A Private Life

A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian in the way of her previous film Other People’s Children, this cyclical structure also alludes to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Themes of obsession and waning psychological shifts reinforce this reading in A Private Life, evoking quite palpably the Master of the Suspense’s oeuvre, though Zlotowski’s film is less dramatic in tone than that might suggest. Punctuated by whodunnit slapstick humor, A Private Life is a playful one-off anchored by a transatlantic cast and Zlotowski’s trademark sensitivity.

Jodie Foster stars as Lillian Steiner, a psychoanalyst turned amateur sleuth. She appears affluent thanks to her apartment, office, and wardrobe — which includes a casual Goyard tote and Phoebe Philo-esque ease — but the façade soon fades. Within minutes of viewers meeting the protagonist, a client arrives unannounced in order to fire the sleuth after being “cured” by a hypnotist, and then Lillian learns that another, Paula (Virginie Efira), has committed suicide. Devastated by the latter event, Lillian attends her client’s Shiva, where her grief is aggravated by an unsettling interaction with Paula’s bug-eyed husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), and daughter, Valérie (Luàna Bajrami). Seeking to understand where things unraveled, Lillian sets the film’s narrative proper in motion with the commencement of her personal investigation.

Similar to John “Scottie” Ferguson in Vertigo, Lillian quickly establishes herself as an unreliable narrator. She insists she isn’t grieving, yet she can’t stop crying. Her tears are so excessive that they streak her face and even spill onto a stranger during a Metro ride. This marks the film’s first rupture from realism, which Zlotowski extends further in a bizarre hypnotherapy session with Jessica (Sophie Guillemin), which Lillian submits to in a bid to cure her uncontrollable weeping. Guided through this so-called “past life,” Lillian discovers that she was apparently a Jewish man living during World War II who impregnated Paula. Both were musicians in the orchestra, with Simon as the conductor, and Lillian convinces herself that this explains Simon’s present-day animosity. As ridiculous as this “past life” sounds, Zlotowski’s tonal shift from the contemporary whodunnit to period piece is seductive. The film’s languid rhythm is jolted awake by a rush of diegetic sound, allowing the transition to work not because of its strangeness, but because of the intimacy Zlotowski lends these visions. Lillian seems invigorated for the first time upon waking up, prompting the question: is there a queer awakening at play?

Lillian has been icy until this point in A Private Life. She’s guarded around her patients, which in fairness could simply be professionalism, but then she’s also awkward around her family. She visits her son Julian (Vincent Lacoste) and his newborn baby, but she refuses to hold the child, much to her son’s dismay. Lillian’s tears also lead her back to her ex-husband Gabriel (the lovely Daniel Auteuil), an optometrist. Gabriel is taken aback by Lillian’s vulnerability during their eye exam. For the first time in years, they are physically close and there’s sexual chemistry. It’s clear that Gabriel still has feelings for his ex, with his wide-eyed gaze and flirty charm, but Lillian is not exactly on the same page.

Paula, it seems, is really in charge of Lillian. The irony is that she’s dead, but this void allows for Lillian’s projections. She leans into fantasy despite the personal reminder that she is “too rational for this.” But is she? Despite having limited evidence, she’s certain that Paula was murdered, so she starts sleuthing on her own; that hypnosis really messed with her vision, both literally and figuratively. She steals packages from Simon’s apartment lobby and rummages through his trash. In her mind, she’s looking for clues, but to everyone else, she’s simply, well, jumping headfirst into the trash. Foster is so convincing in these moments that it’s hard not to fully buy into her performance, and so we wonder: maybe she’s right after all?  It’s not until she clashes with the police, who meet her with suspicion, that we see clearly how the world actually perceives her. Gabriel is also duped. He enables her and seems somewhat amused by Lillian’s antics, but it’s not until after their relationship is rekindled that he realizes Lillian has truly lost her marbles. After a family dinner with Juilian goes rogue, Gabriel gets the last word: “You’re building a narrative from this false memory.”

