Combining the pulpy nonsense of a Dan Brown novel with the sheen and polish of prestige television, Oscar-winner Edward Berger’s Conclave nearly fools you into thinking it’s a serious high stakes drama probing deep theological ideas. But for all the starry cast making the most out of the scenery-chewing screenplay, the latest awards season contender from the director of All Quiet On The Western Front reveals itself to be a fast-moving thriller as thin as a gilt-edged page of the Bible. Following on the heels of its Toronto bow, it is playing early in competition at San Sebastian.

The Pope is dead, and his body isn’t even in the ground when Cardinals start campaigning to take over the holiest seat of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals — or as he likes to call himself, “the manager” — is tasked with leading the titular conclave. The process will find the Cardinals completely sequestered to cast votes, only to see the light of day once a new Pope has been selected by a majority. Basically, it’s like jury duty, and in both cases, a man’s life hangs in the balance.

Lawrence himself commands the greatest respect of any of the candidates, but he doesn’t want the job. In fact, he’s not even sure he deserves to be part of the Church. Battling doubts about his faith, he asked the Pope to step down prior to his death, but his request was denied. Now, Lawrence believes the Pope wanted him to stay because he could be trusted to honorably lead the conclave after his passing. Certainly, there’s no shortage of scandal and skullduggery that Lawrence will need to navigate. Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) is overshadowed by potentially career-ending rumors. The extremely conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) wants to Make The Pope Italian Again, while Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) threatens to ideologically pull the Vatican back decades. And then there’s the surprise appearance of Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who arrives from Kabul claiming he was appointed in pectore (in secret) by the late Pope. As Lawrence ponders all this, he pushes for his best friend, the progressive Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci). As for Lawrence himself, his excessively humble manner has some wondering if it’s not a duplicitous tactic to feed his own ambitions.

Power, Faith, and Responsibility are the capital letter themes that dangle like shiny sacramentals from the screenplay by Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), but the writing never gets below the cassocks and ferraiolos the cardinals wear. Conclave plays like an entire season of House Of Cards smushed into a feature length running time. It’s a pacey, walk-and-talk movie that agreeably shuffles its pawns — there is literally an early scene centered on a chess board — around each plot turn. But as the film wears on, one suspects the the picture’s technical work is doing much of the heavy lifting.

There’s not a gleaming surface or sacred image that goes unnoticed by the smooth camera from cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (Rust and Bone, A Prophet, Jackie). Whether gliding down hallways or lingering on frescoes, the photography is intent in letting the air inside the drama’s stuffy setting. It also manages to work around the clanging score by Volker Bertelmann, whose aggressively plucked strings heightens the tension, but threatens to overwhelm the performances that are working on an altogether different register.

Bringing an unflinching gravitas to the lead role, Fiennes is reliably impressive. His devout, yet spiritually shaken Lawrence delivers the film’s fortune cookie thesis in a centerpiece speech where he notes, “certainty is the great enemy of unity, and the deadly enemy of tolerance.” The actor’s equanimity works well alongside a similarly conflicted Tucci, and their scenes together are often the rare moments of serenity in a picture that rarely pauses to gather its thoughts. The rest of the ensemble are essentially avatars that represent different facets of church leadership, and while they don’t miss a step, it’s a shame that actors like Lithgow don’t have a bit more room to play. That’s not to mention Isabella Rossellini who appears in small, almost entirely dialogue free role as the film’s nun ex machina. Thankfully, the actress can do as much with her eyes as she can with any dialogue, and maybe it’s for the best she’s spared any ropey monologues.

Conclave winds and twists its way toward a staggeringly silly climatic reveal. The coup de grace won’t be spoiled here but it’s a serious misstep by Berger and Straughan, who try and steer the audience into a hamfisted statement about contemporary Catholicism and the world it operates in. More than any other move the picture makes, it’s the one that does the most to dissipate the drama like so much white smoke floating out of a chimney at the Vatican.

Director: Edward Berger
Screenplay: Peter Straughan
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Carlos Diehz, Lucian Msamati, Brían F. O’Byrne, Merab Ninidze, Sergio Castellitto, Isabella Rossellini
Producers: Tessa Ross, Juliette Howell, Michael A. Jackman, Robert Harris, Alice Dawson
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Suzie Davies
Costume design: Lisy Christl
Editing: Nick Emerson
Music: Volker Bertelmann
Sound: Ben Baird, C.A.S., Valentino Giannì
Production companies: FilmNation Entertainment (United States), House Productions (United Kingdom), Indian Paintbrush (United States)
World sales: FilmNation Entertainment
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Italian
120 minutes

The Wailing stumbles a little in its final act, leaning too heavily on conventional haunted house tropes, spooky jump scares and muddled explanations. Even so, this is still a supremely confident debut with a timely message about violence against women being a real-life. never-ending horror story. Following its San Sebastián launch it next screens in Sitges, Leiden and London film festivals over the next few weeks, with a theatrical release to follow in Spain and Mexico in late October. Genre-friendly trappings, timely themes and glossy production values should ensure it finds a wider global audience.

The multi-chapter narrative hooks audience attention instantly with a visually arresting opening sequence set in a Madrid techno nightclub, where spooky transformations are teasingly half-concealed, half-revealed by pulsing strobe lights. This first section revolves around Andrea (Ester Expósito), a nervy Spanish university student who virtually lives inside her phone and computer. Between regular text conversations with her boyfriend in Australia, which Martín-Calero plasters across the screen in splashy typographical collages, the pair also speak on video link. During these exchanges, Andrea first becomes aware of a sinister figure constantly hovering nearby, a demonic old man only visible on screen, not in person.

After this phantom menace commits a lethal act of violence, Andrea’s life becomes a living hell of grief and fear, never sure whether her invisible stalker is lurking just out of view. Even so, her testimony is largely dismissed by friends and fellow students as mentally disturbed rambling. Shaken by shock revelations about her family history, she begins to suspect she is part of a pan-generational curse spanning decades and continents, with links to France and Argentina. Lured by a creepy siren call of moaning, sobbing voices, she sneaks into an eerily empty apartment in a striking high-rise block,  sensing instinctively that this place is the source of the malevolent forces pursuing her.

The second and third chapters rewind the story 20 years, jumping across the Atlantic to La Plata in Argentina. Seeking a subject for her next student film project, sullen college misfit Camila (Malena Villa, an uncannily ringer for a young Kristen Stewart) becomes fixated on French mystery woman Marie (Mathilde Olivier). Apparently motivated by queer attraction, only lightly hinted by the film-makers, Camila begins following and secretly filming Marie. But her risky exercise in cinematic stalking ultimately exposes both women to the same murderous curse that affected Andrea, this time with the ghostly monster a background character in Camila’s films. In an extra uncanny twist, the apartment building from the first chapter appears to have an exact replica in Argentina, which emanates the same horrible compelling chorus of doleful wailing to any unhappy souls tuned to its wavelength.

