NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2025 (April 2-April 13)
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GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD
THE NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS series at Lincoln Center April 2-13, 2025: LINKS TO REVIEWS
THE ASSISTANT (Wilhelm Sasnal, Anka Sasnal 2025)
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PIOTR TROJAN, ANDRZEJ KONOPA IN THE ASSISTANT
WILHELM AND ANIKA SASNAL: THE ASSISTANT (2025)
Surreal life with an early 20th-century inventor
This strange, slow-moving piece set in the very early twentieth century is adapted from the well-known 1908 novel by Swiss-German author Robert Walser Der Gehülfe that is a masterpiece of calculated unease and very dry humor. But does the film capture these qualities? I'm not so sure, though it tries hard. It is the work of a Polish married couple, Wilhelm a painter and visual artist who is the cinematographer and Anka who is an editor and writer. But the film's nominal editor was Aleksandra Gowin, and she could have used a stronger hand.
The novel, described as "breathtaking" by Good Reads, follows a man called Joseph Marti (Piotr Trojan), who quits his job at a bookbinding shop after being abused for a poorly glued volume, and gets hired by an inventor whose projects are doomed. Marti doesn't at first know this, but we're made uneasy in the best early segment of the film by the suspicoiusly odd pampering he receives, fine food, freedom to smoke on the job and come and go, a flirtatious wife (Agnieszka Żulewska), while a previous assistant is just in the process of being sent packing. Debts multiply.
Is this a great job or just a very weird and crazy-making one? A lot is expected of Joseph yet his duties are never clearly defined, and he's not paid. The actor is muscular and well-built and seen a lot shirtless at first, to show he might be ready for anything, though any potential affair with the wife is held in check.
Walser, who would up penniless and forgotten and institutionalized after a mental collapse, apparently experienced the same mix of jobs as his protagonist here.
An inheritance has led "Technical Engineer Karl Tobler" to set himself in a grand hilltop mansion and set up as an inventor and create a goofy project of "advertising clocks" to be used in public places and on trams all to tell the exact time. But when a potential investor comes, When Marti has to greet him since Walser is away, the sample clocks are all set at different, wrong times, and the investor leaves laughing. Good Reads summarizes the novel: "Joseph is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures?" No, and why does he get them?
There is no Pinteresque reversal of roles or Beckettian degeneration, just a gradual disorder and decline. The film does capture the surrealism of the situation: and though 1908 is before 1917 when the actual surrealist movement began, it seems to hover around Engineer Karl Tobler's posh but off-kilter world, an incidentally there are knockoffs of School of Paris modernism hanging on the walls of Tobler's villa. This is also a story of a victim, and has vague affinities with Kafka, especially The Trial and The Castle, and indeed Kafka is said to have admired Walser.
There is a lot going on in this film. There is the economic and class element, but Marti is exploited in other ways, sometimes as a factotum or front man, often as an amenuensis, sometimes given the lead, treated like a member of the family, or a live-in butler. He doesn't know what he is or where he stands, and he sticks by Tobler in hopes the latter will succeed and thus pay him. Beside the clocks, midway Tobler begins to tinker with a can opener, which Marti, in a moment of foreseeing the two world wars when millions of soldiers woult be issued can openers, predicts this is a good idea. Tobler also makes giant ugly objects that look like bad soap sculptures. These are displayed backed up by fireworks at a big party when the central cast all gets drunk and naked, Marti and his past and present bosses and the women, and they all dance nude in a drawn-out sequence. A man who has played beautiful Bach on the keyboard now, at the party, turns to cacophonous modernistic banging. Is this the trimph of modernism, a harbinger of World War I? Or just another inexplicable digression?
Olivia Popp, in her Rotterdam CIneuropa review, says the best part of the film is its anachdronisms, in some of the costumes and sets (and zooms?) but especially the use of contemporary rock music, and wishes that had been done more. But she also acknowledges the film runs on too long. It might have been better if it was tightened up and unified, and instead of rock with period-appropriate modernist music, like early Stravinsky. A [URL="https://thefilmverdict.com/the-assistant/[/URL]by Carmen Gray is also admiring of the film's "eccentric flashes of avant-garde dance and performance" for infusing "wild energy" and the mood of "risk-taking." The whole trouble is that this film, better at mood than narrative, goes haywire, then fizzles out, as uncertain of shape as its giant soap sculptures. But The Assistant's premonition of how crazy the twentieth century was going to become so very early is a haunting one.
