It's like being a bird in a cage.
Weekly Directed By Women Viewing Guide
This week I am recommending one of the best documentaries of the year, a new indie drama, two films with unique emotional spins on time travel, a cheeky ghost story from director Ann Hui, a short spin on Filipino folklore, a singular noir, and a short documentary about life under occupation in Gaza from 1989.
Co-directed by a four Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers and journalists (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor), No Other Land is one of the year’s best films —and one of its most essential. Despite winning two awards at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and playing festivals around the globe, the documentary still does not have U.S. distribution. It is however have an awards-qualifying run at this week at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City and will be released in the UK by Dogwoof on 11/8. I like what Sheila O’Malley wrote in her four-star review at RogerEbert.com, “Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, showing the years-long refugee crisis in the forest borderland between Belarus and Poland, was one of the most upsetting and important films this year. No Other Land stands beside it in equal urgency, hopelessness and anger.” It’s no surprise that both films will be among my top list at the end of the year. Here is a bit from my review when I saw the film at KVIFF in July:
Co-director Basel Adra's first memory is from when he was 5 years old. He was awakened by the light of his father's late-night arrest. At seven years old he attended his first protest. Slowly, Basel realized he comes from a family of activists. His mother helped devise a plan to build the elementary school where he was educated. Her idea was to have the women and children build during the day so soldiers would relatively leave them alone and then have the men secretly build at night. Later we will see footage of Tony Blair visiting the site of this school, impressed that it was built via nonviolent protest. Because there was footage of Blair's seven minute visit to the school, the Israeli Army stopped harassing the people who built it and the building was no longer marked for demolition. "This is a story of power," Basel says.
In the two decades since that incident, Palestinian activists lost their appeals in the Israeli courts and the expulsions were made legal. "They destroy us slowly," Basel says in voiceover. "Every day, another house." Eventually they even come for the school -- while it is still in session. There is footage of the army locking the children into the building, the teachers frantically helping them escape out of a window moments before the bulldozers come and destroy the once saved elementary school.
If you are in New York City you can see the film now at Film at Lincoln Center and in the UK you can find its release schedule here.
The first film released by the new distribution arm of Caryn Coleman’s The Future of Film is Female, Hannah Peterson’s The Graduates is a beautiful coming-of-age drama about a high school senior named Genevieve (Mina Sundwall) who is struggling with survivor’s remorse a year after a school shooting took the life of her boyfriend Tyler. Over the course of the film she re-connects with Tyler’s best friend Ben (Alex Hibbert), pulls away from her mother Maggie (Maria Dizzia), and shares her grief with Tyler’s dad John (John Cho), who has stayed on as the school’s basketball coach despite bearing this unbelievable loss. Peterson’s film is a deeply empathetic look at the unique burden that comes with growing up in a country where high school shootings have become a normalized part of life. My November interview column with Peterson will drop next Wednesday, so keep an eye out for that. The Graduates opens this week at the Metrograph in New York City. There is also a nearly sold-out screening at the Vidiots in Los Angeles on the 11th and the film will also screen at the American Cinematheque on November 15th. You can further release dates here.
Directed by Hannah MacPherson who co-wrote the script with Michael Kennedy, Time Cut is a family drama that is being marketed as a time travel slasher. While it does have those two elements, they are more a means through which the film explores its complex emotional themes. Madison Bailey plays Lucy a teenage girl who has grown up in the shadow of the murder of her older sister Summer (Antonia Gentry). Lucy’s parents are catatonic, going through the motions each year leading up to the anniversary of Summer’s death. Each year on that day they eat at Summer’s favorite restaurant and bring offerings to the site of her murder. Lucy, we learn, was born a few years after Summer died, through IVF, an attempt by her parents to fill the void left by their first daughter’s death. On the 20th anniversary of Summer’s passing Lucy discovers a time machine and accidentally finds herself thrown back in time to 2003 — a few days before the serial killer who murdered Summer began his spree. Throughout the rest of the film Lucy grapples with what to do with her knowledge, while befriending Summer and a nerd named Quinn (Griffin Gluck), and discovering how buoyant her parents were before the heavy shroud of death dulled their spirits. It’s weighty stuff, but they filmmakers find the right balance between these dour notes and light doses of mid-2000s nostalgia. The film begins with a killer needle drop, “What’s Luv?” by Fat Joe, Ja Rule, and Ashanti, and keeps going hard with tracks from Vanessa Carlton, Hillary Duff, Wheatus, Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch that truly had me time-traveling back to my senior year of high school. The film uses the time travel conceit to cleverly address issues the beleaguered kids of my generation like vicious hazing style bullying and an atmosphere of normalized homophobia so thick that many teens stayed firmly in the closet until college. The filmmakers ask what would happen if the radical empathy of Gen Z were able to go back and help Millennials make it through high school perhaps with a little less emotional damage. The film will likely get compared to last year’s Totally Killer, which has a similar plot (although Time Cut was actually filmed first), but where that film was a true slasher with a sardonic comedic bent, this film is more aligned with the emotional wavelength of another time travel film released this year: Caddo Lake, but more on that in the next entry. You can watch Time Cut now on Netflix.
