Bouchra

Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker living in New York, and her mother Aicha, a painter who lives in Casablanca. Some time in the past, Bouchra had sent a coming out letter to her parents, a confession that we learn was met with nine years of silence about the topic — that is, nearly a decade of conversations which danced around the matter of her sexuality. Now in the planning stages of a semi-autobiographical film, Bouchra occasionally visits her mother in an attempt to understand her side of the story, to get some handle on what she was thinking and feeling during all that time. Structurally, Bouchra has a kind of reflexive, meta-fictional aspect to it: as Bouchra storyboards for the film she is planning to make, we see episodes which are either memories, imaginative projections of the film she will make, or scenes from the film that she has already made and which we are viewing. Also, the film is entirely shot using 3D animation, and in the world of the film, all the characters are different kinds of animals.

The natural question to ask is: why? Why render this story through anthropomorphic animal animation? Like early Richard Linklater, Barki and Bennani display a rare ease with character banter and (voice) performance. Dialogue is often entertaining and witty. Interactions are convincingly naturalistic. There’s even a conversation about an idea for a theme park where the “rides” would be patrons going on reality shows which no would would ever watch, but which one could take home, that could be slotted right into a segment of Slacker (1990). But as in Linklater, the surface naturalism of performance in Bouchra mainly serves as an entertaining cover for, or as a complement to, a deeper conceptual hook, in this case having to do with how the animation renders the contours of the relationship between Bouchra and her mother.

For one thing, the decision to have all the characters be animated animals serves to efface the usual signifiers that one would associate with a film focalized around a character’s sexuality — especially when that character is queer. As one might expect, it is generally hard to figure out the gender or sexual identity of an antelope sitting in a cafe or a lizard on the street. Likewise, the usual behavioral markers which would indicate sexual attraction or repulsion are quite understandably more difficult to read. During a trip to Morocco, Bouchra interacts with a friend’s friend as she’s leaving a radio station — an interaction that she thinks may be a flirtation. For the viewer, who sees only a crudely animated coyote and a bear exchanging conversation, the ambiguity of the interaction is only compounded. For another, as in Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), the animation places lived reality, memory, and fantasy on the same visual plane, refusing the usual markers that would ordinarily permit the viewer to categorize any given scene as one or the other. And what this does across Bouchra is create a very specific tension, in any given scene, between fantasy and reality. As in the would-be flirtation scene, there is an undecidability between what might actually be there and what might be only imagined.

Within the context of the film, the significance of this dynamic is that the central mother-daughter relationship, which is significantly a long-distance one, is one defined by a kind of mutual projection. Bouchra is not, or not simply, a film about a mother slowly coming to terms with her daughter’s sexuality. Rather, it is a film about a mother-daughter relationship where the actions of each party are continually mediated by an anxiety about what the other party might be reading into their actions. On Bouchra’s side, her life in New York is informed by what she thinks her mother imagines she is getting up to; and on her mother’s side, her existence in Casablanca informed by how she thinks Bouchra imagines she is processing having a queer daughter. One of the film’s subplots involves Bouchra hooking up with an older woman, and comprises shots of Bouchra’s mother becoming suspicious of what is going on between them. It is an indication of the film’s overall dynamic that these scenes work simultaneously as Bouchra’s imagined projections of her mother’s suspicions, as well as her mother’s imagined projections of her actions. Like Joanna Arnow’s I Hate Myself 🙂 (2015), albeit with a very different tone, and with 3D animation in place of a diary-film conceit, Bouchra continually refracts its central relationship through this canny meta-fictional play, eventually introducing yet another layer of complexity toward the end of the film.

With all this in mind, we might understand the filmmakers’ decision to animate Bouchra as a rejection of the assumption that there exists some isolable core of natural behavior, in relation to which all animation would be abstraction. Rather, it suggests a conception of behavior closer to that of reality TV, suggesting that even when we aren’t literally being observed by an audience, that our actions cannot but be informed by the roles we think we play in the imaginings of others. — LAWRENCE GARCIA

Girl

Girl, the directorial debut of Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, is a beautiful film about a number of ugly subjects. In many respects, this is the determining factor of how one will respond to Girl. As one spends time with the film, it is indeed possible to come to resent its beauty, as if Shu Qi were trying to aestheticize her subject matter. When we see films about spousal abuse and parental neglect, they often employ the cinematic language of “kitchen sink realism,” showing a collection of poor, troubled people living in squalor. This tendency has at least two purposes. It makes a sociological argument, implying that poverty spawns violence almost as a matter of course. And it also serves to give form to the film, with its miserable surroundings operating as an objective correlative to the broken lives that populate them.

