Copper

In director Nicolás Pereda’s Copper, Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Rodríguez) discovers a corpse by the side of the road. It’s unusual enough for him to mention this to his mother Tere (Teresita Sánchez) and his aunt Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez — these eponymous characters also a Pereda hallmark), but not important enough to report to anyone else. Lázaro is much more concerned with obtaining an oxygen tank as his breathing has been infrequently more laborious, likely due to his time spent in the mines. It’s a mining town, El Carmen, and everyone seems to work for the mine in one way or another, including the doctor who tells Lázaro that his problems come from and will subside with his small smoking habit. His further attempts to get this oxygen tank are treated as suspect by his bosses and family, though his mother knows he’s not lying — after all, she says, his eyes haven’t changed colors.

This time, Nicolás Pereda has toned down the magical realism from last year’s Lázaro at Night in favor of a political thriller, though still in the laid-back Pereda vein. One is tempted to call Lázaro’s situation Kafkaesque, but these roadblocks to Lázaro’s oxygen tank are more so built by the town’s conformity to the company and a personal dismissal of Lázaro than an opaque, labyrinthine bureaucracy (though some semblance of that does still exist). But this situation is, to anyone who’s ever had any kind of job at all ever, still frustrating because it’s so real. It’s one thing for an impersonal corporation to accuse you of an unknown crime and deny your access to basic bits of information; it’s another for your own aunt to not believe you because of petty grievances or a doctor to deny you an examination because she thinks you’re annoying. That said, the film’s politics happen in the background. Lázaro is instructed by Tere not to tell anyone about the discovered body, and a short radio piece announces that this is the third such body in six months, implying a conspiracy by mysterious forces in the mine town’s administration. To what degree the company is actually murdering activists or directly denying its workers’ healthcare is, in classic Pereda fashion, never revealed.

But Copper never quickens its pace to match the urgent sleuthing of All the President’s Men (1976) or The Day of the Jackal (1973). Lázaro is no political journalist nor even a whistleblower, and Copper seems just as interested in long stretches of its subject riding his motorcycle (which, in his Job-like story, inevitably breaks down) as it is in delving into crimes and cover-ups. Similarly, the film is interested in dreams, as Lázaro, resting in his cavernous bedroom lit like a Baroque dungeon, explains to Rosa that he’s been dreaming of the dead man leading him around the town’s bars, ordering and sucking and eating lemons lest he begin to rot. Though this may sound like a slight surreal detail, this is actually an answer to a previous scene in which Lázaro himself sits in his aunt’s boyfriend’s car and sucks on a lime for several minutes. Scenes like this, of everyday events both banal and bizarre, dominate most of the runtime of Copper.

Near the end of the film, Lázaro has worked out a deal with another doctor: an oxygen tank in exchange for a date with Rosa. Lázaro agrees — an oxygen tank has never been so close — but doesn’t ask Rosa first. When the eventual date happens, Lázaro and Rosa’s boyfriend trail behind for her safety, but lose her after a quick detour for cigarettes. Where most films would play up the tension elicited by the now-missing Rosa, Pereda lets the audience sit with that for just a bit before revealing her again in that bedroom from Caravaggio’s dreams. It’s another moment of the unexplainable everyday, one in a series that helps make Copper but the latest subtly brilliant work of Pereda’s magical realist world. — ZACH LEWIS

Headlights

“I understood that this had little to do with Berlin and everything to do with me,” the unnamed narrator of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts proffers confessionally as she recounts an extended trip to the city, impulsively made and justified in retrospect by the self-righteous hand of autofiction. A solipsist by profession and serial narcissist off the job, her quasi-fictional persona enacts an all-too-reflexive posture of cynical ennui, mining the barren psychogeography of her lonely time in Berlin — as a floundering yet resolutely independent expatriate — for glimpses into her interiority. This approach commands grudging admiration for its commitment to subjectivity, but, being borne out of a literary disposition, risks epitomizing the banality that its logorrhea inevitably gives rise to.

