By: Henry J. Fromage –
Well, my gambit just about paid off. I bought the Award Winners Package guessing that despite my cramming every free moment with Sundance flicks the last week and a half, there would still be 8 flicks I didn’t catch get awarded. Well, there were five, which ain’t bad.
64. Navalny
The last film announced of the Sundance Film Festival wasn’t revealed until Monday, which was also the last day the main slate was debuting films. With the imminent threat of a Putin invasion of the Ukraine in the news, the reasoning may have had something to do with how dangerous this film feels- after all, who makes a documentary exposing the willingness of Putin to poison anyone anywhere without at least a small pit forming in their stomach? In any case, Daniel Roher’s portrait of Russian opposition leader, lawyer, and activist Alexander Navalny, in the period of time between his poisoning in Russian airspace, his long recovery first in Omsk and then in a safer, further Bavaria, and his unquestionably brave, maybe foolhardy return to his native land where he is assured some form of martyrdom is a stunning document of a struggle for freedom playing out right. now. This is history happening as we speak, and hopefully just the beginning. A Toast.
65. Leonor Will Never Die
Martika Ramirez Escobar makes her debut in this extremely winning and playfully complex story of Leonor, the queen of Filipino action films, whose heyday is long enough ago that her power is constantly in danger of being shut off and she’s living with one son who dreams of heading abroad while mourning the other who died young and whose ghost literally still walks the house. When she’s hit by a plummeting television set, she’s thrust in the kitschy lo-fi world of an action film script she’d been working on with him. From there the film plays out entertainingly in ways you’d expect (the world of the film is non-stop gold) and ways you wouldn’t (the Adaptation comparisons are not for nothing). A joy. Two Beers.
66. blood
This won the Uncompromising Artistic Vision award, and it wasn’t until yesterday that director Bradley Rust Gray revealed that it was inspired by Michelle Williams’ mourning for Heath Ledger, with Williams originally slated to star until she decided it was still too close to her to do so. I saw some of the influence of Gray’s spouse So Yong Kim, herself a perceptive director specializing in low-key drama, as well in the story of a photographer played by Carla Juri who is traveling Japan for work and her friendship with a man played by Takashi Ueno who has a young daughter with Down’s Syndrome. It’s only gradually that we begin to realize this is a story about grief, as Juri seems to be possibly the most well-adjusted and cheerful character until she doesn’t. The entire film is comprised of beautifully shot vignettes about the lives and experiences of the characters, with the barest structure of a narrative emerging over time. I can see how it’s not for everyone, but I found it to be a very affecting approach. Two Beers.
65. A House Made of Splinters
The majority of the awards-winners I missed were documentaries, which I think is more a function of how consistently strong the documentary slate has been the last several years than my inability to choose the best ones when buying tickets. This one is about a children’s home not far from the front lines of the Donbass conflict in Ukraine, where most of the children are staying while awaiting the custody decision of a court. This was a hopeless place even before the war, with the eternally patient director of the institute telling the camera how often these childrens’ lives are a vicious circle of neglect, substance abuse, and eventually returning to visit their own children who’ve been taken from them as the cycle begins anew. Despite this, director Simon Lereng Wilmont shows the irrepressibility of these kids, too- despite their ordeals and the terrifying specificity of the scary stories they tell each other, they’re still very much children full of potential and even joy. Three Beers.
68. All that Breathes
This documentary is about a three Muslim men who run a hospital for raptors in New Delhi, doing their best to care for the constant stream of injured and sick birds that come in at a rate that appears exacerbated by the ever-increasing pollution in their urban space. They also need to contend with the anti-Muslim violence and discriminatory political climate that has exploded in recent years. Filmmaker Shaunak Sen shoots stunning footage of life in the city, from its human and flying denizens to the turtles and boars most would not guess live there down to the bugs skittering across a perfectly reflective puddle. This film sees the beauty in all forms of life. Two Beers
69. Midwives
Our second documentary in a row about the plight of Muslims in non-Muslim majority regions, Hnin Ei Hlaing’s film follows a Buddhist midwife and her Muslim apprentice in the Rakhine region of Myanmar, where a genocide against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya ethnic group has been going on for years. Despite strong community pressure, our midwives insist on carrying on their healthcare mission, their Hippocratic Oath under fire unlike most anywhere else in the world. This is a special kind of bravery, and Hnin finds both the beauty and the fear in their circumstances and the bucolic countryside that surrounds them. Three Beers.
