments of sexuality including full frontal male nudity. What is the fascination of this community? Perhaps simply its remoteness from the lives of most people, which makes its practices seem surreal, or like an art piece. Filmmakers seem to delight in showing how its rules go wrong, as with the wife in the recent Mountain (ND/NF 2016), who is led to share cigarettes with whores in a cemetery on the Mount of Olives; or the two (male) butchers who fall in love in Eyes Wide Open (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2796-EYES-WIDE-OPEN-(Haim-Tabackman-2009)), or the New York Hasidic boys who turn into drug mules in Holy Rollers (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2854-HOLY-ROLLERS-(Kevin-Asch-2010)).

But in Tikkun, which arouses admiration, puzzlement, and annoyance in viewers, means to present a dilemma -- though what the dilemma is, is left intentionally open-ended. A young man, Haim-Aaron (Aharon Traitel, an attractive non-professional who has a warm, appealing face), the eldest child of a kosher butcher (tall, long-bearded Khalifa Natour) and his wife (short, slight Riki Blich), seems confused and uneasy before his accident; he will seem more so thereafter. While fiddling with the shower, getting an erection, he slips and falls, knocking himself unconscious. Emergency medics give up on reviving him and decide to pronounce him dead, but Khalifa can't accept that, and, struggling to pump air back into Haim-Aaron's lungs, brings him back to life.

This is hailed as a fortunate event. But here's the rub: has Khalifa undermined the will of God, who seemed to have wanted Haim-Aaron dead? Or is it a "tikkun," in the sense of a fixing or rectification? A chance for Haim-Aaron to become a saintly, enlightened man, deeply appreciative of the gift of life? Perhaps it's an opportunity for Haim-Aaron to do good in the world.

Sometimes Tikkun, which is almost as sparing with dialogue as it is with music (of which there is none except for a celebratory Hasidic dance) makes use of mime and tableau, in a way that brings out the absurdity and oddity of the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. Never more so than when ten men, all identical, with their dark long suits and beards and broad-brimmed hats, come to visit Haim-Aaron, standing over him and making him look tiny in his hospital bed, all exuding wordless identical goofy-chic.

In the event, Haim-Aaron seems far from "tikkun." He goes more haywire than before. He announces -- in the family of a successful butcher -- that because one must respect death (hasn't he returned from death, and in so doing, disrespected it?) he will no longer eat meat. He begins falling asleep at Yeshiva till he gets kicked out, unsleeping at home, hitchhiking and doing increasingly inappropriate things. It seems obvious that this twenty-something virgin is in search of sex, and a run-in with prostitutes, one of them grotesquely fat, follows.

Avishai Siwan, for whom this is the sophomore effort, and his cinematographer, Shai Goldman, and editors, Nili Feller and Sivan, continually roll out events in a mix of shots that is surprising, coy, and sly, as well as surreal and comic (while Khalifa's oddball dreams of lizards and toilets seem just a little vulgar). Unfortunately, Haim Aaron's adventures fall rather flat. Surreal mime is a storytelling method that's hard to sustain interestingly, or hard for them, anyway. The climax, which occurs in a fog surrounding a fatal car accident, and a bloody bed, somewhat counteracts this flatness. But Siwan's film seemed disappointing to me. Its puzzlements never come together. It's promise is not lived up to. Nonetheless, it has enough originality to attract the cinephile class. And there are small moments between Haim-Aaron and his little brother Yanke (Gur Sheinberg) that add a touch of sweetness. Shots of the narrow streets of the ultra-religious Mea Shearim district of Old Jerusalem have an appealing claustrophobic oddity. We have seen such streets before -- in our dreams.

I can add little to the review of Tikkun by Dennis Harvey written at Mill Valley for Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/tikkun-review-1201623521/) Oct. 2015 in which he describes the thought-provoking aspects of this film, which he not inaptly calls "willfully enigmatic."