Oyler’s caricature of the German capital nonetheless accurately captures a mood of unsettled transience, and this unmoored sensibility is rendered more acutely and successfully in Johanna Schorn Kalinsky’s debut film, Headlights. Though not a New Yorker’s whimsical account of folly and entitlement, Headlights follows a similar logic of alienation. In the film’s most pronounced conceit, the city of Berlin is visually sparse and relegated to the background, its existence affirmed by auditory cues and utterances. In its place is the interior of a car, and its protagonist Alexandra (Marie Bloching), a 20-something woman, occupies the center of this space. An advertising agent by day (or perhaps only in name), Alexandra sells drugs at night from her car, effectively putting an illegal spin onto an already unregulated economy of Uber drivers and gig work. Her mobility, livelihood, and psychology, we gather, are all in some way informed by the constraints of her vehicle.

Kalinsky deftly exploits the car’s unique status as a site of constant liminality to flesh out Alexandra’s person. Over a series of flashbacks, Headlights constructs a tenuous portrait of a woman beset by personal grief and unhappiness, without offering too much causal resolution. We learn something about the characters in her life, who are kept either out of focus or off-screen entirely: her mother, her deceased brother, her brother’s fiancé, and so on. These flashbacks, we also come to realize, are non-chronological: a radical re-ordering of them in lieu of a conventional reading (i.e., her drug-dealing as a consequence of her past unhappiness) would not be implausible. Much like David Easteal’s The Plains (2022), which is also set (almost) exclusively in a car, Kalinsky’s film peeks into a space of foreign familiarity in which casual reflection and conversation reveal whole unseen lives beyond the present journey.

But where Headlights swerves away, and stands out in its own right, is in the camera’s unyielding fixture on Alexandra. Bloching’s performance, inscrutable on the surface, plumbs great depths of sorrow, snark, and self-awareness — a cacophony of feeling that wells up and enlivens the film’s formalist strictures with pathos. Kalinsky bookends her narrative with scenes of New Year’s Day, when fireworks light up the sky outside and Alexandra drives wordlessly around the suburbs of her clientele. The effect is melancholic, not just because of the jarring clash of sound and silence, but also a result of the day’s significance as a summation: of regrets of auld lang syne, and of possibilities never to be realized. The substrate of Berlin may prove conducive to melancholy, but in the words of Robin Schulz’s 2015 single of the same name, “chasin’ all the headlights” to “get ahead of life” actively precipitates this sadness. For Headlights, the opposite might be true. Alexandra is behind the headlights and she’s already gone forward, but life always finds a way. — MORRIS YANG

Morlaix

Jaime Rosales’ Morlaix opens with a montage: open rural landscapes stretching over hills and fields, cut through by roads and paths. Then, a sleepy town, plain and motionless. The town is Morlaix — though those roads and paths could lead anywhere, here they all seem only to lead to Morlaix. For the inhabitants of this town, the same repeatedly turns out to be true. Some have travelled hundreds of miles to settle here, some will leave only to later return. Excursions out are strictly temporary. Even a trip to the local cinema draws the characters further in: the film they see is also entitled Morlaix, and it reflects and reimagines their own lives.

Gwen (Aminthe Audiard) is a high school student mourning her recently-deceased father, raising her younger brother, and torn between the safe but stifling love of her boyfriend Thomas and the tender but determined advances of the new Parisian boy in town, Jean-Luc (Samuel Kircher). When she and her friends attend a screening of the film-within-this-film, which features the same actors playing the same parts in a fictional progression of the story up to this point, a detail to which the characters are crucially oblivious, their responses to the melodramatic incidents of that story begin to redefine how they view themselves, one another, and their futures, perched as they are on the precipice between childhood and adulthood.

Morlaix is a subtly beguiling film, but that subtlety is the result of Rosales’ artistic ambitions leading him astray — it’s hard to take stock of the film’s strengths when they’re subsumed beneath some truly perplexing creative choices. Fundamentally, and particularly in the film’s first two-thirds, Rosales seems curiously estranged from simple human behavior — characters perform scenarios that feel drafted from cliché rather than reality, acting as if programmed to fulfil theatrical needs, engaging in overly verbose philosophical and artistic discussions. If aspects of this can be excused as satisfying Rosales’ own philosophical and artistic impulses (and, were they more delicately designed, they might), other aspects just ring false: a trip to the beach between teenage friends is written like something out of Enid Blyton, and the same teenagers enthusiastically attending an unusually packed screening of an arthouse film (with no snacks!) is close to fantastical.