Girl does not do these things. Shu Qi, best known for her work in Hou Hsiao-hsien films, gives us a portrait of the bitter, violent childhood of Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying), the middle-school-aged child of Chuan (an actor known as 9m88), a hairdresser’s assistant. She has a younger sister (Lai Yu-Fei) who is much more confident than she is. And her father, Chiang (Roy Chiu), is a violent alcoholic who batters Chuan both physically and emotionally. (“I own you,” he tells his wife. “You can never leave me.”) But the environment Shu Qi gives us — at the hairdresser’s, on the bridge between home and school, or the family’s small apartment— has the visual luster we associate with the films of Hou, Edward Yang, and Wong Kar-wai. Pink nightlights illuminate mustard-colored walls. A blue oscillating fan anchors the foreground of compositions while the family sleeps and eats. The dim kitchen is patterned in teal and avocado. Even the banal school building is sunlit by banks of high windows. If this is a memoryscape, Hsiao-lee’s darkest times are recalled with the hard illumination of clarity.

There are several ways to think about Shu Qi’s directorial choices. First, of course, we can observe the similarity to Hou’s filmmaking, and how the actress herself once occupied his mise-en-scène as an illuminated object in her own right. After all, Shu Qi’s best-known role is in Millennium Mambo, in which she played a very different kind of girl, almost a human embodiment of the 21st century Zeitgeist. Hou taught his protegee that cinema is a kind of time machine, and that when we excavate memory for creative purposes, we almost always embellish it. But Girl may go deeper than this. Part of what this story conveys is the degree to which familial abuse often conceives of itself as private when in fact it is transparent, like an open window, visible to nearly everyone. Chuan’s pushy boss (Peggy Tseng) tells her she should get a divorce, “if not for you then for your children.” Hsiao-lee’s school nurse (Angel Lee) provides her with milk and bread because she knows the girl is malnourished. And even Chiang’s uncle (Bamboo Chen), who keeps him on at his garage out of duty to his dead brother, knows that his nephew is a worthless drunk.

So in a sense, Girl is about the open secret of family violence, and the way that people on the outside may try to help out in small ways while knowing they are powerless to intervene. It’s also about the cycle of abuse. Chuan simultaneously wants Hsiao-lee to study hard so her daughter doesn’t end up like her, while at the same time blaming Hsiao-lee for circumstances she had no part in. In one of Shu Qi’s smartest directorial moves, we occasionally see flashbacks to Chuan’s own childhood, with unexpected reverse-shots of young Chuan seeing present-day Hsiao-lee. The mother watches over the daughter, but her perspective is arrested in her own early traumas. When Chuan sees herself in Hsiao-lee, she only sees the worst parts of herself, and treats her daughter accordingly.

The visual style and nondiegetic inventiveness of Girl do not soft-pedal abuse, then. Rather, Shu Qi’s film serves as a gentle corrective to much of the Taiwanese New Wave, with its male-centered view of both nostalgia and cultural reckoning. What would films like A Brighter Summer Day or A Time to Live and a Time to Die look like if they were about young girls? They would be just as sumptuous, because that’s how we tend to remember our childhoods. But like Girl does, they would matter-of-factly depict the gendered divide. Skipping school and smoking and riding motorcycles is how boys form camaraderie and break away from the previous generation. When girls do this, they are in danger of becoming “fallen,” damaged goods who will only be able to take what men are willing to give them. Shu Qi rightly suggests that this just isn’t enough. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Dead Lover

“Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta Gerwig, but if there’s any justice in this world, she soon will. After co-starring in a number of low-budget, resolutely small-scale films, she’s now released her second directorial effort. Her debut, 2019’s Tito, was a disturbingly odd bit of provocation, a sorta-cringe comedy built entirely around Glowicki’s twitchy, nervous (and hilarious) lead performance…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — DANIEL GORMAN

Renoir

The pursuit of meaning in life is a negatory one. The more one seeks understanding, the more mystery one discovers. The more one learns to stop seeking, to live in the moment, the more meaning one discovers. Life, in Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, seems pretty meaningless for Fuki (Yui Suzuki), an 11-year-old girl coping with the hospitalization of her terminally ill father over a summer. People enter and leave her space and time, bringing friendship, pain, joy, and danger, each seemingly fleeting, yet their impact indelible on the development of this young girl. She never revels in the emotions her tumultuous life brings, drifting through them with a blitheness befitting someone so young dealing with an impending tragedy so severe as the death of a parent; Hayakawa never revels either, her film exhibiting a spatial and temporal flow between vignette-like scenes that’s lucid, graceful yet abrupt. If it’s ostensibly indifferent, it’s merely a reflection of reality: Fuki’s life may have meaning, but its meaning is only discernible in the accumulation of all these little moments. They must be lived, then left, for there’s always more living to be done.

