21st Century Labor Movement

Union (2024) - Story, Maing It's amazing how the words "the essential workers" left our collective consciousness already, after 1.2 million died of Covid related illness in the US, only a couple of years back. Now we are back to normal, being apathetic to our e-commerce-based economy, where delivery people, warehouse workers, and Uber drivers, among many others, are not treated like heroes anymore.

That said, it is quite clear after this year's Presidential Election that the majority of the US population casted their votes out of economic anxiety, rather than any other issues. For the last four years, we were told, the economy was getting better. But for us working stiffs, it did not feel that way.

Cost of living is way too expensive for most of us, while meager wage increases couldn't keep up with the inflation. For democrats, who had been counting on anti-Trump sentiments alone, and shunned progressive working-class voices within the party, the landslide defeat was a sobering wake up call. It's not likely, though, that they would learn anything from their mistakes, just as they didn't in 2016, and again in 2022.

As we are facing a grim future for the next four years, Brett Story and Stephen Maing's new documentary, Union, should resonate more than ever. But you won't see the film streaming on Amazon any time soon.

Union tells the story about ALU (Amazon Labor Union) which made headlines in 2022 by organizing and winning the right to unionize a Staten Island Amazon Fulfillment Center. It's truly a Samson and Goliath story.

Amazon, one of the richest and most powerful online retail companies, which has 1.3 million workers nationwide, aggressively cracked down on unionizing workers who were asking for better working conditions, after many workers died during the Covid pandemic while working long hours on the floor with inadequate PPE. Chris Smalls, a former Fulfillment Center employee who was unjustly fired, became the point person, as he started organizing in a grassroots, face to face style, to have a worker's union, in and outside the facility for 11 months.

To have a union and have an election to do so in a workplace, you have to get 30 percent of the workforce to sign a petition and deliver it to NLRB (National Labor Relations Board). For the Amazon workers, just like any other heavy-turnaround e-job workers, it's an uphill battle all along the way because ALU is an extremely small and regional union (one Amazon facility among four in New York alone), no other established union would throw their support (Teamsters finally did only AFTER ALU won, of course), and even NLRB not giving a damn. There were infighting among factions: old school patriarch issues, disagreeing on abrasive tactics, class differences, all while Amazon deliberately oppressed their efforts to unionize.

Documentary veterans Story and Maing let the movement play out their efforts instead of narrating. They include several video footage of the internal Amazon meetings by the workers with their phones: in it, Amazon brought in outside consultant to discourage any kind of union activities with age-old, turn of the century talking points: the union takes dues no matter you are in it or not, which will go into the union bosses' pockets; even if you have a union, there's no guarantee that their conditions will improve, and so on. They plaster anti-union signs in breakrooms, even above the urinals.

NLRB decides that the petition for unionization is invalid because not all petitioners are currently Amazon employees. And this is the reality of the e-commerce economy. These gig jobs are not meant to be permanent. That means a company doesn't have any obligations to pay benefits.

But these are the most prevalent jobs for unskilled workers nowadays, and they are fast becoming permanent for most working class people, with no job security. The whole US economy is built on that, and companies like Amazon are still trying to cut corners any way they can for profit.

What Smalls and company are advocating is pretty obvious and simple: higher wages, workplace safety and job security. With day in, day out canvassing, they win the election to have a union. It is a small miracle. And there were some serious labor victories nationwide recently.

However, their fight is ongoing as the film shows: the second Staten Island Amazon facility failed to unionize. But the seed is planted, and the Amazon union momentum is spreading across the US. Union shows us that there is a glimmer of hope in the darkness.

I wonder as I watch Union: if only someone can tap into a worker solidarity, and speak plainly about the worker's rights in the state of our economy run by multi-million-dollar companies. With all the personal deficiencies, Smalls knew how to cut through all the bullshit that comes with organizing and actually get to people.

In a world of plutocracy, the working-class struggle is not a left or right issue. Smalls didn't care about whether he gets Biden's endorsement (again, he did AFTER they won). I wish he or someone from his organizing committee would run for office in the near future.

The film screens this week at DOC NYC. Visit their site for more information. It is also screening at Leeds International Film Festival, IDFA Film Festival, and Indie Memphis.

Death Drive

The Shrouds (2024) - Cronenberg Death, technology and commerce intermingle in David Cronenberg's new film, The Shrouds. With his bold exploration into our darkest human desires throughout all of his filmography, the Canadian body horror master still finds a lot of humor and irony in his storytelling after fifty plus years. Even the theme of death haunts every aspect of the film, The Shroud is suprisingly funny and engaging film that tells a lot about the current technology obsessed culture.

The death of his beloved wife Becca (Diane Kruger), prompted the tech mogul Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to create GraveTech, a technology that enables for grieving family to watch the images of their loved one's corpse as it disintegrates in ultra high definition, via app. The body is wrapped in shrouds with sensitive cameras attached to them. Karsh goes on about the gory details to an unsuspecting blind date, set up by his savvy and concerned virtual assistant named Hunny (voiced by Kruger with a yassified avatar). The blind date, uncomfortable and freaked out, excuses herself out the door.

On the cursp of his business going global with a dying Hungarian businessman's investment, someone vandalizes his GraveTech enabled cemetary with headstones adorned with videofeeds knocked down and smashed, including his wife's. With no one to trust, he brings in a desheveled tech expert Maury (Guy Pearce) who happens to be the ex of Becca's twin sister Terry (Kruger again). They suspect some underground environmental group based in Iceland is responsible for the vandalism. But it also could be other parties engaging in industrial espionage (Chinese company which makes the shrouds, Hungarians, etc).