According to their promotional interviews in San Sebastian, Peña and Martín-Calero conceived The Wailing as a veiled allegory about male violence against women, how abuse and trauma is passed down the generations, and how female victims are often disbelieved or even blamed by wider patriarchal society. These are commendably weighty real-life themes for a genre film to tackle, especially in horror, where female slasher victims and “final girls” are recurring motifs crying out for critical feminist analysis. Indeed, a growing cohort of female directors like Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Jennifer Reeder and Prano Bailey-Bond have already unpacked these tropes with wit and originality. The Wailing certainly touches on these broader social currents, but not in a very decisive or conclusive way. A little more faith in these deeper intentions, and a little less fidelity to genre conventions, might have elevated this classy nerve-jangler into a modern classic instead of just a solid exercise in superior Euro-horror.

Director: Pedro Martín-Calero
Screenwriters: Isabel Peña, Pedro Martín-Calero
Cast: Ester Expósito, Mathilde Ollivier, Malena Villa, Alex Monner, Lautaro Bettoni, Sonia Almarcha
Cinematography: Constanza Sandoval
Editing: Victoria Lammers
Music: Olivier Arson
Producers: Eduardo Villanueva Díez, Nacho Lavilla Canga, Fernanda Del Nido, Cristina Zumárraga, Pablo Bossi, Jéròme Vidal, Juan Pablo Miller
Production companies: El Llanto AIE (Spain), Caballo FIlms SL (Spain), Setembro Cine SL (Spain), Tandem Films SL (Spain), Tarea Fina SRL (Argentina), Noodles Production (France)
World sales: Film Factory
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Spanish, French
107 minutes

Directed by the fraternal indie film-making duo David and Nathan Zellner, this tragicomic creature feature closely observes a small tribe of hairy, ape-like Bigfoots living in a remote, densely wooded part of North America. Adding an extra layer of surreal humour, two of the four main sasquatches are played by Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, renowned actors who sportingly rose to the challenge of spending an entire film in heavy prosthetics and costumes, with zero human dialogue, only grunts and yelps and shrieks. Co-director Nathan Zellner also does double duty as one of the sasquatches, a sexually aggressive alpha-male whose reckless machismo leads him into deep trouble, while art-house horror maestro Ari Aster has an executive producer credit.

The impressively detailed creature designs in Sasquatch Sunset are modelled on the infamous “Patterson-Gimlin” footage, a shaky clip of a mysterious a furry monster striding through Northern California woodland in 1967, a key foundation stone in Bigfoot mythology and the sole filmed evidence of this mythical beast. In truth, we have to take it on trust that we really are watching Eisenberg and Keough inside these costumes, and the stars are not just playing along with an outlandish hoax. If that is not them on screen, the joke is on us, but it’s still a pretty good joke. We might call this the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Following its well-received world premiere in Sundance, Sasquatch Sunset makes its European debut in Berlin this week, with a further festival stopover at SWSX in March ahead of US theatrical release in April.

With their previous features Kid-Thing (2012), Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014), and Damsel (2018), the Zellners have already established a defiantly offbeat, genre-twisting voice. But Sasquatch Sunset, which builds on a short film the brothers made in 2011, takes their WTF vision to bold new heights. Across four seasons, the film’s lonely sasquatch tribe travel vast distances without encountering others of their species, share dangerous interactions with other wild animals, get drunk and stoned on forest fruits, sleep and fight and have sex.

Initially the date and setting are purposely vague: this could all be taking place centuries ago, or yesterday, or even in some post-apocalyptic future. As small clues from the human world slowly creep into the story, the background context comes a little clearer, but questions remain. Are we witnessing the aftermath of some extinction-level eco-disaster? Has humankind perished? Are these fabulous furry freaks the last of their kind?

Sasquatch Sunset will not suit all tastes. Some reviews have complained it feels like a juvenile gross-out comedy skit stretched too thinly, particularly as urination, defecation, and nudity are recurring motifs. The Zellners certainly push body-focussed slapstick humour to the max, but there is also pathos and tenderness here, with a semi-serious tone closer to Planet of the Apes (1968) than Bigfoot and the Hendersons (1987).

Performances are expressive and committed, even under heavy make-up, while poignant scenes of death and bereavement are played straight, daring human viewers not to empathise with our simian cousins on screen. Winking homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), gorgeous landscape photography by Michael Gioulakis, high-calibre production design credits and a haunting score by Texas experimental rock trio The Octopus Project, serial collaborators with the Zellners, all suggest a level of artistic ambition far above lowbrow toilet jokes. This bizarre creature feature may be a novelty stunt on some level, but it is brilliantly sustained stunt, with a surprisingly rich emotional range.

Directors: David Zellner, Nathan Zellner
Screenplay: David Zellner
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Nathan Zellner
Cinematography: Michael Gioulakis
Editing: Nathan Zellner, David Zellner, Daniel Tarr
Production designer: Michael Powsner
Costume designer: Steve Newburn
Music: The Octopus Project
Producers: George Rush, Lars Knudsen, Tyler Campellone, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner
Executive Producer: Ari Aster
Production companies: ZBI (US), Square Peg (US), The Space Program (US)
World sales: Protagonist, London
Venue: Berlinale (Special)
No language
88 minutes

Backed by feted indie-horror powerhouse A24 and heavyweight producer Christine Vachon’s Killer Films, A Different Man certainly has classy credentials and solid potential to turn potentially challenging material into buzz-driven, word-of-mouth success. At its Sundance world premiere last month, Schimberg’s twisted fairy tale divided critics but earned mostly positive reviews. In an unusual double booking, it also screens in competition at the Berlinale later this week.

Initially acting behind an elaborate mask, Marvel regular Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a minor-league actor with a medical condition that has left him with heavily disfgured facial features (superbly realised prosthetics by Batman veteran Mike Marino here). Shunned as an unsightly outcast by neighbours, and routinely mocked by strangers on the street, Edward lives a gloomy, solitary life in a crumbling New York City apartment. His rare acting roles are dispiritingly narrow, typically playing disabled office workers who are treated with pity and condescension in corporate diversity training videos.

But Edward’s fortunes take a dramatic turn thanks to two momentous developments. Firstly, aspiring playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) moves into the apartment next door and develops an instant, flirtatious, almost stalker-ish interest in her shy neighbour. Norwegian Reinsve, making her English-language debut, appears to be riffing on her insufferable persona in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021) here. Meanwhile, Edward’s doctors begin treating his condition with a revolutionary new therapy that triggers a radical metamorphosis. In icky. gooey transformation scenes that play like homages to David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), which Schimberg cites as a key influence on A Different Man, Edward begins peeling great bloody lumps of flesh from his disintegrating face.

Casting the striking attractive Stan as the reborn Edward was a smart, pointed choice by Schimberg and his team. Seizing on this bizarre rebirth, he cuts off all ties to his old self with a faked suicide, adopts a new persona under a new alias, then rewrites himself an entirely fresh life as a wealthy real estate dealer and highly sexed lothario.

The old Edward seems dead and buried, but he lives on in Ingrid’s imagination, as an off-Broadway play based on their brief friendship. The chance to audition for the lead, subtly reshaping Ingrid’s self-serving vision of his own former self, proves too tempting for Edward. He lands the role, which he then performs beneath a medical mask of his old face. He also begins a romance with Ingrid which reveals her amusingly kinky, festishistic side.