I somehow missed Celine Held and Logan George’s Caddo Lake, a time-bending thriller inspired by the eponymous lake that straddles the border between Texas and Louisana, when it dropped on Max earlier in the month, but I am really glad I caught up with it at last. Like Time Cut, it’s a film that uses time travel as a way to explore generational trauma and the way that grief can hold people back — especially as parents. I would suggest going into this movie knowing as little as possible to get the full effect of its twists, so I will keep this brief. Eliza Scanlen stars as Ellie, a teenaged girl who has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother Celeste (Lauren Ambrose) and her step-father Daniel (Eric Lange). When her step-sister Anna (Caroline Falk) goes missing on the lake, the family unravels as they try to locate her. Their story is contrasted with that of Paris (Dylan O’Brien), a young man still mourning the mysterious death of his mother years earlier. These two strands cross is some truly remarkable plotting that might make your head a little dizzy if you try to think about it too logically. Instead, this is a film you should feel with your heart, because time, like love and family, is not always logical.
Sticking with this off-kilter vibe, I wanted to recommend Ann Hui’s horror comedy Visible Secret, which also finds a unique way to explore the weight of grief and the struggle to move on after death. The film follows hairdresser Peter Eason Chan) who meets and falls in love with a woman named June (Shu Qi), who has a third eye which allows her to see ghosts. Their newfound love is put through the ringer as June contends with a cadre of cadavers who continually possess her comrades instead of coping with the loss of their corporeal lives. It’s a fun film gorgeously rendered by Arthur Wong’s lush neon-lit cinematography and offers the perfect mixture of romance, zany comedy, eerie ghosts, and gore. You can stream the film now on Ovid.
Gabriela Serrano’s evocative short film Dikit puts a queer twist on Filipino folklore, using the story of the Manananggal to examine toxic masculinity, urban isolation, and the human need for tenderness. Serrano uses an innovative split-screen structure to simultanously follow the story of two women (Mariana Serrano, Mika Zarcal) whose lives collide just when they need support the most. You can stream the film now on Criterion Channel.
Kasi Lemmon’s underrated The Caveman’s Valentine is a film the effectively straddles the line between horror and noir. It’s also finally available on streaming! Based on the book of the same name by George Dawes Green, the film follows Juilliard-trained pianist Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson), whose paranoid schizophrenia has resulted in him living inside a cave located New York City’s Inwood Park. When Romulus finds the frozen dead body of a young man outside his cave on Valentine’s Day the cops dismiss the death as an accident, including his own daughter Lulu (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), but Romulus is convinced it was a murder and sets out to get proof. This is a deeply strange film, but one whose rhythms and hues I deeply enjoy. It’s also probably the most beautiful Jackson has ever looked on screen, thanks to Amelia Vincent’s sumptuous cinematography. You can stream the film now on Prime. For more Noirvember picks directed by women check out my list on Letterboxd.
This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is Antonia Caccia’s documentary Voices From Gaza. Filmed during the First Intifada in 1989, this doc’s aim is to bring the voices of every day Palestinians to the attention of western audiences. The film begins with a brief overview of the history of the planned partition and then Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967. The rest of the doc consists of interviews with Palestinians living in the refugee camps in Gaza sharing stories of how the arrived, the way their families have been torn apart through separations often caused by economics, the aftermath of Israel’s bombing of residences, and other realities of living and working and studying under the thumb of occupation. The film also gives an overview of the illegal settlements that have been built since 1967. At the time the film was made — 35 years ago — a third of Gaza’s land had been stolen for use by the Israeli settlers. This mirrors the settlements that have taken place in the West Bank as well. We hear stories from indigenous farmers about their tradition stewardship of the land, how much of the previously public land has now been fenced off, and the Kafkaesque process it takes to apply for a license to maintain any sort of agriculture enterprise under the occupation. Footage of fisherman attempting to fish the waters are interspersed with footage of army humvees patrolling the coast to make sure the fisherman stay within their bounds. A teacher explains how a class of ten-year-olds where arrested by the army after tear gassing their school. “The uprising didn’t come out of nothing,” one man says, “it built up slowly from our suffering, time after time. It happened so we could express what was inside us. . .the oppression that we felt.” The film then features interviews with women, children, and doctors sharing stories of the impact of the increased violence inflicted by the soldiers. Stories of children arrested for throwing stones. Stories of women coming together to patch up neighbors who have been tear gassed. Stories of miscarriages and stillbirths increasing. But also stories of hope and of community and the stedfast preservation of culture. Again, it’s hard to watch a film like this, one that is thirty-five years old, and then watch No Other Land, and realize these stories have been told for generations, while those in power have continually chosen to look away from the suffering caused by their continual enabling of this violent and oppressive occupation. You can stream the film now on YouTube.
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