Nineteenth-century Polish farming life presents as no pastoral idyll, as the patriarchal and predatory village of gossips Jagna lives in is swayed by lynch-mob consensus. Nobel-winning writer Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel of the same name (written in four volumes from 1904 to 1909) is brought to luminous life with a vigour that channels the decadence and neo-romanticism of the Young Poland artists of that era. The gorgeous, oil-painted frames use a live-action shoot as their base, a pain-staking technique similar to that used by the directors for Loving Vincent (2017), their biographical drama about painter Vincent van Gogh.

Poland’s Oscar entry, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, is rapturous and sensuous yet dark and uncompromising. Its age-old theme of female sexuality repressed with escalating malice should resonate widely, and its feverish emotionality act as a sure hook. The ending of this tale of jealousy and desperate survival grants Jagna dignity in independence, though scant comfort or consolation amid stark sexual violence and a vicious denouement.

Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is at the age where her mother is eager to get her married off. “Love comes and goes, but land says,” says the scheming match-maker, her goal being to ease financial pressures, rather than indulge anything so flippant as true love. She successfully sets her sights for her daughter’s wedding on Maciej Boryna (Miroslaw Baka), considering his advanced age a mere footnote to his assets as the village’s richest farmer. Jagna’s reluctance is compounded by a magnetic attraction to Maciej’s son, Antek (Robert Gulaczyk). Antek shares her longing, despite already having children with a devoted wife, Hanka (Sonia Mietielica). Antek is at loggerheads with his father over property and potential inheritance — hostility compounded when he and Jagna start an illicit affair. After Boryna gives Jagna six acres of land as a dowry, he kicks his son’s family out to scrabble for survival, close to starving, on their own.

Complicating the village dynamics, Jagna is no demure, primly innocent maiden wrongly slighted, but rather a desiring and libidinous force with little respect for moral convention or indeed the feelings of others (such is the hardboiled opportunism on which the village cogs turn). Nor does she have much enthusiasm for the necessary drudgeries of domestic chores, preferring to spend her time creatively, crafting paper cut-outs to decorate the home. She was already a target for the nasty barbs of sanctimonious chatter, a previous dalliance with a farmhand having sparked rumours of licentiousness. But that is nothing compared to the scandal and animosity that erupts over her new triangulated attachments. The village frequently tips over into the carnivalesque at a number of drunken celebrations of wild dancing, whipped along by a wonderful soundtrack by Lukasz “L.U.C.” Rostkowski derived from Polish folk songs.

The Peasants follows four seasonal chapters, just as rural life is dominated by nature’s cycles, to end in Summer — but the poor harvest is far from a welcome fruit of renewal, only increasing the atmosphere of threat and a common impulse to find someone to blame. Jagna’s beauty had afforded her a certain power in the village, but it amounts to nothing without male protection. In a class dimension to the tale, the farmers are hitting back at the oppressive domination of the landowners who have been cutting down their forests without premission. An attempt at an uprising leaves Maciej wounded and Antek arrested, and Jagna in physical danger, as the mayor tries to use the situation to take advantage of her, and the villagers see her increased vulnerability as an opportunity to destroy her position and influence once and for all.

Directors, Writers: DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman
Cinematography: Radoslaw Ladczuk, Kamil Polak, Szymon Kuriata
Editing: DK Welchman
Cast: Kamila Urzedowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Sonia Mietielica, Miroslaw Baka, Ewa Kasprzyk
Animator: Piotr Dominiak
Production Design: Elwira Pluta, Piotr Dominiak
Sound: Michal Jankowski
Music: Lukasz “L.U.C.” Rostkowski
Producers: DK Welchman, Sean M. Bobbitt
Production companies: DigitalKraft doo, Art. Shot, BreakThru Films, Chlopi Sp. Z o.o.
Sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: World Premiere Toronto International Film Festival
In Polish
114 minutes

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

The latest from director Mladen Djordjevic has arrived at TIFF with a banger of a title — Working Class Goes To Hell — but it might confuse audiences who signed up for a wild ride based on its name and Midnight Madness programming slot. There will be no trips to the underworld or blazing infernos in this slow-burn meditation which takes the tools of terror to construct a metaphor for those who continue to be mired in the socio-economic fallout of venal corruption.

Deep in the rural Balkans, the citizens of a small town are fatigued in an ongoing fight over a factory that went up in flames five years earlier, killing several members of the community, and wiping out a host of jobs with it. The stench of arson by the former factory owners hangs over the whole affair, and as construction begins on an industrial sized incinerator to take its place, a court case to get some answers is continually delayed, showing no signs of being resolved soon. Even worse, the town’s mayor and politicians appear to be firmly in the pocket of the developers. This makes it harder for Ceca (Tamara Krcunovic), the local labor leader, to keep her small group of activists motivated. They’ve all seen and felt the effects of the factory’s closing — family and friends dead; job shortages; a rise in prostitution and domestic abuse — but their hope is nearly extinguished, sensing that they won’t get the accountability and change they’re seeking.

Enter the mysterious Mija (Leon Lucev). After years in prison he’s returned with an obscure book under his arm and rumors that he’s learned how to summon the spirits and command them to do his bidding. At this point, Ceca and her followers are ready to try anything, including his incantations and rituals which involve pentagrams, nudity, rituals, and dead animals. Mija brushes aside any talk of woo woo by repeatedly maintaining he learned everything in “group therapy.” But when Ceca and company start seeing changes, and a mysterious, mute man suddenly appears with a supposed ability with healing hands, is it the work of God’s rejected angel (read: Satan)? Or merely everyone’s own fervent belief in something otherworldly empowering them to take a more confident stand than they ordinarily would?

Working from his own patient screenplay, Djordjevic is just as uninterested in woo woo as Mija. What emerges instead is a study of what people in power will do to keep it, and what who those want power will do to grab it. And while genre fans will get a glimmers of the blood and vengeance they’re hoping for, Working Class Goes To Hell has headier things on its mind, exploring how corroded power structures exploit the weak by making them work to keep themselves exploited. It’s a circle more vicious than anything the prince of darkness could dream up.

The film requires a firm tonal balance between its more outré moments (a sex scene involving raw meat is one, another featuring the most animalistic cunnilingus in recent memory is other) with messaging that stays subtle instead of strident. Krcunovic is the counterweight to both sides, with a performance that illuminates the reserve that keeps her cool-headed and the stoicism that powers her leadership position in the community. But the film’s heart spreads from Ceca to those around her, as they each yearn in their own situations for the same things we do: love, connection, success, dignity.

Working Class Goes To Hell is a thoughtful effort from Djordjevic that finds its satisfying catharsis in the unlikeliest of places. As the film draws to a close, it shapes itself as a call to arms for anyone who has lost faith in the system to take matters into their own hands, no matter where the inspiration comes from. Because there is nothing more frightening to those in power than people with faith in themselves and their community.

Director, screenplay: Mladen Djordjevic
Cast: Tamara Krcunovic, Leon Lucev, Momo Picuric, Ivan Djordjevic
Producers: Milan Stojanovic, Mladen Djordjevic
Cinematography: Dusan Grubin
Production design: Zorana Petrov
Editing: Lazar Predojev
Music: Kalin Nikolov
Sound: Nenad Sciban, Momchil Bozhkov
Production companies: Sense Production (Serbia), Agitprop Ltd. (Bulgaria), Homemade Films (Greece), Adriatic Western (Montenegro), Kinorama (Croatia), Tangaj Production (Romania), Banda (Serbia), Cinnamon Film (Serbia), ERT (Greece)
World sales: Patra Spanou Film
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Midnight Madness)
In Serbian
127 minutes

Even before the red carpets were rolled out, there were considerable challenges on the horizon. The ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes raised questions about which actors, if any, would be attending to promote their latest work. Then, just over a week away from opening day, came the shocking news that TIFF’s long-standing, nearly three decade relationship with lead sponsor, Canadian telecom giant Bell, was coming to an end in 2023. During the festival, another shockwave arrived, when 200+ actors and filmmakers signed a petition demanding TIFF cut ties with its second largest sponsor, Royal Bank of Canada, over their fossil fuel investments. However, based on the excited, enthusiastic chatter on the ground, those concerns hardly caused a ripple among critics and the public alike whose focus remained on the impressive lineup.

Opening night film, the International Premiere of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and The Heron, proved to be so popular that organizers added multiple public screenings to meet demand. Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy Of A Fall caused some of the biggest press lineups in recent memory, and it was an equal chance you’d later run into a critic who didn’t manage to get in as someone who did. Other titles making a splash on the ground included Alexander Payne’s awards season bound The Holdovers, Venice sensation Hit Man, Kristoffer Borgli’s surreal cancel culture comedy Dream Scenario, Azazel Jacobs’ moving family drama His Three Daughters, and Ava DuVernay’s Origin, a last minute addition to the fest. Meanwhile, spurring astonished conversation for entirely different reasons was Harmony Korine’s divisive, infrared provocation Aggro Dr1ft.

