The First Look Festival returns to the Museum of the Moving Image this month offering audiences opportunities to see exciting new films of all kinds from all over the world.
There are films just out of Sundance, like Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s Tendaberry, which weaves together Nelson Sullivan’s video diaries and archival footage of Coney Island with a narrative about a young woman making her way in today’s Brooklyn, and opening night film Sujo, from the team behind Identifying Features, that delves into the life and psychology of its titular character as he survives and attempts to thrive in the wake of cartel violence.
A trio of documentaries from the Caucasus, 1489, Magic Mountain, and Limitation, highlight the past and present horrors fostered by the Soviet legacy of imperialism and corruption. Other docs, such as The Echo, The Clinic, What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? and Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020, provide detailed and affecting portraits of people and places from around the globe. Narrative films like Samsara and An Evening Song (for three voices) invite audiences to revel in stunning images and give themselves over to almost mystical filmmaking. And that’s only a fraction of what the festival has to offer, a fraction of which I’ve reviewed in the gallery below.
The First Look Festival runs from Wednesday, March 13, through Sunday, March 17 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Check their website for tickets and more information.
While it’s tempting to say that Solaris Mon Amour draws some plot elements from the novel it takes part of its name from, given that we hear parts of early radio adaptations of Stanisław Lem’s book, the film offers no narrative. Made up entirely of pieces of films by the Educational Film Studio in Lodz from the 1960s and soundtracked with an original score and sound design by Marcin Lenarczyk along with the clips of the radio dramas, Solaris Mon Amour is a purely aesthetic experience.
Sure, viewers can intellectualize about the contrast of machine and organic imagery, or why director Kuba Mikurda selected these specific sections of the radio adaptations of Lem’s novel, but that would be to fight against the hypnotic power of the film.
At just 47 minutes, Solaris Mon Amour feels almost endless while watching. It pulls us into its often stunningly beautiful black and white world with significant snap, crackle, and pop from the old films, and elicits an instinctual emotional response beyond/past/beneath narrative and conceptual thinking.
Elene Asatiani and Soso Dumbadze’s Limitation is made up entirely of archival footage, offering only a small bit of text in the upper right hand corner of the screen that informs us of the source as commentary. The result is a documentary that plays like a narrative film. From the cold open, showing Georgia declaring independence from the Soviet Union and the democratic election of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Limitation grabs hold of its audience and does not let go.
Shortly after Gamsakhurdia’s election, protests begin branding him a dictator and calling for his resignation. Protests that Gamsakhurdia argues are stoked by Soviet misinformation seeking to destroy independent Georgia. It’s possible to question the truth of his claims until the protests evolve into an all out coup, with heavily armed combatants using Soviet-provided weapons.
Limitation then plays out like a war film, switching between pro-government and pro-opposition cameras, with some interviews with leaders from both sides given to international media sprinkled in. It’s gripping and horrifying. We see the streets of Tbilisi transformed into a warzone as some inhabitants still attempt to walk through their home city, waiting for gunfire to die down before crossing streets.
Beyond the viscerality of the film, Dumbadze and Asatiani’s commitment to refusing explication forces sometimes uncomfortable questions of alignment. The inclusion of a Gamsakhurdia speech where speaks passionately about fighting pagans and godlessness are sure to set off alarms for some viewers. The film doesn’t give “good guys” and “bad guys” for the audience to root for, opting instead for the much more real portrait of a flawed recently independent nation battling the misinformation and covert operations of an imperial power.
Tatiana Huezo’s The Echo is immediately striking. The scene of mother, daughter, and son saving a lamb from a pond in a torrential downpour looks shockingly crisp for a documentary, with a clarity of color that production designers and cinematographers dream about, and overwhelms viewers with the sounds of thunder and rain on leaves. The film never becomes less remarkable to look at and listen to, allowing the audience to bask in the beauty of still ponds reflecting children playing and later adding a string score to the many natural sounds to create an enveloping soundscape.
Huezo pulls us into the titular village of El Eco through these images and sounds, forcing us to feel the joys, frustrations, and sometimes conflicting desires of the girls at its center that much more. The Echo is essentially a coming-of-age documentary, following several girls who live in the town as they go about their lives for a little over a year. But Huezo doesn’t interview the girls or have them explain their routines. She simply films them, which makes The Echo, like Limitation, play out like a narrative film. So much so that viewers may need to remind themselves that despite the astonishing visual and aural experience, what they see is real.
Shoghakat Vardanyan’s debut, 1489 seems like a response to the oft-cited adage (originally attributed to Stalin) that the death of one is a tragedy, while the death of a million is a statistic. Vardanyan’s film begins and ends with on screen text informing the audience of the geopolitical conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia that has plagued the predominantly Armenian Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region. She includes a brief history of the conflict and an overview of the most recent Azerbaijani offensive in 2023 that forced more than 100,000 Armenians to flee their homes.
Between these images of white text on a black screen, she offers a glimpse into the lives of those affected by the conflict. Vardanyan’s younger brother Soghomon disappeared shortly after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War began, and days after his disappearance, she began to film herself and her parents.
She captures her family’s attempts to find or at least get answers about her brother. They visit the members of Soghomon’s unit in an attempt to get a clear understanding of the chaotic battle during which he may have disappeared. She calls officials and gets nothing but circular bureaucratic nightmares. Family friends join the quest and look at recently discovered corpses, but do not recognize him among them.
Yet it’s not the quest that makes 1489 so phenomenal, it’s the way that Vardanyan shows the horror of sitting in uncertainty. In long static shots, we see her father pace in and out of frame as he speaks of the pain of not knowing what has happened to his son and questions “what kind of life is this?” We see the family comfort one another in silence. These moments make the film unmissable, the moments that show the human beings behind all the numbers.
The first thing anyone will notice about An Evening Song (for three voices) is its unique hazy look. Created by combining a large format photography camera and a digital camera, writer/director Graham Swon and cinematographer Barton Cortright give the entire film a dreamlike quality in its visual presentation.
Even at their clearest, the images are grainy with edges in soft focus or complete black. Frequent double exposures add to the otherworldly feeling of the film, as something that’s not quite a fairy tale, not quite a dream, but certainly not the reality we inhabit.
The titular three voices, which flow into one another and sometimes overlap in voiceover, are married couple Barbara (Hannah Gross) and Richard (Peter Vack), and their recently hired maid Martha (Deragh Campbell). Barbara doesn’t write anymore but was very successful when she did, Richard writes horror stories and bemoans the lack of intellectual and emotional engagement people afford genre fiction, and Martha seems more than happy to become their new obsession, because she is also fascinated by them.
The film is full of conversations on grand topics like God and ecstasy, and the mysteries at its edges -- there’s talk of a hairy man, or a werewolf, or something killing animals in town -- are less threats and more suggestions of the boundlessness of this world. More than a drama about a beguiling outsider shaking up a marriage, An Evening Song (for three voices) is a film about stories, written, passed down, and dreamed, and their power to structure and change the ways people live their lives.