Originally published Aug. 30, 2023

In his first feature film,  Oceans Are the Real Continents, Tommaso Santambrogio expands on a short of the same title that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and now opens the Giornate degli Autori section of Venice.

The plot unfolds in long, leisurely takes that resemble still photography, shot in beautiful black and white, over the course of two mesmerizing hours, although the editing could have been tighter. The film reflects on the lingering beauty and the deep sorrow of survivors of a social and economic catastrophe that has rendered them either paralyzed by grief or clinging to dreams of escape and success far from Cuba’s shores. Separation affects every Cuban family, and the film recounts the wounds inflicted by the difficult decision to part ways with loved ones.

Santambrogio, who was born in Milan, studied film there and in Cuba before making such award-winning shorts as Taxibol (2022) and L’Ultimo Spegne la Luce (2021). He recreates the atmosphere of Cuba poignantly as his eye and ear for detail reveal a familiarity with the treasures and travails encountered in daily life: street vendors offer peanuts, fried plantains, or guarapo (sugar cane juice); tropical downpours mingle with nostalgic boleros playing on the radio; the swooshing a broom makes on the floors of a dilapidated house; the clanging bell shaken by a station master announcing the arrival of a rusty train.

The film gently unfolds the three main plot lines. Milagros is a widow still grieving over the death of her husband in distant Angola; a young couple, Edith and Alex, are deciding whether to pursue their artistic careers at home or abroad; Frank and Alain are two boys who dream of becoming star players for the New York Yankees. All actors use their real names in the film and contribute to what Santambrogio calls “a choral, collective work.” Dialog is sparse and information is sometimes conveyed off-screen: a radio reports an anniversary of the Angolan wars, where over ten thousand Cubans died; parents discuss their plans to emigrate, thinking their young son cannot hear them argue.

San Antonio de los Baños, a small village close to Cuba’s famed international film school that Santambrogio attende, serves as a perfect location for those stories. Inspired perhaps by Italian neorealism, Santambrogio uses non-professional actors that he came to know for several years before filming started and encouraged to improvise. The acting he elicits is spontaneous, but at times it can feel staged and stilted.

In the stunning opening scene, a skinny Black man is crucified on a raft that slowly drifts away from a bereaved woman closer to shore.  He is Alex, an art teacher, and his partner is Edith, a puppeteer. Their performances provide other symbolic representations of life in Cuba; Alex’s art students are blindfolded but urged to recognize their environment by touch and sound; Edith’s puppets dangle from ropes that threaten to suffocate them, but they manage to embrace nonetheless. Time seems suspended in the quiet streets of the village, but we are jolted awake into the present day when strobe lights and rock music erupt at Edith’s opening night, or on a trip to the Italian embassy where they require electronic verification of fingerprints before issuing a visa.

The film evolves in layers of meaning and salutes some Black Cuban artists, such as filmmaker Landrián (whose films are re-imagined in an abandoned cinema) and composer Bola de Nieve. Cuban cinema flourished in the years following the 1959 Revolution. Still, while many acclaimed films have dealt with the themes of separation, notably Humberto Solás’s Honey for Oshun (2001), or Tomas Gutiérrez Alea’s  Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), few have dealt with the taboo of Fidel Castro’s costly adventures and interventions in Africa. Cuban filmmakers have suffered waves of expulsions and exile, as occurred with Landrian; more recently, Carlos Lechuga and Pavel Giroud have emigrated to Spain. The Cuban Film Institute, (ICAIC) is currently facing a rebellion by filmmakers outraged by the censorship and unlawful broadcast of Juan Pin Vilar’s documentary about Argentine musician Fito Paez, beloved in Cuba but critical of the regime.

Santambrogio’s cerebral filmmaking is most effective when he finally allows emotions to break through in scenes that convey the pain of those left behind: Milagros hanging her husband’s letters to dry after her home floods; Alex invoking his African gods in a prayer to the sacred Ceiba tree; Frank comforting a caged canary from his balcony, which in turn is surrounded by iron bars. Los Oceanos son los verdaderos continentes/Oceans Are the Real Continents is an ode to a wounded, wondrous country that still bleeds and loses its young to emigration.

Director, screenplay, Tommaso Santambrogio
Cast:: Milagros Llanes Martinez, Alexander Diego, Edith Ybarra Clara, Frank Ernesto Lam, Alain Alfonso Gonzalez
Cinematography: Lorenzo Casadio Vannucci
Editing: Matteo Faccenda
Sound Design: Tommaso Barbaro
Live Sound: Victor Jaramillo
Producers: Marica Stocchi, Gianluca Arcopinto
Executive Producers: Ricardo Figueredo Oliva, Marcello Mustilli, Alessandra Limentani
Delegate Producer: Ivan Casagrande Contiroduction companies: Rosamont Production, RAI Cinema, Cacha Films
World sales: Fandango Sales
Venue: Venice Film Festival 2023
In Spanish
119 minutes

En su primer largometraje, Los océanos son los verdaderos continentes, (Oceans are the Real Continents), Tommaso Santambrogio amplía un corto del mismo título estrenado en el Festival de Venecia de 2019 y que ahora inaugura la sección Giornate degli Autori del actual festival.

La trama se desarrolla en tomas largas y pausadas que parecen fotografías fijas, rodadas en blanco y negro, de gran belleza, durante dos hipnotizantes horas, aunque el montaje podría haber sido más ágil. La película reflexiona sobre la perdurable belleza y el profundo dolor que afecta a los supervivientes de una catástrofe social y económica que los ha dejado paralizados por el dolor o aferrados a sueños de huida y éxito lejos de las costas de Cuba. La separación afecta a todas las familias cubanas, y la película narra las heridas infligidas por la difícil decisión de separarse de los seres queridos.

Santambrogio nació en Milán y estudió cine allí y en Cuba. Sus cortometrajes se han proyectado en festivales y han recibido premios, entre ellos Taxibol (2022) y L’Ultimo Spegne la Luce (2021). Ha visitado Cuba desde su primera infancia. Su ojo y su oído para los detalles revelan una familiaridad con los tesoros y trabajos de la vida cotidiana: vendedores ambulantes ofrecen maní, plátanos fritos o guarapo –el jugo de caña de azúcar-; el repiqueteo de los aguaceros tropicales se mezcla con los nostálgicos boleros que suenan en la radio; el ruido de una escoba que raspa contra el suelo de una casa destartalada; o el de una campana agitada por el jefe de estación que anuncia la llegada de un tren oxidado.

La película se desarrolla sin prisa con tres líneas argumentales y nos presenta los personajes principales: Milagros es una viuda que aún llora la muerte de su marido en la lejana Angola; una joven pareja, Edith y Alex, están decidiendo si seguir su carrera artística en su país o en el extranjero; Frank y Alain, dos pequeños, sueñan con convertirse en jugadores estrella de los Yankees de Nueva York. Todos los actores utilizan sus nombres reales en la película y contribuyeron a lo que Santambrogio llama “una obra coral y colectiva”. Los diálogos son escuetos y la información se transmite a veces fuera de la pantalla: una radio informa de un aniversario de la guerra de Angola, en la que murieron más de diez mil cubanos; unos padres discuten sus planes de emigrar pensando que su hijo pequeño no puede oírles.

San Antonio de los Baños, un pequeño pueblo cercano a la famosa escuela internacional de cine de Cuba -a la que Santambrogio asistió- sirve de escenario perfecto para esas historias. Inspirándose quizá en el neorrealismo italiano, Santambrogio recurre a actores no profesionales a los que conoció durante varios años antes de empezar a rodar y a los que animó a improvisar. La interpretación que consigue es espontánea, pero a veces puede parecer escenificada y algo forzada. En la impresionante escena inicial, un hombre negro y delgado es crucificado en una balsa que se aleja lentamente de una mujer desconsolada que lo mira desde la orilla de un rio.  Se trata de Alex, un profesor de arte, y su compañera es Edith, una titiritera. Sus actuaciones muestran otras representaciones simbólicas de la vida en Cuba; los estudiantes de arte de Alex tienen los ojos vendados; pero él les insta a reconocer su entorno mediante el tacto y el sonido; las marionetas de Edith cuelgan de cuerdas que amenazan con asfixiarlas, pero aun así consiguen abrazarse. El tiempo parece detenido en las tranquilas calles del pueblo, pero nos sacude al presente cuando las luces estroboscópicas y la música rock celebran la noche del estreno de Edith, o cuando la embajada italiana pide la verificación electrónica de las huellas dactilares antes de expedir un visado.

La película va revelando estratos de significado y contiene algunos homenajes a artistas negros cubanos, como el cineasta Landrián (cuyas películas imaginan verse en un cine abandonado), y el compositor Bola de Nieve. El cine cubano floreció en los años que siguieron a la Revolución de 1959, pero aunque muchas películas aclamadas han tratado los temas de la separación, como las de Humberto Solás en Miel para Oshún (2001), o Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, desde Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) hasta Fresa y chocolate (1993), pocas han abordado el tabú de las costosas aventuras e intervenciones de Fidel Castro en África. Los propios cineastas cubanos han sufrido oleadas de expulsiones y exilios, como ocurrió con Landrián; más recientemente, Carlos Lechuga y Pavel Giroud emigraron a España. El Instituto Cubano de Cinematografía (ICAIC) se enfrenta actualmente a una rebelión de cineastas indignados por la censura y la emisión ilegal del documental de Juan Pin Vilar sobre el músico argentino Fito Páez, muy querido en Cuba pero crítico con el régimen.

El cine cerebral de Santambrogio es más logrado cuando permite que afloren las emociones en escenas que transmiten el dolor de los que quedaron atrás: Milagros cuelga a secar las cartas de su marido después de que su casa se inunda; Alex invoca a sus dioses africanos en una oración al árbol sagrado, la Ceiba; Frank juega con un canario enjaulado desde su balcón, que a su vez está rodeado de barrotes de hierro. Los océanos son los verdaderos continentes (Oceans Are the Real Continents) es una oda a un país herido y maravilloso que aún sangra y pierde a sus jóvenes a causa de la emigración.

Director, Guión, Tommaso Santambrogio
Reparto: Milagros Llanes Martinez, Alexander Diego, Edith Ybarra Clara, Frank Ernesto Lam, Alain Alfonso Gonzalez
Fotografía: Lorenzo Casadio Vannucci
Montaje: Matteo Faccenda
Diseño de sonido: Tommaso Barbaro
Sonido en directo: Victor Jaramillo
Productores ejecutivos: Ricardo Figueredo Oliva
Marcello Mustilli, Alessandra Limentani
Productor delegado: Ivan Casagrande Conti
Productores: Marica Stocchi, Gianluca Arcopinto
Productoras: Rosamont Production, RAI Cinema, Cacha Films
Ventas mundiales: Fandango
Estreno: Festival de Venecia 2023  

En español
119 minutos

Following her award-winning short film Snow in September last year, writer-director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir delivers a thoughtful first feature about a young man’s conflicting identities and a nuanced look at her country’s coming-of-age as a capitalist haven – and how a new generation of Mongolians come to terms (and rebel) against the powers shaping this transformation.