Becca in intervals with her decaying body still haunts Karsh's dreams. The Hungarian mogul's blind wife (Sandrine Holt) gets into the act also. And he can't resist hooking up with Terry, a dog groomer who reminds him of his dead wife, at least in body resemblance. Terry has a tendency to be sexually aroused by conspiracy theories, which nowadays, there are plenty to go around.

As always, Cronenberg meshes both our skepticisms and fascinations about the advancement of technology into a great, thought provoking film without ever succumbing to sentimentality. Added layer in The Shroud is self-reflexivity in grief (Cronenberg lost his wife in 2017 and with Vincent Cassel with his silvery spikey hair, closely resembling the director). There's plenty of humor in The Shrouds, but the grasping at the loss of a loved one and the hard act of letting go of the earthly, bodily attachment rings true.

If I Fall from Grace

By the Stream (2024) - Hong Clocking at 111 minutes, Hong Sangsoo's new film, By the Stream, is perhaps the most busily plotted and the most sinewy among his recent output. It touches on many of Hong's preoccupations and reflexive filmmaking, along with the recent surge of the Korean feminist movement.

It concerns a disgraced actor, now a small bookstore owner Siyeon (Kwon Hyeho) in Kangwon province, being invited to stage a play in the year end festival in a women's university in Seoul, by his niece Jeonim (Kim Minhee) that he hadn't seen for years. It turns out that he is a last minute replacement, because the young director who was in charge of the production was dismissed because he slept with 3 of the cast members. The actor sees this opportunity as a kind of redeemable occasion which would rekindle his passion for art as he felt when he first started his career, which happens to be at the same university long ago.

Jeonim, in her early 40s, is living a quiet, uneventful life as a textile artist and working at the university. She is first seen sketching in her notebook by the steam in earth colored Fall attire. It was the university's department chair Jeong (Cho Yunhee) who gave her the job and trusted her and became a big sister figure in her life. It turns out Jeong is a big fan of Siyeon as an actor and really wanted to meet him. After a couple of drinking occasions and some grilled eels, the actor and Jeong get along swimmingly and that makes Jeonim a little uneasy and jealous. In the meantime, with new materials that Siyeon wrote, the 4-female play team rehearses their play under his guidance. The young women are eager and full of optimism in their expression of joy and outlook- the way only not-yet-jaded-by-life young people say and behave.

Jeonim confronts the young director (Ha Seongguk) who was let go, when he comes back into the university campus to talk to one of the girls he professed his love for. His remorseless behavior and demands to get his job back and his material being staged receives Jeonim's contempt and anger. Her reaction is almost feral.

When the young man makes a second appearance to propose to one of the girls, Siyeon steps in and has a talk with the young man. We don't get to see what's being said.

Hong leaves a lot of threads messy and untidy, unlike Jeonim's textile patterns with intricate designs. What really happened to Siyeon the actor? What made Jeonim content with her life? Why did their play receive poorly and why did the dean of the school want to talk to Siyeon? It Doesn't matter. Hong's characters interactions are delicious as always. It's a change of pace from his minimalist work with his last couple of outings, even the Isabelle Huppert starring A Traveler's Needs that came out this year as well.

Space Music

Little, Big and Far (2024) - Cohen The launching of the James Webb space telescope in 2021 changed the way we look at space. High up in space, it is able to detect the wavelength of many distant planets, stars and galaxies that the Hubble space telescope couldn't. The clear and astonishing images of the planets in the solar system are flooding in for the first time.

There was another awesome celestial development: the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Rosetta Mission put a lander probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, named after its two scientists who first detected it. It recorded a 24 minute video footage from the surface of the comet, and was later compiled as a grainy black and white two seconds gif, which became the internet sensation. In it, we see the great jagged mountain cliffs with specks of space dust flying about like snow with the vastness of space in the background. These jaw dropping, fairly recent developments in space explorations and discoveries and the implications of finding the origins of our known universe were never properly contemplated in current culture, until now, with Jem Cohen's Little, Big and Far.

The film starts with an Austrian astronomer named Karl. He chronicles how he got into the field and discusses his love for jazz- the soundtrack for space. It is something to see the ESA probe Philae's footage of comet's surface gif on loop with Coltrane's Manifestation (from the album Cosmic Music) blasting in the background on the big screen. Karl has studied stars all his adult life, but at 70, he is at a crossroad: His consultant gig at the university is uncertain and his physicist wife is in Arizona, utterly devoted to her work and he feels they are growing apart.

For a while Little, Big and Far is a visual/aural correspondence between Karl and Sarah, a fellow astronomer, who reside in the US. Sarah's concern is with the ecological disasters in anthropocene era, that the environmental destructions caused by human activities are too vast and frequent - recently highlighted by the Eastern seaboard in the US being besieged by unnatural orange smoke blown from a large forest fire in Canada. Sarah tells a story about an abandoned New Jersey telescope steeped in local legend and folklore by way of her young, nonchalant and wise beyond his years PhD student. The title, Little, Big and Far refers to what Karl and his wife see as the core of their work and life. Our lives seem very small to the vastness of the known universe which is still expanding, in comparison.

Cohen, as with his Museum Hours (2012), makes a gentle inquiry to human connections while presenting it within the bigger picture- in this case, the universe. His unhurried docu-fiction hybrid, using real academics and scientists through interviews and anecdotes, is so seamlessly melded together, while accentuating his micro/macro world view.

