AFI Fest Best Films- Page 3 of 7

Should the Wind Drop – AFI Fest 2020

Should the Wind Drop is a timely cinematic introduction to the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. It’s a country that has suffered genocide and unending land disputes, which recently flared up with neighboring Azerbaijan (the country most of the international community places it within).

We enter the country with Alain, an airport inspector traveling from France. He, like most of us, arrives without much knowledge of the country’s history. He’s here to inspect the regional airport which has been shut down since the outbreak of war in the 1990’s. If it passes all his tests, it can be officially opened and both establish the country’s existence globally, and open it up for it’s residents.

We follow Alain’s transformation from an auditor “just doing his job” to a sympathizer of the independence cause. During his time there he meets a good portion of the population and slowly opens up to their way of life. He grows to sympathize with the optimistic airport operator, the TV host, and his taxi driver shown in his more open conversation with them. His connection to Nagorno-Karabakh peaks with a jovial drinking session with the local soldiers. It’s the one time he seems to stray from the commitment to his job and truly mix with the locals. His transformation serves us (the audience), as like him, we have probably come to this movie with little prior knowledge of the country and people. Whilst it seems foreign at first, we, like him, end the film with a connection to the place and it’s characters through his experiences.

As a result of it’s significance to the locals, the airport has become a symbol of pride and hope. It has the potential to free them from their landlocked prison and regional disputes and become recognized internationally. It also literally fuels the village as one little boy walks by the airport every day to fill up his water bottles to sell in the village. Everyone in the town is seen drinking his ‘magic water’. It symbolizes their faith in the airport and the modern world it will bring.

As a symbol of recognition, the movie itself is just like the airport. In being made and celebrated at international film festivals, it puts Nagorno-Karabakh on the map, finishing what the airport started.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.

Luxor – AFI Fest 2020

Hanna starts Luxor looking like the typical ‘gone abroad to find yourself’ young white adult. She’s dressed in loose clothing, feels an other worldly connection to the foreign place, and sleeps around. However, whilst her character never completely loses this image in the film, our interpretation of her changes.

Instead of opening up, she becomes more closed emotionally as the film progresses. It doesn’t feel like we learn more about her. Scene by scene, her face becomes a canvas of lonely stoicism, even after she meets her former lover, Sultan. The only moment she breaks this facade in the first part of the film is when she automatically switches into ‘work-mode’ to help a tourist that faints. Otherwise she’s made a shell around her personality to defend herself against hardships.

Luxor could have slipped into the trap of exoticizing a foreign location from the perspective of an outsider. Whilst it does turn Ancient Egypt into a place for a white person to contemplate (side note: shout out to the British Museum), it feels self aware of what it’s doing. Hanna finds connections on her own organically, and other connections to the land through the eyes of a local Sultan. It also recognizes that tourists do visit Luxor to exoticize ‘the other’ by representing them in the spiritual group of westerners that followed the Grateful Dead, and the obnoxious American tourist from the opening. Again it just about avoids the trap of falling into the problematic ‘white girl finds herself in exotic location’.

Instead it uses the environment, and Hanna’s connection to it, to evoke nostalgia for Hanna’s past life with Sultan. We learn that this isn’t the first time she’s been to Luxor (having been here with Sultan earlier in life). Now she’s older, she has experienced trauma (that is only hinted at in the film), and her mind is in a different place. She’s seeing the same locations, but in a different light. Everything feels familiar, shown in her confident exploration of the place on her own, but it also feels different, as shown in her inquisitive interaction with the ruins. Her new connection to the place suggests that her return may be fated, and that she may have found her home and future.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.

Notturno – AFI Fest 2020

Notturno is a beautifully shot documentary. It’s clear that each shot has been carefully set up and framed. For example, the shots of the first protagonist of the documentary, a man traveling to his hidden canoe to go hunting, are incredibly well lit in low light. He paddles out into the darkness with the reds of the night sky burning in the background. And that’s right after the shots of him on his motorbike riding to the lake, with oil rigs spurting flames behind him. This film is full of incredible images of the borderlands between Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon.

However, because it’s so well shot, the documentary kind of feels a bit staged. Everything shot feels like it has been planned. It feels like the director, Gianfranco Rosi, has asked the people he’s shooting to wait for him to set up the camera before they move around, as his camera captures them so perfectly from a distance. He seems to know where they’re going. So even if it’s not that obvious, you can feel the faint presence of the director slightly disrupting their lives which makes Notturno feel less natural.

Because you can feel the director’s gaze, Notturno also feels a bit exploitative at times. The shots of poverty and buildings in ruin are what western eyes expect to see from the war torn Middle East. These images are complemented by a few displays of trauma from mothers who’ve lost their children and children who have lost their mothers. They’re opportunities to tug on the heartstrings of western audiences and emphasize the tragic cycle of war the region is stuck in. But these images don’t always feel organic. The scene with the children running through their memories feels more like the rehearsals for a local stage show that appear in the movie. Both are designed and practiced to illicit an emotional response.