For Fuki’s father, however, there’s only a limited amount of life remaining. The emotional strain isn’t something she can rationalize — it manifests in disturbing dreams, morose school assignments, and an insatiable desire to escape. Her home has become a hostile place — an only child, her mother is distant and overstressed, and often as physically absent as she is emotionally. For a film about the present moment, Renoir’s present is frequently in flight: Fuki’s reality is a difficult one, so she’s drawn to alternate realities, whether in thoughts of vacationing on a beach far from her cramped Tokyo flat, visits to her rich new friend’s pristine family home, English lessons that expand her purview on the world, or dabbling in magic and mystical hobbies.

A young mind looking anywhere but right in front of it may easily be led astray, though, and a desire to make connections puts Fuki in disturbing peril in the film’s later stages. Yet Hayakawa won’t even settle within individual scenes — the film is fluid and surprising, and it offsets its light with dark and vice versa just as the real world seldom, if ever, produces purely good or bad experiences. Fuki peruses pictures of starving children from a school textbook in a bright, cheerful room; she ignores her mother’s venting by dancing with her headphones on, or doodles and chuckles during an argument between her parents; she opens a bag of snacks during a harrowing film about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Levity intrudes every time Renoir signals toward tragedy, a touch of lightness that keeps this film both unpredictable and relatable.

Hayakawa shows genuine skill in developing and maintaining this light touch, and the film is best when it indulges in little grace notes, expressive details less tethered to narrative necessity. The image of Fuki sitting behind her mother on a scooter crossing a bridge, gently touching the billowing fabric of her mother’s blouse in the wind, is really beautiful. There’s a striking observation in an early funeral scene about whether mourners cry for the dead or for themselves, a question that’s not as cruelly unfeeling as it may sound, but rather dispassionately perceptive. If all these little details don’t accrue into something particularly impactful in the moment, their power lies in their sincerity and astuteness, and in Hayakawa’s sensitive rendering, and in their meaningful meaninglessness.

Eschewing establishing shots, Hayakawa emphasizes real experience over narrative remove — Renoir feels less like a story than like a true account, lived as much by the viewer as by the characters. Even its most expressive moments feel real, focused as they are on sensations and feelings that engender identification. One never feels the cogs spinning, advancing some linear plot from a definite beginning to a definite end. Like life, it just keeps drifting through, from pain to joy and everything in between. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Hen

In 2002, Hungarian director Pálfi György released his first film Hukkle to near-universal acclaim. The title, which is an onomatopoeia for the sound of a hiccup, was a 78-minute kaleidoscope, not so much a narrative film as a collection of highly unusual vignettes regarding the surrealism lurking just below the surface of rural village life. One of the most assured debut features of the decade, Hukkle announced Pálfi as a major new director. Alas, Pálfi fumbled the bag with his sophomore effort, 2006’s Taxidermia. A triptych of deeply unpleasant stories about three generations of revolting men, the film felt like nothing so much as a combination of Terry Gilliam’s cartoonish grotesquerie and Ulrich Seidl’s smug misanthropy. Pálfi has released six features in the intervening years, all to relative indifference. Meanwhile, the festival world turned its attention to Pálfi’s countryman Kórnel Mundruczó, despite his films being even more ridiculous than Taxidermia. Programmers can be a fickle bunch.

But Pálfi is back with a very unusual new film entitled Hen. Returning to some extent to the interest in the natural world that was so winning in Hukkle, Hen can be slotted very neatly into the current moment in global cinema. Borrowing from both the post-Balthasarianisms of Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO and the restrained barnyard anthropomorphism of Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda, Hen is the life story of a very soulful chicken. (The unnamed protagonist is portrayed by a total of eight stand-hens.) The film opens in an egg processing factory in Greece, where we observe the Big Agra circle of life. Some eggs are packaged to be sold as food, while others are permitted to hatch. Those baby chicks are then sent through a series of conveyor belts and sorting machines until they arrive at their very crowded, non-free-range accommodations. But wait! There’s one baby chick who stands apart from the rest, its scraggly black features a stark contrast to the sea of fuzzy yellow. This will be our titular hen, and her adventures have just begun.