After attending a conference in Greece, Karl takes a journey to a remote small Greek island in search of the darkest skies. He talks with the eccentric locals who has his own theories about our solar system and ancient methods to measure time. The big finale to the story, which Cohen has been brewing throughout the whole film, features the awe inspiring skies studded with stars as Karl sits atop of the highest point of the hill in a remote Greek island. Our mind wanders - the stardust, the infinite vastness of space, our human connections to each other which gives meaning to our existence. With the long shutter, Cohen captures all the glories of the universe. And it's magical.

Colonial Herstory

Grand Tour (2024) - Gomes Miguel Gomes’s beguiling new film Grand Tour takes us down to the tour of Southeast Asia through the eyes of a British colonial bureaucrat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) and his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), as they crisscross Burma, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and Chinese hinterland. Beautifully shot in 16mm in color and black and white by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Guo Liang (Chinese part) and by Rui Poças (for staged dialog scenes), Grand Tour illustrates the filmmaker's penchant for playing with its cinematic form and historicity, tinkering the boundaries of space and time. And it's delicious.

Based on Somerset Maugham's travel essays collection, The Gentleman in the Parlor, the first half of the story concerns Edward, fleeing impending marriage to his fiancé who is on her way from Britain to join him in Burma. The title card indicates it's the year 1918. The thing is, many of the footage in various places indicate that it's the modern times. That the film is not a period piece and nostalgia trip, swooning over the bygone era. That there is something bigger at work here than the mere silly screwball narrative. Nevertheless, these documentary style footage - a human powered Ferris wheel in Myanmar, Jeepney karaoke in Manila, shadow puppet play in Bangkok, the view from the boat in Yangtze river are all stunning. The dizzying display of places as Edward zips through one place to another, and the rhythm of the tour never slows down. He goes further and further away to avoid seeing Molly, his journey becomes more and more of an existential trip. What is he running away from? Even Edward himself doesn't really know.

The second half of the film is from Molly's point of view. And we repeat Edward's trajectory on the map with her. Molly is a spirited woman, and not the type who gives up easily. With her determination and charm (with a distinctive devilish laugh), she traces Edward's path like a good detective. She picks up dutiful servant Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) while staying in a palatial house of a smitten American colonialist Sanders (Cláudio da Silva) in Bangkok and continue her journey in the pursuit of catching up with her runaway fiancé.

On the surface, Grand Tour is an old Hollywood screwball comedy of the battle of the sexes. But it's also a rebuke of the inherent male oriented adventure story- a man wants to be free and subservient woman haplessly pursues the love of her life into foreign lands and dies. In Gomes's hands, the artificiality of footage shot in studios of the exotic locale- jungles, a train wreck, colonial homes, etc., rubs shoulders with the 16mm color footage shot on locations is all the more accentuated. Molly is both that lovelorn girl in silent pictures and stubborn, fraternizing modern woman with a charismatic laugh.

Grand Tour exists on its own floating cinematic biosphere outside spatio-temporal continuum where past and present intermingle, in the context of first-world colonialism and the old-world sexism. It's another delicious concoction from Gomes.

Silent Observer

Caught by the Tides (2024) - Jia The master chronicler of China's changing times, Jia Zhangke keeps up with Caught by the Tides, again starring his collaborator/wife, Zhao Tao, taking the lead in a silent role. The film charts from 2001 to the pandemic era China. Culling from unused footage from his own films of the last 22 years, Jia, as always, inventively looks back and forward to tell the characters swept up by the times and tides of life.

When we see Qiao Qiao (Tao) for the first time in the city of Datong, She is a hustling dancer, singer, model in nightclubs and shopping malls in her Cleopatra wig. She is in a relationship with her manager Bin (Li Jubin), a two bit, small-time businessman. One day Bin texts her via mobile phone that he is moving to another province to look for business opportunities, that he will pick her up after he makes some money. His business overseeing construction takes him to The Three Gorges Dam and the cities are condemned to be demolished because of the rising water level.

Qiao Qiao decides to follow Bin, even though he doesn't reciprocate her feelings and seldomly contacts her over many years. In the meantime, Bin, trying in several business ventures, gets embroiled in political corruption when his boss takes money and runs off. When Qiao Qiao finally catches up with him in Fengjie, the town condemned by the rising waters with the dam being built, she finally breaks up with him using texts on the phone. The year is 2006.

We find Bin, now old and walking with a cane, taking a plane down to Guangdong Province, to visit an old time business associate. Everyone is wearing masks and some are in hazmat suits. He came to see if there's business opportunities in the south. But his friend is now in a hospital and because of Covid restrictions, they communicate through video chat on the smartphone. When Bin asks if there's anything he can be useful at, as he is well versed in constructions, the bedridden friend tells him that it's all about advertisement revenues off of tiktok. He manages several country bumpkin tiktok stars.

Bin goes back to Datong and finds Qiao Qiao working as a grocery clerk. Even though they wear masks and have aged significantly since they saw each other (Tao not as much because she doesn't age), they recognize each other. A lot of water under the bridge. They walk together silently as the snow falls.

Due to the Covid pandemic and restrictions, Jia couldn't shoot another film. So while looking at unused footage and b-rolls he shot over the years in various formats, he decided to incorporate them into Caught by the Tides. This experiment, in line with his formal cinematic exercises in his previous works - the blending fiction and documentary, tinkering with different genres and using different formats, adds another layer to the poignancy of the film - time passing. Not only rapidly changing technology (there are scenes shot in 360 VR camera in Tides) and landscapes, we see his actors aging right before our eyes.

