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This week’s guide is all about families lost and found and misfits bucking the system. I’m recommending a new documentary about a transformative program that unites girls with their incarcerated fathers, a film about familial resilience in the face of gentrification, a screening series focused on the singular Carol Kane, Patricia Rozema’s sensual odes to misfits, a semi-autobiographical drama about rise of skateboarding culture in the 1970s, a look at the Mexico City punk scene in the 1980s, and a powerful Palestinian documentary about healing the emotional wounds inflicted by decades of occupation.
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Garett Bradley's Oscar-nominated documentary Time follows Sibil Fox Richardson as she fights for the release of her husband Rob, who has been sentenced to a 60-year prison sentence after engaging in an armed bank robbery. The film uses twenty years worth of home video footage to illuminate Richardson's abolitionist goals, but also her efforts to keep her family -- the two have six children -- whole. The title refers not just to the time Rob is serving, but also the time his wife, and especially his children, have lost during this long separation from him. I thought of Bradley's evocative film when I saw Natalie Rae and Angela Patton's equally poetic and heartening documentary Daughters, during Sundance earlier this year. Patton is the CEO of Girls For A Change, an organization that began a program called Date With Dad Weekend. Inspired by the needs of the girls Patton worked with in the community, the program offers a chance for these girls to connect with their incarcerated fathers -- and also gives the fathers the tools to rebuild their relationships while incarcerated, and to find the resiliency to keep their families together once they are released. The four girls at the center of Daughters could not be more different in their personalities, but their needs for love and their desire to have their fathers in their lives unites them. Rae and Patton, along with cinematographer Michael "Cambio" Fernandez, film these girls with such a light touch that it's almost as if they're not there at all. The journeys of these girls are their own, and so the film's most emotional sequences arise naturally, leaving the viewer quietly devastated, and deeply moved. Both Time and Daughters illuminate the rot that is the U.S.'s prison industrial complex and the way that many of its ill-advised policies do more harm than good. But both films also offer a glimpse at a better way forward for everyone. You can watch Time on Prime (or buy the Blu-ray from Criterion) and watch Daughters on Netflix. After you watch, be sure to read my interview with co-directors Rae and Patton.
I really loved Monica Sorelle’s debut feature film Mountains when I saw it out of TIFF last year. The film, which takes its name from the Haitian proverb, “Behind mountains, there are more mountains,” features tremendous performances from Sheila Anozier and Atibon Nazaire as a couple living in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami whose American Dream begins to shift as the realities of gentrification begin to set in. Nazaire is Xavier, an Haitian immigrant who works in demolition. Anozier is Esperance, his wife who works as a school crossing guard and freelance seamstress. Chris Renois is Junior, their son and aspiring comedian who finds himself a little bit lost as he shifts between his two worlds. When a quaint house comes on the market in their neighborhood, Xavier and Esperance think maybe their dreams of upward mobility will become a reality at last. That is, until Xavier realizes the for most, the American Dream is really just a bitter lie, like a picture postcard you tape to a plaster wall. Sorelle and her co-writer Robert Colom paint a rich portrait of this community, with a visual language that has shades of both Charles Burnett and Chantal Akerman. This film truly took my breath away. It opens this week at the Coral Gables Art Cinema in Florida before expanding over the next few weeks, including the Gene Siskel Film Center at the end of the month. You can see the film’s theatrical rollout schedule here. You can also read
’ interview with Sorelle here.In New York City, the Metrograph theater is in the midst of a series celebrating the singular Carol Kane. The eight-film series includes three films directed by women. Kane received a best actress Oscar nomination for her stunning turn in Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street. She stars as Gitl, a Jewish immigrant who arrives with her son to live with her husband Yankel (Steven Keats) in New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century. To Gitl’s shock, Yankel has embraced assimilation, turning his back on their traditions, changing his name to Jake, and even taking a lover. A few years ago I was asked to program a film for a series about “strong female characters.” I chose this film because I think Gitl’s determination to hold on to her beliefs and to craft the most loving home she can for her son, no matter what the world around her pressures her to do, is the kind of strength we should all aspire towards. Kane shows a completely different side of herself in iconoclastic artist Cindy Sherman’s sole feature film Office Killer. A hilariously bleak workplace satire and horror comedy all in one, Kane plays mousy magazine copy editor Dorine, who is often tormented by the magazine’s tyrannical editor (Barbara Sukowa). Due to budget cuts, Dorine begins to work from home. When she’s called into the office one night to help a co-worker fix a computer, a terrible accident ensues, unleashing the darker impulses hidden below Dorine’s timid surface. Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and a young Michael Imperioli round out the film’s ensemble cast. Lastly, there is Karen Arthur’s independently produced psychodrama The Mafu Cage, co-starring Lee Grant. This film has been on my watchlist for ages and I so wish I could see it for the first time on the big screen because its plot sounds absolutely bonkers and the imagery I’ve seen is so completely beguiling. If you go, let me know what you think! To accompany the series, Nathan Silver had an illuminating conversation Kane about her 50+ year career, which you can read here.