Is there anything more 21st century than getting absorbed by ruminations? A Private Life suggests that not even psychologists are immune. In a lesser film, technology would aid Lillian’s psychosis, but in Zlotowski’s whodunnit, Lillian’s brain does all the work. Foster, for her part, proves that she doesn’t need any props to carry a performance, and she keeps A Private Life psychologically engaging… until it isn’t. Eventually, after several robberies, a little more sleuthing, and some cryptic red paint, the film hits a threshold. Rather than untangling Lillian’s blossoming sexuality, Zlotowski’s film too comfortably settles into mere murder-mystery tropes. The problem is the murder itself is delusion. The real victim, it turns out, is the film’s own sense of purpose. — CLARA CUCCARO

Wrong Husband

In addition to being the leading auteur working in the Inuktitut language, director Zacharias Kunuk has been a standard bearer for Indigenous cinema more generally for decades. He made a big splash internationally with his epic 2001 debut, Atanarjuat, aka The Fast Runner, and while some viewers were a bit confounded by Kunuk’s meandering narrative style (adapted from classic Inuit folktales), others admired the film for its expansiveness, in both storytelling and visual style. Kunuk’s widescreen compositions tend to cast human figures against the flat tundra, the horizon splitting the frame in half in a way that engages with minimalism but is in fact replete with activity and natural features.

Two of the director’s more recent films were also generally impressive: Searchers (2016), an Arctic riff on the John Ford classic, and 2019’s One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, Kunuk’s most overtly political tale, about a man who is forced by the Canadian government to move to a reservation, giving up his traditions for enforced modernity. No one else is telling these stories the way Kunuk does, and in his films one gets a true sense that he is often bending, if not reinventing, the cinematic apparatus in order to convey these ordinary yet mythic tales in stark visual form.

As an admirer of Kunuk, then, it gives this writer no pleasure to say that his latest project, Wrong Husband (or Uᐃᒃᓴᕆᖖᒋᑕᕋ, in Inuktitut), doesn’t really work. It’s a combination of a number of Inuit folkloric themes into a single narrative, but oddly, these elements neither cohere into a linear story form, nor do they transcend the everyday to achieve the mythic. The main plot concerns a pair of young lovers, Kaujak (Theresia Kappianaq) and Sapa (Haiden Agutimarek), who were betrothed to one another from childhood. When Kaujak’s father dies suddenly, she and her mother Nujatut (Leah Panimera) are sent by the elder tribesmen to live with another clan. The mom is quickly married off to Makpa (Mark Taqqaugaq), a man referred to as “wifeless friend.” This all happens while Sapa is away on a hunt, and so Kaujak is essentially bartered to the neighboring tribe as a matrimonial chit.

There are supernatural elements, such as the frequent appearance of an ancestor (Karen Ivalu), called Fog Lady in the credits, who intervenes in various affairs. And for some unknown reason, there is a fellow in a grotesque latex costume who crawls out of the water and threatens to menace the various characters. He is the Troll, and despite his frequent appearance, nothing he does impinges on the marriage plot whatsoever. It’s as if Kunuk just had the costume and thought it was cool.

As with all of Kunuk’s films, the cinematography is exceptional. In many respects, Wrong Husband is a landscape film, with the barest traces of human conflict imposed on the rugged imagery. In fact, for this writer it even recalls Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, since it often resembles the land and sky that Snow’s film transforms into an abstract tilt-a-whirl. And it’s to Wrong Husband‘s credit that, despite its overt depiction of a patriarchal order, the film is primarily concerned with women’s subjectivity and their conflicted emotional lives. Nevertheless, one gets the sense that Kunuk put his faith here, as he had previously, in the inherent cinematic potential of traditional Inuit myth, but this time it didn’t pan out.

Additionally, after the modern narrative and sociological incisiveness of Noah Piugattuk, Wrong Husband is even more of a disappointment. This story, taking place in 2000 BCE, is a film made by and for Inuit audiences, but for the first time, Kunuk’s focus on tradition and mythology begin to feel like a form of avoidance, a sort of fetish for the distant past that unintentionally places this present-day community into an ideological past. As we know from the history of ethnography, and from foundational films like Flaherty’s Nanook of the North that recreate old ways instead of engaging with new ones, there is a reactionary tendency for Western subjects to perceive other cultures as part of an anthropological past. And while it would never be right to suggest that Kunuk tailor his film work to avoid the worst possible interpretations, it nevertheless feels like Wrong Husband reflects a creative dead end. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Mirrors No. 3