However, the best-kept secrets at TIFF are often found within its extensive, well-curated international programming slates. EFP (European Film Promotion) were busy with fourteen films under their belt, including: the World Premiere of Ladj Ly’s highly anticipated Les Indésirables; the continued rollout of Agnieszka Holland’s Venice winner Green Border; with Solitude, Homecoming, Spirit of Ecstasy, and Sisterhood making a strong impressions as well. Asian cinema was also out in full force with pictures such as Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, and Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) making their North American debuts.

For those who still wanted some A-list shine to the TIFF experience, they got that too. Jessica Chastain brought glamour to the North American Premiere of Michel Franco’s Memory, Viggo Mortensen was on hand to unspool his latest directorial effort The Dead Don’t Hurt, Ethan Hawke brought Wildcat to Toronto, while the long awaited Talking Heads reunion for the launch of the newly restored Stop Making Sense was truly a once-in-a-lifetime event. Meanwhile, Bertrand Bonello pulled double duty, not only representing his latest The Beast, but also introducing a screening of Jacque Rivette’s L’amour fou.

As always, unexpected themes emerged among this year’s films. Hit men factored in Hit Man, Michael Keaton’s directorial debut Knox Goes Away, and Aggro Dr1ft. Talking Heads, aside from the refresh of their seminal concert doc, became an unexpected plot point and end credits capper in Dream Scenario. While features from actors-turned-directors abounded with the aforementioned Mortensen and Keaton, plus Chris Pine bringing Poolman, and Anna Kendrick unveiling Woman of the Hour.

From the Studio Ghibli pop-up store that had Miyazaki fans lined up down the block to lively Festival Street — bringing free screenings, concerts, food trucks, and more to King Street — the energy was still up at TIFF, even if not all the stars were on hand, and the parties a little more subdued. Toronto’s devoted cinephiles still staked out their spot in Rush Lines, the indefatigable volunteers kept things running, and if there were any behind the scenes troubles at TIFF, it became clear they would have to wait until the credits rolled on this year’s edition.

In 2017, the National Museum of Finland announced a plan to repatriate over 2000 artifacts to the Indigenous Sámi people. In the lead-up to the first exhibition of these pieces at the Sámi Museum and Nature Centre Siida in 2021, the director-general of the National Museum of Finland, Elina Antilla, declared, “The objects are returning to their original family context. The objects are very useful as prototypes when younger people are learning the traditional techniques.” But that’s merely the beginning. As Suvi West and Anssi Kömi illustrate in their moving, deeply personal documentary Homecoming, the return of the objects will not only launch a re-discovery and deeper understanding of a way of life, but write new chapters in the Sámi people’s past, present, and future.

Finnish Sámi filmmaker Suvi West goes in front of camera — with Anssi Kömi (mostly) behind it — traveling to Helsinki, Germany, and Sweden where she’s granted access to museum archives to personally connect with both the artifacts that are returning to her community, and just as importantly, those that aren’t. Boxed away and stored on shelves, the objects that have been gathered by collectors for over 150 years are often more valued for their worth than their cultural significance. When it’s commented that there’s been “no interest in the stories, only the items” themselves, the point is underscored when West reveals that a hat on display is facing the “wrong way around.”

It can be tricky for directors to place themselves at the center of a documentary, but West nimbly utilizes her personal journey to address issues that aren’t just unique to the Sámi, but to Indigenous communities around the world that are working through the same conversations. By gatekeeping cultural articles, museums have become second-hand interpreters, disconnected and divorced from the peoples they are striving to understand, even as they establish what becomes common, accepted knowledge about them. West affectingly connects this to the knock-on effect this has on how she navigates the world as a Sámi. The representation of her people is a construct that leaves her, paradoxically, feeling booth too Sámi and not enough, depending on the context.

As West continues her journey, she becomes increasingly sensitive to what role she plays in speaking for cultures other than her own, and careful about inadvertently exploiting her position as a storyteller. A powerful sequence finds her working out aloud if it’s appropriate for a sacred drum — carefully crafted for their original owners, and of which there are less than a hundred left in the world — to be shown on camera. And while she’s eager to share the spirit and energy she feels from the ancestors that are guiding her — there’s a gorgeous moment when she feels the presence of her grandfather — she also ensures hers alone isn’t the voice speaking for the Sámi.

Each screening at the Toronto International Film Festival begins with a land acknowledgement, asking audiences to “reflect on the history of the land you are watching from.” It’s well intentioned, but when its immediately followed by the next pre-roll bumpers before the feature, the gesture can lose a bit of meaning. This is not to find fault with the festival — the correctives to the long, complex, colonial shadow cast in Canada, Finland, and countries around the world has no single, easy, or comprehensive approach. However, these actions can often make it seem like the cultural life of the Indigenous communities they are addressing has ceased, stuck in the amber of history. But the words “We’re still here” — uttered when the Sámi artifacts finally reach Siida — are a poignant reminder of the cultures that are continuing to thrive, aiming to reclaim and rewrite what has been taken away for far too long.

Director: Suvi West, Anssi Kömi
Screenplay: Suvi West
Cast: Suvi West, Heini Wesslin, Eeva-Kristiina Nylander, Áile Aikio
Producers: Janne Niskala
Cinematography: Anssi Kömi
Editing: Hanna Kuirinlahti
Music: Georg Buljo
Sound: Frode Hvatum
Production companies: Vaski Filmi (Finland), Ten Thousand Images (Norway)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF Docs)
In Finnish, Sámi
76 minutes

“I’m sorry. I need you to forgive me.” Dimman (Joel Spira) will regret his request for absolution as it sends him spiralling into the shady underworld of sunny Malta in Axel Petersén’s pure vibes thriller Shame on Dry Land. This scorched, loose-limbed noir might barely hold together, but its surreal, off kilter mood is almost enough to make up the difference.

After ten years away, Dimman literally washes up on the shores of Malta, and finds his way to Fredrik’s (Christopher Wagelin) luxe home where he’s none too pleased to see him. A decade earlier, Dimman pulled the rug out from Fredrik, leaving the company they founded together in the dust and disappearing in a flagrant act of fraud. Now he’s back, seeking a way to make up for his crimes, but Fredrik wants none of it. Living as part of the small, but significant Swedish ex-pat community, he’s rebuilt his life, preparing to get married to Sara (Julia Sporre), and has buried the past. Sent packing, but with nowhere else to go, Dimman winds up being tasked by his shady friend Kiki (Jacqueline Ramel) to follow the even shadier Krumm (Michal Axel Piotrowski) from the Economic Crime Authority who has been seen skulking around town, as it might threaten her even more shady business. Of course, it’s not long until all roads wind up leading back to Fredrik.

Imagine the cigarette brick road of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, but less sardonic, and spiked with an enigmatic dream journey of David Lynch and that’s the sensation of tumbling down Shame on Dry Land. Petersén’s script isn’t so much a knot as a number of loops, with Dimman following Krumm only to hit dead ends that turn into trap doors that lead him right back to his man. At first, the instinct will be to pay close attention, to gather clues to unravel the secrets that are waiting to be revealed, until it becomes obvious that Petersén prefers to toy with this audience like a cat with a dead mouse.

Mileage will vary on how much one likes being strung along before answers to the film’s many questions start being answered. Part of the issue is that unlike the aforementioned reference points, that characters aren’t particularly interesting or charismatic to hang onto, the world its operating in not as sufficiently intriguing or strange as the storytelling structure. Combined with Petersén playing withholding, eventually the urge to slump back overrides any desire to lean in. And when you have Baba Stiltz’s chattering, grating, free jazz style score cranked a couple decibels louder than it should be screeching in your ear, it will test even the most patient viewer who want to see how Dimman and Fredrik will get out of the corner they’re backed into.

Once all the answers become clear, scores have been settled, and blood washed away, it turns out Shame On Dry Land is a twisted pretzel of a fairly straightforward narrative. Petersén’s script rides right up to the edge of believability in parallel with its rising tension, and the relief that follows also parallels Dimman and Fredrik finally being able to catch their breath after dodging death and the cops. There’s also, thankfully, a respite from Stiltz’s eardrum obliterating soundtrack, but Petersén isn’t done playing with his audience just yet. The director caps his film with an unbelievably campy cover of Cher’s “Believe,” that in a mischievous wink suggests its happy ending is anything but: “Do you believe in life after love? / I can feel something inside me say / I really don’t think you’re strong enough, no.”

Director: Axel Petersén
Screenplay: Axel Petersén
Cast: Joel Spira, Christopher Wagelin, Julia Sporre, Jacqueline Ramel, Michal Axel Piotrowski, Tommy Nilsson, Erica Muscat, Owen Sciriha
Producers: Sigrid Helleday
Cinematography: Josua Enblom
Production design: Jon Banthorpe
Editing: Robert Krantz
Music: Baba Stiltz
Sound: Andreas Franck, Aleksandar Bundalo
Production companies: Fedra AB (Sweden), Pellikola (Malta), Film Stockholm (Sweden), SVT (Sweden), Strictly Post (Sweden)
World sales: LevelK
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Platform)
In Swedish, English, Maltese
91 minutes

It’s January, mosquitos are out, the mercury is showing over thirty degrees Celsius, and news reports on Rome radio warn that “we’re experiencing temperature backwards.” The smoggy sky suggests an oncoming apocalypse, but the world-ending conditions can’t overcome the personal addictions, vices, and petty grievances of the cast of characters in Ginerva Elkann’s tiring and torpid I Told You So. The film unfolds a handful of stories of sex, religion, drugs, and love in a vision of the Eternal City you won’t see in travel brochures, in which its inhabitants strive to rise above their damned circumstances.