The Assistant/Czlowiek do wszystkiego (Polish: "A Man for Everything"), 129 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Jan. 31, 2025. Included in New Directors/New Films, for which it was screened for this review. ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 5
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, April 6
6:15pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
GRAND ME (Atiye Zare Arandi 2024)
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ATIYE ZARE ARANDI: GRAND ME (2024)
A child of divorced parents decides who she wants to live with
We who have watched Iranian films, maybe known some Iranians, know they're complicated people, that their greatest skill is in making life difficult for each other. This short documentary by Atiye Zare Arandi about her neice and focused on her famnily and their tense discussions of her custody is, therefore, excruciating. But it is curiously satisfying, because there is something like a resolution, even a happy ending. The question is answered. No cusody court: the child, nine-year-old Melina, does not want to reject her father's claims on her and opt for living with her motner. She wants to continue living with her maternal grandparents in Isfahan. She certrainly does not want to go and live with her father (Ramin) in Tehran. But she finds her mother (Atefeh) "irritating sometimes" and doesn' want to live with her either. But with her grandparents after all she is happy, and in the final footage of a trip to the country and playing in the snow, happy she seems to remain. What was all the fuss about? Well, they are Iranians: how can you even ask?
In the possibily Kiarostami-inspired car scene, segments of which are intereperced through the film, Mama is driving and Melina is sitting beside her and they dialogue. Melina delivers a fiery, devastating critique of her mother. She aays neither her father nor her mother should have divorced. At the end she says in any case they are all alone. Everyone in the world, the "dunya," is always alone. This from a nine-year-old! Itt's astonishing, both the maturity but also the fire and energy of delivery from this skinny tyke. When they come back to her grandparents Melina says from the car, smirking, "I taught her a lesson," and adds, "I slaughtered her." And she did.
But of course: Melina is almost frighteningly precocious and smart. We learn that she has gotten excellent grades in all her subjects. Her grandmother teases her about this at first, saying it was bad news and holding the report away from her. Also, we see a set of drawings of big-eyed creatures the girl has made, which show variety and rich color and show an impressive ability, at nine, to work in series and even mount the seies neatly on her bedroom wall. We may also note that though she is dissatisfied and fearful about her father, she never gives in to emotion or breaks into tears. In these difficult, tense days she remains a tough cookie.
But despite Melina's apparent right to decide in court who she wants to live with, she can't travel to Turkey with her mother because her father controls her right to a passport and won't let her have one.
In the car we stare at the beautiful but sad face of Atefeh, her mother, which has something helpless about it. She despairs of ever winning back her daughter's love and trust.
All this footage the aunt has shot also shows well off, roomy apartments - glimpses of comfortable middle class Iranian life. A litlte music has been judiciously added by Naďma Joris. The editing has been done by Katarina Türler in a way that provides order and economy and a measure of pacing to the film.
The biggest shocker is a conservative muslim coming-of-age ceremony in which Melina, at her ninth birthday, is filmed in identical nun-like costume with two dozen other just-turned-nine girls, who are charmed and lectured by a slim, handsome young imam in gray who charms them while coaxing them always to wear hijab with their hair covered and never appear before men with "thin tights." At home, we notice women continue to wear hijab (except when as young as Melina) while the men are fat and badly dressed and one even goes shirtless in the kitchen with a repulsive hairy back on view.
The father is never seen, and Melina avoids answering when he calls. Sometimes she doesn't answer when her mother calls either, which she lies to cover up. Once her father comes for her and there is fear that he may not bring her back. He keeps her for four days instead of one, and when she returns she runs into her grandmother's arms looking stricken but doesn't speak. Ominously, we have learned that her father has thought twice about having her live with her because he has an adult son. . . and she is not bad looking. (In fact one of the best scenes staged into the camera by Melina is one in which, posing as a pretty person, she gives a mock lesson, using herself as the model, on how to do makekup for a party. ("The next time I will show makeup for mourning.") This is a film that comes to seem more than it does at first as the complexity of the people and especially of this precocious girl emerges.