Tikkun, 120 mins. debuted at Jerusalem 10 July 2015, followed by Locarno, awards at both venues, and showing at about a dozen other international festivals including Telluride, Vancouver, the Hamptons, Chicago, and Stockholm. Latterly included in New York's FSLC/MoMA-sponsored New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. Limited release in Israel 3 Dec. 2015. Slated for US theatrical release 10 June 2016 (NYC) by Kino Lorber.

[Chris Knipp]

TONY STONE: PETER AND THE FARM (2015)

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PETER DUNNING IN PETER AND THE FARM

Touchingly real documentary portrait of a lone organic farmer in Vermont

The articulate, instantly engaging narrator of this docu-portrait is Peter Dunning, a former artist with Sixties hippie sympathies for whom since he was 35, 35 years ago, his 187-acre Mile Hill Farm in rural Vermont has been more important than anything else. "I am the farm and the farm is me," he says, in part of an articulate running commentary that bursts from every vivid frame. Tony Stone's intimate camera follows even the dirty, brutal side of the work, like Peter butchering, skinning, and gutting a sheep and a vet reaching inside a cow to see if she's pregnant and wrestling with an aging John Deere hay bailing machine, with the eagerness of a young man eager to learn from someone with deep experience.

Peter Dunning is a flawed individual and partly an unlucky one. His switch to farming away from a possible career as a painter and sculptor, which he studied to be when young, may be connected to a hand mangled working at a saw mill in his late twenties. What emerges is a life of endurance and dedication that has rather soured over the years as livestock have died out (coyotes have done serious harm in the past year), the buildings have sagged, the weeds have grown, and the man who has done all the work alone has aged and grown into deeper and more dangerous alcoholism. This idyllic place has become a prison in the years -- he says the farm was at its peak of production, when friends and family were all working happily together, in 1999 -- since his wife has run out on him (he's lost two marriages) and his grown children now won't even talk to him on the phone any more. And, worst of all, he knows the drinking is eating away at his soul. Thoughts of suicide seem a daily thing. The F-word flies in every sentence. The tough work of the farm that looked like fun 35 years ago now doesn't.

This is, of course, not an "objective" film. Would cool detachment while filming a man living and describing his life on the land even make sense? Not when Dunning says he feels closer to the filmmaker and his cameraman, than he ever has to any men. They stay out of Dunning's way, but the grown-closeness shows when Stone (sometimes glimpsed) worries or seems to criticize and Dunning seems wounded or angry. But mostly the sense of a seasoned relationship works well, shows in the film's way of making you feel you're there, watching, listening, smelling the barn smells while Dunning tells his stories and explains his processes. And he tells all and explains all clearly and vividly from first to last, the reason why this is a watchable and worthwhile film.

Peter and the Farm, 92 mins., shows in the True/False documentary festival 6 March 2016 and New Directors/New Films, 24 March 9:00 p.m. at MoMA and Friday, March 25, 6:30 p.m. at Lincoln Center. Screened as part of ND/NF for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

GABRIEL MASCARO: NEON BULL/BOI NEON (2015)

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JULIANO CAZARRÉ IN NEON BULL

Tale of rodeo roustabouts breaks the barriers between documentary and fiction

Gabriel Mascaro is a Brazilian documentary filmmaker who has turned to fiction films -- but not entirely: his two features are drenched in exotic real life atmosphere. Both his 2014 debut feature August Winds and his follow-up Neon Rodeo are so steeped in realism they feel like documentaries, but with a visual beauty and sensuality and vague plot line that only conscious manipulation could make happen. Yet it's troubling to see things happen that are "real." Neon Bull takes some thinking about, and the experience it offers is a confusing one. It left me puzzled and not wholly satisfied. But Mascaro is a heck of an interesting director.