It’s worth noting here that, although Pálfi does insist that no animals were harmed in the making of Hen and the moments that depict the deaths of fauna wild and domesticated are clearly achieved with judicious editing, this is nevertheless a film that probably could not be made in North America, even though the indignities that befall these hundreds of baby birds are simply documentary footage of stuff that happens every day, all over the world. There are certain moments where one suspects that Pálfi may have used AI, especially a scene of conflagration in which the hen nearly gets completely Kentucky-fried. But all indications are that Hen does its dirty work with montage, misdirection, and practical effects.

Quite by chance, the hen ends up living with the owner of a seaside restaurant (Yannis Kokiasmenos), his daughter (Maria Diakopanagiotou), and her criminal boyfriend (Argyris Pandazaras), a customs agent who is involved in a human smuggling operation. As was the case in Bresson’s Balthasar, the hen is an uncomprehending witness to the cruelty of venal bipeds, but whereas the donkey was characterized by his impassive, forlorn stare, Pálfi gets some truly quizzical and often very droll reaction shots from his fowl players. At its core, Hen is a testament to the enduring power of the Kuleshov effect. See someone get shot, then cut to a goggle-eyed chicken, and our cognition does the rest. Then again, a lot of the time Pálfi just hangs back and lets his poultry do what comes naturally — there are no fewer than four separate scenes of chicken sex in Hen. But let’s not shame a lady for enjoying a good cock.

Despite engaging with serious themes, Hen is firmly a dark comedy. The film uses the animal perspective to depict humankind as animalistic in its own way, but it’s not above a bit of emotional goosing. Pálfi has insinuated himself into the Greek Weird Wave, and it’s a good look on him. It would not be at all surprising if Hen proved to be a minor hit, and it will certainly put Pálfi back in the global cinema conversation. But it’s above all a heroine’s journey, at certain moments a live-action Chicken Run with a few elements of Toy Story thrown in the pot. This chicken does indeed cross the road, and as luck would have it, her predator never gets to the other side. In fact, Hen is a picaresque of unlikely triumph, one that unlike Balthasar, EO, or Gunda, ends with the mother hen outlasting her caretakers and tormentors alike. She gets a new beginning, and by embracing an unexpected optimism, Pálfi once again gives us something to crow about. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Wizard of the Kremlin

“More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner mechanics of the Kremlin within a more human framework only feels natural. As in the aftermath of cascading geopolitical crises that shattered our grip on reality in front of our very eyes, a pressing question has emerged: how the hell did we even get here? And who is responsible for all this misery…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — HUGO EMMERZAEL

Bad Apples

Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples takes place somewhere in the United Kingdom, most likely a studio somewhere near Bristol, though it may as well be mistaken for a Scandinavian black comedy. Etzler, a Swede, deploys the genre’s well-worn vocabulary. There’s stark minimalism, a static, watchful camera, and clinical detachment toward its characters. But the effect is somewhat forgettable in execution. Where a master like Roy Andersson uses austerity to crack open the abyss of human absurdity, Etzler’s touch in Bad Apples is less adept. Despite being well-made, playful, and nasty, Bad Apples ultimately does not pack much of a punch.

Maria (Saoirse Ronan), a disillusioned primary school teacher, kidnaps and holds one of her students hostage. That “bad apple” is Danny (Eddie Waller), an 11-year-old with a mullet and the hollow-eyed stare of a delinquent-in-training. He looks ready for a Skins casting call, even if it’s a few years too early. He clocks Maria’s incompetency from the get-go, and during a school field trip to an apple orchard, his tossed shoe brings an entire sorting system to a shuddering halt. Cinematographer Nea Asphäll captures Maria in the aftermath: she’s so small, engulfed by the vast machinery of the orchard, and framed in a way that emphasizes her slight stature and vulnerability. She is clearly not a threat to anyone, unlike Danny.

Casting Ronan is a clever inversion. She’s often the face of resilient self-possession on screen, whether in Brooklyn or Little Women, but she achieves the opposite in Bad Apples, playing against type and further demonstrating her versatility as an actor. Rather than standing up for herself, Maria becomes the definition of a wet noodle. She has no social life, and her vices aren’t even cool — mainly, she plays farm video games until her eyes glaze over while she’s staring at the screen. Everyone bullies Maria, too, and her authority evaporates the moment she enters the classroom. But because Bad Apples is so stylized, Maria never feels tethered to the real world. Her exhaustion, lack of recognition, and desire for a better “work-life balance” read more like jokes than genuine struggles or personal failings. And even her students know she’s a people-pleaser, publicly admonishing her with statements like, “Miss, my mom thinks you’re incompetent,” because they know she won’t reprimand them. This passivity eventually curdles into exasperation, and it becomes hard to care for her, let alone root for her.