And yet the film does have its strengths. Rosales’ methods toward extracting emotional poignancy from his material are unconventional and they undermine the sincerity required to execute this task effectively, but they have a point. Morlaix’s third act is set 20 years after teenage Gwen decides to leave for Paris; now a pregnant mother of two, married to neither of her young beaus but a different man (Àlex Brendemühl), she receives an unexpected visit from one of her old friends from Morlaix, bringing sad news. And this sad news brings her back to her hometown. Once, she saw paths ahead of her, taking her in any direction she might choose. Now, she sees the paths behind her, paths not taken, choices never made. And the film-within-the-film reappears, only it’s not the same film. One’s life, or the life one might have (had), looks distinctly different when viewed from either end. It’s a beautiful observation from Rosales, and beautifully handled, with none of the stilted unreality of earlier scenes, less reliance on verbal explanation to flesh out its thematic concerns, and a sensitive performance from Mélanie Thierry as Gwen, markedly more expressive than the rather soulless Audiard.

Rosales has shown previously that he understands the intricacies of human emotion and the interplay between memory and emotion, and this understanding rescues Morlaix from the peculiarities he’s so inexplicably burdened it with; they fade in the viewer’s memory, as do the lines between reality and fiction, leaving us to query exactly what that we saw was true and what was pretend. It becomes a bittersweet tapestry of life imagined and reimagined, futures avoided and pasts missed, anticipations and regrets. The paths ahead of us may lead us anywhere, just as those behind us may have led us anywhere else. There’s a really, deeply affecting film in Morlaix, but it takes some effort, and some time, to discover it. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Macdo

Contemporary cinema has been overtaken by analog textures for quite some time. Combined with the wide variety of formats they appropriate — Super 8, 35mm, or pre-digital video cameras, to name a few — countless films either attempt to capture their aura by actually using them or mimic it through digital tools, resulting in an ever-increasing indexical uncanniness for the viewer. Analog texture often infests the cinematic space by drawing attention to its own materiality (or, in many instances, its simulated materiality), leaving little or no room for other visual or narrative devices and, aside from a modest number of exceptions, paradoxically reducing its own presence to the status of a mere gimmick. 

Racornelia’s debut feature MACDO is a welcome addition to those exceptions where the aural and visual compositions generated by the video camera go beyond self-referentiality and extend into the narrative domain, becoming, in this film’s case, a haunting presence within. Inspired to a certain extent by the filmmaker’s own childhood experiences and family, the film takes place in 1997, during a Christmas dinner shared by two middle-class families — comprised of two brothers, Alejandro and Octavio, their wives, Estelle and Lisbette, and their respective children, Alicia and Lalo. Alejandro and Estelle are hosting the evening, and from the very first scene — even before the guests arrive — the pressure to appear as a perfect family hangs heavy in the air. Alejandro urges Estelle to tidy up a teary-eyed Alicia, to make her presentable; the doorbell rings, and the family histrionics are already set in motion. 

Throughout the first hour of MACDO, we witness what can be described as a chamber piece drama, unfolding within the relatively predictable framework of a Christmas dinner. Yet even stripped to its narrative bare bones, Racornelia shapes a carefully balanced atmosphere, filled with dramatic tension, humor, and an overarching critique of the patriarchal, heterosexual, and Catholic family model — all while sustaining the illusion of authenticity on which these video-camera images depend. On the surface, we witness a deeply rooted, passive-aggressive sibling rivalry unfolding across various fronts — financial status, manners, child-rearing, and interactions with their wives — mirrored in the antagonism between Lisbette and Estelle, who reproduce the hetero-patriarchal roles assigned to them without fully grasping the oppression they’re subjected to. The autobiographical dimension reinforces this effect: while the inclusion of the filmmaker’s childhood photos suggests she sees herself in Alicia, her portrayal of Estelle complicates the picture, creating a fractured subjectivity in which each character — even Lisbette, who, unlike Estelle, displays a more flirtatious and impudent attitude — embodies a distinct facet of the female experience.

During its first half, MACDO establishes an intriguing fictional pact with the viewer — concealing the narrative mimesis of the home video imagery through the actors’ naturalistic performances, and alternatively exposing it through a range of formal strategies. Among the most striking are the arbitrary visual abstractions created by the optical zoom, and the embodied yet anonymous camera that observes and follows the characters — when it’s not passing through their own hands. There are indeed traces of mockumentary-style camerawork from which this quizzical gaze may originate, but the overall effect evokes something closer to the unease and eeriness associated with the well-established tradition of found footage horror. Who, then, does this gaze belong to? Part clinical, part curious, and part inattentive — yet always haunting — the film seems progressively less concerned with making sense of or through this gaze, and more invested in moving away from it in the second half.