It all starts in the bedroom of Gianna (Valeria Brunie Tedeschi), a God-fearing woman who we find on all fours, praying for forgiveness mid-coitus. Her uneasy relationship to sex is due to her complicated, obsessive relationship with her ex-best friend Pupa (Valeria Golino), who holds a restraining order against her. The former pornstar is fully embracing the attention that has come her way thanks a minor social media resurgence, but it’s all she can do keep her head above troubled financial water. Pupa is practically a saint compared to Bill (Danny Huston), an American ex-pat and priest battling a heroin addiction. He’s trying to keep it together while his sister Fran (Greta Schacchi) is in town to scatter the ashes of their recently deceased mother. Also trying to keep from unraveling is Caterina (Alba Rohrwacher) who is just days into her sobriety, and aiming to reconnect with her young son Max, whose father (Riccardo Scamarcio) has been awarded custody. Lastly, there’s Gianna’s teenage daughter Mila (Sofia Panizzi), who is working through an eating disorder and a romance with a food delivery boy, all while handling her duties as a live-in caregiver for an elderly woman (Marisa Borini).

If that paragraph was exhausting to read, rest assured it’s exhausting to watch. Playing out in the territory of Short Cuts and Magnolia, the loosely connected, quasi-omnibus structure ups the ante by playing out across a single day as temperatures in Rome continue to rise with each passing minute to unimaginable levels. The problem is that, outside of Pupa, none of these tales are particularly captivating, but more troublesome is that its thematic undercurrent is fairly thin. The film’s attempt to parallel religious obsession with serious addictions is reaching at best. Meanwhile, Elkann can’t quite determine if we’re all doomed or if there’s still hope in the face our certain demise. So she endeavors to split the difference but none of its convincing.

After a lively opening that establishes its ensemble, I Told You So quickly settles into a dull, drearily paced grind as it flips from story to story without any particular rhyme or reason. The only thing really keeping the picture moving along is Golino’s charmingly desperate performance as Pupa. The porn star might be years out of the game, but Golino completely owns and works the sexiness Pupa still feels charging through her. It’s the brightest, funniest light in the entire film, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share our time with Pupa with anyone else. However, Rohrwacher and Panizzi do make the most of their fairly one-dimensional roles, bringing an endearing sensitivity to their characters.

“It’s God trying to tell us something,” Gianna says about escalating weather conditions, navigating the film with a purpose she believes is divined from a higher power. If only Elkann swaggered a bit more with that kind of confidence. Even as the smeared orange cinematography by Vladan Radovic grows thicker as the sweat slick heat rises, I Told You So stays stuck, unable to carve a meaningful path through the disaster of its own making.

Director: Ginevra Elkann
Screenplay: Ginevra Elkann, Chiara Barzini, Ilaria Bernardini
Cast: Marisa Borini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria Golino, Danny Huston, Sofia Panizzi, Alba Rohrwacher, Greta Scacchi, Riccardo Scamarcio
Producers: Elena Recchia, Lorenzo Mieli, Simone Gattoni, Malcom Pagani, Moreno Zani, Mauro Monachini
Cinematography: Vladan Radovic
Production design: Roberto De Angelis
Editing: Desideria Rayner
Music: Riccardo Senigallia
Sound: Vincenzo Urselli
Production companies: The Apartment Pictures (Italy), Rai Cinema (Italy), Tenderstories (Italy), Small Forward (Italy)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Platform)
In English, Italian
100 minutes

In Norway, if a young person’s asylum application has been denied, they may receive a permit to stay until they’re 18 at which time they must leave or face deportation back to their home country. For those fleeing persecution or war zones, and seeking a future filled with hope and opportunity, it’s a heartless, bureaucratic outcome. It’s against this backdrop that Hisham Zaman’s ironically titled, deadpan comedy A Happy Day unfolds. The film is a noble attempt to illuminate the humanity behind the headlines, but its heavily mannered stylization often gets in the way of its message resonating.

The action takes place at a youth reception center in Norway that is so isolated, barren, and cold, the authorities don’t even bother with watchtowers, fences, or barbed wire to keep its residents from fleeing. That doesn’t stop the poetry writing Hamid (Salah Qadi) and his friends Aras (Ravand Ali Taha) and Ismail (Mohamed Salah) from working on an escape plan. Somehow, they’re going to get to the other side of the mountain before their 18th birthdays when they’ll be unceremoniously shipped away from the country — and each other. Their careful preparations are disrupted by the arrival of the feisty and headstrong Aida (Sarah Aman Mentzoni), especially when she strikes up a romance with Hamid that threatens to split the free friends apart.

Combining the pastel, unreality set design of Roy Andersson, with a tone that favors Aki Kaurismaki mixed with a splash of Wes Anderson quirkiness, Zaman places his very real world concerns inside what is essentially a snowglobe. It allows the filmmaker the freedom not to worry about exactly replicating the conditions and rules of Norway’s asylum system. However, without a check on his ability to invent and dip into fantasy, the sluggishly paced A Happy Day starts slowly sliding so far from reality that it becomes difficult to remain attached to the plight of these characters.

Hamid’s troubling backstory is gradually meted out, as we discover he’s suffering from PTSD or mental illness after managing to escape from being used as a child suicide bomber. Aida’s remarks suggest she was a victim of human trafficking. In a world that has stripped them of their identity, the secrets they hold are the quartet’s greatest currency, and their connection is forged by the trust they place in each other. But as the film goes on, its haiku like dialogue (particularly from Hamid), and continually arch mood obfuscates its tenderest moments and disconnects us from its complex characters. The frequent spins into fantasy or dream sequences, especially in the film’s second half, also work to push us away from the story right when it should be pulling us in.

Despite the wavering tone of the picture (which includes a minor subplot that seems inspired by Porky’s) it’s held together by its lovely ensemble performances. Even as they must wrangle a prose poetry script, Qadi and Mentzoni create a spark that rises above the film’s aesthetic tics. Meanwhile, Taha is terrific as the totally crushed out Aras, whose unrequited love for Ingvild (Anja Saiva Bongo Bjørnstad), a soldier stationed on a nearby base, leads to some of the film’s most amusing moments and memorable dialogue (“Stop asking me to talk to girls about serious things. It breaks my heart,” he tells Hamid after another disappointing meeting with Ingvild).

A film needn’t strictly replicate the real world to have something meaningful to say about asylum seekers. The aforementioned Kaurismaki showed that with Le Havre and The Other Side Of Hope, pictures that fully retained his sensibility and humor, without sacrificing the moving and relatable heart of their stories, and their pointed politics. Zaman, unfortunately, can’t find that balance. A Happy Day often finds its style overwhelming its substance, leaving its audience longing for any development that doesn’t come wrapped in a riddle.

Director: Hisham Zaman
Screenplay: Hisham Zaman
Cast: Salah Qadi, Ravand Ali Taha, Mohamed Salah, Sarah Aman Mentzoni, Hilde Skovdahl, Aryan Pezeshki, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Stig Frode Henriksen, Anja Saiva Bongo Bjørnstad
Producers: Hisham Zaman
Cinematography: Lukasz Zamaro
Production design: Reinert Kiil
Editing: Joakim Schager
Music: Anthony Lledo
Sound: Håkon Lammetun
Production companies: Snowfall Cinema (Norway), Zentropa (Denmark), Rein Film (Norway), Take1 (Norway)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Centerpiece)
In Norwegian, Sámi
113 minutes

Bridges are featured on the back of Euro banknotes, but what were initially designed to represent famous landmarks were rendered into “imaginary monuments” to keep the political peace. It’s a fact Jeanne (Claire Pommet) learns during a job interview with Atlas Bank and a lesson they’ll encounter again in Spirit of Ecstasy (La Vénus d’argent). The latest film from Héléna Klotz is presented in the wrapping of a financial world drama, but hidden inside is a unique and sensitive look at coming-of-age and the fortitude it takes to make dreams come true.

The job doesn’t pan out, but Jeanne seizes an opportunity to get noticed at the investment company where they intern on the coffee-fetching rung of the ladder. After pointing out an error in code that could’ve cost millions, Jeanne is taken under the wing of Farès (Sofiane Zermani), the slick and ruthless boss. Farès doesn’t care that Jeanne binds their chest and identifies themselves as “neutral” — their incredible facility with numbers is what matters. Jeanne quickly becomes a hand-picked, rising star and Farès teaches them how to dress for the role and provides a glimpse into a high life far from what they’ve known. Best of all, he starts making plans to include his protegé in launching a new hedge fund abroad.

After countless hours spent buried in mathematics textbooks and puzzling over formulas, this is music to Jeanne’s ears. This will take them far from the military base where Jeanne watches over her younger siblings while their single father works. More importantly, it’s a chance to escape the family’s military lineage and forge a path of their own. But dreams don’t come easy. The return of Jeanne’s former partner Augustin (Niels Schneider) from military service causes complications, while the ledger on Farès’ promises might be just as illusory as the bridges on Euro bills.

