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New Directors/New Films 2018

The festival is rich in contemplations of identity, tradition, and more that straddle the line between truth and fiction.

New Directors/New Films 2018
Photo: Cinereach

New Directors/New Films opens this year with a provocation about a provocateur: Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.. The documentary, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, is an all-encompassing yet scarcely conclusive portrait of singer-songwriter and activist M.I.A., and was stitched together by director Steve Loveridge from self-shot footage given to him by his musician friend. The film, already controversial because of M.I.A.’s relationship to it, is nothing short of a testament to the authority of perspective, which could be said to be the mission statement of New Directors/New Films.

Forty-seven years young, New Directors/New Films—programmed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art—is an eclectic, geographically far-flung survey of bourgeoning filmmaking talent, and more than ever, this year’s lineup suggests a willingness on the part of the programmers to celebrate works made under the most defiantly independent of conditions. The festival this year is chockablock with more mysterious contemplations of identity, tradition, technology, and more—and ones that more daringly straddle the line between truth and fiction.

Not a single one of the 25 features in this year’s program was purchased by a studio at another festival for countless millions, and don’t expect any of them to be thrust into the Oscar conversation. And to these eyes, that’s a badge of honor. Only a fraction of these films already have distribution, among them Gustav Möller crime thriller The Guilty and Valérie Massadian’s Milla, though one hopes that will change by the time the festival wraps on April 8 with RaMell Ross’s radical Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a documentary that’s as deep about race as it is about its own construction.

See below for selected coverage from this year’s New Directors/New Films, which runs from March 28—April 8. For tickets click here.

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New Directors/New Films 2018

Ava

As written across Ava, the eponymous role almost insists on a consistent level of intensity from an actor, and Mahour Jabbari more than rises to the task. She gives a performance of constantly simmering rage, filtering typical teenage angst through a steely tone that fills otherwise banal rejoinders with disdainful sangfroid. Ava’s hardened features offer a tacit warning to everyone who interacts with her, and she often meets her mother’s loud hectoring with cold indifference. As Bahar’s (Bahar Noohian) outbursts against teachers and parents gradually turn Ava’s friends against her, the girl finds a kind of release valve in taking out her frustrations on her peers. And Jabbari acutely depicts the self-annihilating fury that eats away at Ava, emphasizing the girl’s volatility even at her most vulnerable.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Black Mother

Khalik Allah’s Black Mother simultaneously elucidates and scrambles notions about class, gender, spirituality, and the history of a nation. The photographer turned director’s new documentary marks a striking advance from Field Niggas, which announced him as a sui generis talent. Filmed entirely at a single Harlem intersection, that 2015 film employed a radical formal gambit, melding photographs and videos of children, K2 addicts, police officers, and other community members with an asychronized soundtrack drawn from interviews Allah recorded with his subjects before or after shooting them. Though few people have seen Field Niggas, Allah’s distinctive close-ups and stream-of-conscience editing style will feel familiar to viewers of Beyoncé’s Lemonade film, on which Allah served as a director.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Cocote

It’s been said that a jazz musician is someone who never plays anything the same way twice. If that’s true, then Dominican director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias may qualify as the jazziest filmmaker of all time. His first fiction feature, Cocote, is a dazzling collage of styles and approaches in which every scene—practically every shot—feels different from the one that came before. Evoking the restless unpredictability of a late-period Jean-Luc Godard film, de Los Santos Arias’s images shift form almost constantly—from film to video, from black and white to color, from widescreen to full frame—as the writer-director experiments with a vast array of aesthetic stylings, everything from slow-cinema stillness to ethnographic vérité to lustrous film noir. The result is an invigorating, if slightly exhausting, parade of near-perpetual innovation, in which the only constant is the filmmaker’s stylistic dynamism.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Drift

The ocean has provided fertile territory for visual experimentation in recent years in a number of non-narrative art-house films, from Mauro Herce’s hallucinatory Dead Slow Ahead to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s frantic Leviathan. Helena Wittmann’s Drift can now be added to this micro-genre, which isn’t so much nascent as inextricably connected to an ancient tradition of storytelling based around the unknowable mystery of the sea. Two examples of this narrative legacy get cited early on in the film when its nameless female protagonists share thoughts at a beachfront café somewhere in wintry Germany prior to their parting from one another after a long weekend. One (Theresa George), who will soon embark on a solo expedition across the Atlantic, paraphrases a Papua New Guinea creation myth regarding a primeval crocodile and the warrior who slays it. The other (Josefina Gill), who plans to return to her native Argentina, responds by mentioning the legend of Nahuel Huapi, a Patagonian riff on the Loch Ness monster.

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New Directors/New Films 2018

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

The eschewal of narrative thrust has profound implications throughout Hale County this Morning, This Evening. The film’s subjects can’t help but recall those of Hoop Dreams, a documentary that threaded the everyday struggles of African-Americans in Chicago through an overarching drama about whether its teenage subjects would “make it”: land a college scholarship, play professional hoops, and more broadly “overcome” their upbringing. Hale County is much more impressionistic, and centered around a fundamentally tranquil relationship between its subjects and their surroundings. Much of the film transpires around social gatherings on public sites—parking lots, schools, churches, and front and backyards—and the interactions director RaMell Ross captures suggest lives so intertwined that the presence of a camera and a filmmaker couldn’t possibly alter or disrupt them.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Makala

Set in the harsh bushlands of the Congo, Emmanuel Gras’s documentary Makala opens with a young man, Kabwita, walking toward a massive, twisting tree. It appears to be the sole object of beauty in the surrounding area, yet as soon as the camera begins to lovingly trace its long, winding branches in a Malick-esque low-angle shot, the sounds of an axe rhythmically striking the tree’s trunk return us unceremoniously to the humdrum of Kabwita’s inescapably and invariably demanding existence. For the audience, the tree may stand out as the aesthetic pinnacle of this patch of land, but for Kabwita it represents the raw materials for his and his family’s very survival.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.