We're following a little vaquejada rodeo troupe in Northeastern Brazil that moves a bunch (I didn't count) of silver bulls pairs of cowboys bring down in shows by trapping them with horses on both sides and one grabbing their long tails and pulling them to ground. That's the show. But it's not what this film is really about. It's about people on the fringes of that action. The macho, model-handsome Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), who's a wizard with animals, and also sews sexy costumes; the tubby, gross Zé (Carlos Pessoa), skillful with a tricky prize mare; their lady truck driver, blonde Gaega (Maeve Jinkings), who is also a sexy nightclub dancer wearing a horse-head mask and elaborate G-strings costumes crafted by Iremar; and Gaega's feisty young daughter Cacá, who often gets in trouble but holds her own in the work -- plus Junior (Vinícius de Oliveira, an actor since as a child he played a key role in the classic Central Station), who's brought in later, to replace Zé -- none of them perform in the rodeos. They're just roustabouts, traveling with the bulls, preparing the carefully powdered ends of their long tails, sleeping in hammocks, living by their wits, living their dreams. Those are their roles in the film. They're all actors.

But they're also doing these things -- cleaning up the bullshit, taming horses and such. Zé and Iremar sneak into a fancy horse fair and try to steal a prize stallion's semen -- with comically failed results. That's not the only erect penis we get to see because Iremar has sex with a pregnant woman on the big work table of clothing factory, secretly, of course, at night. These things happen. Where's the fiction? You see why I call this troubling.

The images shot by dp Diego Garcia (of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor) are composed in wide aspect ration with a soft look where the camera is often standing a little back, to compose a landscape, most memorably a horizon with glowing crepuscular light and multiple shots of the bulls in a row framed by wooden fences. What could have been ugly and crude is unified and often handsome-looking; the color quietly glows. Handsome livestock and handsome male bodies are seen equally, as in a dark panorama of almost a dozen well-built rodeo men showering in a reddish humid scene. Never has a movie contained sensuality so gritty or photographed with such casual beauty.

Mascaro creates a keen sense of this de facto "family's" day-to-day life with a few notable incidents, but the action is meandering, with no particular goal -- and the film suffers from underdevelopment of characters and their lack of backstories, despite a unifying feel of sensuality and ignoring of gender barriers. To some viewers this may feel pointless, and the physicality disgusting at times. What holds it together is a sensuality, a wallowing in muck that seems somehow relaxed and pleasant, perhaps in a spirit that's particularly Brazilian. Iremar, Gaega, and Junior with his long hair wear thrown-together outfits, but they look stylish, despite the heat and mire and muck and shit one can almost smell. Will their marginality eventually catch up with them? Or in Brazil is dolce far almost niente a spirit that can sustain a happy life?

Peter Debruge in Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/neon-bull-venice-film-review-1201584981/) says of Diego Garcia's images that "Selected at random, any given frame of the film might stand alone as powerfully as a Dutch genre painting (think Brueghel or Vermeer)." Boyd van Hoeij pretty well sums up the film's feel and themes in his Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/neon-bull-boi-neon-venice-820017) review when he writes of its "indirect meditation on bodies and the way they are used, both in the animal world and in the human one," with an emergent "portrait of a society in which gender and body norms are much less rigid than one would expect."

Neon Bull/Moi Neon, 100 mins., debuted in the Orizzonti section at Venice where it won the prize. The Brazilian rodeo drama also screened at the Toronto Film Festival in the inaugural Platform section (honorable mention), with a number of other nominations and awards. Screened for this review as part of the March 2016 FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series. To be released in US theaters by Kino Lorber. Opens Fri. 8 Apr. 2016 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

[Chris Knipp]

JOSH KRIEGMAN, ELYSE STEINBERG: WEINER (2016)

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ANTHONY WEINER IN WEINER

Basic documentary of Weiner's disastrous campaign for mayor of New York

Anthony Weiner, disgraced Congressman from New York, then disgraced candidate for the city's mayor, is a politician brought down by sex scandal for the digital age. His special humiliation is that his improprieties never even involved physical sex. They were all only virtual, online, social media, "sexting" (exchanges of lewd text messages), faux pas on social media, and phone sex. This film is mainly a blow-by-blow account of Weiner's mayoral campaign. He already had to contend with the almost insurmountable obstacle to election of the public's widespread disapproval of his past. But it got worse. As the campaign progressed it emerged that after his resignation from Congress he had continued to engage in multiple phone sex relationships.