The magnetic and confident performance by singer-songwriter Claire Pommet (aka Pomme) in her acting debut anchors the occasionally scattershot screenplay of Spirit of Ecstasy. After opening with a robbery that vibes with the spirit of Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, the picture can seem uncertain about whether it wants to be a The Big Short/Margin Call-style drama or a study of young people trying to unstick themselves from life’s circumstances. It turns out it wants to be both. Those elements never quite seamlessly cohere but Pommet, working with Schneider, gets to the softer center of the picture. They beautifully render the delicate relationship between Jeanne and Augustin as the pair come to understand they can’t return to what they had but need each other to move forward. So does the picture.

Also helping to tighten the fabric of the film is some terrific work by cinematographer Victor Seguin (Blue Jean, Full Time) and editor Julien Lacheray (Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Petite Maman, Girlhood). The former applies a sheen that feels like the matte pages of a business magazine — a polished blue-grey appliqué that matches Jeanne’s ever present suit — that even makes a messy retail employee break room brim with possibility. And through the film’s occasionally abrupt stylistic pivots, Lacheray holds its moving parts together, allowing them all to breathe in equal measure.

At supper one night, Augustin explains to Jeanne’s family that a bullet from an M4 enters the body making a small hole, and exits through a big wound. It’s a weapon designed to maim. Jeanne’s dreams are similarly fully loaded, starting as small kernels of an idea, but metastasizing to life-altering size. Spirit of Ecstasy makes a clumsy analogy out of Jeanne both fully inhabiting their own skin and pursuing a meaningful career. But its authentic depiction of the affection we need to make us strong, and the fearlessness required to keep going when knocked down, makes it worth joining Jeanne on their journey.

Director: Héléna Klotz
Screenplay: Noé Debré, Emily Barnett, Héléna Klotz
Cast: Claire Pommet, Niels Schneider, Sofiane Zermani, Anna Mouglalis, Grégoire Colin
Producers: Justin Taurand
Cinematography: Victor Seguin
Production design: Olivier Lellouche
Editing: Julien Lacheray
Music: Ulysse Klotz
Sound: Dana Farzanehpour, Mikael Barre, Daniel Sobrino
Production companies: Les Films du Bélier (France)
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Platform)
In French
98 minutes

Conductor Nina Palcek (Maren Eggert) is deep in rehearsals, fine tuning the orchestra for a monumental concert at the Berlin Philharmonic that’s just ten days away. Parenting offers no such chances to practice and Hanna Slak pulls on that thematic thread for her compelling and efficiently moody thriller Not A Word (Kein Wort). With little time for her son, Lars (Jona Levin Nicolai), who slinks around, sullen and withdrawn, Nina’s emotional absence turns to simmering guilt and paranoia that threatens to incinerate her life when she suspects there might be something more sinister behind his hormonal behavior.

The constant buzzing and ringing of Nina’s phone is the only sound in the otherwise antiseptic apartment she shares with Lars. Confining himself to his room, he might as well be on another planet. But he comes flying back into her orbit when he suffers a concussion following a mysterious accident — or was it? — at school. The incident forces Nina to confront some troubling information she’s been actively ignoring: the recent murder of Lars’ classmate; the curious appearance of a pair of floral patterned socks in his room; her son’s obsession with fire and fixing things. Eager to help him convalescence and get some answers, she whisks him away to Locmaria in Brittany, their regular vacation spot. But what’s usually sunny and busy in the summer is desolate and lonely in the dead of winter, and the foreboding atmosphere only intensifies the fissure Nina wants to bridge with Lars.

Unfolding somewhere between psychological suspense and slow-burn chamber drama, Slak keeps an enigmatic air behind Lars’ intensely burning anger and frightening outbursts. The film succeeds in keeping the audience just as off balance and uncertain as Nina. She’s continually trying to find solid ground in her gentle probing as Lars’ elusive responses often bring her inches closer to the truth and yards away all at the time. Their spiky tête-à-têtes — Eggert and Nicolai finding an easy rhythm in their dysfunction — are the core of Not A Word, which makes the appearance of Gwen (Juliane Seibecke), a young girl with Down’s Syndrome, all the more distracting. The character is an ill-advised and manipulative device, an innocent sheep led into the potential crosshairs of Lars’ wolfish and unpredictable rage that feels like a cheap ploy to ratchet up Nina’s anxiety about her son.

While they couldn’t be more different, comparisons are bound to be drawn between Not A Word and Todd Field’s Tár. Both films are about female composers leading the Berlin Philharmonic, each readying a performance of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 5.” However, where Field’s film merges the challenges of performing the piece with Lydia Tár’s personal journey, Slak sidesteps it. The filmmaker doesn’t particularly consider the ramifications of the rarified classical music world, its mercurial works and personalities, and their impact impact on Nina’s role as a mother or on her separation from Lars’ father. There’s no mistaking the job is demanding, but we’re left in the dark about how Nina’s journey — a rare one, as a woman and conductor — have shaped her as a person.

Just when it seems Not A Word will remain out of grasp, keeping its secrets close to the chest, its series of escalating events elegantly find a resolution, with Nina and Lars, at last, on an even keel where honesty can finally be tabled. The tension fades, but in its place is a troubling view about the assumptions we make about children, and the questions parents ask of them instead of about the substance of their own role in their lives. As Nina takes the podium, baton at the ready, with Lars watching proudly in the audience, they’ve reached an understanding. But as Slak knows, one wave of the hand could once again change everything.

Director: Hanna Slak
Screenplay: Hanna Slak
Cast: Maren Eggert, Jona Levin Nicolai, Maryam Zaree, Mehdi Nebbou, Marko Mandi
Producers: Michel Balagué
Cinematography: Claire Mathon
Production design: K.D. Gruber
Editing: Bettina Böhler
Music: Amélie Legrand
Sound: Martin Steyer, Grega Švabi, Noemi Hampel, Gábor Ripli
Production companies: VOLTE (Germany), Ici et Là Productions (France), Tramal Films (Slovenia)
World sales: Beta Cinema
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Platform)
In German, French
87 minutes

It’s a fine line between being alone and feeling lonely, and one can become too settled on their own to feel the difference. In Ninna Pálmadóttir’s endearing feature debut, Solitude, she navigates the delicate yet sometimes expansive distance between the two. Gentle and compassionate, the film explores an unlikely connection that’s forged between an uncomplicated man and a young boy that might to be too pure for the modern world.

There’s a saying in Icelandic, “I came completely from the mountains,” that’s handy if you’re ever feeling lost or out of the loop in a conversation. While he’s not quite from the mountains, Gunnar (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson) can see them in the breathtaking view from his ramshackle rural farm where he’s long lived contentedly on his own. When the government expropriates his land to build a dam and pays him off with a cool $150 million, Gunnar quickly resettles in Reykjavík, purchasing a modest apartment the day he arrives. His plans to continue his comfortably reclusive life are upended when Ari (Hermann Samúelsson), the ten year-old boy across the street, starts poking his head around. Gunnar’s reluctance eventually softens into a sincere friendship with Ari, even if dealing with peculiarities of a young child might leave him reaching for that famed Icelandic phrase.

With the potential to feel hokey or sentimental, Pálmadóttir’s restrained hand goes a long way in creating an emotional tenor that feels genuine. The film — which runs a mere 75 minutes — makes the most of its quiet efficiency, with every scene necessary, and nothing extraneous. This is hardly surprising coming from screenwriter and producer Rúnar Rúnarsson. A filmmaker in his own right, his 2019 picture Echo presented a portrait of contemporary Iceland across 56 individual scenes, running no more than a minute or two each. Solitude displays a similar ability to mine complex characterisation, and a plot that also manages to involve the refugee crisis, with few words and short scenes.

This careful moderation also shines through in the performances. Gunnarsson shapes Gunnar as a man whose solitude isn’t necessarily closed; it’s just how he’s long known to navigate the world. Thus his resistance can only hold so long when Ari’s interest in him won’t flag, but Samúelsson’s approach is never precocious or coy. With Ari’s parents combatively dealing with shared custody, and his best friend Nikki having moved away, it’s easy to see the role the child subconsciously needs Gunnar to fill. As For Gunnar, Ari brings vibrant “life, news and curiosity” into his flat that’s half-filled with furnishings left behind by the previous owners. The actors build an easy comfort between Gunnar and Ari, situating their growing dependence on each other in the familiar motions of routine.

“You’re a little weird,” Ari tells Gunnar soon after they meet. It’s an amusing, yet accurate observation. But it’s not his long hair, scraggly beard, and taciturnity that make him stand apart. From the moment he arrives in Reykjavík, Gunnar takes to collecting bottles, observing protests for refugee rights, and eyeing things that need mending. As he writes to his cousin in Canada, with his new life in the city, he wants to “contribute to making it a better place.”