Grand Me, 80 mins., debuted Mar. 18, 2024 at CPH:DOX (Copenhagen) and won the Next Wave Award there., also showing at Taipei (Golden Horse), DMZ (South Korea), and DocPoint (Helsinki). Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, April 12
2:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Sunday, April 13
1:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES (Du Jie 2024)
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SOICHIRO TANAKA AND MINAMI OHBA IN THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES
THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES (Du Jie 2024)
Love and suicide and ghosts in Japan from a Chinese cinematographer turned director
Du Jie is a cinematographer from China. He has chosen to set his directorial debut in Japan, and its festival debut was at Busan, in Korea. It reminded me initially, with its use of voiceover and still photos, of Chris Marker's haunting classic French 1962 sci-fi time loop story short, La Jetée. This time the words and stills feature a discussion of suicide. But the body of the film is more a piece of overlapping storytelling, with two couples who slightly connect, a lost ring that is threaded through, and the ideas of the artist Kenji Chiga, all in service of the themes of suicide and ghosts. The effect is unconventional and enigmatic and can really be quite confusing. At this point there are only two reviews, neither of which summarizes the plot thoroughly. Even a 37- minute interview with Du Jie clarifies little.
People are interested in how Du Jie wound up directing (and filming and editing) his own feature in Japan and not China. Evidently he found more artistic freedom in his adopted country, but still goes back to China for work as a cinematographer to support himself. This film vry much shows the lack of constraint he may have wanted: it's quite experimental.
Du Jie wants to draw a connected line between elements of his film that are disjointed. Partly this hinges on a lost ring. It seems a man with a bowler hat (whom we enounter at the ene) loses his wedding wing, which falls off while he is playing with a child by the sea. The ring is swallowed by a fish. The main couple are a pet shop worker Aoki (Minami Ohba) and her fish factory worker boyfriend Sugamoto (Seita Shibuya). Shibuya, with his height and stylish hair, looks like a Japanese movie star, and Miami Ohba is very pretty and has beautiful long hair, making for an unlikely working class couple, if that's what they are meant to be. Anyway, cleaning a fish, Sugamoto finds a ring, which he gives to Aoki. They both get tattoos, she a tiny one of Mount Fuji on her neck. They plan to marry, and, apparently, arrange a honeymoon, ending at a resort spot, the southernmost part of Shikoku island.
But after a ride on a roller coaster filmed with unusual thoroughness, though showing the ride, not the couple, Sugamoto tells Aoki that maybe the tattoos were ot a good idea. He has changed his mind and is not ready to marry, and they're over. She gets the tattoo removed, then decides to go on the honeymoon trip by herself, without her boyfrriend. A lot of the second half of the film is this trip. You sort of suspect she might intend to commit suicide, especially when, on preparing to leave, Aoki takes her big suitcase on wheels and leaves it with the building trash, taking only a backpack. Later we are shown that the trash collectors leave the suitcase. Of course, it's not packaged properly. BUt the truly Japanese touch is that the trash men leave a little neatly printed note explaining why the suitcase was not collected.
Aoki apparently isn't going to kill herself, and sheis going to run into some ghosts, or thunder at the resort that is ghost voices she does not yet recognize. This town is known to be a suicide hotspot, a place where the spirits of those who took their own lives roam around without finding a way to the afterlife. The guy who checks Aoki in at the hotel is played by Soichiro Tanaka, who has appeared inn earlier scenes, only now he is without a mustache. He seems to be everywhere. But Du Jie has said his starting point was a woman who went on a trip that made people think she was going to commit suicide, as appears to be the case with Aoki.
There are scenes early in the film involving the other couple. A young man with chisled fatures and striking hair (Soichiro Tanaka) who has lost his keen photographer girlfriend (Mado Karasumori) to suicide. But on the trip to Shikoku island, Minami Ohba's character also seems to be using a similar-looking camera. It is Sichiro Tanaka who checks her into the hotel.
Regrettably, I've so far found it impossible to pin down what happens in the film any better than this. (Amber Wilkinson of Screen Daily understands it better.) Du Jie is trying to do is interesting, as the early segment's reminding one of Chris Marker shows. Certainly the images are very nice here, as everygody has noted. Perhaps another time the dp-turned-director will find ways make his basic narrative elements more readable without losing his thoughtful, suggestive approach.