“No matter how common the surroundings or how ordinary the story may be, a Christian Petzold film always catches the viewer by surprise. His films depict worlds where familiar colors, worn-out songs, and well-known emotions operate according to an entirely different logic — and as mesmerized passers-by that we are, the real pleasure lies in trying to find our way there. From one film to the next, we think we have finally grasped what the color red feels like, what emotions water can carry, or between whom love can truly exist. But it’s only to be fooled again, left dumbfounded — like a siren out of water, an amnesiac woman, or, as in Mirrors No. 3, a troubled car crash survivor…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU

Babystar

Content is the new oil. In Babystar, the debut feature from German director Joscha Bongard, the 16-year-old Luca (Maja Bons) is the center of both her parents’ world and their camera. Luca’s entire life has been filmed, edited, and uploaded, from her conception and birth to her sex talk with her mother (Bea Brocks) to the paid social engagements she posts herself. As a teenager, Luca has learned to wield artifice like a knife, offering effortlessly manicured answers to invasive questions from her 4.3 million TikTok followers and hitting the perfect angle when they inevitably ask for a selfie. Whether or not she’s happy, she knows how to project the sort of algorithmically grateful, brand-endorsed beatitude that landed her family a seven-figure smart home ripped from the pages of Dwell. When her parents tell her they’re thinking about having another child, though, the screen begins to crack.

Smartphones and social media are such a hurdle for filmmakers that even the most prestigious working directors often opt to avoid them completely. Technology’s pace of evolution seems to have diverted screens on screen into two major causeways: follow trends reactively and risk Boomerism before your film hits postproduction (Chef, Don’t Look Up), or deliberately swing past the bounds of futurism and into cybernetic incohesion (Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD era). For its part, Babystar finds a natural ease in the immediate.

Always seeking brand growth, Luca’s parents land her a meeting with a burgeoning tech company that wants to use the social media star as a guinea pig avatar for their new AI buddy app — users can interact with Luca and receive personalized and automated responses as if they were Facetiming with the real thing. The facsimile is both chilling and not out of step with the teenage ChatGPT relationships scoring headlines IRL. Just as compelling is watching the real Luca form a metasocial relationship with her own likeness, her ennui blurring the bounds of her avatar’s coded responses. The movie makes a few playful jabs at its own conceit, too, letting plot points play out within phone scrolls and web video windows and censoring brand names with the imprecision of an undergrad marketing major.

For all of Babystar’s insight, though, its satire often reads ham-fisted and beleaguered. Netflix docs and milkshake ducks have served us enough content-creating family downfalls to warn even the staunchest luddites of the ills of the trade, and the movie strains its tendons reaching for something new to say. When Luca’s chiseled father (Liliom Lewald) dives into a pool to save his laptop over his drowning daughter, it feels less like a provocation than the third beat in a tired SNL sketch. Her mother’s decision to calm Luca not with lullabies but an ASMR laundry list of skin creams is clever enough, but the family’s vapidity is underlined so heavily that it’s hard not to wish a joke or two was left in the edit bay. We are phone-addled, our beauty standards irreparably smeared by the algorithm, and the greatest insult to our misery is the consciousness with which we bear it. Any time spent treading a knee-deep review of the dangers of Web 2.0 feels like too much, a remedial course we’ve been taking semester after semester.

But Babystar reveals its muscle when the phones stop recording. With Luca, the 22-year-old Maja Bons proves herself the film’s most prescient vision of the screen generation. She also introduces a much-needed inoculation of nuance against an unwieldy satire. When Luca’s poise relaxes in the absence of cameras, it’s difficult to tell whether her trepidations about the baby on the way stem from fear of losing the spotlight, reflexive protection against bringing a new life under a microscope viewed by millions, or a deeper, inexplicable dysphoria. She experiments with sexuality and cruelty as if they were both sides of the same blade, her teenage impulses all the more unnerving against the collegiate control she exhibits as Luca on The Grid. There’s a genuine sense of danger as Luca pulls further from her family and headfirst into a balm of oblivion, and to see her gain agency is to watch Babystar find strength in its stride.

