Festival Season Greens (WITH LINKS) (Patreon)

How would you know if there was a festival film lurking in your neighbo(u)rhood? Do you recognize the signs?

Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2023) [TIFF] 

It’s unfair to compare Four Daughters to Kiarostami or  Makhmalbaf, not because Ben Hania isn’t a director of their caliber—she  might be one day—but because it’s possible that films like theirs  couldn’t be made today. A lot of what we see in Four Daughters  sidesteps social or political matters in favour of personal therapy for  the participants. In one scene, Eya tries to reassure an actor that  their scene will not affect her: “I’ve done this exercise in the  hospital, with shrinks. I’m over it now.”

Hey, Viktor! (Cody Lightning, 2023) [TIFF / Tribeca] 

Pitched somewhere between American Movie (1999) and Pauly Shore Is Dead (2003), Hey, Viktor! has  a fairly predictable narrative arc. Cody promises a violent German  “producer” named Chomsky (Phil Burke) that he will get the old band back  together for a genuine sequel. We get cameos from Gary Farmer, Irene  Bedard, and—I think the secret is out—Adam Beach, all gamely pretending  that they want nothing to do with Cody. With few options left, he  hijacks a reality TV crew and turns his “documentary” into the film  itself, with the reluctant help of Smoke Signals costar Simon Baker and producer Cate (Hannah Cheesman), a “half-Cherokee” pretendian and Cody’s best friend.

Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing, 2023) [TIFF / NYFF] 

Since Wang moves from one workshop to the next, usually after 30 minutes of screen time, Youth is fairly modular in its construction. This can be a problem since,  theoretically, the film could be an hour shorter, or twice as long,  without really diminishing its achievement. And as the subtitle implies,  Wang may be planning three additional films, which means Youth would rival West of the Tracks in sheer expansiveness. But Wang’s wide view does allow the viewer to  make broad comparisons across the different shops. Sometimes the workers  band together to try to get higher prices per piece. (They are paid,  give or take, five yuan per garment, which is roughly $1 CAD.)

Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2023) [TIFF / NYFF]

One constant in Wavelengths’ programming is cinema as personal expression, and few films exemplify this as directly as Pictures of Ghosts, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s documentary essay about his hometown of Recife, Brazil. Mendonça first focuses on the apartment where he grew up, which became a key location in his films; then he turns to the cinemas of his youth, almost all of which have closed down, repurposed as office buildings, churches, or pharmacies. The work is discursive and retrospective, reminiscent of Terence Davies’ ode to Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008). However, Pictures of Ghosts is more explicitly autobiographical, detailing just how the transformation of Recife imprinted itself on Mendonça’s filmmaking. Virtually any cinephile of Mendonça’s generation will identify with his tour of defunct movie palaces and hole-in-the-wall arthouses, projectors scrapped, screens turned into cheap signage. We all have our own Recife, a cherished location looted by capital. (For the record, mine is Berkeley.)

The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023) [TIFF / NYFF]

Everything about The Delinquents is deliberate, from its languorous pacing, its binary organization (“motorcycle vs. horse” becomes significant), and especially its skillfully deployed score, in which the oboe signals trouble and the harp suggests the anxiety of possible freedom. While hiding the money, Román runs into three other people: filmmaker Ramón (Javier Zoro Sutton), and sisters Morna (Cecelia Rainero) and Norma (Margarita Molfino). But is this really a chance meeting, or part of a doublecross? As part of Moreno’s noir disassembly he positions Norma as a possible femme fatale, but that itself is the red herring.