It becomes clear than Weiner, whatever his liberal bone fides, his declared aim of protecting the middle class in New York City, is a seriously flawed individual. Apart from his weakness for sex-at-a-distance on multiple platforms with multiple (virtual) partners, he also has generally poor impulse control. He is seen behaving extremely as a speaker in the House while a Congressman, though his anger in defending Obama's health care plan against the Republicans is admirable, and may have been effective. Later, he is filmed by the directors frequently flying off the handle with adversaries, whether interviewers in the media or hecklers encountered in the campaign. He also seems compulsive in his persistence in campaigning against all odds. His belief that running for mayor was the best way of wiping his record clean of the 2011 scandal seems misguided. He appears perpetually in denial first of his acts and then of their seriousness. In short, he is a man in need of help. "What's wrong with you?" a prominent TV interviewer asks him. And he has no answer. In 2013 he received only 4% of the vote when Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York.

There is nothing special to set apart the TV-ready film by Josh Krieman and Elyse Steinberg from any other rudimentary documentary about a political campaign, with its jiggly digital images and jumpy editing. The only reason for watching it, as with many documentaries, is an interest in the subject matter. The filmmakers had exceptionally good access to Weiner and his wife. This film, like the media, focuses on scandal, presenting virtually nothing about the political issues figuring in the New york mayoral campaigns.

The special focus here is on Weiner's relation with the leading figures in his mayoral campaign, and with his wife since 2010, Huma Abedin, a leading aide to Hillary Clinton. The scandal that drove Weiner from Congress was in 2011. Well, Hillary is no stranger to politician husbands' sex scandals. But will Huda, a Muslim American with Indian and Pakistani parents who speaks fluent Arabic, be an asset to Hillary's presidential campaign? And if she will continue to be too essential to lose, will she be able to stay with the disgraced and failed politician, Anthony Weiner?

Weiner, 96 mins., debuted at Sundance 24 Jan. 2016 (where it was reviewed for Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/weiner-film-review-anthony-weiner-documentary-1201687323/) by Geoff Berkshire), and also showed at True/False festival 3 Mar. It will show in the New Directors/New Films FSLC-MoMA series, where it was screened for this review, 25 Mar., and it is scheduled for US theatrical release 20 May 2016. It will premiere on Showtime in Oct. 2016.

[Chris Knipp]

MARCIN WRONA: DEMON (2015)

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ITAY TIRAN (ABOVE) IN DEMON

A nightmare wedding

Demon cooks up an ambitious mess of a nightmare wedding gone wrong with spectacular crowd sequences of increasing madness and a raging rainstorm outside. Marcin Wrona, tragically dead now, a suicide at 42, has created a complex film, with an uneasy groom from abroad -- playing with a fork lift, Peter (Israeli actor Itay Tiran), or Piotr or Pyton (his identity already seeming frangible), of Polish extraction but arrived from England, unearths human remains, and may be uneasy also about the rambling disheveled house his bride has inherited, where the wedding is held. During the course of the elaborately scheduled wedding party, which must go on no matter how things fall apart and how bad the weather is outside, he becomes first disturbed, then has an epileptic fit, and finally, taken into the basement, is fully possessed by a dybbuk, the uneasy spirit of a young Jewish women, from a lost population of the region, and explaining herself in Yiddish. (Without ever overdoing it, Itay Tira gives his all in this commendable performance.) And yet the party goes on, becoming wilder and more debauched as the bride's father, Zgmunt (Andrzej Grabowski), gets everyone as drunk as possible so they won't see how things have gone wrong. A doctor, a professor, and Zgmunt cannot agree on what to do. Out into the damp dawn the revelers eventually all go, scattering away.

I was reminded of two excellent recent Russian films, Zvyagintsev's Leviaton (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3880-LEVIATHON-(Andrey-Zvyagintsev-2014)&p=33076#post33076), because here as there a building featured earlier in the film is destroyed at the end; and Yury Bykov's The Fool (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3920-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2015&p=33384#post33384)(ND/NF 2015), because in it there is a party at which people are called upon to remedy a disaster and they delay. The difference is that these two Russian films are harsh, vivid depictions of contemporary social, political, and moral corruption, whereas in Wrona's Polish film that is only vaguely alluded to, with more reference to the past. And Demon has been identified simply as a "horror" film, though that seems reductive and inappropriate. It's about possession, corruption, and madness and it depicts a kind of mass hysteria. But its aims and focus seem a bit hard to pin down. There seems an uncertainty of tone from scene to scene, but the blending of the comical with the horrible is not unwelcome and seems worthy of Poe, as in his remarkable short story, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."

