As regular FITI readers will know, I am a programmer and longtime volunteer at Carbon Arc Cinema here in Halifax. Over the past year as a community we’ve grown exponentially, showing films over four (sometimes even five) nights a week, a robust mix of independent, international, Canadian and documentary film. The films come so thick and fast, including repertory titles, I can’t review them all in advance here on the blog, but I do keep track of the new titles and my feelings about them.
The programming team is made up of seven passionate cinephiles. I haven’t loved all the films we’ve chosen to show, but I have to acknowledge there are movies with audience appeal that just aren’t for me. Here are reviews of many of the films we programmed through the past season in alphabetical order.
The Blue Trail
This lovely Brazilian anti-aging parable and near-future science fiction could have been called Always Departing. It features a terrific central performance from Denise Weinberg as an older woman who just wants to fly in a plane before she’s forced by the dystopian society she lives in to move to a care community. I loved the the gorgeous cinematography and the hardly outrageous futuristic conceit of a culture that considers the aged an economic liability.
The Chronology of Water
This is powerful, raw, and disorienting filmmaking from actor-turned-director Kristen Stewart. It’s a portrait of abuse, pain, and many of the ways someone could try to escape or exert some control over those things — sex, alcohol, exercise, and eventually writing. Stewart’s got an impressive authorial vision, but her editor is also to be congratulated for the way the images are stitched together.
Cutting Through Rocks
This is a slowburn doc about Sara Shahverdi, the first woman to be elected to council in her rural Iranian village. We see the tactics the male leadership use to control women in this conservative culture, including using legislation to deny divorce and forcing girls into child marriages — then it gets really underhanded. A cross-section analysis of how the patriarchy manifests in a community most in the west would likely never know about otherwise, it’s finally heartening to see the change some women are making.
DJ Ahmet
A charming Macedonian film about young people chasing their dreams and their passion for music (and each other), a nice mix of drama and humour, and more than a few crowd-pleasing directorial choices.
Kontinental 25
I went into this gritting my teeth because I was no fan of filmmaker Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World. This one is happily a lot less stylistically over-torqued. I enjoyed this film’s thoughtful, mordant wit around a woman who feels responsible for the suicide of a homeless man and spends the film’s running time looking for absolution from friends and acquaintances. Those people, tangled in their hypocrisies, are unable to offer her much help. There’s also the broader implications of western privilege, even evident here in a culture that was once hidden behind the Iron Curtain.
L’Etranger/ The Stranger
This new film from Francois Ozon feels like quintessential French cinema — a faithful B&W adaptation of the Camus book, gorgeously shot with a very handsome cast that also manages to update some key details.
The Love That Remains
Icelandic drama from Hlynur Pálmason, the director of Godland, featuring a suburban family and a charismatic sheepdog. Dad’s a fisher, Mom’s an artist, they have three kids, and the kids in RL are actually the director’s, and so is the dog. I liked the mix of elemental scenes and the mundane family moments, the detail in the artwork she makes, and the occasional relationship drama, the occasional giant rooster, a mix of the allegorical and absurd. I liked it, though I’m slightly disappointed it’s not quite as much fun as the movie’s trailer, which is an all-timer.
Magellan
Can someone explain to me why so many filmmakers are choosing the Academy ratio for their features these days? This one seems especially counterintuitive: a historical epic with lots of landscapes, boxed in by this framing. There’s an incredible shot of a river in torrential rain, but I wished I was seeing more of it. It doesn’t help that the filmmaker is fond of theatrical and self-conscious blocking — at times while watching I wondered if I’d stumbled upon an unreleased Monty Python picture. I kept thinking about films with some aesthetic and thematic similarities, the incredible Embrace of the Serpent, The Lost City of Z, or The Settlers, all of which I liked a lot more than Magellan. I’m all for historical features that demythologize “heroic” colonizers, but with this one I just didn’t care.
Miroirs No. 3
I think it’s fair to call this a lesser Christian Petzold film — it’s no Phoenix or Undine , for sure — but he is consistent in his humanist inclinations. It’s always a pleasure to see Paula Beer, and I liked how summery the film is, lots of lovely exteriors in the German countryside. The drama and stakes are resolutely low key, but it still charms.
Montreal, Ma Belle
This is about a woman finding meaning through cross cultural experience and embracing the values, and an identity, from a home she wasn’t born in. It’s probably the most moving cinematic story of immigration since Past Lives, and Joan Chen is simply extraordinary in the lead role. I really enjoyed the compassion the filmmaker has for all the characters in this picture, as well as the setting. Between this and Mile End Kicks, Montreal’s having a fantastic year at the movies.
Peter Hujar’s Day
A very wordy Ira Sachs film, based on transcriptions of a real conversation between the photographer Peter Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz that took place in New York in 1974. Rosenkrantz had intended on publishing a book with the specifics of the day of a number of her artist friends, but that never happened. In the end, she wrote a book based on this one exchange. There’s a charming sense of era, and its 73-minute running time is nice and concise. It’s an ongoing conversation in a cool New York apartment that reads as a stage set, where Peter shares his previous day in minute detail. Yes, he photographed Allan Ginsburg, but much of what he talks about is pretty mundane, about people who we never see or get to know. Accordingly, I found my attention wandering, even as Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall are never less than compelling. While not as involving as Sachs’ Passages, it still works as an interesting cinematic exercise.
Resurrection
I find Bi Gan’s Resurrection almost impossible to describe, let alone comprehend, but it’s undeniably and extraordinarily beautiful.
Spare My Bones, Coyote!
One of the questions I ask myself when I watch a documentary where I’ve read very little is if it is more compelling than something I might stumble on via Hoopla, Kanopy, or on the CBC. This doc clears that requirement, and I think it’s strong, but also a hard watch in places as we spend time with people who’ve dedicated their lives to finding the remains of migrants who died in the attempt of reaching the United States through Mexico’s northern deserts.
What Does That Nature Say To You
I enjoyed elements of this film’s comedy of manners, though I also found it a low-stakes struggle. It probably says more about what I’m looking for in a cinematic meal, but I find its neo-realism and hang-out vibe a little underwhelming, this story of a young man meeting his girlfriend’s parents and the afternoon’s collection of alcohol-fuelled awkwardness. And while I’m sure there’s a thematic reason for the filmmaker’s choice of soft-focus scenes, I also struggled with that aesthetic.
Yunan
This is an extraordinarily beautiful film — full marks to Canadian DOP Ronald Plante. And what a face on lead actor Georges Khabbaz. I enjoyed, if you could call it that, how it details the despair of an Arabic writer struggling to find a reason to go on, facing the incredible natural beauty of a flooding North Sea island he finds himself on. The film could be a challenge for some, its deliberate, meditative movement, but its stunning imagery carries the day.
