Landfall is a political film imbued with anger at the current state of Puerto Rico. It captures life in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, choosing to depict the current post-Hurricane tragedies instead of the actual Hurricane, and setting them within the history of U.S. imperialism. In doing so, Landfall presents a critique of disaster capitalism (see Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine) and the U.S. stranglehold on Puerto Rico and it’s ineffectual politicians.
That being said, the actual footage isn’t inherently political. Each scene from each part of the island is shot observationally without any directorial input or opinion. For example, the profile on the wealthy real estate family by itself doesn’t include any tough questions for the family or a political lens. However, by moving between these profiles of wealthy families and crypto-billionaires and profiles of rural farmers struggling to make a living and activists protesting the governor, the film becomes political. It juxtaposes the increasingly wealthy with the increasingly poor to highlight the growing inequality on the island. And by jumping around the country to visit a range of communities, Aldarondo shows that this inequality is endemic to all parts of the country.
One of the most memorable snapshots captures the arrival of U.S. crypto billionaires. They’ve arrived on the island cloaked in good intentions with promises for employment and wealth via the blockchain. However, when confronted by locals on their similarities with the white American imperialists that preceded them their benevolent facade crumbles. One represents the danger of a white savior – talking down on the locals as if he’s the only one that can solve their issues – whilst another represents the cultural eradication of cultural appropriation in her dreaded hair. Cut with scenes documenting the history of U.S. imperialism and speakers pressing Puerto Rico to privatize the country to encourage foreign investment and the warning signs are clear. Puerto Rico is on the brink of being re-colonized by wealthy Americans looking for a clean tax-haven for their millions. Their arrival is a threat to indigenous Puerto Rican life.
Landfall is made as an urgent warning to the precarious situation on the island. Just like Zuckerberg’s land grabs in Hawaii, and the privatization of post-Katrina New Orleans, post-Maria Puerto Rico is arriving at its own tipping point. Fortunately there is some hope that indigenous way of life prevails, represented in the people protesting the Governor, the community schools, and the family standing up to real estate in Vieques. The fight for Puerto Rico isn’t quite over.
Head to our LALIFF 2021 Hub for more reviews from the 20th edition of LALIFF.
COVID-19 hasn’t been great for film festivals. It’s been a year and a half since the pandemic started and many film festivals are still screening films mostly virtually. Only a few are hosting a few in-person screenings here in the U.S. as cases start to decline.
Unlike most film festivals that were either cancelled, delayed, or hosted virtually last year for the first time, the Long Distance Film Festival started as a virtual festival to highlight indie short films affected by the lack of distribution or streaming options during the pandemic. This year, for it’s second edition, it continued to highlight a mix of low budget and experimental short films that might have otherwise struggled to find distribution. Read on to find out more about the format and the films.
The Experience
Like other virtual film festivals, the Long Distance Film Festival 2021 was pretty easy to watch. There were no hitches with streaming any of the films – the quality always looked good and there were no buffering issues. The only slight drawback was that you had to watch them through an internet browser on your computer or phone. Unlike other film festivals which screened films through apps that you could connect to your TV or Smart TV, you had to manually connect your computer to the TV if you wanted to have the ‘bigger’ screen experience.
It was also interesting to watch a virtual film festival that had a strict schedule like traditional in-person film festivals. Each short film segment streamed at 3 specific times during the day, so if you couldn’t make the times, you’d have to wait until the next segment or next year’s edition. The three different times helped a little bit, but as they were spaced out deliberately to help viewers in all different time zones, there might have just been one or two times that worked well for you. For those on the West Coast of the U.S. the viewing times were 1:00am, 9:00am, and 5:00pm, making the 5:00pm session the most ideal time slot for those wanting to sleep in on the weekend.
You also couldn’t pause the film like other virtual festivals have allowed. This meant you had to pay a bit more attention to the films as they all ran back to back and were all pretty short. Because a few of them aired without credits, if you tried to step away quickly, you risked missing a chunk of the end of one short and the start of the other.
It would have been nicer to have been able to watch the films on demand, however as these films were streaming for free, we can’t complain. Long Distance Film Festival keep doing your thing.