Joscha Bongard wears his influences without shame — Dogtooth, The Bling Ring, Thirteen — but Babystar finds an aesthetic and spiritual North Star in Lost Highway. Cinematographer Jakob Sinsel shoots Luca’s home in direct homage to Lynch’s Hot Topic masterpiece, finding shadows so thick in the house’s cloying pink hallways you worry they might drown the family. Babystar knows better than to approximate Lost Highway’s horror — what could? — but Lynch proves a fitting, if unexpected, ancestor. Like Patricia Arquette, Luca is bound by a sickly and shadowed dependency to a life on the wrong side of a camera; if Luca’s danger is more materially defined than Arquette’s, her dread is every bit as demonically abstract. In a sequence toward the end of the movie, we find Luca barreling down a dark road, her only visible limits two white lines and the reach of headlights, her direction ambiguous. Luca’s family may be a caricature, but the tail end of her teen years is as borderless and threatening as the real thing. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG

Aki

Aki is a film of abundance. The world it envisions and celebrates is lifegiving and beautiful. Most of Aki, a title that translates from Anishinaabemowin (also known as Ojibwe) as “earth or land,” is spent in extreme close-ups of the flowing (or frozen or thawing) river, flowers and the bugs crawling on them, and the several sports played by the community’s youth. The cinematography is rich in capturing the fullness of the land; even the cold Northern Ontario winter is still beautiful. And this is enough. Dialogue and characters or plot would be extraneous. All Darlene Naponse, perhaps the most well-known Anishinaabe filmmaker, needs for her documentary is this beautiful community, the land they live on, and her camera. 

That’s not all Aki is, though. As it passes from season to season and from one beauty to another, Naponse reminds us of the havoc that (colonial) industrial anthropocentrism has sown onto our lands. Not unlike the urbanized pillow shots of Yasujirō Ozu’s films, Naponse and her very small crew insert periodic reminders of the giant factories and mines not far away. Unlike Ozu, these shots don’t impart a warm feeling like dew in the morning, but instead remind one of a certain kind of modernity’s disruption (a modernity that, in practice, was enacted only through colonization and occupation). 

The enormous metal structures intrude from the same ground like disruptive aliens, and she always shoots them from afar — as if they were some kind of unsatiated monster devouring all that comes before them. The deer scat is more worthy of a close-up than these industrial wastelands. One memorable shot shows a handful of birds, maybe ravens, dancing in the wind before a giant metal silo of some sort. The birds disappear behind the building as they move from one side to the other in their air-dance, and every time they disappear from view, a small part of the viewer — or at least this viewer — doubts they will reappear. 

Aki meanders playfully with the passing of the seasons, and the film is divided into four parts to reflect these quarterly changes. Each chapter seems to stretch into lengthy, patient visual poems, never in a rush to move to the next location or to see the next animal. Naponse takes her time before letting humans and non-human animals into the picture, knowing they would add a certain kind of energy that one doesn’t need to be as patient with. It’s uncomfortable at times, too. How long will it take the ice to melt? How many flowers need a close-up? How long will viewers need to endure this aerial footage of trees patted in snow? The hardship and chronological experience of time passing is also crucial. Without it, everything becomes postcard picturesque and loses its grander transcendence. And the jump cuts employed add another layer to this insightful use of time. When a rabbit is being skinned, for instance, these cuts move quickly past the actual skinning process (bypassing more sensitive images that could have emerged) and ironically draw more attention to the sensation of time passing.

It’s also very challenging to convey my full spectrum of thoughts without noting a very personal response to Naponse’s film. I come from a family with Anishinaabe blood. The phrasing here is intentionally careful because I’ve always been hesitant to identify with the tribe: I am not a member (in the process), but I have close family, including my mom’s two brothers and all of my cousins, who are registered members of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. There are two “twin” Sault Ste. Maries. One is located in Michigan, where I live; the other is in Northern Ontario, not terribly far from Atikameksheng Anishnawbek First Nation where Aki takes place. The trees look the same. The bitter cold is too familiar. The maple syrup taps could be the ones my family uses. And we even play the same sports. Seeing the “Ojibwa Casino” brochure on an older member of the community’s fridge door really hammers in how familiar this world feels. I don’t fully understand what this familiarity means for me just yet, or if it matters to anyone else; I do know it made me pay really close attention to the few slivers of spoken Anishinaabemowin. But Naponse’s attention to these details, to capturing an essence rather than a story, is what makes her film so remarkable. Aki is like a prayer in this way: beautiful, personal, and uncomfortable all at once. — JOSHUA POLANSKI