The Height of the Coconut Trees 椰子の高さ, 100 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 5, 2024, also showing at Tokyo FILMeX. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Tuesday, April 8
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Du Jie
Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Du Jie
HOLY ELECTRICITY (Tato Kotetishvili 2024)
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NIKOLO GHVINIASHVILI, NIKA GONGADZE, CENTER, IN HOLY ELECTRICITY
TATO KOTETISHVILI: HOLY ELECTRICITY (2024)
Gems from junk
TRAILER
This film from Georgia makes such good use of documentary elements and authentic locales it's tempting to think what's going on is simnply real. Sometimes the documentary elements take over, and sometimes a scene is extravagant and unexpected. All through there is humor and warmth and a sympathy for the eccentric and humble, like a cute kitten, or an old lady who has a bunch of cats and dogs.
We begin with a scrapyard, and this is a fast introduction to director Kotetishvili's point of view, because it's looked at with wide open and sympathetic eyes. There are groups of people too, and some Tblisi street scenes. Sometimes orange seems to be the dominant color.
The scrapyard, in an old car, is where Gonga (Nikolo Ghviniashvili) and Bart (Nika Gongadze) live and sleep, the odd couple who will dominate the narrative. Gonga is a tall, lanky, long-haired boy. His father has recently died, and he has joined his cousin, the short, chubby, debt-ridden Bart, who in a later conversation we learn is trans. Going through a pile of metal, Gonga finds a big box of rusted crosses that they clean and paint and equip with multi-colored LED lighting and sell successfully from door to door, making money to pay off Bart's debts.
This part ends when Gonga leaves Bart in disgust after he gambles away all their money after a drunken party. Gonga winds up with a Roma girl for a while. We witness a string of dialogues where he struggles with expressing an interest. Either he's too shy or he's just not sure what he feels, and eventually she disappears. Along the way they go selling crosses, and when we constantly gliimpse bigger lighted crosses along the road, we reealize the Gonga-Bart ones are part of something bigger and glamorous, halfway between religous kitsch and the art of Dan Flavin. They are elegant objects. But a goldmine? Not quite.
While Gonga is endlessly questioning the Roma girl about her family and her preferences, Bart's debtors are getting tough, and one of the most memorable scenes, handsomely framed and centered, shows two of the latter questioning an upside down Bart hanging by his feet, begging to be let down, while one of them is scrutniizing the contents of his wallet and finding that he's listed as Gender: Female.
There's a hanging scene a bit earlier with Gonga,who's long and physical,and has hair that never loses its long sleek dangle. He's seen on hanging from a giant crame at the scrapyard. The next time you see him he's wearing a light cast on one arm, and it's not cosmetic. He fell off the hook of that giant crane and lightly fractured, he tells the gypsy girl, his radius.
This is a meandering tale that takes detours like that, and dips on the wild side mildly enough. It makes me think back, for no reaason, perhaps, to two gypsy movies. First is Frank Pierson's glamorous 1978 Hollywood saga,King of the Gypsies, Eric Roberts' impressive screen debut, with Susan Sarandon and Brooke Shields. Maybe it was corny but it drew me in and I can remember where I was sitting and who with, a sign it was a memorable impression. Ten years later there was a bigger, more authentic-seeming saga, [I]Time of the Gypsies, which absorbed me, almost wore me down, at home. At Cannes, it won Kusturica the Best Director award.
Holy Electricity isn't like these. Apart from only being glancingly about gypsies, it's a scrapyard production, made of bits and pieces found here and there. The filmmaker shows both humor and sympathy in unusual measure in choosing his scraps. But this strength is also a weakness because at several points the narrative seems to dissolve, and with it our patience may fray and our attention wander. But it's a promising beginning, and it won an award at Locarno to prove that. His work here is notable for the combination of catholicity of taste and the careful composition of every shot.
Holy Electricity/Tsminda Electroenergia, 95 mins. debuted at Locarno Aug. 11, 2024, winning the Golden Leopard in its Filmmakers of the Present section. Later it showed at Thessoloniki,T allinn Black Nights, Mannheim-Heidelberg, and Montreal International Documentary Festival. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, April 12
5:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, April 13
3:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
LESSON LEARNED (Balint Szimler 2024)
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PAUL MÁTIS, ANNA MESZÖLY in LESSON LEARNED
BALINT SZIMLER: LESSON LEARNED/FEKETE PONT (2024)
TRAILER
Life at school
THis is a docudrama, very much an ensemble piece, about life in a school, focusing on a couple of teachers and a new student in fifth grade. The film is most remarkable simply for its strong focus on the classroom and the daily atmosphere of a school, though some critics have said it is not as authentic as it thinks: for one thing, different scenes were shot at different schools. There are episodes of a rebellious boy, a sensitive new teacher, and the case of a large broken window that proves hard to replace.