The Films
In 2021, the Long Distance Film Festival continued to support personal films made with smaller budgets and crews. This was definitely evident in the programming. It was nice to see a wide range of formats which included documentary, drama, diary, experimental, animated, and more. However, it would have been nice to see a bit more diversity in the filmmaker line up as the festival schedule, which emphasizes viewers being able to watch from wherever in the world they are, implies that the programming slate will be geographically diverse too. Just 6 of the 42 films came from outside the western world (2 from Latin America, 3 from the Middle East/North Africa, and 1 from East Asia). Unfortunately there was no representation from Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, South Asia, or most of Latin America. Obviously it’s hard to cover every region, but would be good to see a bit more diversity next year if possible.
One area which some festivals have actively sought to change was the proportion of films directed by women at their festivals. AFI Fest 2020 did this well, with 53% of their films directed by women. The 2021 edition of the Long Distance Film Festival performed pretty well too. Whilst it wasn’t quite 50%, the festival did hit 45% for films directed by women.
Top 10 Shorts of the Long Distance Film Festival 2021
Bambirak (Germany) – a daughter helps her immigrant dad with his daily deliveries for a bit of bonding time. Through their journey, this drama highlights how white privilege and prejudice is maintained by the status quo.
Trammel (U.S.) – watch the camera shots as they get slowly closer and closer to Dale and the shop clerk he’s chatting too. It turns Dale’s one-way conversation from a luxury into something he needs for his mental health.
Intimate Views (U.S.) – this short hypnotizes you into a long weekend away at a secluded holiday home in the woods. It’s a setting which never feels far from a horror twist, especially with the AI and ASMR voiced narration which gives plenty of dystopian vibes.
Recreation (U.S.) – with the screen split into twelve showing different tourist shot footage of the same iconic American landscapes, Recreation transforms sacred natural sites into meaningless footage representative of American imperialism’s continued consumerization and eradication of indigenous culture.
Shadows in a Landscape (U.K.) – can’t beat a storytelling short that slowly builds with the help of music and ghostly black and white footage of misty hills. It’s hauntingly engrossing.
The Other (Iran) – the rural environment and sparse interiors of The Other make it stand out. They and the actors expressions speak the story in a film without dialogue.
To the Girls that Looks Like Me (U.S.) – using many extras and a poetic narrated voice-over, this short celebrates black women living in a society that appropriates rather than respects them.
Peeps (Australia) – as most filmmakers are adults, it’s rare to find films that accurately capture the awkwardness of life as an early teenager. Peeps, like Eighth Grade, is one of them.
Raspberry (U.S.) – who would have thought that you could make a slapstick comedy out of a family grieving over their dead dad’s body. Raspberry is evidence that it’s possible.
Forever (U.S.) – Whether this would be classified as an animation or a drama isn’t clear. However, what is clear, is that the experimental use of LiDAR imaging makes this film examining mortality memorably unique.
Jimena lives day to day in Buenos Aires, scavenging whatever and sleeping wherever she can find. In search of a better life, she smuggles herself on a bus bound for Rio Grande, a small town on the island of Tierra del Fuego in southernmost Argentina. It’s an area known for its manufacturing jobs and it’s also where her estranged half brother, Mariano, lives.
Jimena gives off a quiet meekness. She doesn’t share much with her brother or the locals – least of all her life as a transient in the city. Despite this, she’s welcomed warmly by both her brother, who sets her up with a job at the manufacturing plant he works at, and by her new colleagues, that invite her to work socials. She’s given space to settle in and adapt to her new life.
As the movie flashes through brief moments in Jimena’s first few months in Rio Grande, it’s apparent she’s becoming part of her new community. She connects with her brother’s love interest, bonds with the workers at the union meetings, and starts to help her brother out too. However, her brother, guessing the nature of her previous life starts to implicate her in his own illicit trading business. He knows he holds some power over her whilst she’s living in his apartment and not quite settled in the region. He also knows she relies on him as her only relation. As the economic backdrop kicks in, Jimena has to choose between helping her brother or supporting the union strikes – family or the community.
The New Girl packs a lot into it’s relatively short run time. It quickly provides context for Jimena’s arrival in the remote South of Argentina and her growth and coming of age in Rio Grande, to set up the climax. It highlights the privilege of crime – contrasting her experience stealing out of need vs. her brother’s smuggling to get rich. This, plus the arrival of the union mark the anti-capitalist thread of the movie. The union symbolizes the community and its strength in organization, whereas Mariano’s one-man illegal business represents the flaws and selfishness of unrestricted capitalism.