Magellan

“To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple. With the Cannes Film Festival, the filmmaker’s relationship differs in frequency and seeming stature. Norte, the End of History (2013) and The Halt (2019) premiered in the Un Certain Regard and Director’s Fortnight sections, respectively, and six years on, the filmmaker’s latest, Magellan, receives its global debut in the Premiere section of the 2025 edition’s events. Regardless of what is made of this, be it another potential slight upon Diaz or sparing of more commercially viable competition directors, what is clear over the course of Magellan’s comparatively brief sub-3-hour runtime is that the defining contemporary artist of longform cinema has gifted the world yet another masterpiece…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MATT MCCRACKEN

Lucky Lu

One could argue that it speaks to the humanistic timelessness of The Bicycle Thieves that it just keeps getting remade, with the circumstances adapted to the present day. Then again, its evergreen nature also speaks to humanity’s failures, given that the social ills that de Sica observed in post-war Italy have not improved — and arguably have gotten worse. Lucky Lu, the debut feature from Lloyd Lee Choi, pretty much follows that 1948 template to the letter, and on a formal level it accomplishes very little else. This film is simple and direct. So if you appreciated the mid-aughts social realism of Ramin Bahrani but felt those films were a bit too subtle or abstruse, well, you’re in luck.

Lu (Chang Chen), however, most certainly is not. We meet him as he is putting down the first month’s rent and deposit on a new one-bedroom New York apartment. After several years, his wife Si Yu (Fala Chen) and little girl Yaya (Carabelle Manna) are emigrating from China to join him. Most of Lucky Lu takes place over a single harrowing day, with Lu trying to establish a home for his family to come to. Through phone calls and texts, we know that mother and child have left China on a flight to Seattle, and will soon arrive in New York from there. This creates a time crunch that means to, and to some extent does, ratchet up the anxiety.

Lu works as a delivery man for an Uber Eats-like app. He relies on his e-bike, which he rents from the company, in order to stay in the system and make his deliveries. You can see exactly where this is going. The bike is stolen, he pleads in vain for understanding from his boss, and just for an added kick in the pants, he discovers that the old friend Bo Hao (Haibin Li) who rented him the apartment was in no way authorized to do so. Lu handed the guy several thousand dollars in cash and now has nothing to show for it. Once Si Yu and Yaya arrive, Lu has to head back out to the street, trying to hustle for money from old acquaintances, sell any possessions that might carry some cash value, and hopefully secure another bike. Yaya joins him on these errands, which creates the exact same dynamic we saw between father and son in the de Sica film. Lu is at his lowest, tries to put on a brave face for his child, and only succeeds in losing face.

To be fair, Lucky Lu does have some effective moments. In adapting the post-theft sequence from Bicycle Thieves, where Antonio is practically taunted by the proliferation of bicyclists across Rome, we see Lu observing his fellow gig-economy hustlers, people he probably never noticed before. To add a smartphone-era twist, we hear the constant chirping of the app, signaling to Lu that there’s another order waiting, one that he is incapable of picking up. There’s also a cultural specificity to Lucky Lu that creates certain kinds of frisson that the original could not. Lu is proud but desperate, and we learn that he tried to open a restaurant several years before. His brother Zhang (Perry Fung) and sister-in-law (Fiona Fu) invested with Lu and lost quite a bit of money. Anyone who has ever been the poor relation in their family — one old friend remarks, “I only ever see you when you need something” — will experience guilty pangs of familiarity.

If Lucky Lu is finally a bit of a disappointment, hardly terrible but ultimately not all that good, the main reason is that Chang, one of the premiere actors of his generation, is given very little to do. Lu is noble but not above lying, diligent but not especially smart, and he is clearly a loving family man. But considering that Lu is front and center for almost the entire film, we learn very little about his interior life. As is too often the case when it comes to stories about the working poor, Lucky Lu is content to depict its protagonist as a human doing rather than a human being. We come away with an understanding that life is hard, but most of us already knew that. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Wavelengths 1: Map of Traces

The first of this year’s Wavelengths short film programs begins, appropriately enough, with Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, a 2016 work by Tomonari Nishikawa, who passed away this past April at the age of 56. Nishikawa was a fixture at Wavelengths over the years, easily one of the most respected filmmakers and educators of his time. Nishikawa’s films were poetic and precise. Like some other experimentalists of his generation, he found his voice in a period characterized by the abatement of certain backlashes against the past. Brakhage (‘too solipsistic!”) and structural film (“too rationalist!”) were fair game once again, approaches that a filmmaker could adapt to their own aesthetic projects as appropriate. Nishikawa demonstrated this better than most. His films are about exploring our ability to perceive and respond to reality, to really think about what we could see and hear.