I wrote a bit about Patricia Rozema’s films when I interviewed the trailblazing Canadian filmmaker earlier this year about her amazing career to accompanying a handful of retrospective screenings that were happening in NYC and Los Angeles. I am happy to report several of her films are now streaming on the Kino Film Collection: I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, White Room, When Night Is Falling, and Mouthpiece. My favorite of these four films is her 1995 romantic drama When Night Is Falling. Pascale Bussières plays Camille, a reserved, yet deeply passionate professor at a religious college. She's in a longterm, but relatively lifeless relationship with another professor named Martin (Henry Czerny). Martin is being groomed to take over as university chaplain, with the administration hinting that couple better tie the knot before that happens. At the same time Camille's dog runs away and dies after being struck by a car. Camille has a breakdown in a laundromat, where she meets the alluring Petra (Rachael Crawford). She is immediately drawn to the mysterious woman, who she later learns is a is a circus performer. A lot of velvet-draped, perfectly 90s sapphic eroticism ensues. Many of the themes that often reoccur in Rozema's films -- and her life -- are explored at length here, as the film ruminates on myths and Christianity, on human nature vs “moral law,” on openness vs closeted behavior, on fear vs safety, on the stifle of the city vs the healing power nature, on acts of performing vs observing. I just absolutely love this film and I hope you will too!
Co-presented by the HollyShorts Film Festival, Catherine Hardwicke’s sophomore film Lords of Dogtown, will be screening this Sunday at 6:00pm at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre. The film was inspired by the true-life story of three teenage surfers, Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk), Stacy Peralta (John Robinson), and Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch) growing up in 1970s Venice, California who radicalized the sport of skateboarding. Heath Ledger is like a shot of lightning in his early supporting role as surf shop owner Skip Engblom, who co-formed the Zephyr skate team aka the Z-Boys. In a piece of perfectly Y2K trivia, before Hardwicke took over the reigns of the film the project had been slated to be directed first by David Fincher. After he dropped his was allegedly going to be replaced by Fred Durst! Hardwicke, who will be on hand for a Q&A after the screening, brought to the project the same frenetic energy as her debut feature film Thirteen. You can get tickets for the event here.
Turning their cameras on the punk scene of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (offten called Neza for short by those who live there), an economically neglected municipality on the outskirts of Mexico City, video artist Sarah Minter and her partner, filmmaker Gregorio Rocha, captured the essence of an era. Crafting a close relationship with a group of teenagers who called themselves Mierdas Punk (Punk Shits), the filmmakers gave the kids an opportunity to share their stories, their feelings, their hopes and dreams and fears with the world. The films in Criterion Channel's Mexico City Punk collection blend fiction and documentary, using the textures of both 16mm film and video tape to ensure the rawness of this scene remained intact, unpolished, and unapologetic. Rocha's short film Shit Saturday follows the Mierdas over one single Saturday, their youthful exuberance clashing against their already worldweary nihilism. This same tension is the root of Minter's documentary Nobody Is Innocent, in which she follows teenager Kara after he decides to part ways with the group. It's hard to watch someone so young already so completely lost, in search of nothing and living without any joy because he's already so broken down he can’t even imagine a future. Minter revisits the Mierdas decades later with her follow-up documentary Nobody Is Innocent: Twenty Years Later, which is both filled with more hope than the first film, but also even deeper sorrows. Lastly, Minter's docufiction Alma Punk follows the titular Alma (Ana Hernández) as she eeks out a life on the margins, screen printing t-shirts, digging through piles at the dump for things to sell to make her rent payment, rehearsing radical plays and making fanzines. Alma is a nonconformist, living life on her terms as best she can. As I watched the film, I felt the spirit of Sarah Jacobson (who hadn't yet started her journey towards DIY filmmaking), as well as aspects of Susan Seidelman's punk character study Smithereens and News From Home, Chantal Akerman's ode of long distance mother-daughter relationships, but ultimately the film becomes something totally, transcendentally its own.
This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is Azza El-Hassan’s 3 cm Less. The title takes its name from the notion that, as of 2003 when the film was made, the next generation of Palestinians, due to the on-going occupation and the poverty it imposes, are going to be 3cm shorter than their parents. El-Hassan takes this biological idea as as jumping off point to craft a film that looks at the ramifications of decades of occupation through an emotional lens as well. The daughter of Palestinian refugees, El-Hassan was born in Jordan and lived part of her childhood in Lebanon, before attending university in Scotland, and ultimately deciding to return to her homeland of Palestine to make films. She knows the emotional toll of occupation intimately. Her film follows two threads, both inspired by the thorny relationships her friends have with their parents. The first is a portrait of Hagar, a mother of ten who brought her children back to Palestine from Colombia after her husband died. Three of her grown children, Samia, Surida and Sarah, asked El-Hassan to make a film that would help them reconcile their complicated feelings towards their mother. The second thread was inspired by Ra'eda, who wants to reconnect with her father Ali, who was killed when she was just a girl during an attempted airplane hijacking in 1975. Ra’eda thinks that by speaking with people who knew her father, maybe she can let go of the anger she has at him for abandoning her family in favor of the struggle for liberation. These are serious subjects, but El-Hassan wisely approaches them with a tongue-in-cheek tone that playfully deconstructs the way Palestinians have often been presented merely folkloric heroes, rather than the real, complex, messy human beings that they actually are. You can watch the film here on Vimeo.
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i'm seeing OFFICE KILLER tmrw!