45th Parallel (Lawrence Abu Hamran, 2022) (Patreon)

It hasn't gone unnoticed that a large number of short films included in this year's NYFF Currents selection came from the museum / gallery world, rather than the more traditional co-op filmmaking circles. This has a lot to do with funding, of course, since major art institutions are able to sustain a relatively thriving economy, while distributors of artists' films have fallen on hard times. Lawrence Abu Hamran has made provocative films in the past, notably Walled Unwalled from 2018, an inquiry into the use of audio recordings and thermal photography to "penetrate" private spaces without need of a warrant.

In some ways, 45th Parallel is like Walled Unwalled in that it too is a theoretical consideration of the liminal spaces of individual freedom and legal jurisdiction. However, the new work is anecdotal and disorganized, a kind of open-mic riff on contemporary political matters that is designed, although probably not on purpose, to flatter the well-heeled liberal donors and collectors who form the cash nexus of the art world. An "essay film" in the sense that, technically speaking, articles in Harpers or Mother Jones are "essays," 45th Parallel revels in deadly ironies, asking little of its viewer except a pitying head shake: "what a shame."

Hamran uses the unique space of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, an art institution deliberately bisected by the U.S. / Canada border, as a physical metaphor for, well, borders. The narrator (Mahdi Fleifel) tells a story about a crime boss who used the library's mens room to smuggle guns into Canada, and then pivots to a discussion of a U.S. Supreme Court case involving a Border Patrol agent who fired his gun over the border at a Mexican teenager, killing him (in Mexico) while the agent's feet were planted on American soil. Unsurprisingly, SCOTUS found that the government of Mexico could not prosecute, because that would set a precedent for countries like Yemen and Pakistan to demand justice for civilians killed by U.S. drones.

"In a parallel world, where Donald Trump was never elected," the narrator muses, the case could have been decided differently. Sure, that and about a thousand other cases. 45th Parallel is so pleased with its controlling metaphors that it never manages to propose any reaction other than the shoulder-shrug of a defeated politics. (This smugness is all the more pronounced to me after seeing Amber Benak's documentary on radical border artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña.) I've often remarked that problems like the immigration crisis are never really solved by politicians, because solving them would eliminate an "issue," something politicians need for their endless electioneering, all to burnish their brand. 45th Parallel strongly suggests that "political art," in its institutional form, may be similarly ambivalent regarding radical change, for many of the same reasons.