Ten Mornings is a perfect example of Nishikawa’s idiosyncratic formalism. A series of shots of bridges in Japan, the film is vertically striated in bands of relative light and dark. Once a car is seen crossing a bridge, the viewer figures out what’s up. Nishikawa has taken the same shot from the exact same position several times, under varying light conditions, and pieced the shots together into a single image. So a moving vehicle will arrive within one “slat” but vanish behind the others. Ten Mornings braids the landscape into discrete but nearly identical views. Watching the film again, it becomes clear that the composite images are a lot like test strips from a darkroom, wherein a photographer exposes a negative with increasing or decreasing apertures in order to find the best settings. Upon recognizing this, something clicks about the film, and about almost all of Nishikawa’s work. His films, perfectly constructed as they were, seem to reveal the editing process. An editor typically sees his or her footage dozens if not hundreds of times, and inevitably discovers new aspects of the material over time. Nishikawa’s films displayed that process of discovery, sharing his own unexpected perceptions with the viewer.

The other films presented in Map of Traces share this unique quality of discovery, an engagement with the mundane or quotidian that reveals unexpected phenomenological depth. The program takes its title from a new mid-length film by Hong Kong’s Chan Hau Chun. Chan has made a film that emphasizes the physical presence and solidity of her city while also making us acutely aware of its distance, the fact that most of what she remembers about it is slipping away or being actively erased. The film opens in a park, and we immediately notice that people’s faces are blurred out. Given the location, a viewer might initially think Chan is protecting the identities of those captured by her camera. But soon she begins moving us around and through the frame, and we realize these are Google Earth images. We hear two voices talk about this place, how there are banyan trees and one time Chan was asked to meet her father in this park but she decided not to show up. The filmmaker mentions that she currently lives in the U.K. Although we are not explicitly told that Chan cannot return to Hong Kong, there is a kind of resignation in her speech, a sadness in the fact that once she lived in this “picture,” and must now scroll through it like a web-browsing tourist.

The second half of Map of Traces is a bit more documentary-like in its style and mode of address. We meet a man who describes having been arrested for painting dian, or mourning symbols, on various public walls. He was captured by CCTV and admits his surprise in learning he was a wanted criminal. As we see, he still paints these symbols but does so in water alone, so that the brushstrokes evaporate almost instantly. Chan concretizes his painted symbols onscreen, allowing us to see them as temporary monuments. The remainder of Chan’s film captures fleeting moments, like a couple of friends holding hands, or the elongated shadows of people walking in the city. There’s an almost Jim Jennings feel to these gestures, but Chan makes us aware that these tiny shards of life are also politically-laden, since she must now find the real Hong Kong in the intervals between discrete events. Additionally, every so often Chan interrupts the film with letters to someone named C.R. The tone of the letters is intimate, and it is clear that the writer longs to be with this person again but it is presently impossible to do so. While these words literalize the distance between the artist and her subject, they also implicitly connect the current plight of Hongkongers to that of dislocated people through the ages, ordinary lives torn asunder by the oppressive conditions of their own historical moments.

One of the year’s best and most surprising films is 09/05/1982 by Colombian filmmakers Jorge Caballero Ramos and Camilo Restrepo. A film that is somehow both shocking and entirely inevitable, 09/05/1982 initially looks like a very particular kind of experimental documentary. It shows seemingly ordinary scenes of street life in “Latin America.” Quotation marks are necessary here because Caballero and Restrepo don’t tell us where the film takes place, but it contains specific elements that consumers of contemporary media have come to associate with Latin America: older downtown areas, the prevalence of construction and infrastructure work, young boys playing soccer in a field, and above all, walls covered with “resistance” graffiti.