Without saying much, in Tao's case, nothing at all, it's Qiao Qiao's sad smile looking at a robot greeter at the mall that tells a thousand stories. And it's much more effective than any expositional dialog. Jia finally makes a silent movie star out of his muse, who witnesses the passage of time with her sad gaze.

Manifestation

April (2024) - Kulumbegashivili After her impressive debut film, Beginning (2020), about a woman's plight in a deeply religious and patriarchal society, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashivili returns with April. And it's a challenging feminist work, to say the least. The film features some difficult to stomach scenes of real time medical procedures.

April starts in the complete darkness, then there is a hideous naked creature, traversing shallow pool of water in the dark. Her skin's all saggy and her feature is shapeless. The sound of children playing in the water accompanies this disturbing sight. Throughout the film, we see the creature over and over again.

We are then introduced to Nina (Beginning's Ia Sukhitashvili, starring in another challenging main role), an OB/GYN delivering the baby in an operating room. It's a real-time birth filmed. After the graphic birth, the baby is not moving. Later, the father of the still birth baby blames Nina for its death. There's a rumor going around that Nina performs illegal abortions in this rural, agricultural region of Georgia. Nina rebuffs the insinuations and points out the fact the ignorant, superstitious local population - that the couple had no prior consultations or pre-natal care at the hospital until it was too late to find out that there were complications with the young mother's pregnancy. It turns out Nina does perform outpatient abortions for unwanted pregnancies (young mothers, rape victims, etc., usually on the patient's kitchen table). Her colleague David warns her about her extracurricular activity, that the hospital admins are itching to get rid of her with any excuses, "That's the side-job for the under-paid nurses, you don't need to do it. You are not changing the world."

In her spare time, Nina visits bars and cattle auctions at night, looking for anonymous sexual encounters which results in violence. It is as if she is actively challenging what she can get away with as an educated, professional woman, in a male dominant, deeply religious and superstitious society, even if it means bodily harm and even losing her career.

There is a prolonged scene where we are presented with a young deaf-mute girl's exposed midriff on the dining room table as Nina performs an abortion. Her older sister summoned her knowing she does the procedure. It is revealed that they don't know the who the father is. Yet they refuse to take pills (the older sister has five children, all delivered by Nina) because of the religious reasons and they can't let the man of the house know about the pregnancy. The scene is not graphic per se; It's procedural and detached. But It goes on forever. April is one of the few films that deals with the same subject matter that does not resort to making the actual procedure as a selling point or the emotional crux of the film. It comes later, involving the same girl.

Kulumbegashivili's formalist approach in April - full frame, long continuous shots, minimal coverage and mostly from its protagonist's POV, is effective in creating dread and isolation Nina feels in an oppressive society where she sees no reprieve for women. The director delves in to metaphysics (as she did with Beginning), and one can interpret the creature as a modern day witch. A medieval monster who kills babies and being reviled and persecuted by male dominant society, still steeped in superstitions.

Living Under Occupation

No Other Land (2024) - Adra, Ballal, Abraham, Szor As I write this non-review-review of a documentary on the West Bank in the Occupied Territories, Israel is engaging in military conflicts with Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Yemen. Iran just launched retaliatory bombing of the airbase in Israel.

Going through what's been happening for the past year is going to be futile because it will need detailed context with how we got here - on the verge of World War 3, would take way too long. As I cover New York Film Festival which this film is part of, there's a boycott happening against the event because of many of the sponsors are deemed pro-Israel donors.

I say this is not a movie review because I'm about to lay down what happens in this very personal documentary and explain what it means at this time and place in the world, not as much about how the film was made and put together. This article is from the perspective of a person living in New York, married to a woman of Jewish descent: this is how I see it from my perspective and no one else's. So please keep that in mind as you read along.

No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activists, shows what it's like to be living under an apartheid state, in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. Five years in the making, it documents the ongoing destruction in Masafer Yatta- an area consisting of a small group of Palestinian villages in the South of the West Bank. It focuses on Basel Adra, a young activist (serving as one of the directors of the film) who grew up in the village and has been documenting Israeli incursions since he was a child.

He meets Israeli journalist Yuval (Yuval Abraham who is also credited as a director) in 2019, covering land siege and demolition of the Palestinian inhabitants’ brick and mortar homes on the dry hills by Israeli military, which cites the Israeli Supreme Court ruling that Israel has the right to the land in the Occupied Territories, for building a military training ground. Confrontations ensue. But it's been like this forever. Basel's dad has been arrested many times in the past. The homes get destroyed, then rebuilt (with great difficulty I might add), destroyed and rebuilt. They live in constant fear of being evicted or being arrested. The military cuts their water lines, confiscates their generators, pours cement to the wells - all these are documented by Basel and others. Basel, along with his father, known to the Israeli military officers as troublemakers, is a constant target for harassment and threats.

Yuval is rightfully enraged by all of the things he sees, done by the Israeli military, by his name. He is an Israeli. At the end of the day, he gets to go home by breezing through checkpoints, using the Israeli citizen only lanes. He gets to shower and sleep in a cushy bed. On the other hand Basel, about the same age as him, with a law degree, can't get a job, other than manual labor. He needs to tend the gas station when his father gets arrested for protesting, since that's the sole source for the family income. Yet, it's Basel who comforts Yuval, who tells him to calm down. "You are too enthusiastic. You want to see the change overnight, it won't come tomorrow." After years of living under occupation, people become realists.

The network of resistance is done via phone, neighbors communicate that there's a raid or bulldozers coming to this town or that house, as the military seemingly selects their targets at random. They mobilize to stage a demonstration.