Lesson Learned is only the English title of this film (the Hungarian one means "Black Point"). Indeed it is difficult to see what "lesson" is "learned" in this film. The director has said simply "We wanted to capture the essence of being a child." Some Hungarians commenting on the film and some summaries read more into it, suggesting the film is a critique - which they utterly reject, or strongly endorse - of an outmoded school system; of the Hungarian school system in general. Many elementary school systems lag behind the times but it's hard to see anything uniquely Hungarian here, or any devastating picture of a school system.
If there is any theme here, it's that rebels and outliers, whether teacher or student, don't fare very well in a mainstream elementary school. This is a universal message. Perhaps the fresh life Balint Szimler has captured will survive and satisfy, in its small way, generations of future viewers.
In an interview, the filmmaker, who is 37, explains that like Palkó (Paul Mátis) in the film, he came back with his Hungarian parents to Hungary at 9 or 10 (Pálko is in time to enter fifth grade, I believe); only Pálko comes from Berlin, and the director had been living in the US, and "always felt like an outsider" (in Hungary, presumably). So that is the situation of Palkó, but it's hard to tell if he's a winner or a loser early in the film. He is good looking, calm, and confident. He breaks rules unintentionally. Later he seems to be a rebel. And finally as a symbolic outsider.
The director used improvisation, with mostly non actors and no set script, using real students and real teachers, and then of course editing to bring out an effect or a meaning desired: for instance, he says scenes where Palkó talked more were cut to create the effect of his being almost always silent. He says he "always wanted to shoot a film with children and go back to the sensation of being a child – how free, intense and playful, but also sometimes horrifying, it was." There are moments, especially of the teachers in their faculty room but of students in the classroom too, that are terrific ensemble acting - and directing.
Juci (Anna Mészöly), the rather beautiful young literature teacher, is also a new arrival at the school. With her gentle manner she nonethelsss does radical things from the start, encouraging her class to express their hates, stand up and scream, and sit on the floor, where she reads them a poem that seems to convert them to her and to poetry - the most subtle and touching moment in the film. It is a prizewinning performance.
Later, as can happen, a teacher takes a strong dislike to a rebelious student, and it's the PE guy Akos (Akos 'Dadan' Kovács). Palkó rebels in his class and won't play ball. Akos orders him to gather up the balls afterward, he won't, and Akos manhandles him trying to get him to run torturous chicken jump laps around the gym. Juci sees this, knows Akos has crossed a line, and wants to report him. She has already suffered harsh criticism in private from the father of one of her students for the "crime" of teaching a poem that wasn't in the textbook. This parent becomes an agent of the kind of repression I myself once experienced from the nuns who ran a small Catholic college. If you are a teacher, you will be reported on and criticized from many directions.
Before this, one of the most experienced teachers, Kornél ((Gábor Ferenczi), has been suddenly, summarily fired by authorities for an unspecified violatioh. Colleagues, who sypathize but do nothing to stick up for him, assume this is because he is connected to an NGO. This is bureaucratic, administrative, or governmental repression, something Americans have seen then and now. All part of the picture of the school Szimler is sketching, but the film isn't about this.
Or is it? A Hungarian website Valasz online, says, "Black Dot confronts our inaction, the gesture that for decades millions of people have made to defy the powers above us - be it a teacher, a boss, a school district director, a minister or an entire regime." The writer, Sashegyi Zsófia, notes the film avoids identifying with any specific period - there are no cell phones - it's obvious from what she says that Hungarians feel this film intensely and personally. There are other length revirews in Hunrarian online.
The fewtival blurb notes that Szimler's film, "just his second feature," has "all the intricacy and pleasure of a campus novel," ranging from "the shame-tinged tedium of detention lessons" (seen, like most of the moments, through Palkó and Anna), to "a dazzling school-play sequence" (of Cervantes' tragedy The Fall of Numantia), whose central theme is the need to resist.
It is perhaps not a fault that the film overall is a bit enigmatic, both the young teacher and the beleaguered new student, both of whom from the look of them ought to be winners, but they are silent, tabula rasas, and we can read our feelings and childhood (or teaching) memories into them. The film's weakness as a conventional film may be a strength. It hasn't quite the distinctive shape or compelling trajectory it could have had (that relates partly to being improvised, not written), but thus makes it better able to capture, with its vivid 16mm, the lightening in a bottle of everyday school life and what it feels to be a new kid or a new prof in a traditional, conventional, controlling, and student-unfriendly system where an older teacher advises Anna it's always the kids' fault, whatever happens, not hers.