In an era that feels increasingly cynical, where almost every position has become politicized, Gunnar’s simple worldview feels radical. But what Gunnar doesn’t realize — until it’s almost too late, when a misunderstanding threatens to tear him away from Ari — is that doing good sometimes means stepping out of your shell to fight for yourself and the things you care about. Solitude doesn’t leave us with any certainty about what the future might hold for Gunnar and Ari, but through its weary optimism it gives us hope that even in their brief time together, they’ve become better people in a world that perhaps doesn’t deserve them.

Director: Ninna Pálmadóttir
Screenplay: Rúnar Rúnarsson
Cast: Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson, Hermann Samúelsson, Anna Gunndís Guðmundsdóttir, Hjortur Jóhann Jónsson
Producers: Lilja Osk Snorradottir, Hlin Jóhannesdóttir, Elli Cassata, Rúnar Rúnarsson
Cinematography: Dušan Husár
Production design: Gus Olafsson, Arndis Ey, Andrea Strbova
Editing: Ivor Šonje
Music: Pétur Þó Benediktsson
Sound: Tihomir Vrbanec
Production companies: Pegasus Pictures (Iceland), nutprodukcia (Slovakia), Jour2Fête (France), Halibut (Iceland)
World sales: The Party Film Sales
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Discovery)
In Icelandic
75’ minutes

What happens when imagining the future is overwhelming, and looking at the past only brings sorrow? That’s the predicament facing Marian (Brigitte Hobmeir) in Elisabeth Scharang’s Woodland, a drama haunted with regret and guilt, tracing a woman’s journey through trauma across overly familiar terrain.

“You pay for what you get. You keep your word. You don’t let family down. You live the life your mother gave you, as best you can.” Those are the rules laid out by Franz (Johannes Krisch), the former village heartthrob and Marian’s long ago ex-lover, when she mysteriously returns to her rural family farm. It’s her first time back in decades since her parents and grandparents have passed and the old house — with a leaky roof and no electricity — needs a serious airing out. Her arrival immediately raises the hackles of the close-knit community; she might have grown up and moved on but they haven’t. The ill-tempered Gerti (Gerti Drassl), her closest neighbor, and Franz, both put up a frosty front. The residents eye Marian, an award-winning journalist who has exposed secrets about the town, with suspicion. Even Marian’s husband Georg (Bogdan Dumitrache) is left uncertain about why she’s suddenly decamped, alone, to the countryside.

The reasons for Marian’s self-imposed exile are rooted in her trauma following the 2020 terror attack in Vienna during which an ordinary evening dining out with Georg turned into a nightmare. But the event — that she walked away from deeply unshaken, but physically unharmed — unshackles a reckoning that’s been a long time coming. Scharang aims to explore the repercussions of accumulated traumas and residual pain; the manner in which emotional violence manifests in different forms. Unfortunately, her screenplay parcels out the wreckage of Marian’s past parsimoniously, leaving the audience witnessing her grief often before the foundation for it is fully understood, playing catch up to Marian rather connecting with her turmoil. This structural withholding of critical character information can’t hide the fact that, ultimately, Woodland offers little new about the way suffering takes hold. More perplexing is that once Marian’s full picture comes into view, it’s actually Gerti’s story that becomes more compelling and sympathetic.

Woodland slowly pivots into detailing both the pitfalls of following Franz’s guidebook for maintaining generational traditions, and the cost of abandoning it altogether. Marian may be disconnected from her past, but Gerti, having never left the house she grew up in, giving up on her dreams of emigrating, and now caring for her abusive father and slowly unraveling mother, has no place to escape to heal. For all of Marian’s pain she has another life, and a loving husband, waiting for her when she wants it. This privilege neither she nor the script seems to recognize. “People like you always win,” Gerti snipes at Marian not long after she arrives. It’s a barb that’s meant to be ignorant of Marian’s real reasons for returning home, but it turns out to be true, and carries more weight than the film may want to admit.

From Marian screaming in anguish in the forest to screaming in anguish in the house, Scharang’s depiction of despair hits very few notes. Similarly, the spare, repeated motif of the piano score by Hania Rani, feels like it could be slotted into any number of moody arthouse pictures. And the climatic inclusion of Rani’s song “Home” — opening with the lyrics “Home, I feel like home / Though nothing is as was before / No words to say, no place to go” — makes thuddingly and jarringly obvious what Scharang prefers to treat obliquely everywhere else.

These choices don’t do justice to the strong performances by Hobmeir and Drassl, who untangle the complexity of a close relationship splintered equally by chance and conviction to their choices in life with a tender thorniness. As their relationship flickers with the flames of rekindling, it’s a momentary sketch of authentic healing, hinting at a version of Woodland that could’ve been more fully formed.

Director: Elisabeth Scharang
Screenplay: Elisabeth Scharang
Cast: Brigitte Hobmeier, Gerti Drassl, Bogdan Dumitrache, Johannes Krisch
Producers: Ulrike Lässer, Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz
Cinematography: Jörg Widmer
Production design: Nina Salak
Editing: Alarich Lenz
Music: Hania Rani
Sound: William Edouard Franck, Manuel Grandpierre
Production companies: WEGA Filmproduktion (Austria)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Centrepiece)
In German
95 minutes

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

The multi-layered and ceaselessly vociferous Snow Leopard is a powerful reminder of the recently deceased Tibetan filmmaker’s undimmed humanism, his ease in accommodating different visual styles to his poetic universe, and his deft representation of socio-political issues which might still be taboo for China’s rigorous censors today.

The first of two films Pema Tseden managed to finish shooting before he died of a heart attack in May, Snow Leopard is a powerful and unquestionably appropriate showcase of the filmmaker’s flair and also his vigorously open approach in embracing different artistic influences and social perspectives. Bowing out of competition at Venice, where Pema Tseden’s three previous features also premiered, Snow Leopard is bound for broad gallops across festivals after its next stop at Toronto, and should serve as an effective entry point for the filmmaker’s new converts in potential retrospectives.

After a night of bloody ravage in a pen of rams, a snow leopard finds itself encircled by the owners of its prey. The herders are conflicted about what they could or couldn’t do with a predatory beast which is at once a spiritual totem, a state-protected animal and a threat to the livelihoods of people on the ground. The patriarch of the ram-rearing family, Aku (Losang Choepel), says the leopard shouldn’t be harmed as it’s just acting according to the divine laws of nature; the hot-headed son (played by Pema Tseden’s regular star Jinpa), however, demands retribution, and has to be restrained by his family and friends from shooting the animal.

For once, however, the peasants are not really the sole protagonists. As if taking a leaf out of his 2007 feature The Search, a Kiarostami-like story about a film crew’s roam across rural hinterlands to cast non-professional actors for a production, Pema Tseden parachutes a team of TV reporters into this rural incident. Led by the bespectacled journalist Dradul (Genden Phuntsok) – whose urbanite background is shown through his ruminations about life, and also his video chats with his flamenco-loving fiancée – the group watches from the sidelines as arguments (and threats of violence) ebb and flow, first among the herders themselves and then between them with the arriving government officials.

However much we could consider Dradul as Pema Tseden’s onscreen proxy, his importance here is merely as the foil to the beating heart of the whole film. Nyima (Tseten Tashi) provides an interesting contrast to the single-tracked city and countryside dwellers around him: a monk who converted to monastic life only in his 20s, he is at once comfortable with his religious calling and enthusiastic about modern-day technology, as shown in the sophisticated camera he carries around him. “I can do what I want to do, and still chant sutras,” he says to Dradul in one of the many conversations the pair have throughout the film.

And it’s around Nyima that the viewer gets to engage with the titular animal – and the spiritual aspect of Pema Tseden’s film kicks in. As the monk approaches the besieged snow leopard, he is catapulted into visions which remind him of his past connections with it. In less certain and more populist-minded hands, these flashbacks could have been rendered cheesily melodramatic; here, Pema Tseden invokes genuine emotions and affections through polished on-screen special effects, fostering Nyima’s budding relationship with the leopard.

Such reflections about how people should engage with their (human) foes – or, specifically, how the Tibetan minority is to contend with the incursions of Han Chinese in the rural backwaters in western China and beyond – are in fact the subtly articulated central theme in Snow Leopard. It’s a topic Pema Tseden had long brought to the screen through minor nods and nudges, but he had perhaps made one of the most overt reference to this debate in Snow Leopard through what seems to be a bizarre editing decision.

In the middle of the film, Nyima and a fellow local hook a ram’s carcass from the pen and carry it to a snow-covered hilltop, so as to feed the snow leopard’s hungry, squealing cub. The film then suddenly cuts indoors to the herder’s house, as celebrations begin for Wang Xu (played by pop singer-actor Xiong Ziqi), the only Han person in the TV crew and for miles around. He’s feted with a big birthday cake – a confectionery the locals decline to consume – and adorned with a paper-made crown by his colleagues, perhaps in jest.

But is the “coronation” really just a visual gag? The fresh-faced, diligent Wang is impeccably polite and respectful for local traditions, with his enthusiasm about learning and speaking Tibetan surprising his colleagues and the locals. But Wang could also be considered as the human equivalent to that cub in the distance: he might seem vulnerable and benign, but he’s from “the other side” after all. (Pema Tseden’s ninth and last feature, The Stranger, is aimed at probing this further, with a story about a Han motorcyclist’s arrival at a remote Tibetan village. His son, Jigme Trinley, is working on the edit with Pema’s long-running close collaborators, such as composer Dukar Tserang.)