Because Maria is so frustrating, allegiance shifts toward Danny. Scandinavian black comedies tend to subvert the usual markers of identification we expect in conventional narratives, so Danny, the little Devil himself, eventually evokes bleak sympathy. Danny is revealed to be illiterate, and the irony cuts deep: Maria, perhaps the worst teacher in the world, never even noticed. Only once Danny has been kidnapped and is being held in captivity does she finally attempt to teach him how to read. Penned up like an animal with a harness, Danny’s situation reads like a cruel joke until the light leaves his eyes. Eventually, Maria and Danny start playing video games together in the makeshift dungeon she’s created for him, replete with a portable toilet and bunk bed. It’s sweet, until it’s sickening. Danny has simply lost his bite, or perhaps he’s succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome.

The outside world brightens while Danny is locked up, and Maria’s life seems to improve. The film’s use of fluorescent lighting underscores the artifice of her newly minted contentment, and when she finally gains some control over her day-to-day life, Maria drifts into a fragile ease that nonetheless feels temporary. The classroom runs a little smoother, her small victories feel meaningful, and the absurdity of her existence becomes almost bearable, but she hasn’t truly changed. A new troublemaker emerges, Pauline (Nia Brown), one of Danny’s early victims. Unlike Danny, she’s not overtly hostile, and yet, she’s worse — she’s annoying. With braces, red hair, and tone-deaf singing, she tests Maria’s patience in ways that feel almost petty, yet she’s treated as a legitimate threat once Danny fizzles away. Pauline recalls Tracy Flick in Election: she’s sharp, offputting, and unlikely to make friends; she’s not benign exactly, but she also doesn’t break anybody’s bones like Danny. This development reveals how the film is undermined by a sexist dichotomy that casts women as either meek, like Maria, or manipulative, like Pauline.

Unfortunately, strong performances from Ronan, Waller, and Brown can’t save Bad Apples. The film contains a healthy dose of pleasant nastiness, but it’s rendered forgettable by the end. The dark humor and petty cruelty are superficially entertaining, but without any substantive commentary to give any of this acerbicness real weight, Bad Apples loses its bite. As a result, the film drifts along as an amusing but ultimately shallow exercise, offering shock and discomfort without insight, leaving little to linger after the credits roll. — CLARA CUCCARO

Wavelengths 3: Slightest Pretense

The third and final Wavelengths group program, Slightest Pretense, is a decidedly mixed bag, although it does contain the two best films in the entire series. The program takes its name from the title of Eri Saito’s film, and inasmuch as a specific theme can be identified among the six works in the show, it has to do with an expanded idea of landscape. In the nineties and through the noughts, landscape cinema proved to be a dominant trend in experimental film, perhaps best exhibited by the films of James Benning, Rose Lowder, and the late Peter Hutton. As we have seen with the newer iterations of structural film, filmmakers have taken this somewhat classical form and found new ways to adapt it, exploring how specific locales can reveal deeper social connections as well as a materialist connection to history. This is a tendency we see in the films of Shambhavi Kaul, Jodie Mack, Ben Rivers, and many others. Whether or not it is intentional, these contemporary filmmakers seem to have tapped into Japanese maverick Masao Adachi’s “landscape theory,” in the sense that relations of power can be critically read in otherwise ordinary spaces. A mode of filmmaking with its origins in 19th and 20th century painting and photography, the new landscape cinema permits us to examine locations as accretions of community and conflict, and not simply as the empty void in which human history happens.

This is always a complicated matter, and one of the benefits of experimental film is that it can provide a laboratory in which these issues can be explored. Saito’s film, Slightest Pretense, is based on Cogwheels, a posthumously published novel by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Thought to be a partly autobiographical work, it is the story of a young man whose grasp on reality is shaken by optical phenomena in his perception, specifically a plethora of translucent cogwheels whirling in his line of sight. Although the tenor of the novel suggests that these hallucinations are reflective of his inner turmoil, it is more likely they were part of a chronic migraine aura, specifically a condition known as “scintillating scotoma.” Saito shows us a young man (Hisao Kurozumi) who is attempting to go about his day but is continually distracted by visual disturbances. He looks at the ocean, the park, the hills, and he is disoriented by a heightened glare. In an interesting bit of synecdoche, Saito essentially uses the thick, swirling grain of 8mm film to stand in for the aura that the man is experiencing.