Barely months after If Only I Could Hibernate made history by becoming the first Mongolian film to premiere as part of the official selection at Cannes, City of Wind upped the ante by becoming the first feature from the Asian country to storm both the Venice and Toronto festivals. Its social realist drama veers steadfastly away from clichéd clashes between the old and the new – an astonishing feat in itself, given that the young protagonist works as a shaman in the shiny modern veneer of the capital, Ulaanbataar. The film is anchored in a vivid screenplay, an engaging mix of images and sound, and magnetic performances from its two leading actors.

Purev-Ochir’s first feature, this French-Mongolian-Portuguese-Dutch-German-Qatari coproduction has wafted through the festival circuit since its premiere in Venice’s Horizons sidebar, where it bagged a Best Actor award for young Tergel Bold-Erdene. After its latest award-winning stop at the Pingyao International Film Festival in China, where Purev-Ochir took home the Best Director prize, City of Wind should interest programmers and audiences alike with its subtle yet insightful chronicle about the colossal challenges facing contemporary Mongolian youth. But their problems are very much universal too: much like their foreign counterparts, they are weighed down by traditional responsibilities, modern emotions and all the things in between.

What makes City of Wind exceptional is the filmmaker’s refusal to present the main character’s rite of passage as a mere binary battle between tradition and modernity. Rather, the 34-year-old Purev-Ochir presents her country as a land of convergence, and its people as a product of multiple contradictions. Her view is very evident in the many panoramic views of Ulaanbataar unfolding throughout the film, sweeping shots which reveal snow-covered tundras sitting just a mile or so away from smoke-spewing industrial plants, and modern apartment blocks rising high above sprawling “tent-city” settlements. Embodying this mix is Ze (Bold-Erdene), a teenager who we see channeling a “grandfather spirit” as a gravelly-voiced shaman in one scene set in a yurt, and in the next studying in a high school classroom while his schoolmates fiddle with their phones and crack dirty jokes.

Quiet and diligent, Ze is perfectly at peace straddling these two very different worlds. He is the most well-behaved and academically gifted in his cohort, and a teacher’s favourite for not going along with his classmates’ naughty antics. He’s also very much an angel as he helps his mother at her garment market stall downtown and toils with his homework at home – behaviour standing in stark contrast to his slacker elder sister Oyu (Anu-Ujin Tsermaa), who only makes herself useful when she serves as her brother’s assistant during shamanic rites.

Ze’s mild manners and neatly delineated life are shattered when he meets Maralaa (Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba). The boy is summoned to predict the girl’s fortunes before she has a pacemaker installed in her heart. Masked and possessed, Ze assures the family he – or, at least, the “grandfather spirit” – will look after Maralaa. The girl, however, is having none of this, and she grabs the boy after the ritual and calls him a “fucking con artist”. Intrigued by her blusterous personality, Ze tracks her on social media, brings her candy at the hospital and is invited to stoop near her chest to listen to her new beating heart – an intimate gesture kick-starting his immersion into this very unstable and mortal thing called love.

With patience, grace and an ability to tease intense frisson out of the young couple’s most mundane activities, Purev-Ochir delivers an engaging look into her characters’ blooming relationship. We see the pair enjoying themselves – as teenage lovers do everywhere – at games arcades, shopping malls, nightclubs and, inevitably, in bed as well. What they talk about are revealing about their culture-specific hopes and fears. Surprisingly, the urbanite Maralaa – whom we later see making local tapestries – aspires to a quiet, rustic life in a country villa, while Ze says his dream home is a completely automated apartment where all household chores are done by clapping his hands.

For all his newly acquired convictions about attaining progress through technology, Ze is never shown to have ditched his traditional beliefs in the ethereal. While very much enjoying his time with Maralaa and all the mischief that entails – hair-dyeing,  class-skipping and the like – he remains dedicated to his work as a shaman, and is pained by his inability to summon spirits into this world because he seems to have “upset” them. The fatal consequences of this turn of events and a sad twist in his relationship lead to Ze’s awakenings into adulthood.

To her credit, Purev-Ochir never goes down the easy route of just having Ze abandon “dated” rituals to embrace modern life, or have him realise the error of his contemporary ways and reconnect with his “roots”.  He holds onto them and seeks to forge a way – his way – to maintain both. The winds of change in Purev-Ochir’s story are, in fact, generational rather than cultural, as we see in the way Ze, Maralaa and even Oyu defy established norms and develop their own ways of accommodating different influences and circumstances into their lives. This rallying call for independence is vividly illustrated in one of the film’s final and most memorable scenes, when Ze leads his classmates to rebel against the tyranny of their homeroom teacher.

Working with her Portuguese DP Vasco Viana, Purev-Ochir conveys both the grit and the glamour of Ulaanbataar, and the way it serves as the stage on which angst-driven teenagers walk, run and stumble their way towards self-discovery and adulthood. With the help of French editor Matthieu Taponier, the story unspools with a dynamism deserving of its excellent young actors and bustling landscapes.

Director, screenwriter: Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
Cast: Tergel Bold-Erdene, Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba, Anu-Ujin Tsermaa, Bulgan Chuluunbat
Producers: Katia Khazak, Charlotte Vincent
Director of photography: Vasco Viana
Editor: Matthieu Taponier
Production design: Bolor-Erdene Naidannyam
Music: Vasco Mendoça
Production companies: Aurora Films, Guru Media, Ume Pedra No Sapato, Bolya Films
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival (International Competition)
In Mongolian
103 minutes

As with Stoker’s more popular story, Tolstoy’s eponymous character is a bloodthirsty former-man. He is absent from the story at the start, although the film’s atmosphere of foreboding dread has to be on his account. It is the Marquis that serves as anchor in the meantime.

At first he mistakes the young son of the house for a woman, then falls deep in lust when he does meet the household’s actual daughter, Sdenka. But these are side beans for what awaits when he learns that before leaving home to fight a band of outlaws led by a notorious Turk, the family’s patriarch left an instruction. He is to be allowed back into his home if he shows up before six days go by. If, however, he returns home after six days have passed, “I enjoin you to forget I was your father and to refuse me entry whatever I may say or do. For then I shall be no more than an accursed Vourdalak.”

This is an easy instruction but it proves difficult to follow when Jegor, the family’s eldest son, makes his own decision on the subject. And as it happens, the Marquis has arrived on the sixth day. While the family waits, the Marquis, an avatar for viewers unfamiliar with Tolstoy’s tale, is curious. What exactly is a vourdalak? One person says she has no idea; another tells him he won’t believe it when he’s told. “I like novelties,” he responds. Ah well, we’ll see about that.

In Beau’s screenplay, co-penned with Hadrien Bouvier, the Marquis is presented as a bit of a goofy character. and in Klein he finds an actor willing to commit to the goofiness. But there is one false note. It comes when the script requires our protagonist to display an aggressive libidinal streak. Clearly, the strange household’s strange maiden has caught his eye, but there’s really no background to his violence except, of course, the filmmakers’ intent to critique masculinity and patriarchy, a play that becomes obvious in the final third of the film. It is the one weak spot in an otherwise solid screenplay.

Following the Marquis’s aggression and subsequent humiliation at the hands of Sdenka, old Gorcha is discovered on a corner of the land at exactly the moment when his family is preparing to make a decision about whether he should be allowed back in. Jegor insists that his father must have returned days earlier, implying that the old man has not become a vourdalak. That the father he carries in his arms is merely a bag of bones doesn’t quite register. But then, on the evidence presented by the dialogue exchanged between family members, the Gorcha household was never really one big happy unit. Still, there is quite a difference between regular familial dysfunction and having a skin-bereft skull of a dad sampling dinner.

The absurdism in this turn of events is treated with a pleasing levity by Beau and his crew. Where the modern vampire tale relies, for better or worse, on high-level CGI, La Vourdalak subverts the convention. Beau’s vampire is operated via puppetry, which lends his film a quaintness emphasised by the decision to shoot in Super 16. The verisimilitude is dimmed and absurdism heightened.

The decision to go this route has its charms, even as it makes the horror elements milder. It probably also limits the potential audience of the film — but non-mainstream horror lovers will lap this one up, insofar as, like the Marquis, they dig novelties, and because this old-fashioned picture has a shortish 90-minute runtime.

In the scene where old Gorcha is finally revealed to be a somewhat benign vourdalak, there’s surprise at the state of his being — but nobody flees. The household’s only kid laughs at his grandfather. Viewers are perhaps supposed to laugh along. But there is bedlam ahead. You will not be laughing for long.

Director: Adrien Beau
Screenplay: Hadrien Bouvier, Adrien Beau, based on A.K. Tolstoy’s novella The Family of the Vourdalak
Cast: Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Grégoire Colin, Vassili Schneider, Claire Duburcq, Gabriel Pavie, Erwan Ribard, Adrien Beau
Producers: Judith Lou Lévy, Eve Robin, Lola Pacchioni, Marco Pacchioni
Cinematography: David Chizallet
Editing: Alan Jobart
Music: Maïa Xifaras, Martin Le Nouvel
Sound: Charlotte Comte, Laura Chelfi, Simon Apostolou
Production design: Thibault Pinto
Production companies: Les Films du Bal, Master Movies
International sales: WTFilms
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Settimana Internazionale della Critica)
90 minutes
In French

In Delphine Girard’s feature debut, which won the Audience Award at the 2023 Giornate degli Autori, she uses the same premise, characters, and actors as her short film A Sister, and all of these questions are important. By design, Girard doesn’t quite supply the answers until much later in her film, by showing a dispassionate but definitive account of what happened that night.

Nonetheless, some of what happened is clear. A man named Dary and a woman named Aly meet at a party one night. There’s a bit of flirting between the pair. There’s a kiss. At that point, all is well with the world: boy has met girl and there are sparks. They decide to repair elsewhere together, leaving the scene of the party. In the car, something happens that leads Aly to make a call. Dary thinks she’s speaking to her sister. Actually, her call is to the police. A woman answers the call and plays along with the ruse, while trying to get a sense of Aly’s location. Dary becomes increasingly irate as he drives; Aly sounds scared. Sometime later, the car is stopped by the police and Dary is arrested.