Focusing on the aftermath of the guests’ abrupt departure — triggered by a heated argument sparked by Lisbette’s claims about Alicia’s behavior — the second half is where fiction begins to unravel, its boundaries growing increasingly blurred, just as the perfect family mask constructed by Alejandro and Estelle shatters into pieces. The spatial shift from the living room to the bedroom further underlines the tonal change, with the latter functioning as the off-scene (or rather, the obscene). The disturbing confrontation between the couple, marked by a violent, oppressive, and unhinged deployment of power dynamics, soon overwhelms the already dramatically dense narrative economy of MACDO. There’s little doubt that the filmmaker sees this startling digression as a key element of the film, yet the formal strategies she employs — split screen, intertitles, audio loops, the addition of a metafilmic level — only make the film feel more overloaded. While the first hour operates within a framework of emotional and formal excess, the second half unfortunately veers into voluntary self-indulgence, stretching in length and weighed down by rage, chaos, and affect. Ultimately, the film seems to short-circuit itself, becoming less a work destined for an audience than a cathartic personal experiment — unless the goal is, in fact, to crush the viewer under its weight. — ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU

Cobalt

The extraction of minerals from the Congo has been an ongoing colonial expedition since the Belgian king, Leopold II, personally annexed the country’s land via private enterprise, officiated by European and American representatives in 1885. What followed was the creation of an enforced slave labor, itself populated by the majority of local indigenous peoples. The horrors that unfurled were great, its legacy persisting under neocolonial rule, where many Canadian mining companies now exploit a country persistently fraught with economic turmoil and serving as an outpost for cobalt extraction. The West’s desperation to maintain control of resource production has led to the implosion of African economies; many of them sought to rebuild after independence, but were then stunted by continued neocolonial exploitation. This is not to mention the assassination of many of Africa’s democratically elected, often socialist, leaders, the case in Congo being that of Patrice Lumumba. Such transparent manipulation of national governance via economic coercion and political interventionism leads inevitably to an urge for resistance by the exploited masses, and this is where Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s Cobalt initiates itself, ethereally observing the landscapes that have been forever altered by the Belgian mining enterprise. A continued unease rests over the length of the work, as Katondolo pointedly peppers in archival, ethnographic footage, utilizing both its narration and images to distinct effect. In essence, the project organizes itself as a collage, handcrafted of juxtaposition, identifying with acute clarity the parasitic nature of coloniality but also providing a platform for the self-enunciation of an oppressed class.

There are two moments in Cobalt that most markedly articulate the ideological faculties of the project and the strength of visual imaginings that such politics are represented through. Early on, a basket of rice is being sifted through, again and again, waves of grain at a close-up, as in a serene tide rolling in. Projected against this image, however, superseding its details — for we cannot see the weaving of this strainer, nor is the rice very discernible — is a projection of ethnographic footage, an act of collage that augments the colonial expedition’s negating praxis over the agricultural history being offered as gesture. Second, a sequence of three shots perforates the neocolonial positionality through an austere semiotic consideration. The first shot of this sequence simply observes the placement and posture of a placard installed for the remembrance of European collaboration against the peoples of Africa: a single column infographic of little-to-no notice to passersby, nestled between shrubbery and a narrow sidewalk. Following this, we glean a static survey of one of the many memorials to the Berlin Wall: a large exhibit placed amidst an open market route, where many have the space and intrigue to gather and scrutinize. From here, we leave Europe, the sequence’s final shot taking us to a wooden rack of coffins on open display. This simple image should be descriptive enough to denote the violence that persists through ongoing material consequences across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Katondolo’s syntax is one of reverberating anger toward the passivity of white comforts, necessarily rebuking this stagnancy with the collective struggle of Congolese activists, whose words take over from the continuity of ethnographic narration. 