There’s quite a lot of M.I.A.’s music in Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., and her insistence otherwise gets at one reason why she’s been such a magnet for criticism over the years: M.I.A. is generally uncompromising, uniquely combining dogged political intentionality and an aesthetic informed by absorbing different cultures’ sensibilities and making a self-determination that art might as well be borderless. All that, along with a natural facility with pop music that very few iconoclasts can claim, and a certain form of techno-paranoia that turned out to be prescient, make M.I.A.’s body of work as enthralling and vital as that of any contemporary artist. That she’s struggled to explicate the various impulses that inform that work to those who’ve had difficulty wrapping their heads around her biography, and that she’s often defaulted to provocation as a coping mechanism, seem to be themes that Loveridge is grappling with as he works to narrativize and contextualize M.I.A.’s life and career.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Milla

The most obvious antecedents for Milla, Valérie Massadian’s thematically direct but artistically abstract rendition of desperate poverty, are the Fontainhas films of Pedro Costa. Massadian is less painterly than Costa, but she similarly finds ways to render her characters’ specific situations as artful illustrations of their social contexts. Living in the outskirts of a seaside town in northern France, the film’s two teen lovers, Milla (Severine Jonckeere) and Leo (Luc Chessel), are more often seen against expansive natural backgrounds than urban ones, a visual cue to remind us of their economic alienation. When the filmmaker does situate the pair within the confines of the city they call home, it’s in rundown areas of post-industrial decay, where abandoned buildings have succumbed to rust due to neglect and the salty coastal air. Transitions frequently elide over key plot details while leaving no confusion as to what transpired here, placing focus less on the concrete misery of the characters’ experiences than their increasingly drained responses to it.

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New Directors/New Films 2018

Notes on an Appearance

The Brooklyn of Notes on an Appearance is a tranquil place full of cafés and bookstores and where writers can make a sustainable living. As in Alex Ross Perry’s melancholic Golden Exits, D’Ambrose nearly utopian vision of the city suggests a daydream, with flaxen washes of light splashing all over everything. Perry’s truculent and loquacious characters think they’re self-aware because they speak volubly, whereas D’Ambrose’s are taciturn, often looking out windows whose curtains dance in the breeze. One film is concerned with listening, and not listening, the other with seeing and disappearing.


New Directors/New Films 2018

The Nothing Factory

Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory invites comparison to the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night, where factory workers choose individual bonuses over letting a coworker keep her job. It also echoes a little-known gem by Brazilian filmmaker Leon Hirszman, They Don’t Wear Black Tie, whose fundamental conflict also lies in the confrontation between personal greed, sometimes perceived as necessity, versus group solidarity: in short, the home versus the factory. While Pinho alternates sequences featuring workers’ everyday lives (drinking, playing soccer, having sex, and getting their nails done) with scenes at the factory (from workers barring higher-ups from entering the building to an unexpected break into singing and dancing around their machines), there’s no clear protagonist here. Unlike the Dardenne brothers and Hirszman, Pinho isn’t interested in the dramatic dynamics of individuals or particular families. This tale of worker dissatisfaction is built around the purposeful absence of heroes. Its main character is the factory, a site of nothingness in lieu of workers ceasing to act as a collective.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Scary Mother

Virginia Woolf’s iconic aphorism that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” comes to life in the most allegorical of ways in Scary Mother. Set in the country of Georgia, writer-director Ana Urushadze’s film follows the aftermath of a middle-class housewife’s literary emancipation. Manana (Nato Murvanidze) has been painstakingly, and furtively, writing an autobiographical novel that’s being hailed as a masterpiece—the birth of a new literature and a sexual revolution, no less—by an editor friend, Nukri (Ramaz Ioseliani), who owns a stationary shop. The problem is that she fears that, once her relatives get a hold of the book, she’s doomed to shatter the fantasy of familial bliss that she’s been groomed to accept as inevitable and might be kicked out of her own home. In the manuscript, Manana confesses to a miserable domestic life, likening her children to unbearable weeds and her husband to a poisonous slab of meat perennially lying on the couch, infecting her with its odor.


New Directors/New Films 2018

Winter Brothers

Shot on desaturated Super 16mm film in a Danish limestone quarry, Winter Brothers is one of the more aesthetically idiosyncratic directorial debuts in recent memory. Icelandic visual artist turned filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason, who decamped with his crew to the film’s inhospitable setting for the duration of the production, approaches his chosen location like Michelangelo Antonioni did with that of Red Desert, transforming a place of grim labor and scant sunshine into a punctiliously designed cinematic space. Where Antonioni painted trees and grass to achieve his pallid industrial dystopia, Pálmason creates his by coating the scenery in calcite, dressing his cast in filthy faded denim jumpers, and partitioning the world into a careful visual system, with each location treated to its own rigorous compositional scheme. If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship.

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