Inevitably, Edward’s super-successful new life comes with a steep price tag. Though he does not appear until midway through, the dramatic lynchpin of A Different Man is Adam Pearson, the British actor, broadcaster and campaigner best known for his brief but haunting scenes with Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin (2013). At an early age, Pearson was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type I, which causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerve tissue, creating abnormally swollen and misshapen facial features.

Schimberg previously cast Pearson in his film-business comedy Chained for Life (2018), a far more straightforward satire on attitudes to disability, beauty and representation on screen. This time around, the director specifically wrote a plum role for Pearson as Oswald, a jobbing British actor who treats his neurofibromatosis like a minor inconvenience in a life full of friends, social events and wide cultural interests. In a smart piece of dramatic symmetry, Oswald’s face closely resembles how Edward’s looked before his miracle cure. Indeed, the upbeat Brit seems uniquely well-suited to star in the play, as Ingrid soon realises.

Before long, Edward is wrestling with the surreal, Kaufman-esque trauma of being fired from playing himself in a version of his own life story, to be replaced by the far more genial, humble and confident Oswald. While the more disabled actor sails through life with self-effacing charm and positivity, his ultra-handsome rival is a resentful and entitled wreck, his unhinged narcissism spiralling into volatile, vengeful, extreme behaviour.

A lesser film would have weaponised these ironic reversals in a schematic way: as trite homilies about beauty being only skin deep, the perils of judging on appearances, being careful what you wish for, and so on. Schimberg’s pay-offs are much more nuanced and disquieting than that, meting out punishments and rewards like random cosmic punchlines. Even if A Different Man lightly scolds viewers for our unexamined complicity in oppressive beauty norms, Schimberg also prods away at more prickly, personal, complex themes here too. For example, the exploitative voyeurism of well-intentioned artists, himself included, or the patronising representation of disabled characters as saintly victims with no depth or agency. A late cameo by Michael Shannon, playing himself, adds an extra meta-comic layer.

There is a lot to unpack in A Different Man, and not all of it makes for comfortable viewing. Schimberg seems keen to unsettle his audience, daring us to react with disgust at our fellow humans, mocking our hollow claims of empathy. This boundary-testing, mildly confrontational edge may alienate some viewers. The film’s increasingly outlandish plot twists do not bear much scrutiny outside the rules of nightmarish farce while Wyatt Garfield’s long-take, crash-zoom camerawork wobbles in places. But for those of us who like our comedies bleak and bitter, Schimberg has constructed a thrillingly original, delciously dark hall of mirrors.

Director, screenwriter: Aaron Schimberg
Cast: Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, Renate Reinsve
Cinematography: Wyatt Garfield
Editing : Taylor Levy
Music: Umberto Smerilli
Production design: Anna Kathleen
Make-up: Mike Marino, Sarah Graalman
Producers: Christine Vachon, Vanessa McDonnell, Gabriel Mayers
Production companies: A24 (US), Killer Films (US), Grand Motel Films (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In English
112 minutes

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat tells the complex story of the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in a complex, cacophonous manner. Implicated in the telling are the UN, the U.S., and the Kingdom of Belgium. All three entities’ evil adventures resulted in the aborted dreams of a newly independent African state. Decades later, we know that Belgium still enjoys the fruits of plunder that actually began with King Leopold II a century before, while the Congo has never really known peace since.

Grimonprez puts together a ton of material — memoirs, home video, books, newspaper reports, songs — to sometimes overwhelming effect. His tale is ostensibly about music forming the backdrop to murder. But every account of what happened in 1960s Congo inevitably lands on one country’s oppression of another.

For Grimonprez, it is important to share a detail, one that isn’t known to everyone concerned about the Congo travails. While plans were being put in place to silence Lumumba and come out on top during the Cold War, the U.S. was also sending its jazz musicians to engage in regions of interest. The musicians themselves were oblivious.

Nina Simone went to Nigeria unaware that her trip was bankrolled by the CIA. Louis Armstrong realized belatedly that he was a tool in the hands of a government that wasn’t treating people with the colour of his skin fairly. Even when some half-understood the purpose behind their trip, they seemed to underplay what was really going on. “The weapon that we will use is a cool one,” Dizzy Gillespie said to an interviewer, smiling.

Intentionally or not, there is a brief passage of screen time in which the words and images on screen give us some heavyweights of history, Eisenhower, Churchill, Khrushchev among them, and the viewer notices that these are all white men. The black men who do show up are Armstrong and company. The juxtaposition is telling. The big decisions — war, Cold War, diplomacy, nuclear disarmament — are made by white men. The black men are singing jazz, their force reserved for blowing into musical instruments with unbelievably inflated cheeks. If you want to take it farther, you could say that while the world rests on the shoulders of Caucasians, the black man is just entertainment.

In global political terms, as pertaining to the United Nations, that white/black U.S.-dominant paradigm was primed to change after 1960, the year that several African countries became independent. Grimonprez presents reports discussing the powerful potential these countries will come to hold if they vote in the same direction. The Cold War was on, so the fear really was that African countries might lean towards Russia and the very scary concept called Communism. Something had to be done.

Belgium was also fearful and not quite pleased with what was coming, especially after Lumumba’s famously controversial speech on the occasion of the Congolese independence on June 30, 1960, a point made more explicitly in the IDFA 2022-premiering documentary Colette and Justin. The country figured it would lose billions if it relinquished control of Katanga, a region replete with the money-spinning mineral uranium. Something had to be done—especially to the man who seemed like he would insist on total independence.

The fears of those two countries pretty much suggest that Lumumba’s mistake was in not forming an alliance with any of the powerful entities interested in his country. Russia, through Khrushchev, who banged his shoe and excoriated the U.S. during a UN assembly, was rather slow in acting. The UN, which ought to have intervened impartially, was led by a man who at some point privately disposed of Lumumba’s wish for a U.S. visa in order to present his case at the UN. The combination of American and Belgian fears and the UN’s strategic reluctance produced results that, in hindsight, sealed the fate of Lumumba and his country.

In Grimonprez’s film, this connection isn’t made explicitly, perhaps because he presents his material without a talking head or voiceover holding the viewer’s hand through this intricate history of the West’s dangerous entanglement in a country seeking sovereignty. But the attentive viewer will understand that it was a confluence of events that led to the tragedy of Lumumba.

Thus, in place of banal clarity, Grimonprez has chosen artful complication. His technique of bombarding the viewer with text and videos of different colour profiles, over the crash-crash-crash of jazz music, is often disorienting, as though Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is more conceptual art than documentary. Somehow it works — in a way that demands a second viewing, maybe even a third to take it all in. The curious can then head to some of the well-detailed sources he provides. Considering the never-ending mess of the Congo, maybe a documentation that is in itself inexhaustible seems apt.

Still, there is something missing from the tale. We are told that Lumumba was killed without any details. Those familiar with history know of the gruesome death and disposal of his body. Perhaps the omission of the details is an act of mercy, a homage of sort. But it’s impossible to know for sure.