Girard purposefully cuts out a part of what has happened for a later reveal, a decision which turns her story into a semi-mystery. But Through the Night isn’t just a he-said, she-said thriller because Anna, who picks up the call to the police, becomes involved. This particular call appears to awaken her curiosity and empathy, perhaps buoyed by her own experience, which isn’t directly addressed or shown.

Girard’s film is making an oblique point: a fellowship of sexual brutality exists between women. That fellowship becomes a part of the story as, after the night is over, Aly, Dary, and Anna’s lives are examined in subsequent scenes.

Aly says she was raped. Dary says she wasn’t, that they had consensual sex. The former situation leads to questioning sessions, which the woman is visibly discomfited by. As one interrogator tells her, “I believe you but in law terms, it’s intangible.” What is tangible, it seems, is evidence. What that evidence might be for a crime that frequently occurs with only the perpetuator and his victim present is the precise juncture punishment fails to meet crime.

In Through the Night, part of the problem is that Aly doesn’t quite fit the picture of a docile, ideal victim. She was at a party, and she did kiss the man she says raped her. Why should anyone believe her version of events? During questioning, she bristles as though there are parts of her life that would wither if discussed with law enforcement. Plus, she did get into the car with him.

For the director (who is also the screenwriter) the tale of that night can (and perhaps should) be viewed through the eyes of a third party, which in this case is Anna, the woman at the other end of Aly’s call. The film’s screenplay hints at her own trauma and how it has led her to be drawn to Aly.

It is through her obvious empathy that the film’s protagonist comes to be seen as more sympathetic. Girard appears to be cleverly playing with the audience’s own sympathies before the film reveals what happened in the vehicle that night.

That suspense, though, isn’t quite the point of Through the Night. Before the night’s encounter is revealed, the viewer is treated to the altered emotional landscape of Aly and Dary. We see how an accusation of rape affects a man who also has women as part of his family. We also see how such an accusation changes the victim, who still has to deal with men and own her own body.

In the wake of the MeToo movement, Girard has chosen a big topic for her first feature. It is to her credit that her film doesn’t buckle under its weight.

Director, screenplay: Delphine Girard
Cast: Selma Alaoui, Guillaume Duhesme, Veerle Baetens, Anne Dorval, Adèle Wismes
Producer: Jacques-Henri Bronckart
Cinematography: Juliette Van Dormael
Editing: Damien Keyeux
Music: Ben Shemie
Sound: Pablo Villegas
Production design: Eve Martin
Production Company: Versus Production
Venue: Venice Film Festival 
108 minutes

En sus momentos de confrontación más dura, Michel Franco divide al público por la mitad. Su obra más conocida Nuevo orden, que describe una revuelta violenta de los pobres contra los millonarios en México, ganó el León de Plata, Premio del Jurado en Venecia en 2020. Es probable que Memoria, su nueva película, coloque también a sus espectadores en orillas opuestas del río, pero por diferentes motivos.

Habrá espectadores ocasionales para este drama romántico bien interpretado y los fanáticos incondicionales de Jessica Chastain (piense en su próxima presentación en el  TIFF) que se tragarán este platillo tibio de entretenimiento familiar, particularmente desde la comodidad del sofá en su sala de estar  (aquí es donde los personajes del filme miran distraídamente sus películas). Luego estarán los descontentos asistentes al festival que esperaban algo atrevido, tal vez en la zona peculiar de  Sundown (2021), en el que Tim Roth abandona la vida inglesa de clase media para holgazanear y beber en Acapulco.

Si tomamos  en cuenta quién es su guionista y director, Memoria destaca principalmente por su firme convencionalismo, sin ningún tipo de ironía o giro argumental. Bienvenidos al sofá. Sylvia (Chastain) es una asistente social que vive con su hija Anna, de 13 años, a la que sobreprotege ridículamente (interpretada por Brooke Timber con una madurez interior que la convierte en el personaje más fácil de empatizar en la película).

Su remoto apartamento situado en una manzana desierta en las afueras de Brooklyn, junto a un garaje que vende llantas acentúa la percepción de peligro que sigue a Sylvia dondequiera que vaya, desde sus reuniones de AA (ha estado sobria durante 13 años) hasta una reunión de la escuela preparatoria. Un hombre extraño con barba se acerca silenciosamente a ella en la fiesta (Peter Sarsgaard) y, cuando ella corre a casa (sola, de noche, a pie y en metro), él la sigue hasta su casa y duerme afuera bajo la lluvia.

Los contactos que ha tenido Sylvia en el mundo del trabajo social con personas en situación de calle y con problemas mentales resultan útiles en este caso. Sin saber si dar rienda suelta a su paranoia de que la siguen o manejar la situación con aplomo profesional, elige lo segundo. Así es como descubre que su acosador es Saul Shapiro, tiene demencia, y necesita que alguien como ella se encargue de él, mientras su hermano y cuidador Isaac está trabajando y jugando.

Los hermanos Shapiro viven en una calle arbolada en una casa de ladrillo rojo de tres pisos y pueden pagarle a Sylvia por sus servicios. Pero ella busca algo más, algún tipo de confrontación con su pasado enterrado hace mucho tiempo y retribución por parte de quienes la han lastimado. Es una horrible historia de su infancia y la razón por la que está separada de su madre. Al principio, Saúl parece estar implicado y Sylvia no acepta un “no recuerdo” como respuesta. Antes de que el espectador pueda decidir por qué una asistente social espera que un paciente con demencia recuerde algo, Sylvia entra en modo de venganza.

Más tarde todo se aclara, allanando el camino para una relación más estrecha entre Sylvia y Saúl que va más allá del trabajo, hasta la intimidad.  Ambas familias están indignadas, excepto la hija lista que lo entiende todo. El romance continúa sin más preámbulos, con los acordes repetidos con frecuencia de la canción, Una pálida sombra.

Esta es una película de actores armada con miradas de reojo y pausas cargadas de contenido; Memoria a veces parece una obra de teatro. Tanto Sarsgaard como Chastain son intérpretes sutiles y bastante ágiles con el diálogo en inglés que tiende a ser fragmentado y en torpe staccato  cuando no francamente banal. Este es el tipo de guion sin resolver que plantea preguntas irritantes como “¿Pero por qué…?”, “¿Pero qué…?” “Pero…” Las respuestas no están en la historia y, a este nivel de realización cinematográfica, realmente no hacen ninguna diferencia.

Director, guion: Michel Franco
Elenco: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles
Productores: Eréndira Núñez Larios, Michel Franco, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery
Fotografía: Yves Cape
Edición: Óscar Figueroa Jara, Michel Franco
Diseño de Producción: Claudio Ramirez Castelli
Diseño de vestuario: Gabriela Fernández
Sonido: Javier Umpierrez
Compañías productoras: Teorema (México), High Frequency Entertainment (EUA.), Screen Capital, Mubi, Case Study Films
World Sales: The Match Factory
Mostrada en: Festival de cine de Venecia (Competencia)
En inglés
100 minutos

Before the start of the 80^th Venice Film Festival, the word on the street suggested this was going to be an off year, anniversary or no anniversary. As was easily foreseeable, the Hollywood SAG-AFTRA strike that forbid union actors and writers to promote their films while contract negotiations were underway put a dent in the red carpet parades of A-list celebs, a blow for a festival that has been courting Hollywood for decades and depends on a high degree of glamour to keep its sponsors happy.

Still, there were other visitors to fill the gap, like Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement-winner Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) and Chinese actress and star Shu Qi, Ferrari actor Adam Driver who talked SAG agreements at his press conference, and the unflappable Woody Allen, representing his well-liked French-language adultery drama Coup de Chance.

And of course there were dozens of talents on view from Italy. Even before the festival started, the consensus was that six Italian films in competition might be a bit much. The movies themselves lived up to that assumption, ranging from admirable to infuriating (and given their genre credentials, both Commandante and Adagio might have fared better in an out-of-competition slot). Whether any of them will benefit from their Lido premiere when they open in Italian theaters is anyone’s guess. The only one to take home a prize was Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano, which won best director for Garrone and best young actor for Seydou Sarr.

The heavy emphasis on Italy also contributed to what has been an overall Venice shortcoming for the past ten years: the fact that the main competition, which gets almost all the media attention whether warranted or not, continues to offer a very narrow overview of what’s going on in world cinema. Out of 23 films vying for the Golden Lion this year, six were from Italy, three from France (excluding co-productions), and seven from the United States. Of the remaining seven titles, only two — Pablo Larraín’s El Conde and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist — were not from Europe. Granted, Venice’s second competition section Orizzonti had a wider range, but those films don’t get as many eyeballs on them.

And yet Japan, to take one example, brought several very moving films to Venice. Hamaguchi’s enigmatic, deceptively simple tale of man’s relationship to nature,  Evil Does Not Exist, won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Award, the festival’s second prize. Another standout was the intimate, moving Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a starkly beautiful solo performance film by the Japanese composer and sometime actor, recorded just months before his death from cancer in March. Clothed in exquisite monochrome by Sakamoto’s son, Neo Sora, this career-spanning visual album of solo piano pieces is delivered without context in a quietly devastating screen memorial, like witnessing a condemned man playing at his own funeral, which it effectively is.

Japan also won the Venice Classics Award for the best restored film, which went to Shinji Somai’s 1993 Moving (Ohikkoshi).

As the unofficial kick-off to the Oscar race, the Mostra del Cinema has often premiered films that will go on to capture an Academy Award, like Brendan Fraser in The Whale last year who won nothing in Venice but received an Oscar for best actor. This year’s possible contenders include Emma Stone, the delicious reborn heroine of Poor Things, and the two stars of the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper. And why not, the poised complexity of Caleb Landry Jones in Luc Besson’s surprising comeback Dogman, whose entire well-groomed canine cast would have won the Cannes Palm Dog paws down. And it’s not hard to see Lanthimos on the best director short-list with Poor Things or Ava DuVernay with her engaging but rather too cerebral Origin.

Two films that got away from the jury are well worth making an effort to see. In the remarkably touching Woman of, co-directors Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert bring a breath of fresh air to the dramatic, heartfelt and wry story of Poland and a trans woman who lives the first half of her life as a man. Understated and poignant, instead, is Stéphane Brizé’s Out of Season describing the meeting of two former lovers disappointed by life.

Out of comp, one noticed above all the trends, as though auteur filmmaking was taking its cue from the fashion industry about what’s in style this season. It was clear that vampire films are back with a vengeance – there were at least four in the official selection, and one of them, the quirky feature debut Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person by French-Canadian director Ariane Louis-Seize, won Best Film in the Giornate degli Autori sidebar.