But one thing that’s odd about Slightest Pretense is the fact that, while Saito mentions scintillating scotoma in the press materials for the film, there is no indication within the film that this is part of her subject. So as one watches Pretense, there’s a disconnection between the point of view shots that comprise the non-narrative elements (and their intense use of natural light) and the actor’s movement throughout the space. A fictional space is implied, but unlike certain other allusive, narrative-adjacent experimentalists, like Lewis Klahr or Zachary Epcar, Saito has some trouble bringing these two strands of material into conversation. Originally Slightest Pretense was part of a larger gallery installation, and it’s possible that some of the paracinematic elements in that exhibition helped contextualize the film in ways that just don’t come across when it’s presented on its own. Saito’s subject is a fascinating one, and it taps into a particular strain of somatic explanation for modernist invention. Over the years, various critics have suggested that modernist vision may have some biological basis, from Van Gogh’s spirals of color to Picasso’s jagged planes. These hypotheses are interesting as far as they go, but they also have the potential to pathologize formal experimentation. I don’t think for a minute that that’s what Saito is trying to do, but Slightest Pretense doesn’t really guard against it either.

In terms of experimental narratives, Land of Barbar by Tunisian filmmaker Fredj Moussa is a simpler but more successful film, one that is plainspoken while at the same time hinting at deeper mysteries. Moussa has loosely adapted a part of The Decameron, but explicitly narrative meaning only exists in the prologue and epilogue. As Land of Barbar begins, we are on the beach and see a boat in the distance. Soon it arrives on land, and a young woman with a veil looks down into the craft to see another woman, sans veil, sleeping. She wakes up and asks where she is, and she is informed that she is “near Sousse, in the land of Barbar.” The woman in the veil is the narrator, and she mentions that she could tell the woman in the boat was Christian “by her clothes.” The two communicate in Latin, and we recognize that Moussa is setting up a kind of cross-cultural gaze. We see the young Tunisian woman encounter the (presumed) Westerner, and we perceive her as she does. Then, the film does some rather interesting things.

Moussa shows us close-ups of locals, including shepherds and fishermen. We see a close-up of two hands holding unleavened bread. Another hand holds up a fish. We see a donkey’s head poking into the frame. All of these shots are static, and have a flat, declarative character, somewhere between Eisenstein and Bresson. But their contents, as well as their sunlit evenness, gives the sense of a highly formal anthropological film. We are seeing images that suggest metonymy, not so much representing themselves but standing in for “coastal Tunisian culture.” But then, this metonymic reduction appears to be from the point of view of the Western visitor. She is lost and trying to get her bearings, and so her engagement with her surroundings is nominative rather than experiential. Toward the end, Moussa gives us wider shots, situating his performers in broader contexts, but at least three times, we see them with tentpoles across their shoulders, wearing large swaths of cloth in a configuration that is part apparel, part shelter. Moussa ends by saluting “the Barbarians,” and although Land of Barbar isn’t reducible to a single meaning, the film does seem to jokingly critique the ethnographic gaze, the tendency to see people not as individuals but as representatives of their culture, part of the landscape.

On a purely formal level, Blake Williams’ FELT is the most radical in the program, since it most dramatically deviates from the standard mode of cinematic vision. For years, Williams has been at the forefront of adapting 3D image technologies for personal and philosophical ends. Whereas mainstream use of 3D tends to apply a veneer of tactility to otherwise diversionary entertainment, Williams pushes it in the direction of Cézanne, inviting the viewer to lose themselves in the strange anomalies that exist between flatness and depth. While watching FELT, those familiar with Williams’ film work will notice some echoes of earlier efforts. From the curling waves, reprised from his 2017 feature film PROTOTYPE, to the reappearance of origami, which was one of the motifs of his Many a Swan (2012), Williams appears to be on a sentimental journey. Based in part on a road trip across the U.S. that the filmmaker took with his parents, FELT is an exploration of how 3D technology can visually define the landscape of a nation that, to borrow a term from Herbert Marcuse, is becoming increasingly one-dimensional. The film begins with images of mountains seen through an old Viewmaster toy. The still frames give way to moving images, initially night shots of passing streetlamps, as one might’ve done as a kid lying back and looking up from the back seat. Then we see a more conventional landscape rushing past as the car speeds down the highway.