That being said, the film does offer something western audiences might not expect to see: the empty silence of the borderlands. Instead of ISIS and armies, the majority of the shots feature vast open spaces explored by a few local hunters. Soldiers watch the landscape, but nothing happens. There are of course the signs of war, but no evidence of it existing in the present. As a result, it feels a bit like the photographer’s quest to shoot the Franco-Mexican War in Towards the Battle and Robert Fisk’s search for the Middle Eastern front lines in This is Not A Movie. Rosi has arrived in a war torn region to perhaps shoot the war, but the war has disappeared. Instead he finds an empty land waking up to be interpreted by his own gaze.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.

Piedra Sola – AFI Fest 2020

Piedra Sola, like Notturno (one of the other films at this year’s AFI Fest), is beautifully shot. Set in the hamlet of Condor in the northern highlands of Argentina, it contains a lot of otherworldly landscapes and local ceremonies that look unusual to foreign eyes.

However, the exceptional images hint at a higher meaning that isn’t really decipherable in the film. For example, there’s the opening shot of a horse with its two front legs tied, hopping over a rocky hill at dawn. It’s a striking image, and beautifully captured in low light conditions, but it’s not clear how it fits into the narrative of Piedra Sola. The horse never reappears and doesn’t have too much of an impact on how we perceive the film, except to create intrigue. That’s not to say the film needs to have a narrative – it doesn’t – however, the scenes don’t feel like they all come together to unlock the mystery that they each contain. It feels more like a collection of sublime images than something complete.

This also comes across in the focus of the film, the lama herder. We see him go travel to a nearby town to sell his wares and get involved in the local festival, but beyond that we don’t have much of an understanding of him. It’s made vaguely aware that his livestock is being attacked by a puma, but it’s never clear if this is imagined, real, or an allegory for something else. His silence and emotionless face don’t give away any of his feelings either way. He is as mysterious as the collection of images that make up Piedra Sola.

His lack of agency also comes across as a bit problematic. Combined with his silence and lack of emotion, it presents another image of the passive Latin American indigenous person. Like Cleo in Roma and Justino in The Fever (two more films directed by non-indigenous directors), things happen to the lama herder that he quietly reacts to. Instead of initiating things himself, he only responds to things around him, which makes him seem a bit characterless.

There’s also the exoticization of the isolated Andean community. The director, Alejandro Telemaco Tarraf beautifully captures the ceremonies and the hamlet, but he also others it. The unique culture is viewed with a gaze that highlights the differences between the highland culture of Argentina from the city culture of Buenos Aires. It makes their culture seem a bit rustic and old fashioned, situating the community as if it exists in another world and time.

If you’re looking for a beautifully shot, esoteric movie set in the remote highlands of Argentina, you’ll love Piedra Sola. However, the mystery in the images and narrative make it hard to access, whilst the exoticization and passivization of the portrayals of the remote community make it hard to love.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.

Rival (Rivale) – AFI Fest 2020

Rival starts with death. There’s the first opening flash forward featuring a shot of Roma, a approximately 9 year old boy, grabbing a gun in answer to someone knocking at the door. Then there’s the second opening with Roman burying a dead bird before attending an older relative’s funeral. It’s an ominous sign of things to come. It’s clear Rival is not going to be an upbeat family drama.

Before there’s time to grieve, Roman is bundled into the back of a van and taken to Germany to live with his mother. She’s been in Germany taking care of an elderly woman (who has recently passed away) as an undocumented worker. Problem for Roman is that the older woman’s widow is survived by her partner Gert, an old German man that has fallen in love with his mum. Roman has to compete with Gert for his mother’s love.

The relationships between Roman and his Mum, and Roman and Gert are pretty all of nothing. They’re either hyper energetically playful: chasing each other around the house laughing and pulling faces, or they’re shouting and roaring at each other. It reminded me a bit of the similarly high energy relationship between the mother and son in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. It just feels like something is going to go badly wrong, like when Roman tries to poison Gert by spiking his afternoon tea.

Their uneasy relationships are complemented by the elements of the horror genre that are intertwined into the images. There’s Gert’s sinister eyebrows (that are a bit like Nosferatu’s Dracula) and the shots of him being injected with insulin. Then there’s the moving door handle at night when Roman is sleeping with his mum (a door which is later locked to subdue Roman). The eerie music, which features plenty of high piano notes, underscores the influence of horror on Rival, positioning Gert as the pretty unpredictable and untrustworthy villain.

If you’re looking for a bleak family drama which promises many things that go horribly wrong, check out Rival. You’re guaranteed to find something depressingly shocking.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.