In another instance, the younger ram-rearer is heard screaming about how he could only watch on helplessly as snow leopards (and other similarly protected wild animals) run amok among his flock: “They’re so protected, we can’t even lift a finger!” What lengths, then, could one go to formulate some kind of peaceful and fair-minded co-existence with the vanguards of assimilation of an overwhelming majority? And isn’t it a co-incidence that the film was set in 2016 – a time when the Chinese authorities established a state-backed fund aimed at compensating rural shepherds for leopard-caused damages to their livestock, and also the year when Pema Tseden emerged from official custody with bruises aplenty, after he was arrested at an airport for what the police described as a “scuffle over luggage”?

Admittedly, Snow Leopard doesn’t leap out as something as visually slick and genre-inflected as his recent outings, whether it’s the crisp monochrome of Tharlo, the desaturated hues of the noir­-tinged (and Wong Kar-wai-produced) Jinpa or the blooming technicolour of Balloon. But Snow Leopard’s power doesn’t lie with what’s on the surface. Zipping between the claustrophobic confines of the herder’s small house and the vast expanses of the wild, DP Matthias Delvaux and editor Jin Di bring to the screen the raw energy produced by the clanging clash of ideas between people – and the fears and hopes such conflicts could possibly yield.

Director, screenplay: Pema Tseden
Cast: Jinpa, Xiong Ziqi, Tseten Tashi
Producers: Wang Lei, Tsemdo Thar
Executive producers: Ji Nan, Zhou Hao, Yu Going, Pema Tseden, Zhang Beipeng, Zhao Yan, Hu Mengchu, Fan Zhaohui
Director of photography: Matthias Delvaux
Editor: Jin Di
Production designer: Daktse Dundrup
Music composer-sound designer: Dukar Tserang
Production companies: Mani Stone Pictures, Beijing Nanji Film Co Ltd, Dzona Pictures, DIGIK 2
World sales: Rediance
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of competition)
In Tibetan, Mandarin
104 minutes

Powell’s Gary Johnson is a divorced philosophy professor who leads a quiet life in New Orleans with his cats and his birds, and his proficiency with electronics scores him a side gig planting hidden mics and cameras for the NOPD. Gary’s devices catch people in the act of hiring a paid assassin, but as he mentions in the narration, hit men don’t really exist. The people desperate enough to seek out a hired gun find themselves talking to undercover cops, who bust them for soliciting a hit.

Before one such sting, roundly-disliked officer Jasper (Austin Amelio) gets suspended for beating up some teens (and getting caught on camera), so Gary is pressed into service at the last minute to play the phony killer. And much to the surprise of colleagues Claudette (Retta) and Phil (Sanjay Rao), Gary’s great at it, improvising in the moment, throwing in ludicrous details about body disposal, and doing and saying all the right things to make the suspect incriminate himself.

In his philosophy lectures, Gary talks a lot about the self and the potential people have to change, and as he becomes the central figure in these stings, he becomes a chameleon, taking on different personalities and wearing different costumes to be the right kind of killer for a wide range of people, from a skeet-shooting good-ol’-boy to a wealthy matron who would rather murder than divorce her husband so that she can keep their house.

One of the stings puts Gary face to face with Madison (Adria Arjona), a traumatized wife who sees hiring someone to kill her abusive spouse as her only way out of a bad situation. Gary, in the guise of the suave “Ron,” is touched by her plight, and rather than entrap her, he advises her to leave and to create a life for herself. The situation gets complicated when Madison falls for “Ron,” and the two start having a no-strings-attached affair; she clearly gets off on what she perceives as Ron’s life of danger and mystery, and Gary is at least a little intrigued to be with a woman who was willing to have her husband killed.

Hit Man operates in the comic true-crime mode of Linklater’s great Bernie — although the setting is New Orleans and not the auteur’s usual homebase of Texas — and the sequences where Gary goes undercover and nails the would-be employers of his various lethal characters are consistently hilarious. Powell shows off his shape-shifting skills, and he and Arjona have scorching chemistry, which the film requires for some dark turns in the final third.

The movie makes viewers complicit with Madison and Gary/Ron’s relationship, so much so that we are expected to follow them as they commit morally questionable acts. That leap is all well and good, and of a piece with the rest of the film, but in the closing titles, Linklater shows us pictures of the real Gary Johnson and reveals too much about the fork in the road between fact and fiction and what filmmakers choose to do with both.

Powell and Linklater would have done better to take Johnson’s story as a launching point and then spun off into their far more complicated version of his life without literally tethering the movie to a real person. Whichever distributor scoops up the film after its Venice premiere might consider changing the opening and closing references to Johnson, since they serve mainly to muddy the water.

Director: Richard Linklater
Screenwriter: Richard Linklater & Glen Powell, based on the Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth
Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, Molly Bernard, Evan Holtzman
Producers: Mike Blizzard, Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, Jason Bateman, Michael Costigan
Executive producers: Stuart Ford, Zach Garrett, Miguel A. Palos Jr., Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein, Vicky Patel, Steve Barnett, Alan Powell, John Sloss, Scott Brown, Megan Creydt
Director of photography: Shane F. Kelly
Production design: Bruce Curtis
Costume design: Julianna Hoffpauir
Editing: Sandra Adair
Music: Graham Reynolds
Sound: Justin Hennard, sound designer
Production companies: Agc Studios, Shivhans Pictures, Monarch Media, Barnstorm Co., Aggregate Films, Cinetic Media, Detour Filmproduction
In English
113 minutes

That her mother is Hiam Abbass will be a major selling point, but the actress’ celebrity is a minor element in what’s a moving look at the Palestinian yearning for home and the catastrophic knock-on effect of the Nakba, when Israel dispossessed hundreds of thousands. Abbas grew up with stories of loss, and although she eventually left for France in a bid to distance herself from the trauma, she and her daughter came to realize escape is impossible. “Don’t open the gate to past sorrows” was the family motto, but hiding them doesn’t reduce the cancer, and Soualem’s respectful yet probing exploration highlights the melancholic residue of memory that connects women down the generational divide. Festivals, showcases and streaming sites will get considerable traction from this quietly intelligent film.

Soualem (Their Algeria) cleverly opens and closes with her mother, first in 1992 and then today, pointing out the geographical centrality of Galilee, from where you can see Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, countries that received huge numbers of refugees and yet never made them feel welcome. Abbass was born in Deir Hana, close to where her ancestors are from on Lake Tiberias (sometimes called the Sea of Galilee), hearing her mother Nemat and grandmother Um Ali – who she remarkably resembles – refer to their lives before the Nakba with a sense of heartbreaking loss. Forced to flee their home on the lakeshore, the family moved 30 kilometers west, inside the Israeli border, but Um Ali’s husband Hosni went mad and the story of his searching for his livestock continues to haunt his descendants.

Nemat was a teacher who raised ten children, and while neither she nor Um Ali would talk much about their experiences, characteristically believing it would protect loved ones from their sadness, that kind of silence acted like a black hole, consuming energy and generating unanswered questions. Abbass’ response was to leave the family home and move to Jerusalem, defying the norms of her community to become an actress. Her rebellion continued when she married an Englishman who taught at Beirzeit University and then, when that didn’t work out, she moved to Paris, marrying Zinedine Soualem and giving birth to Lina and Mouna.

Bye Bye Tiberias implies that it was Lina Soualem’s desire to understand how the cycle of trauma affected her family that was the catalyst for her mother to voice her pained recollections of the past, full of ruptures but also joyful intimacies with her own grandmother, mother and siblings. To this end, the director wrote out histories of Um Ali and Nemat for her mother to read, which becomes a psychologically astute way of getting Abbass to engage with memories that can be difficult to have exposed, especially for an actress who keeps her private life private. What works so well here is the connection between mother and daughter, the way Soualem takes her mother along this path, holding her hand in a sense as they explore the legacy of the Occupation within the context of their female-centric family.

The result is a skillfully layered documentary that looks at ways women cope with displacement and exile by whatever means society and family allow: for Nemat it was by becoming a teacher as well as mother, while for Abbass it was to break free from expectations and escape further, though she maintained a longing for connection. Soualem cleverly explores these ideas with her mother and aunts following Nemat’s death when she puts photographs up on a wall, using them as a kind of storyboard to trigger memories and associations. Among the most painful are ones of Nemat’s older sister Hosnieh, who fled into Syria after the Nakba and was separated from her family for decades, trapped in the Yarmouk refugee camp within Damascus for thirty years before she secretly crossed the border into Galilee for a brief reunion with her family.

Soualem’s editor Gladys Joujou does an excellent job bringing together VHS and super-8 footage as well as archival images of Tiberias from 1940, allowing the viewer to visualize a location so meaningful to the family that was denied them for so long. Though nothing is said, a shot of Abbass and Soualem visiting the lake while next to them stands an Orthodox Jewish family powerfully evokes questions of belonging and exclusion.