For projects of this sort, there might be the question of appropriation. Is it Grimonprez’s place to tell this story? It definitely is. The history of the Congo’s devastation with the U.S. and UN’s complicity is not the history of one country and its people. Grimonprez, a Belgian, has much right to the tale as anybody else. And he has done a remarkable job. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is an impressive feat—a feat of design, narration, sound, and cinema.

Director, screenwriter: Johan Grimonprez
Narrators: Marie Daulne, In Koli Jean Bofane, Patrick Cruise O’Brien
Producers: Daan Milius, Rémi Grellety
Co-Producers: Katja Draaijer, Frank Hoeve, Johan Grimonprez
Editor: Rik Chaubet
Sound design: Ranko Paukovic
Production company: Warboys Films
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
In English
150 minutes

By night, he’s a sex worker, servicing mostly closeted older men who have enlisted on Dreamyguys, a queer, Only-Fans-ish platform with a rather drab UI. By day, he’s a freelance writer, penning reviews for literary publications in London. It is an unusual combination but only on the surface. Anyone who knows anything about the state of the media business since the rise of Google and social media understands why supplementing a writer’s income with other work—even sex work—is not a bad idea.

Writer-director Mikko Mäkelä seems quite familiar with the state of play. He casts a very assured eye across the land of literature. He gets an editor to ask Max a knowing question at an editorial meeting: “Do you think literature pays for itself?” The inquiry comes with a punch to our hero’s artistic instincts: someone else is going to handle the Bret Easton Ellis interview he was looking forward to, while Max is dispatched to cover the launch of yet another app coming out on the market. We get it. In life and in art, tech trumps text.

In his ideal future, Max is a “serious” writer of books, not someone spending his, er, spunk on reviews, short stories and, presumably, tech reports. To that end, he’s writing a novel about a young man named Sebastian who’s a sex worker. He’s feeding his art with his life, a pretty common tack for writers, except that Max seems to be actively engineering the process.

We see him replay events from his nightlife as he sets down these moments in vivid prose, which he then sends off to an editor. When he’s given notes about varying his character’s uniformly elderly clientele, he accepts a proposal to join an orgy involving younger men in real life. Everything (and everybody) is copy. But therein lies the danger, as Max comes to see.

Perhaps because of the nature of the subject, Mäkelä films the queer sex sessions in quite graphic terms. There are no male members onscreen but there is a lot of homosexual thrusting, derrieres, and butt cracks. But after the initial shock of gay coupling mere minutes into the film, the other sessions seem gratuitous. This is hardly unusual for first-time directors looking for buzz but, post-festival, those scenes could potentially limit the audience for Sebastian—although it’s hard to say by how much, given the general population’s indifference to non-brand names in literature.

For a certain type of young person, though, Sebastian is a blast. It is a well-made film that ought to get a lot of attention in and out of festivals in both the U.S., the UK and, especially, in Europe. The film’s preoccupation with the literary market and the media’s gig economy suggests that journalists should fall over themselves with pieces riffing on what Sebastian says about the modern economy for literature and the decline of the media business. So, it’s fair to say that if those think pieces show up in torrents, Sebastian will find an easier path to the very few young people still in love with serious literary stuff. (The nerdiest of that group may wonder how possible it is for one person to win both the Goncourt and the Booker Prize, as a character does here.)

There are no heavy visual or narrative flourishes in Sebastian but Mäkelä does get an utterly believable performance from his lead actor, Ruaridh Mollica. He also seems to be a very good writer of prose from the snippets we see onscreen. And yet, if the director’s own screenplay is to be believed, he needs to perish any idea of writing a novel. After all, he created a character who tells us convincingly, “There’s not much money writing fiction, or in writing full stop.”  He can always channel his literary aspirations into a second feature film.

Director, screenwriter: Mikko Mäkelä
Cast: Ruaridh Mollica, Hiftu Quasem, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Jonathan Hyde, Leanne Best, Lara Rossi
Producer: James Watson
Executive Producers: Mike Goodridge, Lizzie Francke, Jennifer Armitage, Mariyah Dosani, Philippa Nicholl
Co-Producers: Aleksi Bardy, Dries Phlypo, Erik Glijnis, Leontine Petit, Rosie Crerar, Ciara Barry, Severi Koivusalo
Cinematography: Iikka Salminen
Production design: Guy Thompson
Editing: Arttu Salmi
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
In English, French
110 minutes

Amachoukeli’s Ama Gloria is told from the perspective of six-year-old Cléo who, after her mother’s death, finds love and comfort in her relationship with her caretaker, an immigrant who has left her own children behind in her native Cape Verde. Cape Verdean actor Ilça Moreno Zego plays her nanny Gloria with great believability. She demonstrates her love for Cléo, playing with her, comforting and guiding her with a gentle touch. Cléo’s widowed father (Arnaud Rebotini) appears only briefly but movingly, showing his paternal concern and indulgence of his only child

In the role of Cléo, young Louise Mauroy-Panzani is superb as a mischievous, adorable little girl, fearless in her play and passionate in her affections. She is also near-sighted, and we first see her while an optometrist’ fits her for new glasses. The director tells the story in close-ups for most of the film, to convey the child’s point of view and her narrow focus on the world around her. This can feel a bit suffocating for the viewer, who may crave a wider perspective on events and locations.

The use of first-time and non-professional actors gives the film an authenticity and immediacy that more seasoned performers may not have delivered. Secondary characters like fishermen and construction workers also bring authenticity to their parts. Maurov-Panzani is wholly convincing in the main role, and never verges into sentimentality, keeping a brave demeanor even when she bursts into tears. We follow her learning curve, facing hard lessons about love and loss, how to cope with the absence of her beloved “àma” Gloria and come to terms with the death of her biological mother.

Gloria, who has children of her own back home, is much more than a nanny to Cléo. The term “nanny” does not fully explain the role of substitute mother, which the Portuguese “àma” or “amã” conveys; it can also mean to love, nurse, mentor. The director was inspired by her own experience growing up with a Portuguese nanny, who left her to start a new life in her home country; their affection for each other survives time and distance to this day.

The Cape Verde location adds a layer of drama and meaning to the film as we see another side to Gloria, as a hotel entrepreneur, in her home country, with skills beyond those of a nanny or mother. We also understand the emotional toll that distance inflicts on “long-distance” mothers and their biological children, raised by their grandmothers or other relatives, inevitably awakening resentment and mistrust. Among Gloria’s children, young César (Fredy Gomes Tavares) is particularly good at representing these complex feelings of estrangement, need, and reproach towards his absentee mother. The story transitions from Cesar’s jealousy to Cléo’s, as the chain of hurt feelings continues when Cleo confronts the birth of Gloria’s first grandchild and realizes the baby’s needs will displace her own.

