New Films / New Directors (April 3-14) seems like my kind of so-called minor film festival. Similar but perhaps a little more niche than the 14 Years Around the World Festival in Berlin in November — giving you the best of the globe from the year’s fests (caught the Ceylan and Los Delincuentos [Rodrigo Moreno, 2023] there last year) but also displaying some bold choices, not just the standard hype picks — NF/ND, ostensibly focussed on first and second features while sometimes branching out to more seasoned directors people in the states mightn’t have heard of yet, is one of New York’s best options for figuring out who’s the new shiny thing in global cinema.
When it comes to picking the movies, you can tell they really try. We’ve got coverage of a PÖFF (Tallinn) premiere (All, Or Nothing At All), a Sundance jam (Malu) and a Cinema Du Réel pick (Otro Sol), all at the same festival. Our regular contributor Nick Kouhi is back with some excellent short reviews. Check it out below!
Mall of Us Strangers
Jiajun Zhang’s All, or Nothing At All (2023) infuses its featherweight diptych of would-be lovers with a panoply of postmodern touchstones. Confined almost entirely within the walls of the Global Harbour shopping complex in Shanghai, the architectural hegemony of globalisation yields familiar strains of ennui within dual network narratives.
Zhang’s media literacy is both a bug and a feature, imbuing his winsome parables with a knowing irony that sometimes feels like an affectation.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Otro Sol. Only Crime Will Tell.
Otro Sol’s (Francisco Rodriguez Teare, 2023) tale of international larceny closely interweaves historical with fabricated narratives. Teare’s feature debut taps a familiar well of docu-fiction formalism to interrogate the construction of a distinctly Chilean historiography of thieves living abroad. By leaving the veracity of its central criminal ambiguous, the film recalls Matjaž Ivanišin’s Oroslan (2019) in its fusion of constituent truths into a national mythology.
Two cousins find a retired thief by the Pacific Ocean on the edge of the Atacama Desert. The man, Eugenio Pizarro Pizarro, had allegedly participated in an audacious heist, orchestrated by Alberto Cándia Martinez, in January 1978. The men stole several valuable items, mostly gold, from a cathedral in Cadiz, Spain. The location of these items, as well as Alberto himself, remains a mystery the cousins’ ensuing investigation seeks to uncover.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Malu. The Bout of the Brazilian Bohèmes.
Familial strife and political friction binds three generations of Brazilian women in Malu (2024). Writer-director Pedro Freire, who modelled his eponymous matriarch after his actress mother, evidently harbours a close attachment to the material while injecting Malu’s capricious outbursts with the brio befitting her profession.
It’s the 1990s. Malu (Yara de Novaes) is out of work and living at home with her mother Lili (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha) in a Rio favela. Malu’s rancour is momentarily quelled by the arrival of her estranged daughter (Carol Duarte), a television actress visiting from São Paulo. Yet Malu’s militant philosophy of political theatre, coupled with barely-suppressed rage towards Juliana’s father, threatens to alienate her only child and living parent.
As a Cassavetes-inflected portrait of actors, Malu’s interest lies primarily in how the personalities of certain performers can be conducive or detrimental to their interpersonal relationships. Malu herself possesses the greatest depth in understanding how her conception of art was informed by the tumultuous years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. The societal tumult of that era enabled a calcified narrative that she recites to avoid taking responsibility for her personal failures.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!