Director: Lina Soualem
Screenplay: Lina Soualem, Nadine Naous, in collaboration with Gladys Joujou
With: Hiam Abbass, Lina Soualem
Producer: Jean-Marie Nizan
Co-producers: Guillaume Malandrin
Cinematography: Frida Marzouk, Thomas Brémond, Lina Soualem
Editing: Gladys Joujou
Music: Amine Bouhafa
Sound: Ludovic Escallier, Lina Soualem, Gervaise Demeure, Julie Tribout, Benoit Biral
Production companies: Beall Productions (France), Altitude 100 (Belgium), Versus Productions (Belgium), Philistine Films (Palestine)
World sales: Lightdox
Venue: Venice (Giornate degli autori); Toronto (TIFF Bell Lightbox)
In Arabic, French
82 minutes

Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa Sonzai Shinai) feels something like an interlude between big films and may disappoint or puzzle fans of his previous work with its deliberate camerawork, slow pace and ordinary characters who live close to the land in a forested area close to Tokyo. What is exceptional is that the last five minutes change everything, revealing the subtle meaning Hamaguchi has been circling around up to then, and this final scene is guaranteed to furnish lively dinner conversation as viewers try to puzzle out its ambiguities. Not to spoil the surprise, but like Drive My Car, the writer-director seems happy to let individual film-goers finish the story for themselves.

Evil was originally conceived as a silent work to accompany Gift, a live score performance composed by Eiko Ishibashi, then subsequently was rolled out as a narrative film in its own right. Its close symbiosis with the music, however, is very evident from the opening tracking shot moving steadily through a forest of fir trees, with the camera pointed at the sky and treetops. Extended well beyond expectations, this shot forces viewers into a contemplative mode, making them slow down and consider nature without any guiding context.

Takumi (a natural, low-key performance by a non-pro actor, Hitoshi Omika) is an odd jobs man who lives with his 8-year-old daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) in the forest. He leaves her at a day care center while he works and often becomes so absorbed in physical tasks like chopping wood or collecting spring water from a stream that he forgets to pick her up. Hana is used to his lateness and walks home by herself, crossing through empty fields even after a wise elder in the village warns her not to. So a red flag goes up early.

The first part of the film revolves around a Tokyo company determined to build a “glamping” facility in the area. Just knowing that the term is a portmanteau word made from glamour and camping is enough to raise several more red flags. And indeed, when the project is summarily explained to village residents in a town hall meeting, the two company reps, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), are unprepared for the locals’ firm pushback, especially on the placement of a septic tank that will pollute the ground water supply.

Surprisingly, these two rather standard corporate villains, with their cheery video of luxury tents offering city dwellers an “escape to nature” in the pristine forest where deer roam, return in the second half of the film as flawed human beings who don’t like their job. Takahashi goes so far as to suggest he may quit and move to the village, where Takumi can instruct him on the ways of nature.

But does the woodcutter himself really understand the impersonal majesty of the natural world, where a dead fawn has been reduced to a skeleton picked over by other animals, whose bones will soon return to dust? Showing his daughter the carcass, Takumi (no detail escapes him) notes that the fawn was wounded, presumably by hunters whose shots occasionally echo through the valley; it did not die quickly. Yet the film suggests that he himself underestimates the dangers in the wild, and is too busy teaching Hana the names of different trees to warn her about risks posed by indifferent nature.

Although Eiko Ishibashi’s complex modern score is the most up-front of the tech credits, boldly contrasting with the everyday imagery and opening up new depths in the outdoor scenes, Yoshio Kitagawa’s cinematography is a constant counterpoint in capturing a snowy watering hole for deer or a stubbly field that seems to recede into the distance, swallowing up a man and child.

Director, screenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Cast: Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani, Hazuki Kikuchi, Hiroyuki Miura
Producer: Satoshi Takata
Cinematography: Yoshio Kitagawa
Editing: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Azusa Yamazaki
Production design: Masato Nunobe
Music: Eiko Ishibashi
Sound: Izumi Matsuno
Production company: NEOPA
World Sales: M-Appeal
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
106 minutes

Very loosely based on Henry James’ late novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which a man’s inability to open himself to love is the cause for his lifelong premonition of catastrophe, Bonello’s Beast turns the questioning figure into a woman, played to perfection by Léa Seydoux, and weaves together three incarnations, from 1910, 2014 and 2044. Cerebral and striking in all periods, the film works on richly meaningful levels in the first and third periods but loses its universality with the 2014 story, when the man is made into an incel. While intriguing on its own, the plot twist removes a deeper message about humanity in general, which the editing itself seems to acknowledge by largely relegating this section to the end of the film.

Before then, Bonello entwines the earlier past and future in ways that force us to question the importance of sentiment and emotional pain in our psychological makeup, arguing that our humanity is intrinsically tied to exposing ourselves to the full range of feelings: we can’t truly love if we seek to file off all the spikey edges of our psyches. Venturing into science fiction territory for the first time, the director makes AI his immediate target, with its enticing promise of easier lives for all that leads to benumbed placidity. This section’s predictive urgency becomes a natural outgrowth of Henry James’ potent treatment of a man’s refusal to unlock his emotions until it’s too late: this way lies disaster.

A brief green screen prologue in which LA-based actress Gabrielle Monnier (Seydoux) rehearses a role quickly moves to 1910, when she’s seen gliding through an elegant Parisian reception looking for her husband Georges (Martin Scali), the owner of a doll-making factory. The 1910 scenes were shot on 35mm and they’re resplendent with film’s rich, living tonalities, captured in the stately sweep of Josée Deshaies’ waltzing camera. Gabrielle’s muted gold Fortuny gown, set off with a Renée Lalique pendant, is complimented by Paul Poiret himself following a viewing of paintings based on Egon Schiele. At the reception she meets Louis (George MacKay), who reminds her, in words largely lifted from the James story, that they met several years earlier. Gabrielle corrects his memory, which got all the details wrong, and then he asks, in a gender reversal of the source material, if she’s still troubled by the great secret she revealed that first time they met.

For the first two-thirds or so of The Beast, the 1910 sequences are partnered with those set in 2044, in a neutral-toned, minimalist Paris shot with a cool, fixed lens. In 1910 Gabrielle was a pianist working on Schönberg, but in the future she checks data plate templates (whatever that is) and wants something more fulfilling. Any job change has to go through AI, whose voice (Xavier Dolan) in the interview warns that her anger and emotional unpredictability exclude her from most “useful” work. The solution is to have her DNA cleansed in a painless process that smooths away any potentially volatile feelings from this life and previous ones; as an online friend who’s been through the process tells her, it’s not that she doesn’t have emotions anymore, but they no longer make her suffer.

In AI-ruled 2044, placidity is the key to a happy life: Gabrielle eventually agrees to the procedure but it’s not working, and she’s assigned an AI nurse, Kelly (Guslagie Malanda, Saint Omer), to help her through the process. But in this world of damped-down emotions, the only place where Gabrielle feels relaxed is in a club that changes theme according to a year (1972, 1980), where she meets Louis who’s also struggling with whether to undergo the cleansing. The Louis of 1910 is the one urging Gabrielle to be honest with herself and acknowledge her feelings, whereas in 2044 he’s uncertain whether to let go and take the easy path. In 2014, when Gabrielle is an aspiring actress house-sitting in LA for a wealthy family, Louis instead is an incel posting videos ranting against women.

This is where The Beast makes a misstep: in the other incarnations, the issue of love, with all its wonder as well as vulnerability, has a universal resonance, whereas for most people incels are a small, disturbed aberration too psychologically damaged to add anything to the discussion. This Gabrielle is lonely and searches for a connection, more willing to admit to her need for companionship than her previous self, yet pairing her with this Louis turns her into a vulnerable woman potentially at the mercy of a crazy man, which has no echo in the other stories. Bonello’s target, his most frightening beast, is AI, much as Henry James’ beast was the kind of self-control that denies us the ability to love. The Beast does a fascinating job connecting these two across 134 years, but the 2014 portion feels like a film needing to play out on its own.

Pairing Seydoux and Mackay works marvelously, their qualities unexpectedly dovetailing, with each at home in French and English but also in negotiating the different kinds of speech, from the playful artifice of 1910 to the straightforward talk of 2014 and then on to a kind of futuristic flatness in 2044. Each brings a hesitant sexual presence that generates the right level of tension, although the film is very much Seydoux’s in that she’s often the sole figure in the frame.

Josée Deshaies’s gorgeous cinematography adapts itself to each time period, but like the film itself revels in the warmth of the 1910 scenes, clear even in the architecture, quietly decorative to match the decorative costumes with their purples, corals and blues. There’s a standout sequence in the doll factory following the historic 1910 Paris flood, exquisitely shot and a fitting climax to this period, when a seemingly small technological advance winds up destroying everything. Bonello’s musical choices (not to mention his own compositions with Anna Bonello) are as ever spot on, with Roy Orbison’s plangent “Evergreen” a fitting accompaniment to a film that seeks to valorize wearing our hearts on our sleeves. As if anticipating cinema’s future, an onscreen QR code appears at the end as the only way to access the final credit roll as well as a brief additional scene.