Things don't go quite right at the outset of Demon. Neither Itay Tiran, as the groom, nor Agnieszka Zulewska as Zaneta, the bride, is as appealing as one would like, and they're not as strongly established as characters as they should be. It's much more an ensemble piece from the start. A friend said this reminded him of a Chekhov play, and it does seem Chekhov gone mad, with a crowd massing behind the few isolated, ineffectual central characters. This is adapted, freely with an elaborate mise-en-scène whose richness makes one sad that we'll see no more from Wrone, by him with Pawel Maslona from the 2008 play Adherence by Piotr Rowicki.

Demon, 94 mins., in Polish, English, and Yiddish, debuted at Gdynia Sept. 2015 and shortly thereafter at Toronto (where it was reviewed for Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/demon-review-marcin-wrona-toronto-film-festival-1201592105/) by Joe Leyden); other festivals. Winner of Best Horror Feature at Fantastic Fest. An Orchard release. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, where it shows 26 Mar. 2016.

US theatrical release began Fri., 9 September 2016.

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AGNIESZKA ZULEWSKA IN DEMON

[Chris Knipp]

RYUSUKE HAMAGUCHI: HAPPY HOUR (2015)

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Four women in Kobe in family and marriage crises

The title of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's long film, Happy Hour, is ironic. His four female protagonists, Jun (Rira Kawamura), Akari (Sachie Tanaka), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi) and Fumi (Maiko Mihara), all 37, friends since they were in junior high, move much closer to quiet desperation than happiness in their lives and marriages during the course of the action. What may seem at first glance little more than a classy Japanese soap, has a delightfully soothing epic quietude that links it back to Ozu. For the first three and a half hours, its restrained, very Japanese scenes of concealment and revelation, apology and withholding of forgiveness, are quite wonderful. At that point the unconscionably long public reading of a novel manuscript by a young woman writer, Yuzuki Nose (Ayaka Shibutani), occurs, some of the characters become wild and distraught, and the last hour seems longer than the first three. Perhaps it had to be that way: if Hamaguchi knew how to tie things off neatly, he'd have made a film of normal length. (Happy Hour was shown and got an acting prize at Locarno, a festival that seems to favor long-running movies.)

The marathon run-time allows for the novelistic (or mini-series) pleasure of not only playing out individual scenes in something more like real time, but also taking close looks at multiple relationships -- Scenes from Several Marriages, as it were. For a non-Japanese the four award-winning actresses, relative novices whose roles were developed in workshops, may be a little hard to tell apart; but if they seem similarly ordinary, it's precisely Hamaguchi's intention to avoid the flashy. The first scene makes them seem rather plain as they sit at a picnic on a mountain on a day trip, looking over the Kobe skyline shrouded in a fog that one says is like their future, and planning a get-together. It's the next, much longer sequence, a little workshop with a sort of guru called Ukai (Shuhei Shibata), about "communication" (using the English word, which will crop up frequently later too) and "finding your center" -- an understated Seventies-style touchy-feely process illustrating both the uptightness of Japanese culture and its built-in gift for cooperation and reading each other's minds. But it's at the third big sequence, a dinner following the workshop where the four friends join Ukai and some others, that secrets start to come out. The workshop is fascinating, a study in shyness and openness. The dinner is revelatory, the film's ensemble work at its peak. In these first big sequences Hamaguchi and his ensemble are on a roll.