Another tendency that appeared everywhere was for cinematographers to use black-and-white a lot with selected scenes in color. From Maestro to the Turkish Dormitory, from Pablo Larrain’s political satire on Pinochet El Conde to Agnieszka Holland’s story of refugees Green Border (winner of the Special Jury Prize) and Gábor Reisz’s The Theory of Everything (awarded best film in the Orizzonti section), everybody was jumping on this new aesthetic.

What Went Wrong

For those attending the festival, the relative absence of star power paled beside the ticketing disaster, one that has been going on for three years now. Besides making it stressful and sometimes impossible to book tickets, the system sometimes said a screening was sold out when there was plenty of room, which added insult to injury and frustration.

While it was a minor improvement that it’s now possible to book for two or three days at a time, instead of every single day, online queues at ticket-drop times were far too long, sometimes well over two hours. Nor did the system take into account the fact that many festivalgoers flying in from other continents had no choice but to hang out in front of their computer for hours in the middle of the night, praying for access to something they need to cover for work.

The Biennale needs one of two things: either a ticketing system that is specialized in large festivals where thousands of accredited journalists and industry people have to book at the same time to hold onto their jobs (we’re not doing this for fun are we?), OR the enlightenment that ticketing is totally unnecessary, when badges did the trick just fine for decades. If Covid returns next year and seating capacity returns to 50%, we can talk about it. But for now, ticketing just creates sleepless nights and endless frustration.

And a special mention for enforcing irrational rules should go to the ushers at the Sala Pasinetti downstairs in the Palazzo del Cinema. For fear that the Pasinetti ticket-holders could try to sneak into the gala screening at the Sala Grande by mingling with Sala Grande ticket-holders using the downstairs toilets, every Pasinetti screening started ten minutes late.

read the original review in English here

El director español Juan Antonio Bayona sumerge al público en otra catástrofe memorable desgarradora, basada en una tragedia real, esta vez un accidente aéreo en los Andes, en La sociedad de la nieve. Casi tan infartante como su éxito de 2012 Lo imposible, con Naomi Watts y Ewan MacGregor luchando por sobrevivir durante el tsunami del océano Índico, esta producción de Netflix es un drama coral cuyas
docenas de personajes en su mayoría nunca pasan a primer plano, lo que hace que la identificación emocional del espectador con ellos sea mucho más contenida.

Aun así, la recreación que hace la película del famoso accidente de 1972 en la imponente cordillera de los Andes -el avión se dirigía a Chile con un equipo de rugby uruguayo a bordo- es posiblemente la evocación más aterradora de un desastre aéreo que nadie jamás quisiera ver, ni siquiera experimentándola indirectamente en una película. El terror está en los detalles, y al igual que Lo imposible mostró en su comienzo el abrumador poder de la naturaleza para descarrilar vidas humanas en cuestión de minutos, seguido de accidentes y secuelas, esta película está repleta de incidentes que suceden mucho después de que el pequeño avión se hiciera pedazos contra la montaña.

El accidente se produce a la media hora de película. Unos momentos de turbulencias y las bromas alegres y despreocupadas de los fornidos jóvenes de a bordo se silencian. Momentos después de que un miembro de la tripulación ordena tensamente a todos que se abrochen los cinturones, el avión entra en caída libre. Numa (Enzo Vogrincic), un estudiante de Derecho de 24 años que se unió a la fiesta en el último momento para complacer a su hermano, mira por la pequeña ventanilla ovalada segundos antes de que choquen contra la montaña y la cola delavión se desprende, succionando a muchos pasajeros por la parte trasera. Entonces el avión empieza a deslizarse por la nieve profunda entre gritos de dolor y terror.

Para los 29 supervivientes, esto es sólo el principio de un calvario de vida o muerte. En las dos angustiosas horas de película que siguen al accidente, sufren tempestades y avalanchas, frío y hambre extremos, y la muerte de familiares y amigos ante sus propios ojos. Sin embargo, gracias a un magnífico trabajo de montaje de Jaume Martí y Andrés Gil, el tiempo pasa volando sin que sobren escenas superfluas, mientras se desvanece toda esperanza de ser rescatados y aumenta la ansiedad de los sobrevivientes.

Tal vez el aspecto más notorio de la supervivencia del grupo fue su decisión colectiva, tomada una semana después de haber acabado con la escasa cantidad de comida a bordo, de ingerir la única fuente de proteínas de que disponían: los cadáveres de sus compañeros de viaje muertos, doce de los cuales murieron en el impacto y otros a causa de las heridas. Bayona y sus guionistas siguen la historia contada por los supervivientes al escritor Pablo Vierci con delicadeza y discreción, señalando lo repugnante que era para todos, pero también mostrando cómo era ineludible si querían seguir con vida.

Varias personas, como Numa, tenían objeciones religiosas y aguantaron más tiempo, pero al final no hubo más remedio si no querían morir de hambre. Los pequeños trozos de “bocados”; humanos cubiertos de nieve que mastican y tragan con dificultad parecen otra prueba que tienen que superar, una más de una serie que parece no tener fin. Al cabo de dos meses, la nieve empieza a descongelarse y un pequeño grupo de expedicionarios se pone en marcha para cruzar las montañas a pie en busca de ayuda.

Convirtiendo decisiones terribles como ésta en conmovedoras escenas entre seres humanos llevados al extremo, envueltos en la implacable partitura de Michael Giacchino, Bayona se aleja de los clichés dramáticos y del tipo de inútiles peleas internas que suelen afectar este tipo de dinámicas de grupo en la pantalla. Dadas las condiciones en las que vivían, sorprendentemente hay escasas discusiones y pocas voces alzadas, pero sí mucho cariño y compasión.

Varias veces se sugiere que la aterradora experiencia que viven estos desgraciados tiene un sentido. El comienzo mismo de la película plantea la pregunta crucial: ¿lo ocurrido fue una tragedia o un milagro? Al fin y al cabo, se trata del equipo de rugby Old Christians y una escena temprana los muestra en una iglesia abarrotada. “No hay mayor amor que dar la vida por los amigos”, escribe un hombre antes de morir, citando a Jesús. Otro hombre, cuya mujer murió antes de que pudieran sacarla de la nieve, afirma haber aprendido una lección casi mística de amor a los demás. Estos sutiles matices enriquecen una película que se niega a convertir a los muchachos en héroes fáciles.

La fotografía de Pedro Luque acentúa el contraste entre los supervivientes -heridos, hambrientos, congelados mientras las temperaturas caen por debajo de los 30 grados Celsius bajo cero por la noche- y el majestuoso silencio de los Andes cubiertos de nieve que los atrapan. El drama resulta tan visceral que las pequeñas inconsistencias pasan básicamente desapercibidas, como la forma en que una pequeña
radio de bolsillo puede captar una señal en un lugar tan remoto, o por qué varios de los hombres aparecen afeitados después de semanas y semanas de aislamiento.

A pesar de la ausencia de nombres internacionales en el reparto, La sociedad de la nieve cuenta con interpretaciones realistas y comprometidas, aunque sólo tres o cuatro personajes emergen, durante breves períodos de este absorbente y sobrio drama grupal.

Director: J.A. Bayona
Guión: J.A. Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, Nicolas Casariego
basado en una novela de Pablo Vierci
Reparto: Enzo Vogrincic, Agustin Pardella, Matias Recalt, Esteban
Bigliardi, Diego Vegezzi, Fernando Contigiani Garcia, Esteban
Kukuriczka, Rafael Federman, Francisco Romero, Valentino Alonso,
Tomas Wolf, Agustin Della Corte, Felipe Otano, Andy Pruss, Blas
Polidori, Felipe Ramusio, Simon Hempe
Productores: Belén Atlenza, Sandra Hermida, J.A. Bayona
Fotografía: Pedro Luque
Montaje: Jaume Marti, Andrés Gil
Diseño de producción: Alain Bainée
Diseño de vestuario: Julio Suárez
Música: Michael Giacchino
Productoras: Netflix, Mision de Audaces
World Sales: Netflix
Lugar: Festival de Venecia (Fuera de concurso)
En español
144 minutos

At his most harshly confrontational, Michel Franco just about splits audiences down the middle. His best-known work New Order, which describes a violent revolt of the poor against Mexico’s super-wealthy, won the Silver Lion Jury Prize in Venice in 2020. Memory, his new film, is also likely to put its viewers on opposite banks of the river, but for different reasons.

There will be the casual viewers of well-acted romantic drama and dyed-in-the-wool Jessica Chastain groupies (think of its upcoming bow at TIFF) who will swallow this tepid plate of familiar entertainment, particularly from the comfort of their living room sofa (this is where the characters in the film distractedly watch their movies). Then there will be the unhappy festival-goers who were expecting something edgy, maybe in the outlandish ballpark of Sundown (2021), in which Tim Roth drops out of middle-class English life to loaf and drink in Acapulco.

Considering who the writer-director is, Memory is remarkable chiefly for its steadfast conventionality, unrelieved by any type of irony or plot twist. Welcome to the sofa. Sylvia (Chastain) is a social assistant who lives with, and ridiculously overprotects, her 13-year-old daughter Anna (played by Brooke Timber with an inner maturity that makes her the easiest character to relate to in the film).

Situated on a deserted block in outer Brooklyn, their remote apartment next to a garage selling tires accentuates the perception of danger that follows Sylvia wherever she goes, from her AA meetings (she’s been sober for 13 years) to a high school reunion. A strange man with a beard silently comes up to her at the bash (Peter Sarsgaard) and, when she dashes home – alone, at night, on foot and by subway – he follows her home and sleeps outside in the rain.

Sylvia’s contacts in the world of social work with the homeless and mentally impaired come in handy here. Uncertain whether to give her paranoia at being followed free rein, or to handle the situation with professional aplomb, she chooses the latter.  This is how she learns her stalker is Saul Shapiro and has dementia – and needs someone like her to watch over him while his brother and caregiver Isaac is at work and play.

The Shapiro brothers live on a leafy street in a three-story red brick brownstone and are well able to pay Sylvia for her services. But she is after something else, some kind of confrontation with her long-buried past and retribution from those who have hurt her. It’s an ugly story from her childhood and the reason she is estranged from her mother. At first Saul appears to be implicated, and Sylvia won’t take “I don’t remember” for an answer. Before the viewer can decide why a social assistant would expect a dementia patient to remember anything, Sylvia has flown into revenge mode.

Later all is cleared up, paving the way for a closer relationship between Sylvia and Saul that goes beyond work, all the way to intimacy. Both their families are outraged, apart from the wise daughter who gets it. The romance proceeds without further ado to the oft-repeated strains of the song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.