A neighbor gets shot while being evicted from their house. He is paralyzed from the shoulders down. They can’t afford to stay in the hospital. Their home destroyed, they move into the cave (the region is known for its natural caves). With a small camera, Basel records everything. He uploads it to the web and hopes to get the words out of the struggle. That's all he does- constantly looking at the phone. Hey, two thousand people liked my post. Their activism sometimes bore fruit and gave a moment of reprieve, like that time Tony Blair toured the region and saw their situation first-hand. And the Israelis backed down their expansion temporarily. Basel's father has a picture with him to prove it.

When they are chilling at night, sharing hookah, the conversation leads to other things between two men. "Do you see yourself having a family?" Yuval asks. Basel hesitates to answer. He is too tired. The years of struggle weighs him down. Always married to his phone, looking at the likes and responses to his posts about the daily lives of his struggle and the news. He is tired. There's nothing else he can do.

Dominating the Middle East news cycle for a year has been the ongoing indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Gaza since October 7th of 2023 by Israel, in retaliation of the surprise attack from the Hamas militants in Gaza Strip. This emboldened the zionist Israeli settler movement in the West Bank. Accompanied by Israeli soldiers, the settlers start violently attacking the homes in Masafer Yatta. Basel records his cousin getting shot by a settler. His father gets arrested. The movie ends in the early 2024. Basel and thousands of other stories like his still go on. People's suffering is staggering, so is their resilience.

Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor capture something that is so immediate and telling, living under the occupation. The systematic injustice and oppression are well documented in No Other Land. Everything we take for granted - roof over our heads, running water, electricity are in constant threat. Plus scarcity of economic opportunities, healthcare and restriction of movement, makes everyday life of people in the West Bank extremely difficult.

Social media serves a very different purpose in the Occupied Territories. Palestinians really count on getting the footage out to the world to show what’s really going on. I had no idea how much they depend on the pressure tactics by us on politicians to improve their lives. It seems no distributor is picking up this film because of its 'sensitive' nature and fear of offending the Israeli government and its powerful lobby groups even though the No Other Land won the awards at this year’s Berlinale. But injustice is injustice. These people in the film are not actors. The oppression is real. The racist vitriol is real. And I feel it is our (people who've seen the film) duty, to advocate for their plight.

Balls, Tassels, Panty Hose and Death

Afternoons of Solitude (2024) - Serra After garnering global critical acclaim of his South Pacific Cold War espionage thriller throwback, Pacifiction, Albert Serra, the Catalan "enfant terrible" of cinema, offers a documentary on bullfighting. A self-professed non-lover of the genre, Serra goes on to show the gory, testosterone and blood-filled world inside the bullring through the eyes of Andrés Roca Rey, a famed bullfighter from Peru. But again, this is Albert Serra film, so it is no ordinary documentary. In fact, it's nothing but.

Filmed almost entirely in close-ups in and around the bullring, It is clear that Afternoons of Solitude's aim is quite different. With the help of Serra close collaborator Artur Tort (Pacifiction, Death of Louis XIV) helming at the camera and also serving as an editor, the film has a striking consistency and rhythm to it. The bullfight is a highly ritualized endeavor: the getups - the montera (the Mickey Mouse hat that toreros wear), the tassels, the sparkly elaborate embroidery on the jacket, the pink pantyhose, the dainty satin shoes that resemble a ballerina's. And the actual bullfighting - with horse mounted lancers and the whole cuadrilla first attacking the bull and tire them out until matador steps in and finishing the job.

It's also highly gruesome business- stream of blood on the beast's back, the dirt, mud, mucus, the staring, strutting, and hollering, then death. The sight is not for the squeamish or animal lovers. There are multiple deaths of the bulls in the film. This highly ritualized killing has been a controversial tradition, criticized and protested from animal rights groups for years. Rightly or wrongly, Serra narrowly concentrates on what's in and around the ring, nothing else. This means nothing about Roca Rey, his entourage, the bulls, nothing. And this is what makes Afternoons of Solitude fascinating.

The sound we hear are heavy breathings of the beast and Roca Rey, his team feverishly singing the praises in the ring over and over again: You got the biggest balls! You are the greatest! You are the most beautiful human being in the world! With the pouty gaping mouth, Roca Rey stares down his beasts, while strutting like Mick Jagger. The battles are tense and the danger imminent. He gets gored a couple of times yet sustain only minor injuries. He hears other toreros with broken ribs over conversations.

Afternoons of Solitude has more common with Lucian Castraing Taylor (Leviathan, Sweetgrass) and the rest of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) filmmakers' outputs, portraying haptic images on screen. Plus, examining machismo of the Spaniards associated with the bullfighting, not narrated but shown directly with no guise or insinuation. Serra's aim is capturing the purity: the purity of the ritual, the purity of the filmmakers who haven't had any prior experience with bullfighting, the purity of worship, the purity of self-assurance. It's a hard to sit through experience but another worthy effort from one of the most adventurous filmmakers of our time.

Repatriation

Dahomey (2024) - Diop Darkness. Then a booming female/male voice announces the journey to their homeland. It's the voice of a statue, one of the 26 such artifacts France is sending back to its former colony, Benin. The statue was taken by the French soldiers from the kingdom of Dahomey 130 years ago. The voice raises concerns about its return since it was uprooted from their homeland so long ago. It's made from the image of King Ghezo, who ruled the kingdom in the early 19th Century. It doesn't have a name. The name that was given for this occasion is 26, as in, the 26th statue that was chosen to make the journey back out of 7,000 artifacts that are currently in Europe after being taken from Benin.