Amachoukeli’s own family had to relocate from Georgia to France when she was a child, and she draws on those experiences to paint a subtle and profound portrait of her characters. She has an eye for details that are more effective than words: Cléo’s tiny, bare feet on top of her father’s shoes as he teaches her to dance; or her friends’ hands against the bus window in a farewell scene. Sound also conveys early memories: the lullaby that Gloria sings, Cléo’s first words in a new language, the ancient invocations offered to saints and gods to protect a newborn. Subtle music blends into the soundtrack, where crashing ocean waves, laughter, sobbing, and eloquent silences alternate. The use of animation is effective and beautifully rendered in watercolors, as we follow Cléo’s discovery of new feelings and distant landscapes, or her sense of anguish in a dramatic underwater sequence.

Director, screenwriter: Marie Amachoukeli
Cast: Louise Mauroy-Panzani, Ilça Moreno Zego, Abnara Gomes Varela, Fredy Gomes Tavares, Arnaud Rebotini, Domingos Borges Almeida
Producer:  Bénédicte Couvreur, Lilies Films
Cinematography:  Inès Tabarin
Editing:  Suzana PedroAnimation: Marie Amachoukeli & Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet
Sound: Yolande Decarsin, Fanny Martin, Daniel Sobrino
Music: Fanny Martin
Production companies: Canal +,Ciné + TV5 Monde, ARTE/COFINOVA 18 & Cinecap 6, La Procirep
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Spotlight)
In French, Cape Verdean Portuguese, Creole
84 minutes

Cuando una película empieza con el Ministro de Economía verdadero anunciando una  inflación del 100% en un día  y termina con la frase “que Dios nos ayude” es un mal presagio. Por fortuna Reinas, tercera dirección de Klaudia Reynecke, no cumple la profecía: es una buena película coming of age que confirma la presencia de una voz con sello propio en el cine latinoamericano. La cinta tendrá su estreno mundial en la competencia internacional en Sundance esta semana y se exhibirá en el próximo Festival Internacional de Berlín, sección Generaciones

“Reinas”, es el apelativo cariñoso que usa Carlos (Gonzalo Molina) un padre divorciado y ausente, para sus hijas, la adolescente Aurora (Luana Vega Sousa) y Lucía (Abril Gjurinovic), de 10 años.  En el Perú de principios de los noventa -con el grupo guerrillero Sendero luminoso atacando constantemente y una economía en crisis- las hermanas están a punto de abandonar Lima para mudarse con su madre Elena (Jimena Lindo) a Minnesota. En busca de una vida mejor según Elena, para morir de aburrimiento según Aurora o simplemente para vivir lejos de él, según Carlos. En las tres semanas antes de la partida viven con su abuela (Susi Sánchez), una excéntrica y férrea mujer que odia a Carlos.

Klaudia Reynicke nació y pasó su infancia en Lima antes de emigrar con su familia a Suiza y los Estados Unidos; experiencias que dan realismo a Reinas.  Sus películas anteriores Il Nido y Love Me Tender fueron reconocidas en festivales internacionales.

La política y las consecuencias de vivir en un país en crisis están siempre presentes en la vida diaria pero se habla muy poco de ellas. .Lima era una ciudad con toque de queda pero también con playas, trueques, bailes y diversión.  Ambas chicas se mueven en una burbuja, protegidas por su madre y su abuela; más preocupadas por el primer amor y la vida social que por la política que es menos comentada que el fantasma de una tía “re coqueta que murió de amor”.

Carlos, el padre está en el centro de la historia. Pasa de ser un padre ausente y desobligado a uno encantador y cariñoso; puede detener el viaje a los Estados Unidos si no firma el permiso para que sus hijas salgan del país, pero ¿quiere negarles una vida pacífica? Tal vez el coming of age más significativo de la película no es el de las chicas sino el de Carlos, como burlonamente lo llama Aurora en lugar de papá. Para él la vida en una ciudad con coches bomba no es suficientemente interesante: él debe estar en el sitio de la explosión, salvado por una casualidad. Tiene mil anécdotas y cicatrices para probarlas; el guion de la directora en colaboración con Diego Vega, da 40 minutos a la audiencia -¿para encariñarse?- antes de mostrar de que lado de la ley están él y sus simpatías. Es intrigante descubrir si es agente secreto, terrorista, policía o solo un taxista mitómano.

Reynicke es diestra como directora pero su mayor virtud es la sutileza.  Hace que la cámara se mueva nerviosamente cuando Carlos está ante el permiso de salida; una escena decisiva pero que no admite movimiento; dirige a una actriz consolidada como Susi Sánchez, ganadora de dos premios Goya, para que sea omnipresente pero no apabullante; se podría decir que es demasiado obvio el uso del icónico valsecito La flor de la canela, pero es la elección lógica en una fiesta de despedida con pisco sour.

La diseñadora de producción Susana Torres resucita con nostalgia y realismo la Lima de principios de los 90 mientras el diseñador de vestuario Fernando Velazco muestra un buen ojo con el uso de los estampados de la época, cada uno demasiado cargado, cuando la familia se reúne la estridencia de los atuendos  resaltan su disfuncionalidad.

Dirección: Klaudia Reynicke
Guion: Klaudia Reynicke, Diego Vega
Elenco: Gonzalo Molina, Jimena Lindo, Susi Sánchez, Abril Gjurinovic, Luana Vega
Productores: Britta Rindelaub, Thomas Reichlin, Daniel Vega, Diego Vega, Valérie Delpierre
Fotografía: Diego Romero Suarez Llanos 
Edición: Paola Freddi, Francesco de Matteis
Sonido: Carlos Ibáñez Diaz
Compañías Productoras: Alva Film (Suiza), Inicia Films, (España) – Maretazo Cine (Perù)
Distribución y ventas internacionales: The Yellow Affair
Muestra: Sundance Film Festival, International Film Fest Berlín (Generaciones)
En Español
104 minutos

When a film begins with a real-life Secretary of the Economy announcing 100% inflation within the next 24 hours, and ends with the phrase “God help us,” it is a bad omen. Happily Reinas, Klaudia Reynecke’s third film, doesn’t fulfill that prophecy: it’s a good film that confirms the presence of a voice full of personality in Latin American cinema. After its bow in international competition at Sundance, it will be screened in the Generations section of the upcoming Berlinale.

“Reinas” (literally, Queens) is the affectionate term that Carlos (Gonzalo Molina), a divorced and absent father, uses for his daughters, the teenager Aurora (Luana Vega Sousa) and ten-year-old Lucía (Abril Gjurinovic). In Peru in the early 1990s — with the Shining Path guerrilla group constantly attacking and an economy in crisis — the sisters are about to leave Lima to move with their mother Elena (Jimena Lindo) to Minnesota. They go in search of a better life according to Elena, to die of boredom according to Aurora, or simply to move away from him, according to Carlos. In the three weeks before their departure, they stay with their grandmother (Susi Sánchez), an eccentric and strong-willed woman who hates Carlos.

Klaudia Reynicke was born and spent her childhood in Lima before emigrating with her family to Switzerland and the United States, experiences that turn Reinas into a realistic film. Her previous works Il Nido and Love Me Tender have received recognition at international festivals.