An actors’ film made up of sideways looks and pregnant pauses, Memory sometimes feels more like a stage play. Both Sarsgaard and Chastain are subtle performers and fairly nimble with the English dialogue that tends to be awkwardly staccato and fragmentary when not downright banal. This is the kind of unresolved screenplay that raises irritating questions like “But why did…?”, “But why…?” “But…”  The answers are not in the story, and at this level of filmmaking they don’t really make a difference.

Director, screenplay: Michel Franco
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Josh Charles
Producers: Erendira Nunez Larios, Michel Franco, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery
Cinematography: Yves Cape
Editing: Oscar Figueroa Jara, Michel Franco
Production design: Claudio Ramirez Castelli
Costume design: Gabriela Fernandez
Sound: Javier Umpierrez
Production companies: Teorema (Mexico), High Frequency Entertainment (U.S.A.), Screen Capital, Mubi, Case Study Films
World Sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English
100 minutes

Coup! is an engaging battle of wits powered by strong performances across the board, notably from Peter Saarsgard as a devilishly charming proto-hippie revolutionary with murky, possibly murderous intentions. Following its world premiere on the Lido as the closing film in the Venice Days section, this old-school crowd pleaser should pick up further festival momentum, while its evergreen political themes and familiar country-house thriller tropes may help open doors commercially.

Set in 1918, Coup! draws on real historical events, with true-life public figures occasionality intruding on the action, though the main players are fictional. Immediately after World War I, the notorious “Spanish flu” pandemic is sweeping the world, killing more Americans than died in the trenches of Europe. With businesses shut down, legal mandates to wear masks, and violent riots erupting against lockdown restrictions, the parallels with COVID-19 are glaringly obvious but not overstretched.

A smooth-talking sociopath with a shady agenda, Floyd Monk (Sarsgaard) flees the piled-up body bags and eerily deserted streets of Manhattan for an idyllic wooded island off the East Coast. Here he passes himself off as the newly hired cook at the palatial country estate of Jay Horton (Billy Magnussen), an Ivy League man of wealth and privilege who enjoys a high-profile career as a campaigning left-wing journalist, decrying President Woodrow Wilson’s callous mistreatment of immigrants and workers from his high moral perch.

Even though he is safely isolating from the virus in his mansion with his wife Julie (Sarah Gadon) and their two cherubic children, Horton’s newspaper columns strongly imply that he is on the urban front-line, heroically fighting alongside the poor and dispossessed. His solidarity with society’s downtrodden masses may well be sincere, but it also chimes conveniently with his career ambitions, as he plans to run for state governor under the newly formed, short-lived Progressive Party founded by Theodore Roosevelt. In this regard he is relying on support from famous real-world novelist and socialist campaigner Upton Sinclair (Fisher Stevens), who offers his qualified endorsement in a series of probing phone calls.

The wily Monk spots Horton’s hypocrisy instantly, smartly exploiting this weakness for his own political leverage, undermining his new employer’s authority in front of his wife and children, skewering his pomposity, exposing his hollow rhetoric. Meanwhile this impish interloper also begins sewing seeds of mutiny among huis fellow household staff, all poor immigrants and minorities, galvanising them to fight for better pay and conditions. As the pandemic reaches the island, with food running scarce and staff falling sick, the power struggle between Monk and Horton escalates into deadly open warfare. There will be blood.

With its single-set backdrop and talk-heavy chamber-drama format, Coup! often feels like an old-fashioned stage farce. Handsomely shot in unshowy classical camerawork and painterly autumnal vistas of the leafy New Jersey location, it is solidly crafted and well acted. That said, Stark and Schuman play a very conventional hand, steering audience loyalty in a manner that feels bluntly schematic at times. While Monk’s mutinous motives becomes more tricksy as the story unfolds, Horton is so plainly an unsympathetic, self-promoting clown that his humbling is a little too easy for viewers to savour. More psychological and narrative nuance might have given this fun but minor chamber piece more compelling complexity, suspenseful tension and political bite. An ironically jaunty score, by Nathan Halpern and Chris Ryan, hints at a Coen brothers-like level of knowing, genre-subverting mischief that Coup! never quite delivers.

Directors, screenwriters: Austin Stark, Joseph Schuman
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Skye P. Marshall, Faran Kaan, Kristine Nielsen, Callum Vinson, Fisher Stevens
Producers: Brian Levy, Harris Gurny, Warner Davis, Molly Conners, Amanda Bowers, Jane Sinisi
Cinematography: Conor Murphy
Editing: Harrison Atkins, Alan Canant
Music: Nathan Halpern, Chris Ryan
Production company: Phiphen Pictures (US)
World sales: Film Constellation
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Venice Days)
In English
98 minutes

With Vincent Delerm’s prominent though surprisingly effective music mixing synthesizer with other instruments, and the lightly washed-out tonalities, there’s a very 1970s French vibe here, harking back to that fruitful era of French relationship dramas. Mathieu (Guillaume Canet) arrives alone at a thalassotherapy spa in Brittany, having booked a week-long “Well-being plus” package. The place feels more dead than soothing, populated by a few elderly guests in vast spaces where barely a sound bounces off a wall or carpet. His fame isolates him further from people who only interact to take a selfie together, and his celebrity TV presenter wife (voiced by Drucker) is difficult to get on the phone.

He’s in crisis: he just bailed from his first theater performance, four weeks before opening, and the director is furious. Everything had been announced, there was even a Paris Match profile in which he talked about this exciting risk-taking plunge, but now he feels like a massive disappointment, not least to himself. His distracted wife has no insight and tells Mathieu to just move on and get back to being a movie star, but he’s damaged his sense of self-worth and is struggling to keep himself together.

Then he gets a note from Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), an old girlfriend he’s not seen in sixteen years. She lives in town, heard he was there, and suggests they meet. At lunch they reconnect, filling in the information gap with talk of spouses and kids: she teaches piano, is married to a doctor, Xavier (Sharif Andoura), and has a teenager daughter. Mathieu holds back on revealing his depression while Alice leaves just enough out to detect that something is missing from her life, aurally reinforced by elegiac piano music. Through a montage of vignettes the audience understands that she’s got everything in life yet clearly something is missing – she has an affectionate companionship with Xavier but no passion, and she’s filled with “what might have been” when she sees Mathieu, pointedly reminding him that he ditched her and revealing her sense that he was quickly moving up in the world while she was a “nobody.”

Brizé includes a remarkable interview at a retirement home conducted by Alice of a woman in her late 70s named Lucette Beudin which mixes docu and fiction since Lucette and her story are presumably real. The older woman talks about her life as a young bride married to a man for whom she had gratitude combined with a reasonable affection but no love: “I made do with the situation” she tells Alice, speaking of marital duties with no thought to pleasure. Only when her husband died did she allow herself to act upon her same-sex desires, and now she’s about to marry her true love, Gilberte. The interview takes a longer chunk of time than expected, making the resonance with Alice’s situation ever clearer, not in a queer sense but rather in the kind of superficial contentment that had them both treading water through life.

It’s not giving away too much to say that Mathieu and Alice end up in his hotel room where their arms wrap around each other, grasping for a lover who understands them, who can fill that emptiness inside. Neither is able to fully share the chasm of disappointments, largely in themselves, that brought them to this precipice of loneliness, but for a brief time their physical intimacy conveys what they cannot verbalize. Alba Rohrwacher is especially fine as Alice, her self-consciously imperfect French (in the film) adding a further level of insecurity to this fragile, tender woman still hurting from Mathieu’s rejection so many years earlier. She’s well-matched by Guillaume Canet, whose Mathieu is stressed to breaking point though he’s enough of an actor (and a man) to hide it in front of others.

Brizé makes Mathieu’s loneliness more exposed than Alice’s, setting him in the hotel’s large spaces of pale blues, off-whites and beiges that underline his solitude. Given that humor isn’t quite what one tends to remember about a Brizé film, the number of funny moments scattered throughout acts as unexpectedly welcome counterpoints to the overall sense of loss. With its sparse characters and sense of containment, Out of Season feels like a film conceived in the wake of the pandemic, suffused with acute poignancy and a mournful awareness that fulfillment is evanescent, easily consumed in the vacuum of dispassionate relations.

Director: Stéphane Brizé
Screenplay: Stéphane Brizé, Marie Drucker
Cast: Guillaume Canet, Alba Rohrwacher, Sharif Andoura, Lucette Beudin, Marie Drucker
Producer: Sidonie Dumas
Cinematography: Antoine Heberlé
Production designer: Mathieu Menut
Costume designer: Caroline Spieth
Editing: Anne Klotz
Music: Vincent Delerm
Sound: Emmanuelle Villard
Production companies: Gaumont (France), France 3 Cinéma (France), Caneo Film (France)
World sales: Gaumont
Venue: Venice (competition)
In French
115 minutes

It was a familiar setup; a plink-plonking theme tune, a friendly old man speaking directly to the camera, and a trio of small furry creatures having semi-educational adventures. In this case, those creatures were played by tiny people (like The Borrowers) in costumes who are bereft after the series’ creator and presenter (Neil Savage) has died. Not only that, but his body is lying rigid on the studio floor. This unexpectedly affecting tale sees the trio of diminutive performers – Mary (Amanda Lawrence), Billybud (Terence Dunn) and Fumbleton (Toby Jones) – attempting to keep their programme going.

All portrayed in beautifully intricate stop-motion puppet animation, the film oscillates between the contents of a grainy VHS and the happenings of the real world. In the former sections, the audience sees an old recording of an episode of the show, interspersed with moments in which Mary has taped over what went before. She is recording their attempts at new instalments – with a now decrepit set, with flies buzzing past the camera and Toby Jones’ Fumbleton exposing himself while delivering a bravura performance of the Yorick speech from Hamlet.

Surreal and dark, it may be, but Wander to Wander is ultimately a film about endurance and grief. The world around the threesome is slowly decomposing, while means of sustenance are running perilously low – they are down to the last jar of pickles and rationing accordingly. Mary reads through letters that used to come from children who loved the show and she watches old videos. Their desire to make new episodes is tinged with the tragedy of a desperate attempt to hold on to what is now gone – in their own hermetic world and their connection to the larger one outside – and instances of spiralling madness allude to their prior reliance on their benign benefactor. To survive, they might need to break free; not to forget what they’ve lost, but to forge a brave new path in its absence.

Director: Nina Gantz
Cast: Toby Jones, Amanda awrence, Neil Savage, Terence Dunn
Producers: Stienette Bosklopper, Maarten Swart, Nina Gantz
Screenplay: Daan Bakker, Stienette Bosklopper, Simon Cartwright, Nina Gantz
Cinematography: Steven Frederickx
Music: Terence Dunn
Sound: Loic Burkhardt
Production: Circe Films, Kaap Holland Film (Netherlands), Beast Animation (Belgium), Les Productions de Milou, Pictanovo (France), Blink Industries (UK)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti – Shorts)
In English
14 minutes

Revered footage from cinema’s illustrious history is given a sly reworking in We Should All Be Futurists.