Around the table, Akari, a nurse and a divorcee, emerges as the strongest of the women (her acting seems a bit strident at first). In an impassioned speech, she declares that she has to play hard and indulge in sexual adventures to escape the grim realities of dealing daily in her job with an aging population with an overburdened medical system. But a greater revelation comes from the more complicated, seemingly withdrawn Jun: she shocks her friends by blurting out that she's seeking to divorce her scientist husband Kohei (Zahana Yoshitaka), having had an affair, and she hasn't told the other three, or told about the court case, which is horrible. This revelation disturbs the bond among the women, because they feel lied to, or deceived. They attend a divorce court session, and we hear how adamant Jun's husband is. In an attempt at reconciliation among themselves, the women go to the thermal baths of Arima -- where Jun disappears. It later emerges that she's pregnant, and that she's taken refuge at a chain of centers for women who've been denied the right to divorce their husbands. By the end both gallery manager Fumi and housewife Sakurako have followed Jun's lead and told their husbands, Takuya (Hiroyuki Miura) and Yoshihiko (Tsugumi Kugai), respectively, that they went divorces.

Men don't come off well here. Beside Jun's husband who wants to keep her in the prison of marriage even if it becomes a "hell," Fumi's long-haired editor mate Takuya, who stages the reading in her gallery and brings in Ukai to conduct the Q&A, emerges as a cold bastard; and Sakurako's Yoshi, who must contend with a young son Daiki, who gets his girlfriend pregnant, is stolid and conventionally macho, while the seemingly gracious and beautiful Ukai, when he reappears, turns out to be a soulless sexual exploiter. With the reading, which arouses memories of Hong Sang-soo, Hamaguchi starts inter-cutting it with other scenes, doubtless aware of the need to jazz it up.

The manuscript-reading sequence may be serious, or deadpan satire. Either way playing it out in real time was a mistake. And at this point the seat-weary viewer may just be exhausted. The choppier later sequences are less satisfying than the earlier long ones, as well as more melodramatic; and people start falling down too often, the writers seeming eager to start killing off the cast but ambivalent about whether or not to actually do so. Nonetheless, Happy Hour, however flawed, is a tour de force made on a shoestring (apparently the budget was $50,000) showing Hamaguchi, who has a background in documentary, to be a director worth watching. The appreciative essay/review by Nicolas Bardot for the Rrench onoine publicaiton Film de Culte (http://www.filmdeculte.com/cinema/actualite/Happy-Hour-21777.html) makes convincing comparisons with Jacques Rivett5e and the aforementioned Hong Sang-soo, also with a new generation of Japanese directors I haven't even heard of - Katsumi Tomita, Ayumi Sakamoto producing minimalist epics; and pointing to the visual beauties, he cites Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I'm also indebted to a website called Genkinhito (https://genkinahito.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/happy-hour-%E3%83%8F%E3%83%83%E3%83%94%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A2%E3%8 3%AF%E3%83%BC-2015/), which has a detailed summary of the film, plus some reader comments showing I'm not alone in my dissatisfaction with the manuscript reading and my feeling that things go south from then on.

Happy Hour/ ハッピーアワー (Happî awâ), 317 mins., debuted at Locarno (sixth ND/NF 2016 originating there); the four actresses in the principal roles received a collective best actress award there; at Singapore Hamaguchi got the best director prize. Also shown in the LFF. Reviewed by Mark Shilling in Japan Times (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/12/09/films/film-reviews/ryusuke-hamaguchis-study-human-love-loss-trust/#.VuCfkowrInV). Also in 8 other international festivals, including New Directors/New Films (FSLC-MoMA), where it was screened for this review, showing 26 Mar. at 1 P.m. at MoMA, 27 Mar. at the same time at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

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Fumi (Maiko Mihara), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi) , Jun (Rira Kawamura), Akari (Sachie Tanaka)

[Chris Knipp]

TAMER EL SAID: IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY/AKHAR AYAM EL MADINA (2016)

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KHALID ABDALLAH IN IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY

Song of frustration and stasis

Tamer El Said's beautiful, skillfully wrought, but frustratingly stagnant feature film debut, In the Last Days of the City, is meant as a requiem and an elegy for a Cairo that's gone or perpetually crumbling. Hasn't it always been so? Perhaps, as Jay Weissberg wrote in a detailed, appreciative review in Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/in-the-last-days-of-the-city-review-berlin-film-festival-1201705591/) after seeing its debut at Berlin, this is a work "of profound weight and intricate sadness." It's a film drenched in beauty. But it feels maddeningly futile and useless.