We hear pop songs along with bits of talk radio and DJ chatter, and the middle American landscape looks awfully flat. We can see planes receding and, once Williams shows us some canyons and hillsides, we can see the paradoxical optical work of the 3D, making these sublime vistas appear like stage sets. Even as we see people moving through this space, it feels somehow cramped and concertinaed, Williams’ cinematography emphasizing the device, a “cinema of attractions” that asks to look at how we’re looking just as much as the scenes we and Williams are looking at. The landscape of the American West becomes a metaphor even as it insists upon its intractability, its Mesozoic thereness. Williams, a Texan who has lived in Toronto for several years, seems to find himself at a creasing point, poised on the fold between native and outsider. Is this the country he once lived in? Can it be saved? Rather than make a fetish of these purple mountain majesties, Williams suggests that we must put our eyes to work, reassemble the national space, in order to reclaim its depth and make it habitable once more. FELT is precise but also deeply personal, a notable stylistic shift for Williams and easily one of the best experimental films of the year.

Another filmmaker who has explored the cinematic potentials of optical play, Björn Kämmerer often tends to instigate small, almost imperceptible changes within a reduced frame of reference. Like a number of his Austrian peers, Kämmerer has been deeply influenced by structural film, but chooses to take its precepts in somewhat different directions. Whereas “classical” structuralism was largely ontological, investigating how the human mind perceives sounds and images, Kämmerer’s contemporary mode is more epistemological. How do we know which sounds and images to trust? When is deception a bit of fun cinematic gamesmanship, and when is it outright deceit? His new film CONFERENCE has a rather ironic title. Just as Kämmerer’s 2018 film Arena actually showed everything but the arena, CONFERENCE implies a collection of people but, for the most part, we only ever see one at a time.

Then again, there are more people assembled around this campfire than it would first appear. Using a rotating camera, Kämmerer moves the viewer around the fire, revealing a man on the left and then a man on the right. They don’t speak. Every so often when we are shown one man straight on, we see the shadow of the other man’s head or shoulder. The filmic syntax of CONFERENCE tells us fairly early on what we can expect from the film, but before we’ve realized it, Kämmerer is toying with us. In some respects, he is showing us less than meets the eye: sequences are so nondescript that it takes a minute to recognize they’re being repeated. But in other ways, there’s a lot more to be seen, and it takes a constant testing and revision of our awareness to really see the film. If a certain strain of academic film theory places the viewer in the driver’s seat, Karmmerer shows us that it’s difficult to make sense of the moving vehicle we call reality.

Austria is represented by two of the six films in Wavelengths 3. Whereas Kämmerer’s work often feigns minimalism to provoke a perceptual chiasmus, Friedl vom Gröller’s poetic shorts are poignant precisely because they are modest and unassuming. One of at least two new films vom Gröller has released this year (the other one, Emergency Exit, debuted at the Berlinale), Conditio Humana follows the filmmaker’s trusty template. For years now she has been producing the cinematic equivalent of sketchbook drawings, works that tell us a little bit on their own but resonate more broadly across her entire corpus. Under three minutes, as FvG’s films usually are, Conditio combines portraiture with classical statuary in a sort of temporal collapse of then and now. After all, if there is anything that can truly be called the human condition, it must include commonalities as well as differences, the eternal alongside the transitory. At one point vom Gröller shows us a young man and woman in a doorway, suddenly going their separate ways and revealing a piazza beyond the threshold. This seconds-long gesture tells us so much about love’s ebb and flow, and points both to the world outside and the fact that hundreds of other couples have stood in that same spot over the centuries.

The penultimate film in the program, Morgenkreis (“Morning Circle”) by Palestinian filmmaker Basma Al-Sharif, is a major work by any measure, and if the reader will indulge me, I want to discuss it at some length. It is rare that a film succeeds in both aesthetic and political terms, but Morgenkreis absolutely does, which makes it not only one of the best films of the year, but also one of the most urgent. It adopts a number of recognizable filmic languages in order to reveal their authoritarian undercurrents, and this permits Al-Sharif to patch into the affect associated with those modes and direct those energies in unexpected ways.

Morgenkreis begins with a series of traveling shots through the windows and sunroof of a moving car. The vehicle is moving through the center of Berlin, past Potsdamer Platz and eventually into an apartment block in what’s clearly a poor section of town. Throughout, there is a series of synthesizer chords, a vaguely noirish soundtrack from a stereotypically European film. The angles, the shots of the buildings, the overcast lighting and the texture of the celluloid, all very much suggest a sort of late-20th century thriller, the sort of project that Dominik Graf does so well. Clearly influenced by Fassbinder but much chillier and more controlled, it’s an establishing shot that gives us a damaged, dangerous Berlin. As the Steadicam moves through the plaza and up the stairs, we eventually end up in a man’s apartment. This is Mr. Abrahamyan (Panos Aprahamian), an Armenian immigrant who lives there with his young son Adnan (Mohammad Ali).