Politics and the consequences of living in a country in crisis are constants in the daily life of the family, but very little is said about them. At the time the action takes place, Lima was a city with a curfew but also with beaches, bartering, dancing, and fun. Both girls move in a bubble, protected by their mother and grandmother. They’re more concerned with first love and social life than with politics, which they discuss less than the ghost of an aunt who was “really flirtatious and died of love.”

But it is Carlos, the father, who is at the center of the story. He swings from being a disengaged, absentee father to a charming and loving dad. He can stop the trip to the United States if he does not sign the permit for his daughters to leave the country, but does he want to deny them a peaceful life?  Perhaps the most significant coming-of-age story in the film is not that of the girls but of Carlos. For him, life in a city with car bombs is not interesting enough: he must be on the site of the explosion, his life saved by chance. He has a thousand anecdotes and the scars to prove them. The screenplay, written by Reynicke and Diego Vega, gives the audience 40 minutes of running time (maybe to get attached to the character?) before showing us which side of the law he and his sympathies are on. It is intriguing to figure out if he is a secret agent, terrorist, police officer, or just a taxi driver telling tall tales.

Reynicke is a skillful director, but her greatest virtue is subtlety. She makes the camera move nervously when Carlos is in line for an exit permit, a pivotal scene but one that does not allow movement. She directs an established actress like Susi Sánchez, the winner of two Goya awards, so that she is omnipresent but not overwhelming. Maybe the use of the iconic Peruvian song “La flor de la canela” is too obvious, but it is the logical choice at a farewell party serving the local cocktail pisco sour.

Production designer Susana Torres resurrects the Lima of the early 1990s with nostalgia and realism, while costume designer Fernando Velazco makes canny use of the prints of the time, each one too busy; when the family gathers together, the stridency of their outfits highlights their dysfunctionality.

Director: Klaudia Reynicke
Screenplay: Klaudia Reynicke, Diego Vega
Cast: Gonzalo Molina, Jimena Lindo, Susi Sánchez, Abril Gjurinovic, Luana Vega
Producers: Britta Rindelaub, Thomas Reichlin, Daniel Vega, Diego Vega, Valérie Delpierre
Cinematography: Diego Romero Suarez Llanos 
Editing: Paola Freddi, Francesco de Matteis
Sound: Carlos Ibáñez Diaz
Production companies: Alva Film (Suiza), Inicia Films, (España) – Maretazo Cine (Perù)
International sales: The Yellow Affair
Venue: Sundance Film Festival
In Spanish
104 minutes

From Austria comes Veni Vidi Vici directed by Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann, who examine the power of money in their story about a billionaire family, in a film falling graciously into the ever-popular “eat the rich” subgenre. Quite another type of family appears in the Norwegian documentary A New Kind of Wilderness. Director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen finds the Payne family reclaiming their inborn freedom in the remote forest where they live peacefully, until a tragedy forces them to return to “civilization”.

A 6-year-old girl loses her mother in àma Gloria but finds love and comfort with a nanny-caregiver from Cape Verde, until she, too, has to exit from the little girl’s life. French filmmaker Marie Amachoukeli, who is making her directing debut, brings an uncanny sensibility to this moving story. Yet another family, this time in lively but socially and economically unstable Peru of 1992, prepares for a major relocation in Reinas, directed by Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke. This coming-of-ager follows Elena and her two budding daughters as they prepare to move to the U.S., leaving their estranged father behind.

In Ibelin, the parents of a severely disabled young man mourn his passing, yet are amazed to discover how many friends he had made in the world of online gaming, where unbeknownst to them he led an emotionally rich alternative life. Director Benjamin Ree’s touching and visually impressive documentary, parts of which are animated, is another offering from Norway.

Peering into the future, which is actually already here, in Eternal You, German filmmakers Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck dive into the nitty-gritty of AI, which is able to sell “immortality” via digital avatars of deceased loved ones. It’s a cautionary overview of an ethically dubious new reality. Thea Hvistendahl’s half-Stephen King, half-Kafka first feature, Handling the Undead, is a narrative on the irreversibility of death in which deceased loved ones inexplicably come back to life. Powerful, at times cruel and at other times delicate, it explores the devastating power of grief and love in what could be seen as a horror film format.

The international conspiracy surrounding the assassination of the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, is described as a huge political intrigue in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat by Belgian documentarian Johan Grimonprez. In Finnish-British director Mikko Makela’s second feature Sebastian, a young Scottish writer in London decides to research his new novel by experiencing what it is to be a sex worker. And in Krazy House directed by Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil from the Netherlands, a family finds their home being torn apart by Russian criminals.

We hope you enjoy reading these reviews, which show how strongly Europe’s outspokenly creative filmmakers stood out this year at Sundance. EFP once again offered a meeting space for the Europeans attendees. Its EUROPE! HUB received the support of the Creative Europe – MEDIA Programme of the European Union, along with Austrian Films, Flanders Image (Belgium), German Films, Norwegian Film Institute, SEE NL (The Netherlands), SWISS FILMS and Unifrance.

The slowness of the Kafka half might repel certain viewers. But the incorporation of genre elements suggests that a wider release of this film could be rewarded. Smart marketing would lean into the film’s horror components for general audiences. There is also the “reunion” of Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, last seen together in The Worst Person In the World, although they are not lovers here.

We begin the first of the film’s three narrative strands following an elderly father whose daughter Anna (Reinsve) is struggling with the loss of her son. Hvistendahl makes it clear that the loss has destroyed what may have been a great relationship between father and daughter. Moved by grief and his daughter’s quiet devastation, the old man heads to his grandson’s graveside.

While there, the city experiences a series of unusual events — birds flock in the skies noisily, a piercing sound rings out, car alarms blare — culminating in a power outage. This is routine stuff in many cities around the world, but not in a well-off European city like Oslo. By morning, Grandpa hears sounds from the grave. It’s his grandson in there. He will do something about those sounds. First step: get a shovel.

Elsewhere, a woman who had kissed her partner David (Lie) goodbye and then died in an accident shortly afterwards appears to come back to life, confounding the hospital, her partner and, later, her kids. In a different household, an elderly woman finds her late lover in her kitchen. The film focuses on these three households, even as mass resurrections seem to be a city-wide occurrence.Nobody knows why this reanimation of the dead is happening. All that is clear is that the living will carry on with the recently undead. For David, this means leaving Eva at the hospital under supervision. For Anna and her father, this is another chance to care for her lost offspring. For the elderly lady, romance — never mind the non-reciprocity — is back.

In Hvistendahl’s hands, the story, which is adapted from a John Ajvide Lindqvist novel, is an exploration of the wrecking power of grief and the brain-eating nature of enduring love.

In every case, the persons left behind are confronted with the altered body of their loved ones—there’s decay, there’s mangling—but each is willing to accept whatever fraction of the body has returned in hopes that all of what they once were can be coached or loved back to existence. The consuming nature of this very human hope is what gives Handling the Undead its power. And for most of the film, the director handles the results of that hope delicately, never really overdoing potentially graphic scenes.