Angela Norelli’s found footage film, which screens as part of the Settimana Internazionale della Critica at Venice, is a work of montage that creates a fictional story from a selection of monochrome film clippings. Taking pieces from cinema’s earliest years, Norelli crafts a narrative adjacent to the predictions of early 20^th-century Futurists, particularly Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, about the extension of man by machines. In this instance, such ideas take on a deliciously emancipatory feminist edge as a woman discovers the sexual possibilities of the concept.

The plot of We Should All Be Futurists is presented as epistolary, opening with the receipt of a letter by Giorgina from her friend, Rosa. It recounts Rosa’s husband, Umberto, accusing her of being hysterical and consulting a physician to see if she could be cured. Little did Umberto know that what the doctor ordered was a regular dose of sexual gratification – all while he continued paying a handsome price for the treatment. When Giorgina’s reply explains that she is, herself, carnally frustrated since her own husband began a dalliance with Futurism, Rosa retorts that replacing a man with a machine might be exactly what can cure Giorgina’s ills.

Norelli’s repurposing of the archive to visually accompany the voiceover accounts is brilliantly executed. The images themselves come from a wealth of films of the silent era, from work by all manner of filmmakers. These include Ernst Lubitsch, Dziga Vertov, Alice Guy-Blache, Man Ray, and Rene Claire, amongst others. Such sequences are combined with other moving image material from the likes of British Pathe, the Danish Film Institute, and the Library of Congress. Norelli is inventive in the methods she utilises to convey her story – not least in the historical paper clippings that suddenly appear on screen to advertise the therapeutic vibrators that “every woman needs.”  The clips are cherry-picked to perfection throughout, amusingly emphasising the gender relationships that are being subverted in this entertaining tale.

Director, screenplay, editing: Angela Norelli
Cast: Caterina Cianfa, Zoe Tavarelli, Sofia Russotto
Sound: Alberto Moscone, Aman Falconi, Giulio Sereno
Production: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italy)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Settimana Internazionale della Critica)
In English
11 minutes

Sébastien Vanicek’s Vermines — soon to be released in the United States as Infested — dwells at the intersection between two horror classics: Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block.

It’s not as whimsical as Marshall’s cult favorite, and it’s not as exciting as Cornish’s, but it jams those pieces together into a film that eventually, slightly too late, finds its own voice. And that voice is hoarse with rage.

Kaleb (Théo Christine, Gran Turismo) lives in a rundown building with his sister, Lila (Lisa Nyarko, A Bookshop in Paris). They don’t talk to each other much since their mother died. She’s constantly renovating the place because she wants to move, he’s trying to raise money to keep their home by selling Nike shoes out of a storage locker, and his only hobby is collecting scaly critters and poisonous bugs, in the hopes of one day owning his own reptile house.

We know early on that Kaleb’s newest acquisition is a deadly, invasive species of spider. Just like we know that all the kindly neighbors with only one personality trait he knows will turn up dead later, mostly killed by [checks notes]… spiders. The motion activated hallway light only seems to exist because it, too, will be important later, just like the bag of fireworks Kaleb confiscates early on from his fellow, mischievous residents. It’s a lot of clunky setup for what is, at first, a predictable payoff.

But as Vermines charges along into monster movie territory, Vanicek’s film gradually abandons its pretense of plausibility. Good thing too, because the archetypal characters and b-movie clichés long ago undermined those ambitions. Instead, the spiders breed faster and faster, and grow larger and cartoonishly larger, to the point where the only logical response to this film is to simply run with it. Spiders don’t grow that large, they don’t grow that fast, and what the heck could they be eating anyway? There’d have to be a rainforest’s worth of bugs in this one building to beef them up that much.

Early scare scenes where Lili (Sofia Lesaffre, Le Misérables), who’s dating Kaleb’s estranged best friend Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield, Final Cut), gets trapped in the shower with a creepy crawler are almost comical as everyday overreactions to household pests. By the time the building’s few survivors have to traverse a hallway that is now, quite suddenly, so overloaded with webs that it looks like a Spirit Halloween pop-up store exploded, Vermines has officially ventured into haunted house territory.

Like many films about popular phobias, Vermines is specifically designed to terrify anyone who is afraid of its premise. So the target audience is people with arachnophobia, which is a bit ironic, since they’re the human beings who are least likely to intentionally seek this movie out. The cinematography from Alexandre Jamin (Vaincre ou mourir) is dim and grungy, with blown out lights and shadows that could be spiders and might be good old-fashioned black mold. Jamin seems to delight in finding high contrast nooks that show off just how jagged an arachnid’s legs are.

Then again, Vermines may want to terrify you with spiders, but it seems even more dead set on making them neutral parties. These spiders didn’t ask to be dropped in this building, and it sure seems like they’d like to leave, but an early, mysterious death leads the local police to quarantine the property, trapping all the vermin inside. And judging from how the police treat the protagonists, and go out of their way to keep our heroes stuck in a web of systemic social abuse — and a web of, you know, spiders — it’s clear who Sébastien Vanicek thinks the real monsters are in his monster movie.

What’s more, it becomes abundantly obvious that the film’s original title refers not just to the deadly bugs but the people they’re feasting on. The cops see Kaleb, his friends, and his spiders as barely distinguishable nuisances to be isolated, disrespected and brutalized. It’s an overwhelming atmosphere of oppression that leaves, in Vermines’ most powerful moment, all the surviving characters all screaming in helpless terror together. No heroics, no plans, just for a moment everybody totally panics because life’s futility is suffocating.

Vermines can’t help itself forever, and it eventually gives back in to familiar monster movie beats, but the second half of Sébastien Vanicek’s Arach the Block never quite lets go of the righteous fury that justifies the film’s existence. You may roll your eyes at recycled moments from more polished monster thrillers, but Vermines’ tangled web of 21st century despair is all its own.

Director: Sébastien Vanicek
Screenwriter: Florent Bernard, Sébastien Vanicek
Cast: Théo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jérôme Niel, Lisa Nyarko, Finnegan Oldfield, Marie-Philomène Nga, Mahamadou Sangaré, Abdallah Monday, Ike Zacsongo-Joseph, Emmanuel Bonami, Xing Xing Cheng, Samir Nait, Malik Amraoui, Gucci, lots of spiders
Producers: Harry Tordjman
Director of photography: Alexandre Jamin
Production design: Arnaud Bouniort
Costume design: Marie-Lola Server, Marlena Hervé
Editing: Thomas Fernandez, Nassim Gordji Tehrani
Music: Douglas Cavanna
Sound: Samy Bardot, sound designer; César Mamoudy, sound editor
Production companies: WTF Films, Charades, My Box Films,
In Venice Film Festival 2023
In French
105 minutes

“I can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want to keep on living,” says Lucas, the teenage protagonist of Firedream (Lumbrensueno), lamenting the death of a friend. The deceased’s mother replies, “perhaps he did not want to keep on dying.” This conversation furnishes a capsule description of the very sober drama Firedream, the Mexican participant in the Biennale College Cinema section of the Venice Film Festival.

The central theme is adolescent angst, which manifests as insecurity, paranoia, boredom, but also as improbable romantic dreams and the desire to continue living. Lucas is a young man who works in a hamburger joint, he lives with his mother and his sister. He likes to take photos and make short videos with his cell phone, but he doesn’t have a strong interest in life. At work, he meets Óscar, a young man who is both realistic about job possibilities and fanciful about almost any other subject: he believes he is receiving cosmic messages, has multiple paranoias, and pretends that the boyfriend of the girl he likes is in reality a passing relationship. Óscar believes they have broken up. The manager of the burger joint is the typical middle manager who pressures employees with dreams of an unachievable future. Lucas’s life moves between the anarchy of Óscar, and the servile capitalism of his boss who believes that being a good employee is a reward in itself. Lucas’s mother tries to make him aware of the reality of his economic situation, and at the same time she wants him to have other interests.

Biennale College Cinema is an advanced film training laboratory that offers a €200,000 grant for the production of a film that must be completed in one year. In Venice 2023, together with Firedream, L’anno dell’uovo  will be screened; a film directed by Claudio Casale from Italy, as well as Árni directed by Dorka Vermes from Hungary.

Firedream is constructed from fragments of Lucas’ daily life, connected with poems and reflections — some of them good, some frankly delirious, with an industrial city as a background full of diffuse landscapes and images difficult to identify (a photos credit to a “Moth Laboratory” may give a clue). The effect is at times artistic and at others it seems as if the film itself wants to distance us from the main story. Although there is a temptation to join these texts with the plot, reading them and letting the story flow is the best use they can be put to.

As Lucas wanders around the city, the script leaves us free to decide whether he finds things by chance or if he is looking for them. One example is a pinhole camera workshop, in which a teacher gives a wonderful explanation of optics mixed with philosophy. Consequently Lucas changes his point of view in every way as he begins to question his life.

The film has several shortcomings, notably the direction of the actors, or their lack of experience (with the remarkable exception of Teresita Sánchez), which makes it feel awkward. Yet Firedream offers several lessons even for experienced directors: it has the passionate honesty of a work made with love. The production company used a lot of imagination to work on a micro-budget. This, plus the time constraint, means creativity was combined with military discipline, which is a very difficult combination. The result is a film that bows in Venice and can be screened at many festivals around the world.

Director: José Pablo Escamilla
Screenplay: José Pablo Escamilla, Nicolasa Ruiz
Producer: Diandra Arriaga
Cast: Diego Solis, Imix Lamak, Teresita Sánchez, Francisco Barreiro, Nahid Lugo, Amaresh V Narro
Cinematographer: Miguel Escudero
Editor: Julieta Seco
Production Designer: Constanza Martinez, Daniela Guardado, Isaac Márquez
Costume Designer: Constanza Martinez, Daniela Guardado, Isaac Márquez, Gabriela Martinez Ortiz
Music: Lucerna Records, Isaac Soto
Sound: Laura Carrillo, Gerardo Martinez
Visual Effects: Francisco Borrajo, Miguel Escudero
Production: Colectivo Colmena (Mexico)
80 minutes
In Spanish

There are plot details that can arguably be recorded: a woman and her niece work in an often empty diner in the middle of a vast port; a couple apparently begins the process of separation; workers in fluorescent vests idle the day away. However, if there are narrative developments, they occur in almost imperceptible increments and remain oddly devoid of emotion. Both sentiment and stories seem eerily absent. And yet, Xandra Popescu’s short, which screens as part of the Orizzonti competition in Venice, has an irresistibly enigmatic timbre and tempo all of its own.