Cobalt’s polemic is one that mediates on textures forever altered: land, tradition, infrastructure, humanity. The abstracted consequences of a globalized marketplace is seen, here, in the darkness of mines, where headlamps sift through shadows, where the act of witnessing becomes, as expressed by so many across the film, a requisite one for confronting the conditions of total disenfranchisement. This film, like many others finding themselves circulating around the Western circuit (whether from Sudan or Palestine), facilitates an explicit methodology of seeing, which emphatically advocates for the voices of allies to augment the voices of those on the ground, embroiled in the accelerated desperation of extant white colonial histories. The final scene of the film divulges circumstances as plainly as possible: the quotidian turbulence of these enterprises places everyone in danger. Our response should echo those of the workers and activists we hear throughout, pushing us to understand how our mundanity and theirs present radically distinct realities in need of reconciliation. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND

Knife in the Heart of Europe

Popular depiction of the Soviet Union used to hinge on the Cold War’s ideological expediencies, and only with the country’s dissolution in 1991 was there a concerted push toward historicizing it as an object of cultural fascination. With modern Russia, something similar appears to be at play. Its invasion of Ukraine notwithstanding, Russia’s clout atop the literary and cinematic stages has more often been defined with recourse to its Soviet past as a means to critique its present. The likes of Sergei Loznitsa (Ukrainian by nationality, but Soviet by fascination) demonstrate this phenomenon, as do — though to a lesser extent — Andrei Zvyagintsev and Kirill Serebrennikov, the great directors of contemporary Russia. But a post-Soviet psyche stubbornly eludes the silver screen; we’ve had The Death of Stalin and Petrov’s Flu, but these narrative fictions invariably overplay their hand while understating life as it is, whether during peace or war, or some in-between state.

Documentaries, in lieu of straightforward narratives, may thus offer a more free-flowing avenue of expression, and Artem Terent’ev’s Knife in the Heart of Europe further stretches the conventions of this expression. The director’s second feature after Petersburg (2020), an adaptation of Andrei Bely’s eponymous novel, Knife could potentially be described as personal, diaristic, or essayistic, yet its formal qualities arguably subvert these designations one way or another. Referring to the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, nested between Poland and Lithuania and historically a province of the Prussian Kingdom, the film’s title conveys a tone of awe and geopolitical angst, and its sequences replicate to some extent this feeling. But rather than devolve into kitsch or sentimentality, Terent’ev imbues his footage with a melancholic unease as he stitches together lo-fi fragments of the enclave’s environment and inhabitants. His opening shot surveys a collection of glassware and portraits in his family dacha, while voiceless captions describe his lineage to a grandfather who had fought in World War II and, before passing, lost his memory.

An elliptical sensibility both invigorates and frustrates Knife, as Terent’ev’s camera — perhaps the metaphorical knife to pour out and stave off his feelings of weltschmerz — doesn’t exactly lend itself to logical or even associative structuring. The fragmentary nature of the film’s inquiry into place and space is best apprehended on its own terms, as an incomplete and possibly voyeuristic phenomenology of post-Soviet existence that lacks political or spiritual grounding. Teenage boys and fishermen roam the overgrown countryside at dusk and dawn, while the elements both of nature and of civilization comingle in solemn perpetuity. A bridge linking the Kaliningrad enclave to Lithuania mournfully stands in the distance, the Russian and Lithuanian flags billowing neutrally across the water; a shot of the river’s currents dissolves, almost, into an illusion of black ripples across a sea of white like the birds that fly high above. Insofar as Terent’ev fixates on these images, as opposed to other more tangible and deliberately elided ones, Knife expresses the aching and unrepresentable crux of its title: a country and people with a heart, but with no sense of a future to call home. — MORRIS YANG

Daria’s Night Flowers

Filmmakers working under the constraints of an oppressive regime must become very good at leaving things unsaid. The main ideas are often relegated to the subtext, on the assumption (or at least the hope) that sensitive viewers will be able to read between the lines and, more importantly, that the censors won’t be able to. Of course, this doesn’t always work. As we have seen in the case of Iran, major filmmakers like Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof have proven unwilling to toe the line, resulting in high-level political actions against them. Nevertheless, Iranian film offers a unique test case for understanding to what extent a national cinema can “lie” its way toward the truth, somehow showing that which cannot be shown.

In a recent trio of short films, U.K.-based Iranian experimentalist Maryam Tafakory has been digging into the archive of both pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in order to brush it against the grain. Although there are many topics that Iranian cinema cannot ever address, queer sexuality is close to the top of the list, and Tafakory’s project in recent years has been to use clips from that large body of work to create an impossible cinema, one that poetically but unequivocally explores lesbian desire by collecting fragments and making them speak. 2023’s Mast-Del involves a story told by one woman to another while they lie in bed together. Razeh-del from 2024 is about two high school girls writing into a women’s newspaper. And in her latest film, Daria’s Night Flowers, Tafakory draws upon dozens of Persian-language films, both classics and obscurities, to weave a tale of jealousy, muted ambition, and creative suppression.