What about that window? What about that school trip? These are threads deliberately left dangling in this memorable and original film.
Szimler's Emmy-winning cinematographer Marcell Rév, who now works in Hollywood, is a longtimne collaborator. He has done TV series, a short that got him to Cannes, and a music documentary. This should bring him international recognition.
Lesson Learned/Fakete pont, , 119 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 9, 2024, winning the Best Performance prize (for Anna Meszöly) and Special Mention in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Friday, April 11
5:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
LISTEN TO THE VOICES (Maxime Jean-Baptiste 2024)
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MELRICK DIOMAR
MAXIME JEAN-BAPTISTE: LISTEN TO THE VOICES/KOUTÉ VWA (2024)
Grieving and revenge in French Guyana
Melrick Diomar is a boy who gets to come from France and spend summer with his grandma in French Guyana, in the upper right corner of South America, no longrer since 1946 a a colony but still an "overseas department" of France. Melrick is cool and so is his grandmother, Nicole, both good looking, casually stylish, and relaxed. They're easy also with each other: he gets to cook with her and tells her she could be his "girlfriend." Outside, through a friend of his late father, who died when he was very young, he gets to play football and play drums in a street band. He tells local boys Guyana is cooler than France, and tells his grandma he wishes vacation could be extended through the year. His home is in Stains, just north of Paris Saint-Denis. He calls it "lame" ("nul"). He may uinderstandably feel freer and more of a person here.
A Variety article explains that Jean-Baptiste has made all his films about his family, and this one grows from the vry sad fact that his cousin, Lucas Diomar, was brutally killed in 2012, an event that the family is still reeling from,
The film records "stages of grief" surrouding this traumatic death. Melrick is the director's nephew and at the time of filming was 13. The boy is little touched because he was only two and too young. HIs grandmother Nicole has cons contientiously sought to move on. Another adult relative, Yannick, is "stuck in time," and still bursts into tears, as we see here, whenever he is reminded of the death of Lucas. Jean-Baptiste says he tried to make a film that would help heal the wounds.In doing so, he article says, he found that making semi-fiction from his relatives helped distance them protectively from the grief and made Niocole more comfortable than being interviewed on cameara like a conventional doc, which she didbn't wat, he explained. But Nicole tells Yannick on camera that he can never recover from his grief.
The Variety acticle comments that colonialism too can be seen as a wound, one from which French Guyana as a. whole will never fully heal. In fact Jean-Baptiste thinks French overseas departments are really still colonies, though Nicole disagrees about that.
Melrick is seen praying by his bed for the health of his grandma, and to stay in Guyana and complete high school there. But immediately after we see a clip of him him playing a computer game online with friends who are in France, when he talks about coming back home again and and seeing them. Later,with young Guyana friends, Melrick is putting up a poster for a concert by Mayouri Tchň Nčg in honor of Lucas in which he will play bass drum, his first such performance.
On the road driving therre with his grandma he tells her he is "not nervous," but "can't wait" to play. He is in the back of the car; she is at the. They travel alone together (with the camera on them, of course). Itis a significent, and very serious, conversation that summarizes this film. On the ride she explains how, talking to a priest and judges, she has formally forgiven the killers or her son, his uncle.
Melrick, sitting in back, disagrees at first. He says the killer is out of prison and that isn't right: he should die. Then she tells how once, it happened that from her car she happened to see the leader of the killers, his time served, drinking beer and having fun. Har car was just a few meters away, quite close, and she was so strongly tempted to run him over that she called the police and reported herself and after a "bon moment," some solid discussion, he convinced her to think of her children and give up this idea and go home. And this she did. Now Melrick changes his position and agrees with her position now: she is right, vengeance "sert ŕ rien," serves no purpose.
Clips of the street concedrt with Melrick playing several drums followk as a coda. But it is that conversation in the car that expresses the meat of this thoughtful little fllm rich in French Guyana atmosphere, youth, age, and meditation upon violence. Has it halped the families involved cope with their rage and grief? That we dod not know.
Though the title is in Creole French, Kouté vwa, the dialogue of the film is in standard French. Jean-Baptisste's films about his family have been shorts up to now; thisis his first feature film.