‘Cinema of stasis’ is a term that would more typically be applied to films packed with long shots that feature little to no movement either in front of, or behind, the camera. While that description would not be inaccurate here, the stasis in Popescu’s film feels far more fundamental. The world of Sentimental Stories, which feels hermetically sealed in a similar way to the shipyard of Evi Kalogiropoulou’s On Xerxes Throne, seems to be both outside time and utterly in its thrall. Like a clock hand that flickers with movement but never seems to progress, this is a world in which time does inch forward but through a miasma of longueurs and passivity.

“Sometimes it’s better to do nothing,” states the niece, amidst the portents of an unstable future. The dark clouds that she warns of could be those on the horizon for the young couple – the man who abandons his partner in the port, saying he has to go and get something he left behind, her subsequently wandering uninhabited places, perhaps looking for him, perhaps marking and relishing his absence. The threat of those same clouds could also be the reason a burgeoning romance between two co-workers seems to remain tantalizingly out of reach despite almost physically manifesting in the spaces between them. That all of these things remain slightly mysterious increases the effect of the potential hanging in the air, with nobody overly keen to release it.

Director, screenplay, producer: Xandra Popescu
Cast: Marie Tragousti, Estelle Widmaier, Artemis Chalkidou, Grego Belau, Leo Da Silva, Ezra Luke, Jesus Fernandez de Castro
Producers: Janna Fodor, Sabrina Holzapfel
Cinematography: Jonathan Steil
Editing: Xandra Popescu, Lorna Hoefler Steffen
Music: Khidja Red Axes
Sound: Ce?cile Perrot, Rita Dabrowska, Alex Feldman
Production design: Anna Klisetz
Production: Die Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin DFFB (Germany)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti – Shorts)
In Greek, Spanish, French, German
16 minutes

Valentina Pedicini’s 2017 film Where the Shadows Fall dealt in part with the state-sanctioned kidnapping and “re-education” of Jenisch children, but that didn’t get nearly the attention likely to accrue to Giorgio Diritti’s Lubo, in competition in Venice. It’s a story of survival in which Franz Rogowski plays the titular character, an itinerant entertainer whose personal tragedy leads him to murder and a decades-long search for his kids, and while he’s a psychologically complex figure, the film is strangely cold and far longer than necessary. Rogowski’s position as indie cinema darling will significantly help with distribution, but Lubo feels too much like a prestige miniseries cut down to feature length, and despite an interesting story and attractive visuals, theatrical play is likely to be modest at best.

More straightforward than Diritti’s impressionistic Hidden Away and once again set in the war years like his The Man Who Will Come, Lubo opens in 1939 in the Swiss canton of Grigioni (aka Graubünden and Grisons), where Lubo Moser (Rogowski) and his family move from town to town performing in public squares much as similar nomads did for centuries. The first scene is one of the film’s best, playing to Rogowski’s enigmatic charisma as he sheds a bear costume to reveal himself in a dress, flirting with the crowd in a manner that combines ambiguity with seductiveness. Shortly after he’s forcibly drafted into the army but soon learns that his three children were taken away and his wife, in shock, is dead from a fall.

An encounter with a half-Austrian, half-Swiss Jewish smuggler named Bruno Reiter (Joel Basman) offers Lubo the opportunity to escape the army when he’s offered a clandestine job helping to get some goods across the border. In a cooly-played tense night scene full of shadows, Lubo smashes Bruno’s head in with a rock, takes his i.d. and goods, and having observed Reiter behind the wheel earlier, manages to drive his car, ultimately arriving in Zurich to see if he can locate where his children were taken.

Bruno’s murder is a shocking moment, suddenly casting Lubo as a morally compromised man using any means necessary for a just cause. It’s a difficult flip to pull off, and it’s only partly successful because Diritti doesn’t accord Lubo the kind of lasting grief that would soften his character: he’s driven to find his kids but it all feels like a mission, perhaps a biological imperative rather than the heartache-induced desperation of a man who’s lost everyone he loved. In Zurich he’s able to live very well off the jewels and silver that Bruno was smuggling across the border, unaware or unconcerned that the items were Jewish-owned objects Reiter was consigned to bring to safe keeping in Switzerland. Lubo figures out where records are kept for Jenisch children removed from their families, but apart from learning that his three kids were separated and sent to different places, he can’t discover their whereabouts.

With a chameleon’s dexterity, Lubo takes on Reiter’s persona and develops a relationship with society woman Elsa (Noémi Besedes), a dilettante photographer with connections he thinks might be expedient, but her casually dropped line that the Roma and similar groups should be sterilized – she’s strangely OK with Jews – combined with her lack of usefulness results in her being ditched (in one of many plot shifts whose loose ends make one think more had originally been shot). Jumping to 1951, the film picks up in Bellinzona, where flirtatious Lubo is literally the chambermaid’s delight, carrying on a relationship with hotel domestic Margherita (Valentina Bellè).

Their love is Lubo’s redemption and with Margherita he becomes softer, less calculating. Their scenes together provide the only genuine warmth in the film, and yet the script’s new focus pushes out almost all memory of his children, not to mention the wife who never had much of a character to begin with. Instead he looks to Margherita’s son Antonio as a kind of surrogate child, but then Investigator Motti (Christophe Sermet) starts digging into the Reiter story once Jewish survivors get wind that some of their possessions were sold in Switzerland, and Lubo comes under suspicion.

Moral complexity is a fiendishly difficult thing to pull off in a film, and Diritti doesn’t manage to find the right balance, largely because the residue of Lubo’s grief dries up too quickly, but also because there are too many questions that remain. How does this Jenisch street performer who can barely write transform himself into a man at ease among society figures, with a flair for wearing the finest clothes? It’s refreshing that Diritti didn’t make a standard persecuted people drama, but by drawing the story out far longer than wanted, he loses that part of the story that gave it a significant amount of emotional currency.

Adding a creepy pedophile towards the end also doesn’t serve the interests of the story, and a very clumsy scene in a cinema with the crowd divided between Nazi-saluting Third Reich supporters and the anti-Hitler audience is just poorly staged. That’s a surprise given how in general the visuals, together with Rogowski’s magnetism, are the most notable thing about Lubo. D.p. Benjamin Maier gives it all the handsome “prestige picture” look, going easy on any stand-out colors apart from the blue Swiss sky and making the camera waltz at times, like in a lovely scene by Lake Maggiore when Lubo radiates joy upon borrowing an accordion.

Director: Giorgio Diritti
Screenplay: Giorgio Diritti, Fredo Valla, inspired by the novel Il seminatore by Mario Cavatore
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Christophe Sermet, Valentina Bellè, Noémi Besedes, Cecilia Steiner, Joel Basman
Producers: Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib, Marco Cohen, Daniel Campos Pavoncelli, Giorgio Diritti, Francesca Scorzoni, Christof Neracher, Claudio Falconi, Alberto Fusco, Andrea Masera
Executive producers: Simone Bachini, Alessandro Mascheroni
Cinematography: Benjamin Maier
Production designer: Giancarlo Basili
Costume designer: Ursula Patzak
Editing: Paolo Cottignola, Giorgio Diritti
Music: Marco Biscarini
Sound: Patrick Becker
Production companies: Indiana Production (Italy), Aranciafilm with Rai Cinema (Italy), Hugofilm Features (Switzerland), Proxima Milano (Italy), RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera SRG/SSR (Switzerland)
World sales: True Colours
Venue: Venice (competition)
In Italian, Swiss German, Jenisch
180 minutes

A tale of five teenage friends embarking on a post-high school road trip from their backwater Oregon town, it brims with the captivating allure of new horizons. Made with the Ross Brothers’ trademark disregard for the boundaries between documentary and fiction, employing the same improvisational style as their recent hit Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020). Here, the narrative was conceived of by the filmmakers before then being embellished in concert with their young cast. Representing the filmmakers’ bow on the Lido, the film has its world premiere as part of Venice’s Orizzonti competition.

The glamour and romance of Venice feel a long way from Wiley, Oregon. It’s the small town in which Nathaly (Nathaly Garcia), Makai (Makai Garza), Tony (Tony Aburto), Nichole (Nichole Dukes) and Micah (Micah Bunch) have all just graduated high school and from which they are setting out on one last adventure – to see the Pacific coast for the first time – before the drudgery of adulthood beckons. They pile into an RV with hardly a penny to their names and intend to see where the wind takes them. “When there’s nothing to do, you just venture… you’re always trying to find something.” In fact, what they embark on is a 500-mile journey by car, train, boat, and foot, where they will meet strangers occupying a selection of society’s margins and where wild new experiences will be punctuated with moments of poignant friendship and reflection.

In the materials surrounding the film, the directors have described it as like “the cast of Streetwise navigating the wild roads of Easy Rider,” and it’s a perfect summation of a piece that deftly balances rebellious attitudes and unfettered autonomy against the stark realities of its protagonists’ lives. On the one hand, Gasoline Rainbow is a frenetic romp, on the other, a textured portrait of five young people at a major juncture in their lives. From the roaring jet-engine static that accompanies their departure from Wiley (and recalls Easy Rider), this is a voyage of discovery that careers from drug and alcohol-fuelled all-night parties to glorious sunrises over majestic Oregon landscapes or a midday dip in a hazy, lazy pool. Drama ensues when the wheels are stolen from their van in the night and they’re forced to walk for miles before freighthopping to Portland and subsequently traveling by boat to a coastal party they’ve been told about and decide to aim for, called The End of the World.

Along the way – at fireside parties, skate parks, and dive bars – they encounter a procession of intriguing characters, most of whom exist, in some way, on the social periphery. Amongst their shared revelries come deeper conversations that hint at the situations of these passing acquaintances, but more pertinently allow for insight into the teens at the film’s center. There is no one-size-fits-all narrative for Nathaly, Makai, Tony, Nichole, and Micah – elements of their pasts emerge in unexpected ways and regularly ground the film’s more uproarious energy. At the same time, it never becomes somber, instead, instances of heightened sentiment and emotional vulnerability only serve to strengthen the bond between the group. “Family is where you don’t feel like you need to be perfect… or fit their needs,” someone suggests in one of the moments of infrequent voiceover that are dotted through the film, hinting at recorded interviews but quite possibly the result of campfire chats. At some point, each of the teens intimates – or directly reveals – elements of their family lives, and these tend to reinforce the sense that the group is a surrogate family, one chosen and held onto tightly.