In its fragmented written narrartive, Daria’s Night Flowers tells the story of Daria, a writer who has just completed her first novel, about a mysterious girl named “Blue.” The female narrator describes falling in love with Blue. And in Tafakory’s story, Daria has a husband who is determined to destroy his wife’s writing. The novel tells of magical plants that can eat women “who were restless with illicit desire.” Later we learn that these plants are used to create strange drugs that rogue doctors use as a part of sexual conversion therapy. Throughout the film, Takafory combines interstitial scenes of domestic anxiety — dead leaves plucked off houseplants, trays of glasses being clanked about, a single dish being scrubbed — many of which are superimposed with shots of deep, still waters. The clips are splattered with bright dyes of blue and yellow. 

The narrative Takafory elaborates is uncertain, often seeming more like a dream than a coherent fiction. In this sense, Daria’s Night Flowers wafts across the screen like a faint aroma, its subject matter incapable of being pinned down. This impossibility is a double-edged sword, since it threatens to leave no firm trace in history. (Officially, there are no lesbians in the Islamic Republic.) But it is also uncontainable, able to insinuate itself into spaces of consciousness it might otherwise never see. That which is never openly said cannot be censored. The unmade statement cannot be redacted. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Miraculous Accident

Assaf Gruber’s Miraculous Accident provides us with what we might wish to distinguish as one of the first contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist fiction projects. With this, it must be determined that this is not a work speaking explicitly against the Palestinian genocide, but a project whose imagination of Jewish identity exists in contest to the homogenizing monolith that Zionism has sought to normalize across the Jewish diaspora and allied governments. Gruber, in this plight of counter-narrativization, positions us across history, within the relationship of two students and their editing professor. The film’s protagonist is Nadir (played by the character’s inspiration, artist Abdelkader Lagtaâ), a Moroccan filmmaker sent to Soviet-Poland under the auspices of a Communist education into cinematic formalism, where he begins his relationship with the Jewish professor, Edyta, and develops a close friendship with her protégé, Jarek. This short work is mostly an account on Nadir’s reflections as he returns to the Lodz Film School in 2024 and considers his brief time there, back in 1968. This return is prompted by a newfound letter, written to him by Edyta, who reluctantly migrated to Israel when she felt at risk in a post-’67 political landscape.  In the midst of all these spectral dynamics, the revisitation of ghosts in the shadow of their political consequences, Gruber offers a kind of disembowelment of Jewish positionality, where what is organized as a pointedly negative image of a Jew (and Israel) then becomes supplanted by an infatuation, a specter of desire lost in a similar fashion to how Israel’s own policies and ideological designs have supplanted the very individuals and cultures that have amassed there across the decades, whether by choice or under duress.

Across the length of Lagtaâ’s voiceover — reading the letter with a melancholic twang — the textures of our characters are evoked, their obfuscated histories and interiorities unfurled across a narration which emphasizes the totally divorced contexts these reuniting phantoms were forced to shamble through. What roundabout occurs across this reading is the reference of sustained, looming state power, a force whose momentum separated these lovers, altering the trajectory of their story completely. This total conceit, in collaboration with the utility of Lodz’s student films from the late ‘60s, forms a montage that seeks to center the mundane tragedy of lost love, contextualizing it within the ongoing discourse of pronounced Palestinian existence across the Eastern Bloc through the early expansionism of Israel. If anything, politically, the project is a document of anti-Zionist history caught in the flummox of an ideological war that stretches over our world. Its victims, as denoted here, are of course those at the whims of these political projects — ultimately, every individual whose counter-hegemonic ideals become something they’re willing to fight for — but also a history of existence whose dynamics become reified into the larger abstraction of a battling global polarity: lost images, lost souls, lost loves, and lost wars. To create the new world, one which this film seems unsure of how to approach, that old one must be found, discerned, and reckoned with. The final image here, of soldiers flying back up into a plane, parachutes receding back into their pouches, unsteadily gestures to this kind of analysis, but the project’s misguided romanticism spurs on a flailing sense of intention, one seeped in a nostalgia that cannot be placed. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND