October 2024: Fall Film Festivals, Part 2 - NYFF, Pordenone Silent, Refocus, and ChiFilmFest
Monthly Roundup Post
Welcome to my monthly round up post. Here you will find all my writing from the previous month, plus a look at everything I watched.
This month I wrote a handful of reviews, did some really fun interviews, wrote some blurbs for Letterboxd, was on the radio — twice!, and wrote about my time at the Iowa City Book Festival and Refocus Film Festival.
Female Filmmakers in Focus: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
“I’m a Star!”: the Letterboxd crew scares up our favorite horror performances: Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933)
Interview: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson on Rumours
Watchlist This! Our October 2024 picks of the best new bubbling-under films: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
Interview: Jon Landau and Stevie Van Zandt on Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Nite Lite with Pete Schwaba (10/31)
The fall film festival season has finally come to a close. In October I attended the Pordenone Silent Film Festival virtually, watched a few more films via links for New York Film Festival, traveled to Iowa City for the Refocus Film Festival, and then came home for the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival.
I really love how often Pordenone will highlight early travelogue cinema. This year the festival began with a pair of shorts directed by Italian director Piero Marelli: Attraverso la Sicilia (1920) and Nella conca d’oro (1920). Both films were absolutely gorgeous, transporting the viewer to the cobblestone streets and postcard-perfect landscapes of coastal Sicily and the golden valley of Palermo. The shorts were both hand-tinted, with ample usage of my favorite shade of burnt orange.
I also really loved an short from 1911 called Per la morale (For Mortality) whose director is unknown. This short political satire about censorship of art features a well-meaning bourgeois man who makes it his mission to cover up all the obscene public art in the city. He goes around putting white sheets over naked statues and the like. It’s hilarious and unfortunately still relevant today.
Although I was no longer attending NYFF in person, I was still able to watch a films from the program via links. This included Mike Leigh’s latest film Hard Truths, which features a staggering performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She plays Pansy, a prickly woman who is so hypersensitive due to her depression and consumed with anger that she flies off the handle at any perceived slight, making her family and even completely strangers completely miserable. The genius of her performance — and Leigh’s sharp script and delicate direction — is how slowly Pansy’s layers of hurt and anguish are peeled back, mostly through her interactions with her much more sunny sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), revealing the tenderness at her core. Pansy nearly alienates the audience as much as she does those around her until the film’s devastating final act, set during a mother’s day brunch, shows just how perfectly Leigh and Jean-Baptiste execute their high-wire act, ultimately leaving the viewer felling a deep well of empathy for everyone on screen.
Fernanda Torres gives another of the year’s great performances in Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here), the new film from Brazilian director Walter Salles. Torres plays Eunice Paiva, husband of former Brazilian Labour Party congressman Rubens Paiva, whose disappearance and eventual murder was one of the highest profile killings during the military dictatorship that took over Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Based on the book by Paiva’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Salles creates a hypnotic rhythm for the film by spending almost an hour with the family in their home in Rio. There’s beach days and parties and children coming in and out of their warm, lively, intellectually spirited home. Even when one of the teens are subjected to a search coming home from the movies one night, there is still an air of ease about the home. When the military first comes from Paiva, Eunice reacts with a chilly reserve, but her children still come and go, nearly oblivious to the act of terror that has just occurred. The second half of the film traces Eunice as she fights to find out what happened to her husband, while still attempting to maintain a semblance of normalcy for her children. However, as the film continues we see how the past will forever haunt this family, in everything that they do. Torres is a force, her face somehow expressing at least a dozen emotions with every glance. The film ends with a bittersweet coda in which Torres’ mother, the great Fernanda Montenegro, steps into the role, a meta-casting that cements the film’s examination of time as a circle within our lives.
I was a bit surprised by the understated reception to Steve McQueen’s latest film Blitz, which I found deeply affecting. Filmed almost like a dark fantasy, the film follows a young boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) during the London Blitz who has been put on a train, along with hundreds of other children, by his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) to wait out the bombings safely in the country. Before getting on the train George left without saying goodbye, and as the guilt of that moment overtakes him, he decides to jump off the train and make his way home to apologize for his mother. His journey back is intercut with the story of how his parents met, the cruel way his Black father was treated before his birth, and his mother’s own journey to find him once she’s told he’s gone missing. There are scenes of stark violence (I’m still shook by one of the deaths), abject callousness by war profiteers, virulent racism, and phantasmagoric sequences of nighttime London. The film has shades of Waterloo Bridge and Mrs. Miniver and Empire of the Sun, but all very much served by McQueen's keen ability to dramatize big internal emotions with subtlety and the violent selfishness of humans in survival mode with honest bluntness. It's also so tense I wanted to vomit multiple times.