Director: Bertrand Bonello
Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello, loosely based on the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle
Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Élina
Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Julia Faure, Kester Lovelace, Félicien Pinot, Laurent Lacotte, Pierre-François Garel, Céline Carrère, Lukas Ionesco, Hortense Gélinet, Pauline Jacquard, Alice Barnole
Producers: Justin Taurand, Bertrand Bonello
Co-producers: Nancy Grant, Xavier Dolan
Cinematography: Josée Deshaies
Production designer: Katia Wyszkop
Costume designer: Pauline Jacquard
Editing: Anita Roth
Music: Bertrand Bonello, Anna Bonello
Sound: Nicolas Cantin, Clément Laforce, Jean-Pierre Laforce
Production companies: Les Films du Bélier (France), My New Picture (France), Sons of Manual (Canada), Ami Paris (France), Jamal Zeinal-Zade, Arte France Cinéma (France)
World sales: Kinology
Venue: Venice (Competition); Toronto (Special Presentation); New York; London
In French, English
146 minutes

It’s a scenario out of an early Pasolini movie like Accattone or Mamma Roma, skillfully updated to reflect a contemporary world so bleak and futureless it hardly seems like it’s in Europe, and only the energy of the young protags lifts the spirits. Strong on establishing atmosphere, it’s much less convincing when a strained drama finally gets underway towards the end. The film, which counts Domenico Procacci and Wim Wenders among its producers, should anyway get noticed when it bows in the Venice Orizzonti section.

Debuting director Alain Parroni, who has a solid background in cinematography and short films, does an eye-catching job with camera, editing and performance. Another aesthetic influence that is very obvious here is Terence Malick’s lyrical naturalism, felt in the intense closeups of faces and painterly low-angle shots of overgrown fields and cloudy skies with a farmhouse in the distance. They make a strong statement about the inner purity of these young human beings, who otherwise might be interpreted as simple sociological statistics. But it’s doubtful whether they have any more chance of digging themselves out of their unschooled, thrill-based stupor than the lost souls in so many movies about Italy’s South.

The same atmosphere of danger and impending doom that is a staple of mafia and camorra films cloaks Alex (Enrico Bassetti), whose 19^th birthday it is, his jumpy, hyperactive younger friend Kevin (Zackari Delmas) who is already an accomplished thief, and their cool mutual friend/possibly lover, Brenda (Federica Valentini), all braids and tattoos, who looks permanently distracted.

A celestial chorus opens the film on a universal note, a contribution from prolific Japanese composer Shiro Sagisu, whose unexpected music makes us look at the banality of life with different eyes. It soon gives way to a pumping disco beat from a speeding convertible on a dark night, driven by kids who are crazy high and paying no attention to the road whatsoever. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, if there were any parents present in the film (there aren’t.) Tires blow out and they run out of gas, but nothing stops the party.

To celebrate Alex’s birthday they take the train to Rome with its crowded streets and glorious Baroque buildings and fountains; it is another planet compared to the emptiness of the countryside amid soulless residential complexes in the middle of nowhere. Rome is selfies by the river, horsing around the Vatican on a Sunday morning, while over loudspeakers Pope Francis’s familiar voice preaches to the faithful jamming St. Peter’s Square. The trio laughs off this iconic scene – for the moment – and moves on to desecrate some busts of Garibaldi’s soldiers with red lipstick; later Kevin steals a watch at the Bocca di Verità.

It’s tough to find an absorbing storyline in a film whose very title suggests “a day in the life” (though more time passes than that). Night and day flow freely into each other on this “endless Sunday”, creating a feeling of entrapment. The little band travels constantly – to nearby Rome, to the beach, to Brenda’s grandma’s place – yet they never seem to get anywhere.

Only the lanky, long-haired Alex even tries to get his life in gear, after Brenda tells him she’s pregnant. The idea of being a father stuns him with pride and its implications of responsibility. He stumbles onto a shepherding job on a backyard farm run by a grouchy old German hermit (Lars Rudolph, excellent) who lives in a shack and “keeps animals”. When a wild dog kills a lamb, he gives Alex an old rifle, and we spend the rest of the film waiting for the boy to use it. However, it’s a clumsy narrative device, and the ending simply doesn’t ring true.

The most interesting thing about An Endless Sunday is its mature grasp of film language and struggle to invent something new to express the experience of this place and this generation. The cinematography by D.P. Andrea Benjamin Manenti can be lush and sensuous, connecting the characters to the sea and the sky and to nature, then turns into complicated multi-layered shots that suggest the sensory overload of characters on the verge of adulthood.

Director: Alain Parroni
Screenwriters: Alain Parroni, Giulio Pennacchi, Beatrice Puccilli
Cast: Enrico Bassetti, Zackari Delmas, Federica Valentini, Lars Rudolph
Producers: Domenico Procacci, Laura Paolucci, Giorgio Gucci, Fabrizio Moretti, Wim Wenders
Cinematography: Andrea Benjamin Manenti
Production design: Marta Morandini
Costume design: Sara Cavagnini
Editing: Riccardo Giannetti
Music: Shiro Sagisu
Sound: Denny De Angelis, Giandomenico Petillo
Production companies: Fandango (Italy), Alcor (Italy), Art Me Pictures (Ireland), Road Movies (Germany) in association with Rai Cinema
World sales: Fandango Sales
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In Italian
110 minutes

Road movies, born in the American cinema of the Seventies, are transgressive by nature. Their characters behave as they would not in the place where they live; their relationship with weapons, romantic adventures and motorcycles is relaxed, and the viewer doesn’t need to suspend reality to consider it natural. The actions are circumscribed to a specific moment and there are no consequences, at least we do not see them on screen. What happens on the road, stays on the road.

In Upon Open Sky, a terrible road accident in which the father of teenage brothers Fernando and Salvador dies, stays with the boys and haunts them. Two years later, Fernando is obsessed with doing amateur forensic reconstructions of car accidents. Salvador, who was with his father in the accident, says he does not remember anything that happened.

The trauma of the accident obsesses them and becomes so heavy that they decide to go to the place where it occurred, in the state of Coahuila, to look for an explanation about what happened. They are accompanied by their stepsister Paula and her boyfriend Eduardo.

For each of the participants in the expedition, the trip means something different: for Fernando revenge, for Salvador closure. Eduardo sees it as an opportunity to sleep with a reticent Paula. Her reasons are a mystery; maybe she is just bored or wants to fit in with her newly found family.

This is the first feature film directed by the siblings Mariana and Santiago Arriaga. The directors are new –they have directed short films up to now– but the script is very mature, written by Guillermo Arriaga, the Mexican novelist and screenwriter who, among other distinctions, received an award at Cannes for his screenplay The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in 2005.

Coahuila is a Mexican state in the north of the country with a large desert area bordering the United States, suitable for hunting, astronomical observations and illegal border crossings. Upon Open Sky is a road movie, and a coming-of-ager, and at times it is also a western, as shown by the revolver Fernando conceals, by the van they drive and the kind of clothes they wear. The frontier landscape seems to be familiar to the directors and they show it both in panoramas and small details.

The female participation in the film is intriguing. Given the female co-director, I expected women characters to play an important role. On one hand, the father who died two years earlier matters more than the living mother, who is portrayed as a distant woman and unimportant to the siblings. Their step-sister Paula’s mother died, conveniently, when she was a baby so there are no memories or ghosts. Paula appears to be, at the beginning of the film, a spoiled, bored teenager; she follows soap operas and only looks alive when she can tease her brothers. The surprise is that halfway through the story we realize Paula is not in the film as a sexual enticement or ornament. From the moment she makes a seemingly banal decision, she becomes an important part of the story, with enough weight to provoke reactions.

Theo Goldin deserves special note as Salvador: he is convincing as a teenager of  14 and later as a 16-year-old. During most of the film he is quiet, thoughtful, sometimes doubtful. Despite being the younger brother, he is in many moments the conciliatory presence and the one with better judgment. Goldin acts with great poise in moments of tension, as well as in a dramatic scene requiring great physical effort.

While being on the road, the action and relationships are also on the move. Once they stop,  tensions that should increase do not do so and the narrative becomes somewhat irritating. What are they waiting for? Why don’t they do something? They look like they are camping, bored, dirty, and eating badly.  Fortunately for them and the audience the outcome is dramatic but not overdone; something very uncommon in violent scenes in Mexican cinema.  It’s as if the directors discover along with their characters that maturity does not come with revenge, but with self-restraint.

Directors: Mariana Arriaga, Santiago Arriaga
Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga
Cast: Federica García, Theo Goldin, Máximo Hollander,  Julio César Cedillo,   Sergio Mayer Mori,  Julio Bracho, Cecilia Suárez, Manolo Cardona
Producers:Hugo Sigman,Guillermo Arriaga, Matias Mosteirin, Leticia Cristi
Executive Producers:Erendira Nuñez Larios,Diego Copello, Emiliano Torres, Morena Fernandez Quinteros.
Cinematography: Julián Apezteguía
Editor: Andrés Pepe Estrada
Music: Ludovico Einaudi
Sound: Jose E. Caldararo, Leandro de Loredo
Production design: Carlos Y. Jacques
Costume design: Gabriela Fernández
Production companies: Kramer & Sigman Films , Salvaje Films (Mexico) Clave Intelectual (Spain) –
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
Sales:Film Factory
In Spanish
117 minutes