Murina - Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic *Opening Night Film
Julija is a teenage girl living in the small fishing island off the rugged, picturesque coast of Croatia with her overbearing father, Ante, and a former beauty queen mother, Nela.
Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic's debut film strongly develops into a fraught father-daughter relationship out in the open, or under the surface in this case with the striking opening sequence, which they are spearfishing for an elusive sea eel together. As they come out of the water, you can see there is a cut in Julija's upper thigh near her groin. She was manhandled in the water for something she shouldn't have done.
The tension rises when Ante's old friend, millionaire developer Javier (suave Cliff Curtis) visits the island for a land development deal that Ante is cooking up. They are hoping to move to Zagreb and get an apartment if the deal goes through, possibly leaving behind the fisherman existence.
Sexual tensions and jealousy clash with the controlling nature of a patriarchal society. With lush cinematography and great feature acting debut by Gracija Filipovic, Murina stands above the usual coming of age film.
The Night - Tsai Ming-liang *screens with Murina as Opening Night Film
Shot in November of 2019 while making Days in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, this 20-minute short, The Night, is an amalgam of all Tsai's films in a small package: urban loneliness.
Long static shots of nighttime exteriors, lit by cold fluorescents with ordinary people walking, waiting at the bus stops, and eating in tiny stalls, with occasional cars passing by, play out like a Hong Kong version of an Edward Hopper painting in motion in a concrete jungle, where human beings seem tiny and insignificant. A melancholic old song, "The Night is Too Beautiful to Last" by Pei Ni kicks in around the 15-minute mark.
The film is Tsai's love letter to the night and the melancholy it brings.
Babi Yar. Context - Sergei Loznitsa
Babi Yar is a ravine near Kiev where the execution of 33,771 Ukrainian Jews took place when the city fell to invading German troops in 1941. They were rounded up by German SS soldiers and the Ukrainian Police Force.
In this all-archival footage documentary, Ukrainian filmmaker, Sergei Loznitsa approaches the subject in his typical, non-authorial way, without any narration, and spares no one in the process. The holocaust memorial wasn't built until 2016. Now with the Russian invasion and Putin's shrewd campaign to 'denazify Ukraine' and Svoboda -- the ultra-nationalist/neo-nazi element in Ukraine -- and also having a Jewish head of state, Zelenskyy, emerging as a national hero during war time, Babi Yar. Context provides Ukraine's complex history and counters what is termed as chronocide, or erasing history, in our modern society full of misinformation and propaganda.
Feathers - Omar El Zohairy
When her husband turns into a chicken during a magic trick at their son's birthday party, our unnamed female protagonist has to deal with three young children, crippling poverty, and an absurd amount of bureaucracy.
Feathers is an Kafka-esque absurdist social satire of the patriarchal, sexist Egyptian society. Director Omar El Zohairy, assistant director for fantastic 2016 film Last Day of the City, making his feature film debut, prefers tight, off-centered framing to accentuate the cramped interiors and emphasize the physical dominance over the female heroine. Part surrealist comedy and part neo-realist drama, Feathers illustrates that there are very limited options for women living in a man's world.
A New Old Play - Qiu Jiongjiong
Impeccably crafted, Chinese artist Qiu Jiongjiong's epic A New Old Play is seen through the eyes of gifted Chinese opera singer Qiu Fu (Yi Shicheng), living through the tumultuous modern history of China, from the 1920s to Mao's Cultural Revolution and beyond.
Qiu, with a permanent white patch around his nose due to wearing his clown makeup all his life, is summoned by two demons (Bullhead and Horsehead) to report to hell, because he is dead. We are then taken back to Qiu's early years as a street urchin being picked up by the Sichuan theater troupe, headed by Chinese opera enthusiast and army commander Pocky.
Spectacular handpainted sets and backdrops (production design done also by Qiu) and with simple but clever camera staging -- slow dolly tracking and playing with deep focus -- A New Old Play has some things in common with the cinema of Roy Andersson and Wes Anderson, if only aesthetically. Throughout its three-hour runtime, the carefully orchestrated sets and movements settle you in to lived-in, comfortable feeling.
And its Qiu's unbiased approach to Chinese history that gives melancholic resonance and wisdom to the character being a witness to history on a personal level. Qiu hits home the idea of life as a stage, where we live and die on it.
Reflection - Valentyn Vasyanovych
If Valentyn Vasyanovych's previous film, Atlantis, was dealing with a fictional scenario of the future ecological devastation and human toll from a prolonged war, Reflection, using gray landscapes and claustrophobic interiors, delves into the psychological damage of ongoing conflicts and threats from the neighboring, ominous superpower.
Sly metaphors, like dead pigeons, makeshift pyres, and ravenous stray dogs are all present. But as with Atlantis, there is a glimmer of hope in Reflection. This time, it's not the love between a man and a woman, but that of father and daughter.
Known to use non-actors in his films, Vasyanovych uses his own daughter to play Polina. She in turn, gives a great performance in long takes, engaging in religious and spiritual discussions with Lutskyi, who plays her father. Her innocence shines through in a dreadful industrial, monochrome winter Ukraine landscape. Daring in its cinematic language, and unflinching in its presentation of the present, the film makes it impossible to ignore the state of the ongoing conflict in that part of the world.
Read my full review from Venice 2021:
Reflection: Resonant, Formalist Look at Russo-Ukrainian War
Zero Fucks Given - Emmanuel Marre, Julie Lecoustre
Sharp observations on the service industry in 21st century capitalism is at the center of Zero Fucks Given. Adèle Exarchopoulos is Cassandra, a flight attendant at a small European airline company, Wing.
The film devotes most of its running time to the banal day-to-day life of young flight attendants who dream of one day working for Emirates Air, the creme de la creme of the industry and hard to get into. But Cassandra seems to have no directions or ambitions, other than repeating her daily routines of work, dealing with constant micro-management, partying off-hours, being lazy by the poolside in sunny Lanzarote where the company hub is located, and countless one-night stands arranged through online apps.
Things take a drastic turn when she is reprimanded for buying a distraught customer a wine out of compassion and sent home to Brussels. Staying with her younger sister and her sad widowed father, it is revealed she was running away from her mother's sudden death.
With verité style candid cinematography by Olivier Boonjing and Exarchopoulos's committed performance, Zero Fucks Given comments on hyper capitalist society, where work and personal life exist like oil and vinegar, yet one dictates another, whether we like it or not.