There is, however, one scene that should give animal lovers pause. It makes absolute sense in the universe occupied by the film, but that won’t stop some viewers from averting their eyes. In the sense of the cruelty depicted, the film is connected to Speak No Evil, another slow-burn picture from a Scandinavian filmmaker that received a Sundance premiere. (Quick! Someone commission an investigation into Nordic filmmaking’s cool embrace of violent perversity.)

For most of the film’s first half, viewers will be watching a psychological drama with surreal elements. That changes ever so seamlessly as the film proceeds, buoyed by a remarkable sound design and an ultra-competent cinematography that matches the film’s somberness.

Indeed, the strong command of mood and the delicate genre switch would be commendable even for an experienced filmmaker. For a first-timer like Hvistendahl, it is worthy of sustained applause, which she received after the film’s premiere at the Sundance Festival. A star director is born? Seems so.

Director: Thea Hvistendahl
Screenwriters: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Thea Hvistendahl
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Bahar Pars, Inesa Dauksta, Anders Danielsen Lie
Producers: Kristin Emblem, Guri Neby
Cinematography: Pål Ulvik Rokseth
Production design: Linda Janson
Music: Peter Raeburn
Editing: Trude Lirhus, Thomas Grotmol
Production company: Einar Film Drama
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
In Norwegian
Duration: 99 Min

Almost 10 years have passed since the death of Mats Steen, who was stricken from a young age with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an incurable genetic disorder that gradually robbed him of mobility and speech. Mats was a childhood friend of the director, and Ibelin opens with a charmingly retro montage of family home videos chronicling his short life, from lively baby to sickly child, a wheelchair user in his teens, then an increasingly withdrawn young man heavily reliant on medical science to keep him alive. When he dies, aged just 25, his mother Trude, father Robert and sister Mia are understandably devastated. But then a flood of condolence messages begin arriving from online friends all across Europe, forcing the family to re-evaluate a life they had previously deemed to be lonely and loveless.

In an inspired stylistic device, Ree and a 3D animation team led by Rasmus Tukia have recreated extensive episodes from Mats’ online life as “Ibelin”, his avatar in the hugely popular role-playing fantasy computer game World of Warcraft, where he built up a close-knit community of friends and fellow gamers. Mimicking the boxy graphics of the game, these gleaming animations are not quite at the world-beating level of James Cameron’s Avatar, but they do have an immersive, seductively dreamlike quality. Crucially, game-play offers users like Mats an escape from the limitations of their physical bodies into an alternate virtual realm of fairy-tale kingdoms, ruggedly handsome digital warriors and Manic Pixel Dream Girls.

Conveniently for Ree, the World of Warcraft sub-group that Mats belonged to archived many thousands of pages of their interactions, allowing the director and his team to accurately reconstruct real game-play. After first introducing them in avatar form, the film-makers then interview several of this group in person. One, Lisette, became the closest thing Mats ever had to a romantic partner. Another, Horsens, credits Mats with helping her connect with her autistic son, first by encouraging her to hug him online, then in real life. The group developed a warm communal bond offline too, but any time they suggested meeting up in person or even on video calls, Mats always found an excuse not to participate. In his final years, he also wrote a public blog, which Ree quotes extensively here.

The nuanced picture of Mats that emerges in Ibelin is mostly of a thoughtful and empathetic soul, but also a serial flirt given to occasionally belligerent outbursts. Happily, this emotionally rich back story provides a great deal of posthumous comfort to his family. Robert Steen even jokes about his fatherly pride in discovering his son was a “womaniser” in the virtual realm, a consolation prize for being denied any chance of romance in the physical world.

Ree works hard to construct a happy ending for an overwhelmingly tragic life story, and he succeeds up to a point. A more psychologically complex film might have touched on thorny debates about how computer games impact on mental health and negative body image, especially for disabled users, but that may have added too much darkness to a documentary that wears its feel-good intentions very overtly. Uno Helmersson’s score, all soft piano twinkles and cloying stings, certainly leans heavily into sentimentality.

But it feels a little callous to critique a film with such impeccably worthy motives and high-end technical credentials. Ibelin is ultimately a heart-warming memorial to Mats, and a comforting exercise in closure for his friends and family.

Director, screenwriter: Benjamin Ree
Producer: Ingvil Giske
Cinematography: Rasmus Tukia, Tore Vollan
3D animator: Rasmus Tukia
2D animator: Ada Wikdahl
Editing: Editor: Robert Stengard
Composer: Uno Helmersson
Production company: Medieoperatørene (Norway)
World sales: Autlook, Vienna
Venue: Tromsø International Film Festival
In Norwegian, English
104 minutes

Although not mentioned on screen, the starting point for the project was when filmmaker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen came across the Payne family’s website, run by the mother Maria: a visual and verbal chronicle of life on a farm, which Maria and her English husband Nik bought so they could live as close to nature as possible, without relying on the trappings of big city routines. They homeschooled their four children (the eldest, Ronja, is Maria’s daughter from a previous relationship) and were perfectly happy in the middle of a Norwegian forest, a feeling Jacobsen wished to capture on camera.

However, as filming got postponed, she didn’t reconnect with the family until it was too late: Maria was diagnosed with cancer (the film’s English title derives from the online post she used to announce it), and passed away in the first half of 2019. With the consent of Nik and the children, she retooled her original idea to focus on their adjustment to a new life and its multiple complications: Ronja, who always felt a bit distant from the rest of the family anyway by virtue of not being Nik’s child, moved back in with her biological father, and Nik himself contemplated moving back to England, especially since Maria’s absence made it difficult to continue homeschooling the younger children Ulv, Falk and Freja in Norwegian.

The film begins with the idyllic feeling amped up, indulging all the hippie clichés of the family’s chosen lifestyle (one minute in, one of the kids is encouraged to literally hug a tree). Then the euphoria gradually subsides until very soon Maria is out of the picture – barring occasional archive footage and passages from her writings recited by Siw Laurent – and a more somber tone kicks in. The lush vistas of farm life give way to more frequent close-ups of the main players, particularly the children who find themselves “trapped” in a new, more restrictive existence they didn’t know was around the corner.

There’s a gentle rawness to the proceedings, as the trust the director built up with the family pays off in her having access to their more vulnerable moments, with an underlying melancholy even as the overall structure lays the groundwork for a fairly uplifting series of character arcs. Yes, this is non-fiction, but with the layout of a classic drama (perhaps also because of the partial similarities with the aforementioned Captain Fantastic), including the occasional intrusive contrivances – voiceovers especially – that aim to tug at the heartstrings in an even more explicit way. A minor, but not entirely harmless annoyance in what is otherwise a very honest look at a broken family putting itself back together.