The New Girl is an engaging coming of age story as well as a protest movie, along the lines of Made in Bangladesh and Salt of the Earth. Not bad for a 79 minute movie.
If you’re looking to binge on a curated selection of new short films from around the world, look out for the 2nd edition of the Long Distance Film Festival next week. It will be streaming a diverse mix of shorts from May 28th to May 31st ranging from Sundance-award wingers such as Bambirak and The Touch of The Master’s Hand to a one minute long iPhone film of a seagull eating a chicken wing. From the early peek we got of the festival’s ‘Future’ segment (streaming May 31st) we can definitely confirm that you’ll get an eclectic mix of shorts. It’s like a film fan’s lucky dip. Plus, the best part of the festival is that it’s all free to watch from wherever you are in the world. All you have to do is tune in to the stream at the right time.
We’ll be watching and reporting on the event. From the early previews we saw, we recommend looking out for Raspberry and Shadows in a Landscape from the Future segment and the Intimate Views special presentation. Raspberry has one of the most memorably comedic undertaker scenes in cinema, Shadows in a Landscape’s storytelling in the British midlands feels incredibly ghostly, whilst Intimate Views captures what feels like a dystopian vacation service. Just go into the screenings with an open mind as, sticking to it’s roots in supporting art and media made under quarantine’s limitations, the Long Distance Film Festival’s 2nd edition continues to support personal films made with smaller budgets and crews.
Ahead of the launch, please find more information on the films and when to watch them on the Long Distance Film Festival’s website linked above. We’ll check back in after the festival with an overview of what we saw.
In the city of Zinder, Niger, in the heart of the Sahel, young people form gangs to deal with the lack of work and prospects. These groups called “Palais” come from the Kara Kara district, historically home to lepers and outcasts. Zinder-born director and activist Aicha Macky returns to her hometown to tell the story of this disenfranchised youth. She talks with these men, whose bodies and the territory in which they live are scarred by the violence that has passed through them – a pervasive violence – the roots of which go back to the time of colonisation.
Zinder focuses on Siniya Boy, a member of the “Palais Hitler”, who wants to set up a security company with his fellow bodybuilders; and Bawa, a former Palais leader who turned taxi driver, haunted by memories of the atrocities committed. They live off black market petrol, smuggled from the Nigerian border.
The first scene is intended to shock the western viewer. It’s not everyday you see black men flying Hitler’s name surrounded by swastikas. That’s exactly what the “Palais Hitler” gang does, however not for the reasons we’d expect. They ‘heard he was an invincible warrior from America,’ which if it were true would make him a pretty good choice for weightlifting gang’s mascot. The director doesn’t correct them on their oversight. Just as viewers from outside of Africa probably don’t know much about Niger, it’s weirdly refreshing to find out that these Nigeriens don’t know much about U.S/European history and aren’t stuck on the U.S./European news cycle.
They’re definitely not perfect people. The taxi driver recounts his memories along the lines of the Indonesian genocide perpetrators in The Look of Silence. He speaks of the terrible crimes he committed and the young girls he and his gang raped. However, they’re also portrayed reformatively in the present. In this sense, the characters are a bit more like the life imprisoned inmates in The Prison Within. We see them for the crimes they committed as well as the reformed person they are now. By entering their feared neighborhood and giving them space to talk, Aicha Macky humanizes them.
In the present, they’re still being imprisoned, but imprisoned for their identity: both their past life and where they come from. They’re labeled as criminals because they’re from the Kara Kara neighborhood. The scars they carry from their previous lives only help the police and others to mark them. They inhibit their ability to get medical treatment, move across the city in taxis, and find work. Just because they were born in a rough neighborhood.
The personal tone of the documentary shows the failure of society to recognize them as anything but criminals. Their fierce reputation conflicts with how the director portrays them. Through the unrestricted access to their stories, we see that they’re just regular people forming ‘gangs’ for community and friendship. They seem warm and eager to talk and tell their story. We don’t see any fights or violence on screen, just many close up scars from the past. The only current proof of crime are the palais members currently in jail, but even this is up for debate as they argue they’ve been rounded up for past crimes.
Aicha Macky’s Zinder is an intimate tribute to the youth of her country. It offers a hopeful portrayal of those marked by the neighborhood they were born into.
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