The relationships presented feel both familiar to the coming-of-age movies of the past, but also uniquely of today. The film might be Streetwise meets Easy Rider, but in that case, both have been reimagined through the lens of the TikTok generation. Even the Rosses filmmaking adopts some formal techniques that place it within this context – primarily in sequences, dotted throughout, that directly reference social media aesthetics and interject fleeting stills montages that could equally have been thrown up by the algorithm. The filmmaking beyond these moments is also filled with a vibrancy that is presumably a product of being filmed very much on the road with the group – all of it infuses Gasoline Rainbow with a vitality that echoes that of its protagonists. There will be laughter, there will be tears – it’s a hell of a ride.

Directors, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross
Cast: Nathaly Garcia, Makai Garza, Tony Aburto, Nichole Dukes, Micah Bunch
Producers: Michael Gottwald, Carlos Zozaya, Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross
Music: Casey Wayne McAllister
Sound: Cesar Gonzalez Cortes, Mauricio Perez
Production design: Erin Staub
Production: Department of Motion Pictures, MUBI, XTR
International Sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In English
110 minutes

En Malqueridas, su primer largometraje impulsado por el activismo, emocionalmente crudo y conmovedor,  proyectado en la Semana de la Crítica del Festival de Cine de Venecia, la documentalista Tana Gilbert captura la maternidad dentro de las prisiones chilenas.

Las grabaciones digitales  en las cárceles chilenas son una actividad clandestina , oficialmente prohibida por reglamento y un motivo para afectar privilegios si se detecta, pero común de todos modos,  pero no  un delito. La facilidad con la que hoy se pueden grabar imágenes en un teléfono móvil, su disminuciòn de tamaño  y la democratización de la tecnología digital, le ha permitido a la directora recopilar una visión de este mundo mucho más íntima y conducida por prisioneras del que es generalmente representado en el cine sobre la vida en prisión. También se distingue del diluvio  de películas contemporáneas sobre nuestra realidad de redes sociales siempre en línea.  El marco más conmovedor a través del cual considerar las imágenes digitales en Malqueridas es la foto familiar, porque estas instantáneas furtivas son una de las pocas formas en que una mujer que cumple condena puede anclar sus recuerdos y tener una conexión continua con su hijo.

Gilbert ha entretejido las imágenes tomadas por más de veinte mujeres que cumplen condena en prisión y sus testimonios. Estos han sido ensamblados como una experiencia colectiva, expresada por Karina (la ex reclusa Karina Sánchez, cuyas historias de su tiempo en prisión están incluidas). La película está formulada en gran medida como un proyecto colectivo de solidaridad (el padre de la misma Gilbert fue encarcelado en los EUA. cuando ella era una niña, según notas de prensa). El proyecto, investigado y desarrollado durante seis años, surgió a partir de imágenes subidas a Facebook por mujeres encarceladas, con quienes Gilbert se conectó personalmente. Para no poner en peligro su seguridad, trabajó sólo con mujeres que ya estarían fuera de prisión en el momento del estreno de la película.

A las mujeres se les permite tener a sus hijos encerrados con ellas hasta que los bebés cumplen dos años. Las presas de Malqueridas cumplen largas condenas, pero nunca sabemos los motivos. En lugar de reducir a estas mujeres a sus crímenes de una manera que refuerce un sistema punitivo, Gilbert muestra el costo emocional y el amplio impacto que su prolongada ausencia en el  hogar tiene en sus familias. Tampoco es una película orientada a reunir pruebas del duro ejercicio del poder institucional dentro de la cárcel, aunque eso se refleja en un breve fragmento de las  imágenes de la redada en una celda en la que los teléfonos corren el riesgo de ser confiscados,  y ademas algunos  recuerdos (por ejemplo un guardia echando agua a una mujer en una fría celda de aislamiento, por lo que debe dormir con ropa mojada).

Los encuadres verticales restringidos, lo borroso por la prisa frustran nuestra mirada, reforzando la sensación de que estas mujeres están aisladas de nosotros en un presente turbio y encerrado, con sus vidas exteriores a un mundo de distancia y el futuro sin una perspectiva clara. Además de segmentos de madres y bebés, hay imàgenes de fiestas y fuegos artificiales de Año Nuevo, lluvias torrenciales en el patio; fragmentos impresionistas de la existencia marginalizada en el  flujo de las historias familiares cotidianas. Gilbert, para crear algo duradero, hizo imprimir y volver a digitalizar las imágenes. A pesar de, o quizás debido a la escasez y la ligereza del archivo visual, los detalles testimoniales son un devastador gancho al hígado. La condena moralizante estándar de que las prisioneras han abandonado intencionalmente a sus hijos al violar la ley se rechaza aquí en favor de una visión mucho más matizada y sensible de profunda empatía y conciencia de las grandes  y brutales fuerzas socioeconómicas  en juego. El tiempo en prisión para estas madres significa no sólo la privación de la libertad en términos literales, sino también una pérdida de conexión, influencia y control humanos. Existe una verdadera impotencia que surge al depender de los otros de afuera como cuidadores sustitutos, especialmente porque a menudo resultan poco confiables. Una hermana que está afuera se ha comprometido a cuidar a dos niños, pero en medio de un creciente problema de drogas, los entrega a un hogar de acogida. El padre los acepta nuevamente después de terminar su propia condena, pero en medio de la ruptura de la relación, les impide atender las llamadas de su madre. La tecnología digital puede conectarse fuera de los canales oficiales, pero crea una nueva vulnerabilidad a la manipulación  y dificultad de acceso.

En el interior se forman vínculos maternos, y a veces sexuales, entre prisioneras que anhelan el consuelo de una familia sustituta. Karina inicia una relación con Maca, que fracasa debido a la drogadicción de esta última. Patty, la jefa de cincuenta y tantos años de un dormitorio vecino, ofrece estabilidad como la “mamá de la cárcel” de Karina. Karina, a su vez, cuida a Mari, de dieciocho años, que no puede asistir al funeral de su verdadera madre debido a su encarcelamiento. Cuidar a las más jóvenes se convierte para muchas en una forma de afrontar el dolor y la culpa de no ver a sus propios hijos, y en una comunidad solidaria contra la violencia institucional y la fuerte estigmatización social que las etiqueta como malas madres.

Directora: Tana Gilbert
Guion: Tana Gilbert, Paola Castillo Villagran, Javiera Velozo, Karina Sánchez
Productores: Paula Castillo, Dirk Manthey
Editores: Javiera Velozo, Tana Gilbert
Fotografìa: Mujeres cumpliendo condenas en prisión
Narradora: Karina Sanchez
Animación: Fanny Leiva Torres
Sonido: Carlo Sanchez, Janis Grossmann-Alhambra
Compañías productoras: Errante (Chile), Dirk Manthey Film (Germany)
Ventas: Square Eyes
Proyectada en: Festival de cine de Venecia (Semana de la crítica)
En español
74 minutos

Digital recording in Chile’s prisons is a clandestine activity. It is officially forbidden by the rules and able to impact privileges if detected, but common nonetheless, and not a crime. The ease with which images can now be taken on a mobile phone, with the shrinking size and democratisation of digital tech, has enabled Gilbert to collate a view of this world that is more intimate, and prisoner-led, than what is usually depicted in movies about jail life. It also stands apart from the deluge of contemporary films about our always-online social media reality. The most poignant frame through which to consider the mobile-shot imagery in Malqueridas is the family photo — because these furtive snaps are one of the few ways a woman doing time can shore up memories and continue connection with their child.

Gilbert has woven together images taken by more than twenty women serving time in prison, and their testimonies. These have been reconstructed into one composite experience, voiced by Karina (former inmate Karina Sanchez, whose own stories of her time inside are included.) The film is couched very much as a collective project of solidarity. (Gilbert’s own father was imprisoned in the US when she was a child, according to the press notes). Researched and developed over six years, the project was sparked by images uploaded to Facebook by incarcerated women, who Gilbert then personally connected with. So as not to jeopardise their safety, she worked only with women who would already be out at the time of the film’s premiere.

Women are permitted to have their offspring in detention with them until the babies turn two. The prisoners in Malqueridas are serving long sentences, but we never find out what they are in for. Instead of reducing these women to their crimes in a way that reinforces a punitive system, Gilbert shows the emotional cost of their long absence from home and the wider impact on their families. Nor is it a film geared toward garnering evidence of the harsh exercise of institutional power within the jail, though that does come through in brief footage of a cell raid, in which phones are at risk of confiscation. But there are other recollections (a guard pouring water on a woman in a cold isolation cell, so she must sleep in wet clothes, for instance).

Restricted, vertical framing and hurried blurring frustrate our gaze, enforcing a sense these women are walled off from us in a murky, hemmed-in present, with their outside lives a world away, and the future foreshortened. In addition to footage of mothers and babies, there is partying and New Year fireworks, and torrential rain in the yard; impressionistic snatches of existence isolated from the flow of everyday family life. Gilbert, to create something lasting, has had the images printed and redigitised. Despite, or perhaps because of, the slightness of the visual archive, eye-witness details build into a devastating gut-punch.

The standard, moralising condemnation that prisoners have willfully abandoned their children by breaking the law is here rejected in favour of a much more nuanced, sensitive POV of deep empathy and awareness of wider, brutal socio-economic forces at play. Jail time for these mothers means not only the deprivation of freedom in literal terms, but also a loss of human connection, influence and control.

There is real helplessness that comes with relying on others outside as proxy care-givers, especially as they often prove unreliable. A sister on the outside has committed to taking care of two kids, but amid a spiralling drug problem, gives them up to a foster home. The father takes them back after finishing his own term behind bars, but after a relationship breakdown, prevents them from taking calls from their mother. Digital tech can connect outside official channels, but creates new vulnerability to manipulation and withheld access.

Maternal, and sometimes sexual, bonds form inside between prisoners yearning for the comfort of a substitute family. Karina starts a relationship with Maca, which founders under the latter’s drug dependency. The 50-something boss of a neighbouring dorm, Patty, offers stability as Karina’s “jail mom”. Karina in turn nurtures 18-year-old Mari, who is unable to attend her real mother’s funeral due to incarceration. Looking after younger girls becomes a way to cope with the pain and guilt of not seeing their own children, and creates a community of solidarity against institutional violence and the heavy societal stigma that labels them bad parents.

Director: Tana Gilbert
Screenwriters: Tana Gilbert, Paola Castillo Villagran, Javiera Velozo, Karina Sanchez
Producers: Paula Castillo, Dirk Manthey
Editors: Javiera Velozo, Tana Gilbert
Cinematography: Women serving prison sentences
Narrator: Karina Sanchez
Animation: Fanny Leiva Torres
Sound: Carlo Sanchez, Janis Grossmann-Alhambra
Production companies: Errante (Chile), Dirk Manthey Film (Germany)
Sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In Spanish
74 minutes