Director, screenplay: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen
Producer: Mari Bakke Riise
Editing: Christoffer Heie, Kristian Tveit
Music: Olav Øyehaug
Production company: A5film
World Sales: Kim Christensen, Nanna Lykke (DR Sales, Denmark)
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
In Norwegian, English
83 minutes

Marketing for AI technology plays on our hope for immortality, promising to bring it out of the realms of science fiction and religion, into internet-accessible reality. We are swept over cityscapes, and across a digitally connected globe to hear from creators and users from Detroit to Seoul and Auckland about their conceptions and experiences of the latest forays into human simulation, with real manuscripts of ChatGPT exchanges with deadbots (chatbots based on deceased people) incorporated. Joshua Barbeau had been there when the life support of his fiance was turned off, and missed her terribly, until website Project December enabled him to create a likeness of her that was constantly there, ready to respond, uncannily impersonating the way that she spoke. Stephenie Oney, who kept calling her father’s voicemail after he passed to hear his voice, enlisted HereAfter AI to create his avatar, so that her children could remember him “with more dimension,” through an interactive memorial unveiled at a large, emotional family gathering. Expert face renderer Mark Sagar uses his own baby as a source model, as he works to create a digital nervous system that reproduces aspects of human consciousness.

The question of whether simulating the dead is unhealthy, preventing people from accepting their loss and properly grieving so that they can move on, is just the tip of the iceberg in a documentary that touches on even more negative experiences of the AI. The deadbots are experienced like ghosts, creating great distress if users are told things they do not want to hear. Religious believer Christi Angel secretly sought comfort in a simulation of a former boyfriend who died from a drug overdose, but feared he was not in a good place, and might even try to possess her, when he said he did not cross over from Earth and was haunting a rehab clinic. Perhaps most disturbing of all, we watch a mother who has lost her young daughter use virtual reality to fulfill the yearning to encounter her again and create new memories — a meeting controversially televised as a spectacle in South Korea, sparking a furious debate over the exploitation of grief and voyeurism.

The founder of Project December, Jason Rohrer, is given ample screen time to set out his rather libertarian perspective on the experimentation and ethical implications around simulating the dead, and contends that consenting adults should be free to use the technology how they like, taking the moral responsibility upon themselves. More circumspect voices on potential dangers include MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who warns of the technology’s manipulative nature in tapping into our desire for transcendence, as our access to memories of a person are taken hostage. Footage is featured of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee oversight hearing in Washington DC in May 2023 on whether greater regulation of AI is needed, a hearing that reflected a climate of increasing public alarm around the technology. Several people in the documentary point out that ChatGPT inexplicably displayed linguistic intelligence about things not in the systems it had studied —  showing it is beyond the understanding or ultimate control of those programming it. As our use of technology is only set to become more immersive, the accessible reflections and reasoned skepticism Eternal You offers is urgent and timely.

Directors, screenwriters: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck
Producers: Christian Beetz, Georg Tschurtschenthaler
Cinematography: Tom Bergmann, Konrad Waldmann
Editors: Anne Juenemann, Lisa Zoe Geretschlaeger
Music: Gregor Keienburg, Raffael Seyfried
Production company: Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion (Germany)
Sales:  Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion (Germany)
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
In English, Korean
87 minutes

The film should get a decent run across Europe and ensured if modest interest from U.S. audiences. It has premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

From the start, Hoesl and Niemann show their hands. The film opens with an Ayn Rand quote: “The point is, who will stop me?” As we come to see, that line is a wonderfully fitting epigraph.

At first, we are treated to the sight of a cyclist laboring atop his bike. It seems to be going well until bang! Someone takes a shot at his arm. Whoever has pulled the trigger is off-screen. The injured and perplexed cyclist reverses, then stops to assess his wound. Another bang! He’s dead. Two men show up. One takes the bereaved’s bike; the other attempts to clean up. Other cyclists appear. It is broad daylight.

Throughout the film, these random murders will continue and there is no real mystery as to who the gunman is. His name is Amon Maynard; he’s rich; he’s a family man; he has plans to build a large company. A voiceover by his daughter makes it clear that their family isn’t particularly interested in what is ethical. In fact, in a bit, we’ll learn that Maynard has managed to shove off a businessman in a hostile takeover. But cry not for the victim: he was Maynard’s mentor. The pupil has merely grown old enough to displace his master, using his master’s own tricks.

Laurence Rupp, clearly enjoying playing Maynard, renders the character a sunny, blithe one. There is something not quite right about his toothy smile, but he is not a detestable villain. His teenage daughter Paula (Olivia Goschler) from a previous marriage, his wife Viktoria (Ursina Lardi), and their other kids witness him as an engaged father, which might be the easiest way to get viewers not to hate a totally despicable character. It also helps that Rupp is good-looking. Still, there are those who consider Maynard as prison-worthy or worse.

One of them is a man who sees Maynard as he “hunts” one fine day. Another is Volker (Dominik Warta), who in the cinematic tradition of headstrong journalists struggles to publish an exposé on the wealthy man. Their similar intentions will lead them to different paths, both of which say something about confronting evil perpetuated by the rich in a heavily unequal society.

Such a theme will not come as a surprise to fans of Hoesl and Niemann, for whom the rich and their milieu have long been of interest. Their documentary Davos captured ordinary people in the titular location which is now synonymous with the popular event that attracts the global elite to Switzerland. Before that film, Hoesl had taken a satirical brush in examining capitalism in 2016’s WinWin. To the themes explored in those projects, the pair has added bite and blood.

In Hollywood, the addition of bite and blood should be enough to guarantee a mass market strategy. But for better or worse, Veni, Vidi, Vici has a distinctly European sensibility. The mainstream American need to crowd-please is absent and some of the choices (like an early scene introduced in rather needless slow mo) betray the directors’ art house mindset. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe just maybe a film intent on critiquing a class of people present in every society should consider bringing viewers in, rather than keep them at a remove?

Nonetheless, Veni, Vidi, Vici is technically impressive, the sound design—eerie and quirky—particularly so. To emphasise Maynard’s blatant perversity, the film is almost always bright and shiny. Nobody in the post-production suite seems to need darkness to hide untidy shots and tacky edits.

But, of course, the central question for films in and around the eat the rich subsection of cinema is: who is this supposed to be speaking to? For Veni, Vidi, Vici, the answer is probably the society. Everybody is encouraging the wicked ways of the wealthy; nobody is truly trying to stop them.

The filmmakers themselves don’t seem too convinced that the rich can be stopped in a capitalist world. Which suggests that Hoesl and Niemann are too clear-eyed about the world to offer comforting narrative turns. Or maybe it has something to do with Austria, as Michael Haneke has repeatedly demonstrated. And the film was produced by Ulrich Seidl.

In any case, they show us Paula becoming enamoured of her father’s ways and building up the skill set to replicate his hunting. They seem to understand that even as you are eager to eat the rich, their young are just as hungry to eat you. But unlike you, they have the resources to purchase the cutlery needed and their teeth are intrinsically sharper. As another wealthy, unscrupulous character once said, they “drink your milkshake!”

Cast: Laurence Rupp, Ursina Lardi, Olivia Goschler, Kyra Kraus, Tamaki Uchida, Dominik Warta
Directors: Daniel Hoesl, Julia Niemann
Screenwriter: Daniel Hoesl
Producer: Ulrich Seidl
Cinematography: Gerald Kerkletz
Editing: Gerhard Daurer
Sound Design: Gerhard Daurer
Sound: Claus Benischke-Lang
Production company: Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
Language: German
Duration: 86 Min