Listen to the Voices/Kouté vwa, 77 mins., debuted at Locarno, winning the special jury prize and special mention from the first feature jury in the Cineasti del Presente competiton. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, April 5
4:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, April 6
1:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
NO SLEEP TILL (Alexandra Simpson 2024)
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ALEXANRA SIMPSON: NO SLEEP TILL (2024)
People, Americans, a Florida hurricane, explored visually, eavsdropping on quiet amid chaos
In her highly visual, seemingly random documentary film, but actually "part fiction, part real," projections of the director, Alexandra Simpson's fantasies upon them and a particular small town in Florida, surrounding a major hurricane in the state, Simpson captures the imagery of the great Ameriican color photographers of Sally Eauclaire's 1981 classic, The New Color Photography - William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Neal Slavin, John Pfahl, Michael Bishop - the list goes on and on. Here, under the eye of dp Sylvain Froidevaux, we see car lots and swimming pools, little night clubs and highways, skateboarders and bike riders and a motel aglow with colored neon. The unifying element is a hurricane that is going to devastate part of Florida, but has soon passed one piece of it by. The filmmaker has a great sympathy for this small Atlantic coastal Florida town, but possesses a European point of view. She was born in Paris and grew up there, but spent summers in Neptune Beach, Florida, where the bulk of the film was shot. She has said in interviews that Claire Denis is her greatest inspiration.
As with the still photographs, people and situations are introduced randomly, but the filmmaker, like the still photographer, has a unifying vision forming and changing as she goes. There are certain people the film comes back to, particularly a pair of young black man, Mark and Will, but they are friends from childhood from the sound of it, who play as a tricky comedy team where one comes into the act seemingly as a heckler. The standup guy delivers food by bike as a day job, we seem him there at first. Later he lures his partner, knowing the storm is going to upend everything for a while, ("But we'll come back to our lives, man"), to take a trip to DC and Philly to see friends and check out acts and opportunities.
Another locus is the youhg man with long red-blond hair who's a "storm chaser" by game, with lots of gear, ready to follow the hurricane, watching, watching, to see wheere it's going to head. Sitting at the wheel of his white truck he narrates the storm's progress with appreciation, for himself and for us. A third locus is a woman who's been left behind by a skateboarder. There's a couple notes, one that leaves her a video clip of him riding and falling and waving, another that says "We knew it was over from that night at the restaurant when..." Which reminds us at the outset some older people were let go from their jobs by a boss who tells them when this is over, they won't be coming back. They can start putting their lives together now. A theme: a lot of people are going to put their lives together after this weather event. And this town is, like so many places, a victim of gentrification.
Some are deep in the storm, some are escaping it, some have nowhere to go, even though in an area in the outside of the film is receiving an over-and-over "advisory," meaning they are supposed to evacuate the area. And driving along, the young black guys, the comedy team, drivng north, see a whole landscape around them turn dark as the elecdtricity goes out, and they're scared, and the guy who's driving starts going around in circles, not going north at all now. But the point is there are as many different relationships to the hurricane that "unites" them as there are places and people. Some choose not to "evacuate," including the storm chaser with the red-blond hair. A guy rides a small bike around in a lot, doing wheelies and circles: the evacuation alarm screeches, and with a jolt, he does a very fast spin. But the cop is on a loudspeaker asking him to leave. The storm chaser is hiding.
And toward the end of this round of gentle, subtle impressions, a small family is roused to leave in the a.m., little boy in PJ's with teddy bear, but they line up and smile for photos, with firework going off, and the kid saying, "cool!", and then we see people partying, as we learned at the outset some like to do, in a big storm, if they think they're safe.
The Sally Eauclaire analogy notwithstanding, viewing this film requires a different level of concentration from looking at a book or a show of still photographs. You cannot scan through these places and people and images, but must wait for them to go by at their own various different paces, which takes patience and discipline. It is fun, it is a meditation, but it is hard because it requires concentration. This is not a conventional narrative. You must ut it together for yourself. We may not be ready for it, but if feels new.
No Sleep Till, 93 mins., debuted at 2024 Venice Critics' Week, winning a jury special mention, also shown at Monterrey, Poland, Stockholm,Belfort (France), Marrakesh, and Los Angeles. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Wednesday, April 9
8:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Alexandra Simpson
Friday, April 11
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Alexandra Simpson
