Human MOOP: Matter Out of Place

Nikolaus Geyrhalter has described his static-camera, nearly architecturally-composed, observational docs as “archival material, which people will dig out in 50 or 100 years.” Which makes perfect sense since the Austrian auteur is not really a creator of “slow” cinema – an abundance of movement forever present within his frame – so much as works not bound by the manmade concept of time. And similar to many of our (last century’s) modern artists he prefers to let inanimate objects – which in turn become curious characters our eye is drawn to follow – take the narrative lead. Now with his latest Matter Out of Place, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival (and took the “green leopard” environmental prize), Geyrhalter has made what I’m guessing will be this year’s most riveting film about garbage. Though the title could just as easily apply to humankind as well.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

“Without the Consent of our Child Protagonists We Would Not Have Made the Film”: Lidia Duda on her Locarno-Premiering Doc Fledglings

Premiering at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Lidia Duda’s Fledglings is an entrancing look at a trio of seven year olds who bravely travel far from home to board at a school for the visually impaired. Forced to rely only on themselves, their teachers — and most importantly one another — Zosia, Oskar and Kinga spend their days mastering everything from handrails to utensils, to spelling words and playing the piano. Not to mention navigating often overwhelming emotions. (At least for the creative Zosia and sensitive Oskar, whose developmental disabilities can sometimes stress the besties out. Kinga, on the other hand, is one stoic little chick.) And equally remarkable is the unseen force behind the lens who, through respectful closeups and evocative black and white imagery, attempts to meet her young protagonists on their own terms, and, in the process, allow us all to experience a new way of seeing. Filmmaker reached out to the multi-award-winning Polish director the day before her film’s international debut in the Semaine De La Critique section of the fest.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The Very First Cut Lasted About 25 Hours”: María Álvarez on Her Proust Documentary, Le temps perdu

María Álvarez’s 2020 doc Le temps perdu (premiering theatrically on these shores at NYC’s Film Forum August 12th) is the second film in an exquisite trilogy, beginning with 2017’s Las cinéphilas and ending just last year with the IDFA debut of Las cercanas. All three docs are poetic meditations on the intersection of art, aging and memory, similarly focused on vibrant geriatric characters whose connections to cinema, literature and music (in ascending part order) are as profound as life itself. In the case of Le temps perdu reading becomes, in the apt description of one enthusiastic gent, “a creative act” — and an epic one at that. For two decades a band of book-loving — specifically one book, In Search of Lost Time — retirees have met up in a Buenos Aires bistro to read aloud from Marcel Proust’s 3,000-page, seven-volume masterwork. In their meetings they dissect, decipher (Is art an “extension” of life, dependent on it, or can it transcend it?) and find meaning within evocative similes, such as to control the body is like “trying to talk to an octopus.” The latter is a sentiment understood every bit as viscerally by a 21st-century elderly lady recovering from a hip replacement as it did for its turn-of-the-20th-century gay male author. A devoted member of the greying literati describes the sudden sensation of being in Paris while simply waiting to cross the street, noting how wonderful it is to “travel for free.” A man ponders Proust’s scrapping of satisfaction in favor of the “extinction of desire”; while a female reader embraces the author’s “self substitution” as her own experience of changing over the years. And throughout decades of effusive discussion and respectful quarreling at least one consensus comes to the fore: Memories multiply a person after they’re long gone. Which could perhaps explain our own modern entrancement with the moving image as well. So to learn all about the multi-year journey from long book to big screen Filmmaker reached out to the acclaimed Argentinean director the week prior to her doc’s US debut tomorrow at New York’s Film Forum.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

No fail-safe: Hogir Hirori’s “Sabaya”

Like many film journalists, not to mention jury members, who caught Hogir Hirori’s now discredited Sabaya at this year’s Sundance I was riveted, calling it (in the intro to my interview with Hirori) a “harrowing tale of heroism from a filmmaker all too familiar with the wartime struggles of those he documents.” Of course, thanks to the New York Times – and even more so to the dogged reporters at Sweden’s Kvartal – we now know that many of the key scenes in the Swedish-Kurdish director’s doc, which focuses on the ISIS sex slave-saving men and (anonymous) women of the Yazidi Home Center, were staged. Which as a non doc purist honestly bothers me less than the fact that Hirori, when confronted by an inquiring press, fictionalized his own account of obtaining said footage. And even more troubling, seems not to have obtained true consent from all his characters – and likewise not come clean about that terrible breach of trust either. Yet as a film critic with zero background in investigative journalism, I also personally don’t feel I “should have known better.”

To read the rest of my non mea culpa visit Global Comment.