Mati Diop, acclaimed French actor/director (Atlantics) with Senegalese ancestry, chronicles the journey of the artifacts step by step in Dahomey, from handling and putting them into the wooden crates by workers, under the watchful eyes of artists and other cultural emissaries, painstakingly assessing the conditions of each wooden pieces of art. They comment on the significance of the events. Diop’s camera joins the serious gaze of these officials and respectfully captures these large, awe inspiring objects - Besides King Ghezo's likeness, there's King Glele as half-man, half- lion, King Béhanzin as half-man, half-Shark. There are exquisitely carved thrones and doors of the kings taken from the Royal Palace of Abomey of the Dahomey kingdom. The return of these artifacts are the result of what came as calls mount in Africa for European countries to return the colonial spoils in their museums, universities and private collections.

As the large, magnificent artifacts are getting set up in Benin's Presidential Palace for exhibition, Diop cross-cuts the exhibition with the lively debates on the repatriation in a public forum among young people, in the background of bustling Cotonou, the capital of Benin.

The return is a direct result of a pressure campaign by local and international activists. In the forum, some liken the return to putting the souls back to these artifacts. Still, some see it as a shrewd ploy by Macron and Patrice Talon, Benin's president, who are eager to score political points with the African populace. Some see it as an insult, with only 26 out of thousands being returned and deem that celebration is premature. For others, the return is welcome, but understand the repatriation of physical culture doesn't replace the intangible culture - song, dance and oral storytelling which stood in place of the absence of these objects. Through these spirited debates, Diop captures the awakening national pride, questioning the remnants of the colonial education system and even speaking French as the official language - when there are many different local languages spoken throughout the country. No one can argue that the return is not a good start though. It's reflected in the faces of the children when they see these treasures in person at the exhibition.

Dahomey is a spiritual heir to Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's 1953 essay film, Statues Also Die (1953) about how colonialism affected the way African Art is perceived and also Abderramane Sissako's Bamako (2006) in terms of self-determination and awakening of African consciousness through debates in the globalized world. It's a hopeful avant-documentary that needs to be seen widely.

Adieu Godard, Adieu Cinema

Scénarios + Exposé du Film annonce du film "Scénario" (2024) - Godard Jean Luc Godard's last, 17 minute film, Sénarios, which was completed just a day before his 2022 assisted suicide death, is paired with the 36 minute 'making of' documentary for this year's New York Film Festival. For the fans of the late master it is an emotional one. Because it's the last material to see and hear him on screen in his very last days. Originally planned as a feature, this long gestating project had been constantly worked on, even during Covid lockdown. With his failing health, Godard truncated the four part project into two chapters - DNA: Fundamental Elements and MRI: Odyssey. The message is also simplified and more direct. "The final warning," uttered on several occasions to whatever Godard saw as impending for us.

You can tell that the end was on his mind. Images of death, the violent ones at that are displayed - Pina (Anna Magnani)'s Death in Rosselini's Rome, Open City, car wreck that ends Contempt and the infamous car pile up in Week End (both from his own filmography). So are the images of war. Like the DNA itself- the base, the beginning element for all living creatures, Godard here equates the old film clips as what cinema is based upon. The distinctive sound MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging - a modern medical technology of scanning your body for grave illness) machine makes- the beeping, the loud thuds, are incorporated into the latter part of the film. Not new to the procedure at that point in life, Godard signals the end. Beginning and end, of life and cinema, at least his own, ending as well.

Sénarios exhibits primary colors boldly painted on stock papers over the images and words - the technique he used in his later periods with Image Book and the last year's posthumous release, Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars. The colors,shapes, texture painted over collages, Godard was in full late period Mattise mode. At the end, we are shown his exposed old man's hairy torso, as he puffs away his cigar with wild white hair, reading Sartre's aphorism "Using a horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse is less efficient than using a non-horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse." I keep wondering what he would make of the current state of the world - The war in Ukraine and Gaza, the rise of misinformation, the world in chaos.

The making of documentary that follows Scénarios, confirms my assumption about the Mattise comparison. Mattise, wheelchair bound and with physical limitations in his final years, turned to a new type of medium, with the help of his assistants, he began creating paper cut collages (decoupage). Godard, filmed by his long time collaborator Fabrice Argano in 2021, gives detailed instructions on, then, a planned 4 part feature on stock paper cards, what to include, what to cut and what to modify in terms of images, music, colors and what sequences. With a lighter in his hand, we get the rare glimpse of his working method in his last years. It's an invaluable and emotional viewing for the fans of cinema at large.

Shift

Nickel Boys (2024) - Ross Adapting Colson Whitehead (Underground Railroads)'s Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name, RaMell Ross -- known for Hale County This Morning, This Evening, his lyrical tapestry of rural Alabamians -- applies the same lyricism to his narrative film debut with Nickel Boys.

Based on a real life case of Dozier School for the Boys, a Florida reform school, where allegations of murder and physical and sexual abuse surfaced dacades later. Ross's treatment of the heavy subject is a mismatch here, and therefore the emotional impact of the tragic and transcending story of perseverance does not quite resonate emotionally.

Strictly seen from first person POV, Ross takes a gamble with Nickel Boys in its presentation of identity swap and audience identification that plays out in the latter part of the film. The unseen protagonist in the first 20 minutes of the film is Elwood, an African American college-bound student in Jim Crow-era Florida, in the care of his loving grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor).

