Eventually
It seems to me that there are less new films around this year. This was noticeable in the selection for Cinéma du Réel, which, instead of the array of unknown entities that can usually be found within the International Competition, offered mostly highlights from Sundance, Berlinale, and Rotterdam. It was also noticeable in the selections of Visions du Réel and CPH:DOX, which seemed to be lacking in standout films or conversation-starters. The larger festivals seem to have swallowed up many of the new non-fiction films from known names, as well as quite a few from first-time filmmakers too, leaving these three documentary-specific festivals searching, seemingly a little stretched by their stringent commitments to premiere statuses and territorial geoblocking. In the same period, those festivals that looked to do something a little differently, like Alchemy Film & Moving Image or Prismatic Ground, to name two examples, seemed fresher by comparison, untethered from rules created for events situated in the real world, and freer and looser in scope, format, and selection.
Whilst feature films shot prior to the pandemic could be edited and debuted during the moment of interregnum, less new ones will have been filmed and released during this same period. Filmmakers with a feature ready for public consumption may have been holding out for a festival that is able to take place in-person. Attending an online film festival in early 2021 was a strange affair then, offering the same imperfect approximation of an inherently communal environment that virtual events offered this time last year but without the attendant novelty of the new and unknowable. With square eyes and some screen-fatigue, I loaded up logins for both CPH:DOX and Visions du Réel—which this year occurred almost simultaneously and with some titles shared between them—and selected films almost entirely at random, hoping to restore a sense of happenstance to the mechanical process of watching films at home as part of a virtual festival. Below, some emergent themes from highlights from across these two film festivals, penned from the margins of the tail end of a year of online events.
Mood, Memory, Remembrance
Trees in Summer / If You See her, Say Hello
Two of the most affecting films were Hee Young Pyun and Jiajun Oscar Zhang’s If You See her, Say Hello (Visions), and Suyu Lee’s Trees in Summer (Visions), both of which take a contemplative approach to visualizing memory. In the warmly nostalgic If You See her, Say Hello, a traveller returns to his hometown in Northern China to see if the locale’s real landscapes match the idealized ones that live in his memories. Switching geographies and timelines with a dreamlike fluidity, the film drifts uncertainly through various unreal-seeming spaces, its dual narrators talking in whispered tones as the camera glides through an assortment of vibrant neon-lit urban environments and contrastingly denigrated, dislocated rural landscapes. A visually striking and confidently inscrutable film, with all of its technicolor light trails and balletic camera movements, this is a film that evokes the essence of early films by Wong Kar Wai. It is no surprise then to see Jacky Yee Wah Pang—who has long acted as the Hong Kong director’s producer—in the credits of the film. Trees in Summer is a quieter film in comparison, but it's also graced with the same spark of gentle nostalgia. Using an impressionistic diaristic form, Suyu Lee builds a wistful reflection on illness out of her mother’s scattered memories. Darting deftly between swaying trees, shimmering waters, and sunsets that seem to melt on-screen, Lee weaves her mother’s musings on the anxieties of mortality against a backdrop of serene, unapologetically lyrical imagery. In some ways, this is a film that is as simple as its title suggests, all about the search for images, sounds, and sensations that can act as a salve during times of uncertainty, but this simplicity is deceptive. Handling heavy themes, the film avoids drifting into territory that is too maudlin, all the while maintaining a lightness and openness that is as rare as it is charming.
Stylistically different, but also taking memory as subject matter, was Rikke Nørgaard’s Eventually (CPH), an interesting first feature which felt informed more by the conventions of reality television than any trend in contemporary international documentary. Examining the distance between two people’s understanding of the same situation, the film’s premise is almost that of a sociological experiment. Having been romantically involved with each other for a long time but having never defined their relationship, Laura and Malik look to examine their shared past in order to understand whether they should solidify what they have or abandon it altogether. Working with Nørgaard, who is, wisely, a mostly invisible presence, they cast the same set of actors as various versions of themselves and direct them in scenes restaging key moments from their four-year-long on-off relationship. Both individuals get to separately direct the same scenes, then later, they watch each other’s footage together in a theatre, sitting arm in arm, sick to the stomach at the prospect of witnessing the best and worst of themselves on-screen—at seeing, and being seen, by others. The first scene shows how they met, whilst others deal with various separations and indiscretions. The film cuts between showing the scenes themselves, discussions with the actors about these sensitive moments they are recreating, and then reflections from Laura and Malik about how they felt then and how they feel with the benefit of hindsight. Observing the intimacies of their own lives from an almost out-of-body perspective provided by the reflexivity of the screen, both brave participants are remarkably candid, willing to have their relationship mined as dramatic material and let their private lives become public narrative. Tensions mount as the film builds towards a climax that, while telegraphed in some ways, still hurts a lot to watch unfold.
Archives, Autobiography, Investigation
Strict Regime / Splinters
Amongst the many films made from family archives, Natalia Garayalde’s Splinters (Visions) stands out. Gifted a camcorder by her father when she was twelve, Garayalde films her family absent-mindedly until a major incident occurs in her town which she captures on tape. In 1995, the Río Tercero munitions factory in Argentina exploded, propelling explosive shells and shrapnel across a residential area built in troubling proximity to the dangerous facility. In what is a genuinely striking, shocking piece of footage, Garayalde captures a city in chaos as she films from the backseat of her father’s car as he drives through scenes of unfolding disaster. After this, the camera’s function is transformed. No longer a toy, it acts first as a technology of record ( the young Garayalde continues to depict the situation as it unfolds from the perspective of a family afflicted by it), then later, for recollection (when Garayalde, now an adult, returns to the footage two decades later, looking to assemble an investigation into what occurred). Her findings are significant, shown initially through small, in-the-moment observations (one scene shows how unexploded munitions that were left uncollected later exploded, another catalogues the damage done to their own home), then, ultimately, with a roundup of corruption—voiced via a closing statement that is as explosive as that material showing the impact of the detonation.