Another film with tension so thick I wanted to vomit the whole time was Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil (1974). The new restoration made the rep cinema rounds over the last year or so and is now streaming on Shudder and Criterion Channel. I wish I had seen it on the big screen because Stephen Katz’s lush and atmospheric cinematography, which features some of the blackest, most empty night sequences I’ve ever seen, beautifully brings to life the rich colors and textures of Jack Fisk and Joan Mocine’s art direction. Truly I wish more horror films — or any films really — were this cool looking today. This is a film that is more about the vibes than it is about the plot, though it does have big Lovecraftian energy in both plot and tone. Marianna Hill stars as Arletty, a young woman looking for her artist father in the beach town of Point Dune. There she finds herself entangled with a mysterious Portuguese-American aristocrat and his groupies, as well as facing a cult of flesh-eating locals awaiting the return of the titular Messiah of Evil, who it’s prophesied will return under the blood moon.
I finally caught up with Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man after missing it at several festivals. It would plays as an interesting double feature with The Substance. Both films are about what it's like to live with self-hatred. That movie looks at it from the angle of toxic beauty standards as a form of violence that can manifest as physical self-harm. This film very much is exploring self-hatred from the "everywhere you go there you are" angle, while also showing how constantly comparing yourself to others is one of the worst ways to self-harm emotionally. I relate to both more than I would care to admit. I dug that both films use comedy as well, though each are singing in different keys, This is probably the best performance I've seen yet from Sebastian Stan, who, like Jude Law, is a character actor with a matinee idol's face. The last 10-15 minutes really landed this home for me. Just pitch perfect.
Annemarie Jacir is one of the great contemporary political filmmakers. Her 2006 short film An Explanation: And Then Burn the Ashes juxtaposes the buildings on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, where she was a professor at the time, with horrifying and violent Islamaphobic and anti-Arab voice messages that were left for faculty members, herself included. In her director’s statement Jacir says this comparison between the restrictive walls of the buildings and the vitriolic voice messages reflect the “atmosphere of American college campuses today.” This film was made nearly twenty years ago, yet it feels like it could be a portrait of that university — and many others across the country — earlier this year.
I finally watched the Diablo Cody-penned, Jason Reitman-directed Tully for the Filmspotting Live! podcast I recorded at the Refocus Film Festival, which was our top five “mom’s going through it” films. The theme was chosen to tie-in with the festival’s opening night film Nightbitch, written by Iowa City local Rachel Yorder, and will be dropping in December closer to that film’s release. I wrote a lot about this film over on my Letterboxd and how deeply it hit me as both a queer woman in a straight-presenting relationship and also as someone who has spent most of my life since teenagehood struggling with my mental health. It’s a beautiful film and really came into my life at the exact right time, as films so often do.
Directed by Neo Sora, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus captures the final live performance of the Japanese musician before his death of cancer. The 20 songs featured were curated by Sakamoto himself as a send-off for his fans and a summation of his life’s work. It felt like watching someone give their own eulogy, like a live version of David Bowie’s Blackstar.
I didn’t know anything about the plot of Small Things Like These, before I watched it at the Refocus Film Festival in Iowa City and I’m so glad I went into the film like it. It’s a deceptively simply film, shot in an unfussy manner by director Tim Mielants, with long takes and an ample use of close-ups to establish the vast isolation of its rural Irish setting and the great emotional depth of its protagonist, coal merchant Bill Furlong (a devastating Cillian Murphy). I don’t really want to write about the plot, as I think it’s a film best experienced cold, but I will say that this is one of the best performances of Murphy’s career, and a film that speaks to any number of situations where otherwise good people will turn a blind eye to the suffering of others in order to hold on to some comfort or privilege of their own, and the internal strength and moral clarity it takes to actually do the right thing.
I also didn’t know much about Catherine Breillat’s debut feature film Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl). Breillat is one of my biggest cinematic blindspots, a filmmaker I have avoided for a long time because I heard she was emotionally brutal. I don’t know how much of her later style is felt in this early film, which is very much operating in a pop-satirical mode, but I was surprised by how funny this film was, and also not nearly as shocked by its transgressions as I thought I would based on how the film has been written about. I look forward to finally make my way through her filmography now.
I think Robert wrote about the politics of best Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina in his dispatch from its premiere at Berlin, but I will say it’s another film that was not at all what I was expecting. It’s got slick camerawork from DP Juan Pablo Ramirez that should absolutely be in discussion among the best of the year. It’s an absurd, sometimes farcical melodrama that uses the inferno that is the kitchen of a tourist trap restaurant off Times Square called The Grill as a microcosm for everything that is rotten at the core of the lie we call the American Dream.
I have been a big fan of all of the Denzel Washington produced cinematic adaptations of August Wilson’s plays, but I think The Piano Lesson, which I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival, is the best of the three. The film is directed by Denzel’s son who co-wrote the script with Virgil Williams (who also co-wrote Mudbound), and it is absolutely thrilling from the word go as it incorporates elements of the brand of Southern Gothic found in films like Eve’s Bayou and To Sleep With Anger into Wilson’s story of generational trauma and the ghosts from the that past that haunt us in the present. It’s also got the strongest ensemble cast of the year, with great performances from Danielle Deadwyler, Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher, Corey Hawkins, Stephan James, and John David Washington. I’m usually pretty low on JDW, but he plays his role big here and it absolutely works.