We only get a glimpse of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) reflected on the glass windows and on an iron press. The sequences of Black lives in the 60s are captured in Malick-ian bliss: the colors, softness, consumer goods, and the Christmas lights, all accompanied by Ellis-Taylor's smile. Ross interjects these images with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches as the Civil Rights Movement was heating up, to give this time period some context.

Things take a drastic turn when Elwood accepts a ride to the college from a stranger who happens to drive a stolen car. They are pulled over by police. Just because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, he is sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys (segregated).

Spencer (Hamish Linklater), who is in charge of the school, and is practically the warden of a jail, tells the incoming juvenile delinquents that if they are good, they will 'graduate' and can rejoin society. If not, they will be punished.

There, Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), who has a much more cynical outlook of the academy. "You can't rely on anybody. You will have to look out for yourself," he tells Elwood. Our POV changes from Elwood to Turner and we see grown up Elwood (Ethan Herisse) for the first time.

From then on, we switch back and forth from these two characters' point of view. So these two characters are linked. But what does this mean? They endure bullying, and corporal punishment in Nickel Academy. Elwood's prospect of getting out of the place is getting more and more unlikely with his hopes and dreams getting dim.

Ross interjects these scenes with those of a grown-up man with dreads, only seen from the back of his head, in the present day. He owns a moving company and has a girlfriend. He is shown doing research on the now defunct Nickel Academy on his laptop, including the news of mass graves being discovered on the lot of the reform school grounds.

After being punished for attempting to reveal the secrets of the academy (it's unclear what exactly or how he got caught), Elwood and Turner attempt an escape. It is revealed that Turner survives the escape, and takes Elwood's identity to live his friend's aspirations and dreams.

Limiting the POV to two people, and us identifying with those two only, negates all the others who perished in the real reform school it was based on. Not showing or mentioning the nature of the abuse that was going on in there, lessens the emotional impact of the whole ordeal.

Pretty pictures to conjure up the emerging African American middle class and embodiment of unconditional love of the family, captured beautifully by Ellis-Taylor, are all commendable. But for a subject this weighty, the aesthetics in Nickel Boys don't work.

Reach Out and Touch Faith

Distance (2001) - Kore-eda Hirokazu Kore-eda paints a complex picture in the aftermath of unspeakable acts of terrorism and contemplates on the collective responsibility in Distance, inspired by Aum Shinrikyo Sarin Gas Attack in Tokyo Subways in 1995. But in true Kore-eda fashion, the film is not about the carnage or condemnation of the soulless society, but a plea for us to reach out and take care of each other, even though understanding one another can be hard.

It's been three years since the Ark of Truth cult sabotaged Tokyo's water supply system that killed hundreds and injured thousands, we are informed by the TV broadcast. After the act, the members of the cult committed suicide, and their bodies burned and the ashes scattered. Four family members of the cultists, still grappling with the fact that their loved ones committed such a heinous act, get together and pay a visit to the lake in the countryside where the ashes are supposedly scattered. It is revealed that they've been doing this annually, making the trips together to pay respects to the dead.

On the way to the lake, they encounter a surviving cult member Sakata (Tadanobu Asano), who abandoned the group at the last minute, there as well. He keeps his distance. After the visit to the lake and paying respects in various forms, (laying flowers in the water, praying and just saying a few words) they turn back, only to find their car stolen. It's getting late and the rain storm is brewing in the distance, they have no choice but follow Sakata into a cabin which was home for cult members.

Talking to each other and asking Sakata as they spend the night together, they find out the insights and thinking behind their estranged family members. In the beginning, Kore-eda unhurriedly shows the four living their lives, doing their jobs - a swimming instructor, a teacher, a salaryman and a florist. In a series of flashbacks, we get to witness their interactions with their family members who became cult members. Something is missing in their lives, they want to start over, they want to heal their souls...

Just like his previous films - Maborosi and Afterlife, Kore-eda plays the pivotal memories of each character- their final goodbyes, losing them forever to the cult - things get violent for some, not understanding their family, some uneventful and more contemplative. However, that was the last interaction they have had with their loved ones.

Like all his other films, Kore-eda concentrates on the concept of a family in Distance. That it is our duty to shorten the distance between us before it becomes too far and unreachable. With the poetic visuals and contemplative nature, Distance is closer to his earlier films than family dramas of his later films. Unlike the Japanese cinema of disaffected in the late 90s and 2000s by filmmakers like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and others, Kore-eda wants to give us a glimpse of hope in human interactions and advocate reaching out and understanding each other with Distance.

Floating

El auge del humano 3/The Human Surge (2023) - Williams Seven years have passed since Argentine experimental filmmaker, Eduardo Williams's Human Surge made a splash in the international film scene. The elusive threads of young people's lives in the global south, shot in various media that incorporate video games and internet, challenged and refuted the rigid old notion of cinema and its first world colonialist hegemony without being seen as overtly political or preachy. Globalization, in Williams's presentation, at least for young people, is both fantasy and real, and among them, connection is easily made crossing national boundaries over abundant technology and is no big deal, in their impoverished daily lives.

Williams comes up with The Human Surge 3. Never mind its title. It's been a while, things have been happening in the world. It's appropriate that he jumps to the third one to keep up with the times. (The prolific filmmaker has been constantly making shorts) In Surge 3, using a 360 VR camera, he charts the non-binary young people's lives in Peru, Taiwan and Sri Lanka. As always, their daily lives in exotic surroundings and daily conversations can be a little discombobulating to the viewers at first. But as it plays out and we settle with some recognizable faces over time, we get settled in and notice that their thoughts intermingle. Certain conversations are repeated in different languages: their animosity toward millionaires, polution and environmental destruction. Then they appear in each other's surroundings and communicate with each other, either in English or in their own language without missing a beat. Someone mentions, "I saw you in my dream, eating a mango on a raft in the water," matching with the image in the Peru section.