Somewhat comparable, if considerably less incisive, was Stephen Loye’s The Belly of the Mountain (Visions), which also investigates a national tragedy from a personal perspective. This film sees the French filmmaker essayistically examine an incident in which a commercial flight crash-landed not far from his home. Making this film in collaboration with a sound anthropologist, his approach is decidedly non-journalistic, instead focusing on supplementary, seemingly insignificant details that float around the specifics of the case, looking at how this disaster in which 149 passengers died after the flight’s pilot deliberately took the plane down has affected the people in the local French Alps region. A remote and isolated area until investigators, politicians, and journalists arrived en-masse, the region quickly became a site of international focus. The film’s essayistic line of inquiry can be rambling and imprecise, and is also suggestive of a sharper conclusion than the imprecise one it provides, but it interesting to see a subject in which the mode of approach seems preordained given an entirely unorthodox treatment. Instead of being clinical and analytical, the film is sensorial and subjective—committed to uncertainty. For a situation in which no satisfying universal explanation can be easily reached, it is refreshing to see a focus on the resonance of individual subjectivities.
Also a little unsatisfactory but nevertheless enticingly idiosyncratic, Nikita Yefimov’s Strict Regime (Visions) merges a diaristic mode with an investigative perspective in a different way entirely. Heading into a high-security penitentiary in Russia, Yefimov tries to make a portrait of the prison but finds his participants somewhat uncooperative. Seeing this as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, he collaborates with the head of the facility, an unexpectedly young and good-humored man, and together they make a semi-fictionalized account of life within the institution that works around the limitations of what can and cannot be filmed. Despite the severity of the situation, the result is oddly light and comic, made mostly of scenes in which the prison officer involves willing inmates in recreations of real-life situations they might face. One scene sees a prisoner barter for a parole hearing, whilst another has a different man rapping horrendously to camera. Many are revealing in a way that their orchestrators do not necessarily intend them to be, and in this dance between fabrication and documentation, something else is arrived at. Closer to documentary theatre than observational cinema, this is a portrait of an institution performing an idealized version of itself that only serves to show the full extent of its shortcomings.
Losers, Loners, Outsiders
Looking for Horses / The Soldier
An hour-long film about two layabouts in the Australian outback, Kyle Davis’s Dry Winter (Visions) is the sort of film that might often be skipped in favor of more urgent sounding proposals, but proved to be pleasingly watchable, if admittedly difficult to describe. Over the film’s course, aimless couple Jake and Kelly drink beers, spin donuts in their car, and kill time with their friends, working odd jobs in order to avoid addressing the dead-end nature of their overall situation. Making good use of a cast of non-actors, purposely rough sound, and a well-controlled, regularly mobile camera, this hybrid feature assumes a realist mode that gives the film a sense of authenticity that is matched by its commitment to establishing a clear sense of place, or rather, placelessness. In between scenes that progress the narrative action, the film drifts pleasantly into near-nothingness, lingering on the landscape in long, languid takes that feel additively ambient, pushing a film that seems somewhat derivative at first towards becoming something more authored and distinct.
In Nikolaj Møller’s The Soldier (CPH), Danish Afghanistan War veteran Henrik finds himself struck with severe post-traumatic stress that keeps him at a distance from the world he has returned to. Having found the suggested therapies of psychotherapy, psychiatry, and various pharmaceutical drugs inadequate, he applies his own treatment, living in isolation in the Amazon and self-medicating with regular Ayahuasca intake. Filmmaker Nikolaj Møller tracks his daily routines obsessively, probing him gently about his actions and motivations, and hearing about the demons he is not able to face. Unlike many hermits on film, Henrik seems perfectly happy to be observed, and yet, in what is quite a straightforward, sad portrait of a scarred figure, many questions remain compellingly unanswered. Whilst establishing clearly how and why he got where he is, Møller manufactures a clever ambiguity around whether or not it is good for Henrik to be there, or how reliable a narrator he might be. On the one hand, society does seem to have failed this man, and yet, total absconsion doesn’t really seem like the answer either. As a result, though stylistically a little flat and formally simple, Møller’s resulting portrait feels quite psychologically complex.
A similar relationship between subject and filmmaker unfolds in Looking for Horses (Visions), a more nuanced film in which a filmmaker also befriends an outsider. Filming listlessly in his parents homeland of Bosnia, filmmaker Stefan Pavlovic stumbles upon Zdravko, a fisherman who has been living alone on an island at the center of a lake for years, and in him identifies an unlikely prospect for a protagonist for a film. The conceit that is used to explain their connection feels somewhat contrived—Zdravko lost his hearing in the Bosnian war, Pavlovic has a stutter—but the dynamic that grows between them is charming, rich, and palpably real. Using a diaristic mode that sees Zdravko himself take hold of the camera at points, the film feels less like a standard portrait of a recluse than a record of a friendship between two men which seems to blossom in real time. Using his camera as much as a shield as a tool for connection, Pavlovic’s naïveté is disarming and sweet, and gradually, the world-weary Zdravko lowers his long-held guard, sharing wisdoms and swelling visibly with the pleasure of being listened to. The film is winningly simple, and though amateurish in some of the technical elements, it feels earnest and honest. Being proxy to the intimacies of this serendipitous intergenerational friendship feels like a real privilege.