With quarantine restrictions still in place in Los Angeles, AFI Fest has launched as a virtual film festival this year with the help of the Eventive film platform. Despite the challenges that is 2020, AFI Fest has still managed to gather a wide slate of over 100 films from around the world. So whilst no one will be in Hollywood in person, it’s still one of the most prestigious film festivals in Los Angeles in spirit.
I’ll be trying to catch as many of the films from the World Cinema and New Auteurs sections, as both contain a bunch of interesting selections from around the world. Check back here to get the lowdown of some of the films from both sections and a full festival recap a little while after it ends.
If you’re ready to sit down for a few hours to indulge yourself in some cosy, trivial Argentine mysteries, meet the latest film from El Pampero Cine, Trenque Lauquen.
Trenque Lauquen comes from Laura Citarella, one of the members of El Pampero Cine, a group of filmmakers which also includes Mariano Llinas (La Flor, Extraordinary Stories), Agustin Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguilansky. Each of the members of the collective usually pop up in the credits of each other films under different roles, making each of the collective’s films feel like a team effort. They each also use the same actors, so if you’ve seen another of their films before, you’re likely to see a familiar face in this one.
Trenque Lauquen, like it’s El Pampero Cine predecessors, isn’t a light commitment. It’s just over 4 hours long, split roughly equally into two sections which are both tied together by Laura’s character. The entire film takes place in Trenque Lauquen, a city on the far west border of Buenos Aires province near La Pampa. It looks like a pretty unremarkable city, with nothing to really distinguish it from anywhere else in Argentina. However the blandness is all part of the film’s construct. As with the majority of films from the El Pampero Cine collective, Trenque Lauquen uses the mundane as a foundation for it’s engrossing mysteries.
El Pampero’s films are, at their core, fairly simple. There aren’t any extraordinary premises, but they also work as tiny odysseys. Characters embark on fantastical adventures where the mundane is re-signified as something strange, new, and magical. The strangeness with which Pampero approaches the world is inherently transformational. Any and all minutiae represents a good excuse for them to tell a story as if we as the audience were kids listening in rapt attention, trying to keep us from seeing the world in its drab normality, allowing us to perceive things differently and hatch crazy schemes.
Trenque Lauquen, like La Flor and Extraordinary Stories, feels like indulgent storytelling. It’s as if the filmmakers of El Pampero Cine have been challenging each other to come up with new quirky mysteries to keep audiences interested for longer periods of time. They haven’t seemed to hit their limits yet as each of their last few films have kept audiences interested just to see where the mysteries lead us. Each of their films is like following a maze or river cruise full of pleasant surprises. Plus the pacing and characters are conducive to our immersion in the mystery; they’re both always patient and never rushed. They create the relaxed environment to let the mystery lead us along. Serious things happen in these films, but because of the tone, it never feels real-world serious. This is why these films are indulgent storytelling – they’re there to simply entertain and nothing more, and they do this better than anyone else in the industry.
If you’re a secret fan of love triangles but actually an art-house film snob, Paris 13th District is for you. You have your art-house credentials, with Jacques Audiard directing and Celine Sciamma writing, as well as a smooth black and white film. But you also have a light, free-flowing script with lots of sex that doesn’t slow down, making it an easy watch for anyone wanting to tune out.
Paris 13th District isn’t deep. There doesn’t appear to be any hidden subtext to either of the character’s narratives. Some of the scenes even feel a little contrived, particularly the scene in a university lecture hall in which all of the students start watching videos of a chat room girl and making fun of Nora for looking just like her. In an otherwise relatable film of 20-30 somethings, this scene stands out – making you think that the writers might actually be a bit out of touch with the young adult’s reality. But luckily the depth isn’t needed thanks to the lightness of the film. It flows so smoothly that you won’t have time to think about why it was made.
The lightness comes from a range of things. Firstly, there’s the clean simplicity of the black and white film that takes away any noise. This is supported by the simple soundtrack with synth bursts that cleanly separate the breaks between each narrative. Secondly, there’s the free characters. Even though each one has their own problems – Emilie has family drama, Nora is bullied, and Camille has his own grief – they never feel serious. Instead they appear free to do anything they like – each one quickly changes their career as if it were starting a new day. Camillie suddenly becomes a real-estate agent after dropping out of his masters, Nora starts her law degree in her 30’s before dropping out to rejoin a career in sales, and Emilie doesn’t even feel burdened to work. Their free-flowing careers comes across as a bit of a jab at millennials from the older screenwriters of the film. All of them are played as fragile characters that change their mind and lack commitment. However, it does make the film feel lighter – they all live in a city in which their troubles don’t feel that serious and in which they can change their direction in an instant.
So if you’re looking for a light relationship drama with art-house credentials, Paris 13th District is worth a watch. Whilst it’s arguably a bit out of touch, it is an easy watch for anyone looking for a break from the more challenging film festival fare.
Head to our AFI Fest 2021 Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2021.
Whilst we couldn’t attend AFI Fest 2023 in person, we were able to catch a wide range of screeners from the festival representing Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe. Here’s a quick recap of the films we saw, starting with our personal favorites.
Our Top Three Films from AFI Fest 2023
Four Daughters (Tunisia)
Kaouther Ben Hania is back with more drama. Unlike her previous film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, Four Daughters is grounded in reality. Its authenticity and intimacy is granted by Olfa and her two daughters, who tell their family story with the help of actors playing their lost sisters within the confines of their four walls. Ben Hania encourages her cast to re-enact past trauma, like The Act of Killing, but on a more intimate scale, to create one of the most affecting movies of the year.