Last Days is unquestionably an urban visual poem about what is, however crumbling and stifled, one of the world's greatest and most vibrant cities. The images are all drenched in yellow filter, and artistic to a fault. Notice the wire cyclist on the windowsill with the cityscape beyond, and how the camera lingers on a dissolving cake of powder in a flower vase in the hospital room. Notice how the light sings at dawn behind figures along the Corniche. Having lived in Cairo for several years myself (in the Sixties) and loving urban photography, I'm entranced and made nostalgic by the constant flow of beautiful, unmistakably Cairene images in In the Last Days of the City.

But I'm also frustrated by having to watch the protagonist-filmmaker Khalid (Khalid Abdallah of The Kite Runner and The Square), who seems vaguely handsome but perpetually ineffectual, wander through nearly every frame accomplishing nothing. Yes, he has a camera in his hand. He meets with a sad-faced girlfriend (Laila Samy) who's soon going to leave the country, with a mature woman who apparently does movie voiceovers, and with a generic trio of Arab artist-filmmaker friends from Baghdad (Hayder Helo), Beirut (Bassem Fayad), and Berlin (Basim Hajar). After an enthusiastic reunion in Cairo, they exchange occasional brief conversations, and send Khalid footage -- from Beirut and Baghdad, at least. And we glimpse a very old Iraqi calligrapher, who crafts the beautifully written end credits of the film. Other characters come and go: an acting teacher who longs for a lost Alexandria (Hanan Yousef), his editor (Islam Kamal); a colleague of his late father (Fadila Tawfik) . But these vignettes don't create a sense of action.

Futilely, Khalid goes with a tall, scruffy estate agent (Mohamed Gaber) to look at apartments, because for some reason he must leave his. (These visits are glimpses of decay, shabbiness, and the oppressive encroachment of Muslim fundamentalism.) He edits his film, or looks at shots from it. And very often, he goes to the hospital where his mother (Zeinab Mostafa) lies, suffering from a generic malaise: "you've gotten old," he tells her.

The trouble is that all this, especially for a city and a population that are perhaps the most joyfully and irrepressibly in-your-face in the world, is far too detached a portrait, far too solipsistic. There's too little direct, intense interaction with what's happening in the city, or with people outside Khalid's sphere -- though, granted, we see thousands of them, in the teeming streets. The feel and look of Cairo are wonderfully captured: but at an aestheticized, somewhat humorless and self-important remove.

There is a self-reflexive concept at work in Last Days, with technique to burn. Notice how neatly the film slides back and forth from events happening on screen to their manipulation on an editing screen. And then you realize you're watching both a film about the inability to complete a film about Cairo and the filmmaker wandering around, unable to complete his film. Self-reflexive filmmaker paralysis has never been done better. Perhaps Cairo is the perfect place to stage such convolution. It is the largest city in Africa, it is or was, or still is if there still is, the cultural center of the Arab world today. And yet the crushing of the great hope of the recent "Youth Revolution of 25 January" 2011 now mires Egypt in a regime more repressive than the one they revolted against.

But is this what Khalid wants to talk about in his uncompleted film? No -- because he began making his film in 2009, and the timetable of this film is unclear. We hear some intense (and typically well filmed) anti-Mubarak chants at street demonstrations, and when Khalid meets up with his friends from Baghdad, Beirut, and Berlin, Tahrir Square is mentioned. But the 2011 revolution and the events after it, are never described.

And this vagueness is a mixed blessing. Maybe as Weissberg notes Last Days "benefits from hindsight" because it's not one of the various instant responses to the revolution that now "seem hopelessly dated" -- because the revolution has gone sour and been betrayed. However, setting the film's endless meandering flow of images and repetitious actions -- talk with the friends, meet-ups with the girlfriend, visits to the mother, trips with the estate agent -- in no particular time, it seems to lack purchase on the tumultuous events that took place since Said began his work on the film. Sadly, Said marginalizes his effort in a different way.