I also really loved Adam Elliot’s stop motion wonder Memoir of a Snail, which follows a depressed girl growing up in 1970s Australia through a series of hardships, including the loss of her parents and a separation from her twin brother, and the ray of sunlight she finds in a friendship with an old eccentric woman named Pinky. As a snail lover, a hoarder of knickknacks, a world traveler, and a recluse, I felt seen by both characters and really enjoyed the way this film mixed the darkness with the light.
Another film I saw at ChiFilmFest, Virpi Suutari’s lyrical political documentary Once Upon a Time in a Forest, which follows a group of young activists desperately trying to conserve the forests of Finland, just made me so angry and sad. It left me an absolute husk. Capitalism doesn't care about the forests, about biodiversity, about the state of the world. There is a scene where the dead-eyed men who run one of the logging companies lied directly on camera about their commitment to anything other than greed and it all just broke my damn heart. In another scene the grandma of one of the activist tells her granddaughter that she can't carry the all world's burdens on her shoulders, and readers, I felt that.
The best new film I saw at ChiFilmFest was Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ animated odyssey Flow. I was absolutely NOT prepared for the amount of distress the cat was going to go through during this film. I'm was left in awe of the animators, who rendered the most fully life-like (despite still clearly being animation, not some uncanny valley attempt at photorealism) cinematic cat I've ever seen. Same goes for the sound design, which incorporates dozens of different cat "mews" to communicate what the feline is feeling at any given moment. It's not an exaggeration for me to say that I think I've spent more time with cats in my life than I have with humans (growing up we always had at least six cats and I was ALWAYS either playing with or cuddling with one of them; I've had multiple cats as a grownup, and quite often spend more time at home with them than I do going out into the world 🤷♀️), so I had a visceral reaction to everything this cat was going through. It hit on a primal level of my existence that words cannot fully describe. Then you add the capybara and the other animals and the complex ideas the film explores about community and empathy and survival and it’s a movie that has been engineered exactly for my sensibilities. I'm glad I saw this on the big screen and highly recommend you watch it on the biggest screen with the best sound that you possibly can to get the fully immersive experience. It's beautiful and melancholic and ultimately hopeful, both in terms of life on this planet, but also what cinema can achieve.
I’m so glad the festival programmed the new restoration of Ivan Dixon’s politically charged, blaxploitation adjacent gem The Spook Who Sat by the Door. I don’t think a film this subversive could be made today. Definitely not with the money from a studio. It’s angry and it’s purposeful and it’s funny as hell. Robert spoke to three actors from the film — J. A. Preston, Pemon Rami, and David Lemieux — about the making of the film for an insightful and essential oral history. I hope this restoration means more people will see this film and it will continue to provoke and inspire.
Lastly, at ChiFilmFest I really loved Farahnaz Sharifi’s heartfelt documentary My Stolen Planet, which is a beautiful film about how women in Iran have held on to their culture, their voices, their lives in the shadows, despite a regime that wants to keep the forever silent. It’s a film that shows archiving as a form of resistance. It’s poweful stuff.
In November I will be participating in a two-part super draft ranking the films of François Truffaut on the podcast Screen Drafts. This meant I had to catch up on the final few films from the French director that I had not yet seen. Of that group of films I was really taken with Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent or Two English Girls, his raw and sexy erotic drama from 1971. The films stars longtime Truffaut collaborator Jean-Pierre Léaud as a French art critic named Claude, who finds himself caught up in a decade-spanning love triangle with two English sisters, Ann (Kika Markham) and Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). This gorgeous film has shades of Bright Star, shades of Maurice, shades of the Brontë sisters, so obviously I loved it.
I finally caught up with Payal Kapadia’s debut film, the hypnotic hybrid documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, just before it expired on Criterion Channel. Shot in a luminous black and white, that often reminded me of the films of Hollis Frampton, the film uses an epistolary romance between a student only known as L. and her estranged boyfriend, who have been separated because of their differing castes, to explore student led protests against the rise of fascism, right wing politics, and Hindu-nationalism in India. Kapadia finds the poetic in the political, and the beauty in resistance. It’s definitely in conversation with her new film, All We Imagine As Light, and now having seen both of her films. it’s very easy to see why her work has not been embraced by her home country.
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You are in for a real treat with the later films of Breillat. I feel like each time, she finds a new way to push against sexual mores. Maybe her least graphic film, "Abuse Of Weakness" with Isabelle Huppert (who gives maybe the best performance I've seen this century) still defies and complicates definitions of trauma and victimhood.
Curious about this "Spook Who Sat By The Door" restoration. Love that movie, but it ends at maybe the book's 2/3rd point, when it then plunges straight into a race war scenario. I don't think ANYONE is gonna have the guts to adapt that part.
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