70. Descendant
Yes, another documentary, and a standout one. On July 9th, 1860, the Clotilda arrived in Mobile Bay, carrying the last known group of slaves to be brought into the United States, a practice deemed illegal and punishable by death all the way back in 1808. This was so late that by the end of the Civil War, the people from that ship still knew more of freedom than of bondage, and chose to form their own community, Africatown, outside of Mobile. Margaret Brown details the memories of the descendants of these people, who’ve kept their not terribly remote histories very much alive, as well as the quest to locate the scuttled remains of the Clotilda, the complicity of still rich and powerful families of Mobile in the hiding of its truths, and the ways in which they still oppress the descendants of the people they once owned, particularly in zoning Africatown and its environs as high-pollution industrial land. And so the cycle turns in America, but keeping the remembrance of oppressors and oppressed alive is the one hope we have of breaking it. Two Beers.
71. I Didn’t See You There
Reid Davenport directs, shoots, and narrates this film whose express purpose is to present the world from his point of view- wheelchair-level. He lives, only partially by choice, in Oakland, where the infrastructure is more accommodating than most places for those in wheelchairs, but even there the ignorance and indignities of those that may not intend malice, but obstruct and endanger anyways, is unavoidable. The footage Davenport captures is fascinating, and while some asides, like ruminations on the history of freak shows in response to a circus tent that pops up in his neighborhood, don’t gel with the the material as well, this is a powerful demand for respect and empathy nonetheless. Three Beers.
72. Aftershock
A second documentary about the essentiality of good midwives, this time to the African American community of the United States, which is both the richest country on Earth and the one with the highest childbirth mortality rate of any developed nation, in large part due to the inability to properly care for minority women who experience any kind of complication. Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee do a great job of approaching this subject from both the devastatingly personal and the staggering macro viewpoints of the issue. This is not a problem we should still have in the year 2022. Two Beers.
73. Goodafternoon Sweetdream
The Slamdance Film Festival was originally created by and for independent film producers whose films were rejected by Sundance, and for those interested in poking into what’s happening on the margins and potentially the forefront of the indie film scene, it’s one of the best deals around- 10 bucks to stream the dozens of films in their program. I always opt for a Korean film when available, and this one is certainly in the chatty, structurally interesting but not terribly polished vein of a Hong Sang Soo film (shot in black and white to boot). Bang Seung Hyeon’s story is broken into a series of dreams comprised of conversations between our protagonist and friends and relatives, all circling the subject of the death of her father. The acting and dialogue are worth the price of admission on this one. Three Beers.
74. A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
This film was a festival player last year, but I was able to sneak it in this week on HBO Max anyway. It’s a somewhat conventional biography of an unconventional man- Gordon Parks was the only black staffer of Life Magazine over a broad swathe of time (the 1940s to the 1970s) when it largely through his photojournalistic efforts began to show what life as an African American really looked like. He would go on to become the first major black director in Hollywood with the adaptation of his own memoirs, The Learning Tree, then the forerunner of the blaxploitation genre with his seminal film Shaft. John Maggio rounds up an incredible roster of interviewees to expound on his influence in so many cultural spheres- a must if you’re only somewhat familiar with the man and his legacy. Two Beers.
76. Snow White Dies at the End
This Slamdance pick promised a film with the logline of “In a society where almost everybody farts backwards, six stubborn, proper-farting citizens pay a harsh price for being resolute to staying true to their own values.” I’m sorry to say that’s clearly a tongue-in-cheek marketing joke, but Macedonian writer/director Kristijan Risteski nonetheless delivers an energetic dark comedy with some usually successfully bizarre flourishes that will amuse you. This story of crime, punishment, unconventional romance, and video store proprietorship isn’t terribly like much that you’re likely to have seen, which is a recommendation in and of itself. Three Beers.