The man is smoking in the shadows near his windows. Almost immediately he is accosted by a disembodied German voice. “Do you plan to stay in Germany? Are you permitted to leave? Do you identify with Germany?” and on and on. We soon realize that this camera is attached to a specific point of view, that of an unseen agent of the state, questioning Abrahamyan in an official or unofficial capacity. For his part, he answers casually and with some slight disdain. “What does your child’s mother do?” “Well, you should ask her.” The situation that Al-Sharif has staged here is complex because it’s moving in multiple directions at once. The German voice speaks with the full authority of national prerogative, and given the fact that this interrogation is happening in Abrahamyan’s own home, we get a clear sense that these are questions that are demanded of him, and of other immigrants, all the time, whether or not they are actually being posed. The voice of protectionism, of institutional power, of the general atmosphere of the AfD right wing, is ever-present.

Al-Sharif’s sound design is particularly noteworthy. She uses different musical soundtracks — the synthesizer theme, some Arabic hip-hop, etc. — and suddenly cuts to silence. This makes the questions Abrahamyan is facing seem that much more abrupt and intrusive. We see him getting Adnan ready for kindergarten. They watch a little TV, the dad clips his son’s fingernails, and we see the traces of their lives in the apartment. There are marker drawings on the fridge, and half-completed art projects on the coffee table. It is all very warm and intimate, until we remember that our visual mapping of this space is aligned with the authoritarian gaze.

As they set out for school, Adnan plays a bit on the playground, and he and Abrahamyan kick a soccer ball around. The camera follows them at a low angle, which makes these scenes rather unnerving, like the surveilling eye is now fixated on Adnan. Soon, we are at the door of Adnan’s class, and his dad tries to drop him off. But he is scared and doesn’t want to go. Three different kindergarten teachers, all warm and smiling and reassuring, try to coax Adnan inside, and eventually one of them has to gently restrain the child as his father walks away. The other children are sitting in their morning circle, waiting for Adnan to join them. Once he is inside, we see the kids and adults dancing, playing, making music, and a joyous song by Egyptian musician Maurice Louca plays on the soundtrack. Al-Sharif uses a spinning, 360° camera to show the activities in the kindergarten, and this is blended with scenes outside the Abrahamyans’ apartment, as well as a group of people walking down a street en masse, some sort of caravan or perhaps a protest. Finally, we see Adnan on the playground, spinning around until he gets dizzy and falls down.

There is a reading of these final scenes that is uniformly positive, indicative of the pitfalls of liberal thinking that Al-Sharif so skillfully avoids. It is true that, compared with the interrogation received by the boy’s father, the kindergarten is a welcoming place. It’s a space filled with happy children of several different cultures and races, and the adults are clearly nurturing. But Adnan’s trepidation reminds us that this school is another official space of German authority, and no amount of goodwill or anti-racist intentions can change that fact. Somehow Adnan understands that he is not entirely safe in this place, regardless of the fact that the space is populated by people who appear to be actively working against prejudice. With Morning Circle, Al-Sharif shows us that the reach of the nation is insidious. It creeps into the immigrant’s daily life, enforcing a sense of never truly belonging. This is a legacy of oppression, one that cannot simply be wished away. It must be constantly negotiated, and on some level Adnan has already learned this sad truth. The same actor who questions his father’s right to be a German, a man named Philip Widman, also plays one of the kindly schoolteachers.

Al-Sharif’s achievement here is to make us feel the palpable double-consciousness, the uncanny sense of threat, that permeates “benevolent” host nations like a noxious gas. It is a pressure that doesn’t relent, and it is made even more insidious because we often cannot point to it or describe it. In fact, it may appear to be entirely absent. But immigrant minorities feel this pressure everywhere. They internalize it, it hovers in the most private spaces, and follows them like a photographic drone. We perceive it but have trouble even explaining its existence, in large part because liberals need to believe it is no longer there. That pressure, that omniscient surveilling eye, is the State. Morning Circle describes this phenomenon. It points to it, and demands that we too feel its contours as it closes in around us, by force or with a welcoming smile. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Seasons

“In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, which she co-directed with Miguel Gomes, Fazendeiro took an unusual approach to that problem. It was ostensibly a film about another film project that was derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and she and Gomes chose to arrange that film in chapters which were then shown in reverse order. The pandemic and lockdown, of course, generated their own bizarre sense of temporality, a distended twilight zone in which days and weeks were lost, even as the hours and minutes seemed to interminably drag…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MICHAEL SICINSKI