In Williams's hand, globalization in the internet age opens up limitless possibilities for the young people to connect - they literally float in the air. For the viewers, he presents an immersive visual/aural journey while also reminding the limitations of technology (for now) by leaving in the distortions of wide angle VR camera imagery in the film.

There are some great established filmmakers who take great chances with experimenting with narratives and the medium to further their artistry in telling human experiences within historical and cultural contexts: Lisandro Alonso and Miguel Gomes- Harmony Korine to a lesser extent, come to mind. Eduardo Williams, with his minimalist/maximalist free-flowing aesthetics, with acute observations of the world here and now, with a great deal of sense of humor and compassion & tenderness toward its subjects, emerges as one of the most daring, important filmmakers working today.

Orbiting

Janet Planet (2023) - Baker Playwright Annie Baker's feature film debut, Janet Planet, is a small wonder. It might lack the emotional impact or drama of Aftersun or Ladybird as far as a parent/daughter relationship goes, but in its quiet small ways, it depicts a meaningful, authentic mother-daughter relationship on film. Even though it's set in the summer of 1991 and the lack of cell phones indicates the era, Janet Planet is not at all a nostalgia trip. Its rural New England setting, the creaky wooden bungalows peppered with New-Age types emanate that distinctive short summer rental/impermanence vibe.

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is first seen sneaking out of the lodge in the middle of the night of her summer camp to call her mom Janet (Julianne Nicholson). She demands mom to pick her up, otherwise she will kill herself. Next morning, to her displeasure, she finds that both mom and mom's moody boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), waiting to drive her home. She says she changed her mind. Too late.

Divided by chapters with Janet's love interests and friends' names, the film is seen from Lacy's point of view and her single mom making bad choices in men. Lacy, 11-years old, still insists on sleeping with mom in her bed. Janet doesn't treat her precocious and lonely daughter like a child, and always have heart-to-heart conversations - about her career trajectory (she recently got a license to be an acupuncturist and named her practice Janet Planet), her bad tastes in men, her beliefs that she can make any men fall in love with her if she tries, and how Lacy's forthrightness and (sometimes) aggressiveness make her wonder that she would be better off if she turns out to be a lesbian (and she means this as a complement). There are many other gems like that throughout.

Both Ziegler and Nicholson are wonderful. Sophie Okonedo and white bearded Elias Koteas make memorable appearances too. The dialog rings true. No character comes across as out of balance or overly stereotypical, considering its hippie environment. Baker gets the world of Lacy in detail- her odd doll collections, lying under the dining table and on the grass aimlessly for hours, getting sick with anxiety at the bus stop on the first day of middle-school and most important of all, fighting for her mom's attention among series of men that orbits her planet. Baker gets the haziness and dream-like pre-adolescence right. With a blink of an eye, it will be gone. But the grownup world, as witnessed by Lacy, is not that much different. There will be plenty of fights and screaming matches and resentment and all that in the future. She will find a girl her age to talk to, as evidenced in the beginning of the film with Wayne's daughter Sequoia. But for this brief time, mom and daughter relationship is precious, like a planet and its moon.

Scariest of Them All

Oddity (2024) - Mc Carthy Horror genre is having a good year with many successful releases. Some of them are very good. But I find most of them overhyped and not at all scary. Irish director Damian Mc Carthy, whose sleeper hit debut Caveat (2020), a 'haunted house' genre, was in my opinion, both original and scary horror film in an ominous remote island setting. He comes up with perhaps the scariest film of the year.

Just like Caveat, the location plays an important part. This time it is a big old remote castle. Dani (Carolyn Bracken) and Ted (Gwylim Lee) are in the process of renovating the property that they just moved in. While Ted is at work (he is a doctor at a mental hospital nearby), Dani has to fend for herself at the big, cold, empty castle. As far as atmospheric horror goes, Mc Carthy is very skilled at creating the feeling that something is off. He is very good at not only jump scares, which there are plenty, but the sense of forbodding with startling images.

After Dani gets brutally murdered in the castle by a masked intruder, her twin sister Darcy, a blind clairvoyant who owns an oddity shop in town stops in at the castle, with a hideous housewarming gift, a wooden life-size mannequin with terrifying expression, for Damian and his new, unsuspecting girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). Darcy suspects it was Ted who arranged Dani's murder. He is doing some insidious stuff in the mental hospital. And he in turn, challenges the notion of supernatural with his daring arrogance: you wanna play with me? I will play with you. Yana finds strange objects in the holes in the creepy manequin's head - a lock of hair, a tooth, a viale of blood and a picture of Dani and Darcy as children. Unexplained things start happening - Yana's car key disappears, the wooden figure changes its positions by itself, Yana gets to see the glimpse of Dani's apparition in the dark. Freaked out, Yana leaves.

Carolyn Bracken has a great presence in her double roles while Gwylim Lee is appropriately creepy as smarmy, insidious villain. There are many truly terrifying moments in Oddity. The sense of unease Mc Carthy creates has no equal. It's his effective filmmaking - unnerving framing, sense of claustrophobia and timing that really pays off. His playing with the expectations of the audiences provide many spine tingling moments. Horror fans, watch this movie!