In the Last Days of the City/Akher Ayam El Madina/آخر أيام المدينة‬‎, 118 mins., debuted at the Berlinale 14 Feb. 2016, and is scheduled for 1 Apr. at Vilnius. Also in Buenos Aires Intl. Festival of Independent Cinema. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (NYC), showing there 26 Mar. 2016 at 1:00 p.m. at Walter Reade theater and 27 Mar. at 4 p.m. at MoMA. (Interview with the star and director at the Walter Reade Theater here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDQOCnhUp9Q&list=TLO4v7kdUlauwwNjA0MjAxNg).) US theatrical release of this film 27 Apr. 2018. Metacritic rating: 72%.

[Chris Knipp]

KIRSTEN JOHNSON: CAMERAPERSON (2016)

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A politically-conscious, left-leaning cinematographer's visual "memoir" is just a hodgepodge of clips

"How much of one’s self can be captured in the images shot of and for others?" So begins a festival blurb for this film. Well, as it turns, out, not very much, when your visual "memoir" is a tacked-together hodgepodge of one unrelated short film clip outtake after another from Darfur, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and other high-profile photojournalist venues plus scenes here at home. Such is the nature of cinematographer Kirsten Johnson's film Cameraperson. It is difficult to carry away any impression other than a shaky camera, an out-of-focus lens, and a succession of victims. These range from good-natured African ladies, who've been made homeless by marauding Arabs in Darfour (a subtitle giving the location precedes each clip), hacking off pieces of tree for firewood; to an Afghan boy with a blinded eye; to the photographer's own mother, in, a subtitle tells us, the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. In the background, Johnson can be heard pacifying, prodding, or cajoling her subjects. Her murmured words suggest a pleasant personality and the diplomatic skills to safely point a camera in many a tricky place. But not much of a personality emerges, just an awareness that this is a cinematographer with a background in hot spots.

In the scattershot series, one or two may land in the viewer's brain. I remember the smiling boy asked to say what he sees with his good, then his bad, eye; a grizzled, lean old woman in -- was it Bosnia? -- who's held up as stylish; an overwrought American woman a subtitle says has made a film about her mother's suicide, throwing a file of papers across a room in what appears to be angry frustration. What these have in common, or what they have to do with the photographer, is anybody's guess.

Kirsten Johnson indeed has a resume in which documentaries of a provocative or political nature predominate. Her work includes contributions to the "Frontline," "Wide Angle," "P.O.V." and "Independent Lens" TV documentary series. Individual films include ones about the French philosopher Derrida; the Hollywood rating system; a Teamsters strike; a departing governor pardoning death row prisoners; a banjo player touring Africa in search of his instrument's roots; New Yorker cartoons; abortion rights; women raped in the US military; hunger in America. She shot a little known documentary by Michael Moore, the 2007 Slacker Uprising. Moore is shown standing near a bunch of Marines jogging and chanting. Moore declares that it's hard to talk while running. (This would be true for him; not so much for good runners going at an easy pace.) An outtake of Derrida is equally trivial. But these are criticisms of snippets encountered in this grab bag film, not of Johnson's professional work. Her most productive and high profile partnership may be the recent one with filmmaker Laura Poitras, with whom she collaborated on the Oscar-winning Citizenfour, about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and the upcoming Asyum, about the ongoing problems of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The information in this paragraph, if linked together by a searching interview with Kirsten Johnson, might make a good documentary. But none of it is in Cameraperson: I found it on IMDb.

Cameraperson,102 mins., debuted at Sundance, where it was reviewed for Variety (http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/cameraperson-review-sundance-1201681611/) by Nick Schrager; also showing at the True/False and SXSW festivals, and as the closing night film of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art's March 2016 New York New Directors/New Films series, where it was screened for this review. Public ND/NF showings 26 Mar. 6:30 p.m. at Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, and 27 Mar. 1:30 p.m. at MoMA.

US theatrical release by Janus Films 9 Sept. 2016 (NYC). Opens 30 Sept. 2016 Opera Plaza, San Francisco and Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley.