The Year of the Everlasting Storm (various filmmakers, 2021) (Patreon)

As has been widely reported, The Year of the Everlasting Storm is a bit better than the average multi-director omnibus. This is all the more surprising since it is a project occasioned by the Covid-19 outbreak. Thus far I tend to side with those who've argued that it is simply too soon for anyone to make meaningful art about the pandemic, largely because we are still in the midst of it (even if, optimistically, we may be in the final chapter). 

But most of the filmmakers here are wise enough to take a sidelong approach to the assignment. (And at least one seems to have ignored it altogether.) And although it may well have been serendipity, Everlasting Storm achieves a compositional coherence that omnibuses ("omnibi"?) almost never possess. The film begins and ends with reptiles, serving as proxies upon which we can focus our empathy.

Life (Jafar Panahi)

First of all, this short film has none of the clever dodges that Panahi has thus far employed to technically avoid violating his directing ban. He's not on camera as a featured performer for an objective camera, like Taxi, nor does it include a co-director credit like This is Not a Film. It's as though the threat of global extermination has divested Panahi of all the fucks he had left to give. Then again, in a lot of ways Life could be considered a home movie, since it appears only minimally staged and scripted. It's primarily about Panahi's family during lockdown, paying special attention to his exceedingly cautious mother and, of course, Iggy, the family's strangely charismatic pet iguana. The film is a trifle, but is certainly a reasonable choice for a curtain-raiser.

The Break Away (Anthony Chen)

I'll be frank. I'm not much of a fan of narrative shorts. They almost always suggest relationships that ought to be explored at feature length. And The Break Away is a perfect example of this. Chen clearly means to provide highly suggestive glimpses of family life, ones pregnant enough with meaning to radiate outward and illuminate the subtleties we don't have time to see. But in fact this accomplishes the exact opposite. During the first few months of quarantine in Wuhan, a married couple (Zhou Dongyu and Zhang Yu) struggle to take care of their young son (Zhang Yanbo) and not kill each other. If Chen wants to show the way Covid has taken a toll on domestic life, The Break Away can only do so much, because what it shows is a blithely sexist husband who wants to just stare into the middle distance while his wife does telemarketing in the next room. He is a dud, and while Covid may have made it worse, we are clearly lacking enough context to really care about these characters. (Nice use of Ylvis, though.)

Little Measures (Malik Vitthal)

This film suggests that for some people, the distance imposed by the pandemic only exacerbates divisions that were already in place. The main subject of Little Measures is Bobby Yay Yay Jones, a father of three who is working to regain custody of his children after having them taken by Child Protective Services. (Jones alludes to a rancorous break-up with the kids' mother, but provides no information beyond that.) We see him having to conduct his court-permitted visits with his kids over Facetime, the pandemic adding a layer of uncertainty to when the family might reunite. I must say though, not having seen anything by Vitthal before now, his directorial touches (mostly blobby yellow animations) only detract from the film's watchability.

Terror Contagion (Laura Poitras and Forensic Architecture)

I have mixed feelings about Poitras as a filmmaker. She has produced some bracing, highly cinematic reportage (especially The Oath), but at this point she seems intent on dining out forever on her connection to Edward Snowden. In this case, she was brought into an ongoing investigation by the journalistic art collective Forensic Architecture, into the Israeli cyber-warfare company NSO Group. The company sells comprehensive spyware and malware to governments, who then use it to target dissidents, journalists, and activists, including some members of F.Arch. Terror Contagion has only a tangential connection to the pandemic, since NSO repackaged some of its software and sold it to national health services for contact tracing. And while the broader issue is compelling -- what should be done about a private company selling cyber-weapons to state actors for offensive use against private citizens? -- I wasn't sure why I was watching the film, since I'm in no position to stop these heinous global crimes. On the other hand, someone should sit Joe Biden down and have him take a look.

Sin Título, 2020 (Dominga Sotomayor)

While Sotomayor's mini-narrative is far more self-contained than Chen's, there's still a sense that she is using Covid-19 as a way to consider strife between mothers and daughters, the distance between us all, etc. This is precisely the mobilization of the virus as a metaphor that truly seems aesthetically ill-advised. A mom is working on her part in a choral number that, of course, is now happening over Zoom. She has one daughter with her in quarantine, but she's intent on breaking Chile's strict lockdown rules. The other daughter is in an apartment in central Santiago and has just given birth. There's nothing particularly wrong with Sin Título, but especially in the context of some other contributions here, it does feel a little precious.

Dig Up My Darling (David Lowery)

This may be the first effort by Lowery that I've actually liked, apart from his work in Camper. (Kidding.) Where Sotomayor kind of covers her usual filmmaking in Covid-colored tinsel, Lowery goes almost entirely abstract, to genuinely disturbing effect. Claude (Catherine Machovsky) is an older woman driving alone to a desolate location outside of Dallas. As the film opens, she retrieves a basket of old letters from her father (voice of Bill Callahan) from a storage unit. We don't know when they were written, nor do we know exactly when Lowery's film takes place. But we do know that Claude had a brother who died, and was buried by necessity in an isolated spot and must be retrieved by Claude now. There are so many hovering signifiers of tragedy in this film that, if Covid-19 is in fact a part of this universe, it is only one disaster among many. The letters' New Orleans postmark suggests Hurricane Katrina. There are vague allusions in the letters to some untoward actions by the father, acts that effectively destroyed his family. And the circumstances of the young brothers' death are equally vague. Terminal illness? Results of child abuse? In the end, Dig Up My Darling refuses to consider Covid-19 in isolation, instead binding it to a never-ending web of human trauma.

Night Colonies (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

The final film by Apichatpong is the most abstract of all, and certainly the most accomplished. (It has already been "detached" from the omnibus, screening on its own in this year's NYFF Currents selection.) Night Colonies suggests one possible outcome of the pandemic, the complete eradication of human existence. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be catastrophic or simply a logical progression of our self-propelled race to extinction. Apichatpong, for his part, suggests that this is only a trial run, or a kind of artistic experiment, since the bed that is central to Night Colonies is flanked by artificial lighting. And in the end, we do see the artist's hand, showing that the depicted reclamation of the world by insects, invulnerable to the virus though they may be, is merely a simulation. But Night Colonies succeeds in showing us a new order in which we have been made irrelevant, achieving this above all with a jarring sound design that amplifies the buzzing of this literal swarm of diversity. It made me itch just hearing it on my home speakers; if I'd seen it in a theater, I might have clawed my face off.