A voiceover discusses “the events” of May 9, 1982, seemingly from the perspective of a head of state or official dignitary. He describes the unrest, and the government’s heavy-handed suppression of that unrest, arguing that the rebels left them no choice. It was necessary to maintain public order and protect private property. As this voiceover continues, a viewer may be searching their memories, trying to recall what happened on May 9, and where. Is this a part of modern political history we’ve somehow forgotten? In the final minutes, 09/05/1982 gives in to the odd anomalies that we’ve been noticing all along, the eerie sense that something is off. When Caballero and Restrepo reveal their hand, we are brought up short. Why did these images compel belief? Because they are stereotypical images, the sort that the media has been feeding us for decades. It’s a disturbing but predictable trajectory: first the racism, then the slop.

Austria’s Viktoria Schmid is in the program with Rojo Žalia Blau, a sequel of sorts to NYC RBG from last year. Rojo Žalia Blau applies the same color separation technique seen in the previous film to a broader geographical canvas. The new work was shot across three different locations: Spain, Lithuania, and Austria. Whereas the New York film was a geometrically oriented city-symphony, Rojo Žalia Blau is predominantly a landscape film. Schmid pays particular attention to the light through trees and across the leaf-strewn ground, and how the division of the image into distinct bands of color generates a kind of differential illumination. The outlines of things tend to get fuzzier, even as the prism lines between the hues are hard-edged. From a technical standpoint, Schmid really doesn’t add or subtract from her approach in NYC RBG, but it’s a lovely work that demonstrates how a method’s results are changed when applied in different circumstances.

Sohrab Hura is a multimedia artist, and his interest in experimental film appears to be an outgrowth of his work as a painter. A small, subtle single-shot effort, Disappeared plays nicely with the haze one can sometimes coax from digital cinematography. Discernible as a tent in the woods, occasionally with figures moving around it, Hura’s film is primarily a color study, its washed-out sea green an organic visual pillow for a somewhat more distinct peach-orange form. In the final seconds, Hura recontextualizes everything we’d been watching for the previous five minutes. It’s a pleasant enough film, and given Hura’s devotion to 2D creation, it makes one think about the particular way that painters and photographers sometimes employ 4D media to distill time, or to add a bounded moment of contemplation to what is essentially a still image.

Finally, this year’s program marks the TIFF debut of Russian-born maverick Vadim Kostrov, with his 15-minute silent film En traversée. The festival’s catalog description compares Kostrov’s film to Rothko, and this is by no means incorrect. Yes, there are Rothko moments when the screen is subdivided into bands of complementary or contrasting colors. But over the course of its fifteen silent minutes, En traversée covers so much ground, literally and figuratively, that no single painterly paradigm can account for everything we see. The film is nonstop motion, almost all of it going from left to right in a blur that conveys an unfocused gaze out of a train window. Kostrov keeps his lens at just the right setting so that even though it’s direction we see and not “things,” we can just barely make out the landscape, or the outline of a building, or vehicles moving alongside the traveling camera. Because everything is pitched right up to the point of intelligibility, we only register what we think we’ve seen after it is gone. So Kostrov plays a cognitive game with us, placing all representation in the past tense.

There are a few moments where the camera tilts away from its horizontal axis, and the perpendicular forms that have dominated the image suddenly appear diagonal. This momentarily takes us out of the realm of abstract painting and more firmly into architecture, or at least architectural photography. And in the final moments, En traversée takes an impressive gamble by drawing us back into verisimilitude, never resolving into direct depiction but offering us, indeed, a silhouette of a woman, her shadow cast on the window of a moving train. This decision could have backfired, as if Kostrov were grounding the preceding abstraction in the point of view of an interior spectator. But it has a very different effect. The speed and the mutations of the forms onscreen make it impossible for a viewer to fixate on what we’re seeing. Full concentration isn’t really possible, because the material is so protean and gestural. Instead, we have to give it a constant glance. And when we see the shadow of the woman, we’re reminded of all the other aspects of the environment, the human aspects, from which we’ve been given such a playful respite. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Peak Everything

“Peak Everything (or Amour Apocalypse, its easily translatable French title) is only Anne Émond’s second film to premiere internationally, following Our Loved Ones — easily her best film — which bowed at Locarno in 2015. What’s happened to Émond’s filmmaking in the decade since is a tale of what it means to target success in Quebec’s box office market, which is usually seen as an oasis or a fantasy version of Canadian filmmaking compared to the English-speaking part of the country…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MICHAEL SCOULAR