The Buriti Flower (Brazil)
2022 saw the release of National Geographic’s documentary The Territory, which followed the plight of indigenous people in the Brazilian rainforest. Whilst the documentary won awards for its coverage of deforestation and violence against indigenous people, The Buriti Flower tells it better. The Buriti Flower features the indigenous protagonists instead of processing their language and voices through mediators. In doing so, the Krahô are given a political voice and agency within their community and on the national scale.
Set Lam (La Reunion)
Just like Mami Wata and Faya Dayi, you’ll find dreamy monochromatic images in this short film set on the island of La Reunion. These visuals make the film memorable, especially the star-lit sky, and scenes in a pulsating night-club to contrast with the underwater abyss. It also contains mystical magic along the lines of Madagascar’s When the Stars Meet the Sea including a dance with death.
More Great Films from AFI Fest 2023
Terrestrial Verses (Iran)
Anyone familiar with Iranian film releases over the last few years will find a similar satirical portrayal of Iran’s Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Although the form of the film is nothing unique, the high standards of like-minded films such as There is No Evil and A Hero are also found on Terrestrial Verses. Each of the film’s vignettes are simply shot (one fixed camera for each with speakers off-screen) but highly engrossing.
City of Wind (Mongolia)
City of Wind covers the classic ‘tradition vs. modernity’ trope pretty well through its high-school coming-of-age romance. The setting stands out – Ulaanbaatar – which combines a mass of urban development with its rural, undeveloped outskirts, visualizing the encroaching development on tradition. Tradition is represented in a young shaman, balancing school with his cultural role as a ‘modern’ woman pulls him out of his focused life and into modernity. Will he or won’t he be the end of his cultural lineage?
The Settlers (Chile)
A bread-and-butter macho explorer’s film, The Settlers follows an unlikely trio’s journey across the uncharted tail of South America. Like in Godland, the landscape is portrayed brutally because of the unsavory protagonists that are traversing it – a Texan mercenary and ex-British soldier. The mixed-race Chilean that accompanies them, like the indigenous people of the region, is a victim of different guises of power, as conveyed in the film’s third act jab at the authenticity of Chilean nationhood.
The Rest – Featuring Quirkiness and Intimate Stories
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Estonia)
A documentary that takes place almost entirely in a sauna, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood captures intimate conversations between Estonian women. The focus of the film is on storytelling and not the visuals. Only a few of the storytellers are shown, and most of the shots are close ups of their bodies, rarely revealing a whole person. Whilst the visuals are limited, the stories become more and more dramatic, covering a wide range of the woman’s experience.
Cobweb (South Korea)
With Parasite, Song Kang-ho became the most famous Korean actor in the U.S. Whilst not directed by him, Cobweb is very much his film as his energy propels the heavy, but often funny, plot forward. It’s a chaotic satire of filmmaking, with Song Kang-ho playing a director convinced he just needs to re-shoot the ending of his film to turn it into a masterpiece to revive his stalling career.
Tiger Stripes (Malaysia)
Tiger Stripes is for fans of Carrie, Titane, and TV soaps/melodramas. It’s quirky body-transformation high-school coming-of-age plot just about works for audiences unfamiliar with Malaysian culture. However, this film is more of a blast for those in-tune with crazy Malaysian politics (Fictional Dr Rahim vs. Real King of Shamans), the power of TikTok, and the conservative wave in the country that will likely censor this film because of its sexuality (they almost censored a Coldplay concert).
Primetime Mother (Philippines)
A TV gameshow dream for a band of desperate mothers competing for money. However the dreams become exploitative nightmares as the mums are forced to sell their integrity for the gods of entertainment.
The Echo (Mexico)
This quiet documentary reminded me of Iliana Sosa’s What We Leave Behind and Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brother Taught Me. It’s fairly bleak and doesn’t have a story that moves us through the melancholy, but is a very well-made portrait of remote Mexico.
As per previous years, the base was high for all the films we saw at AFI Fest 2023, so whilst we had our favorites, all of the above had their plaudits. Please find previous coverage of AFI Fest here.
Medusa is another genre-bending movie set in contemporary Brazil (see Bacurau, Good Manners, Executive Order, or Divine Love) that corresponds with the rise in the far right and radical Christianity in Brazil. The focus of this film is on how the patriarchy is upheld by radical Christian women
In modern day Brazil, a woman watches a sexy music video of a woman dancing on her way home on the night bus. When she gets off, she’s tailed by a gang of masked women. She tries to escape, but can’t. They gang up on her, beat her up, and force her to swear fealty to Jesus and to become a good Christian woman.
The attackers are Mariana and her female friends from the local evangelical church. Their horror-genre influenced masks are obviously intimidating. However, behind the mask they’re even more sinister. Instead of carrying faces that show years of trauma and fear they carry pristine smiles and clean pastel clothes. They look like a group of preppy high-school girls and not like your typical group of thugs. Their smiles and matching identity give them a cold collective assuredness that their violence is right and justified, when it isn’t. It also highlights a lack of individuality stemming from the strict codes of their social bubble – no one wants to stand out for fear of being identified with the other, so they all try to one-up each other in their devotional acts in order to maintain their social position. They’ve already started beating up people in the street, so what are they capable of next?
The design of the film makes it clear Mariana is brainwashed by her bubble of existence. The church she attends with her friends is flavored with hypnotizing 80’s music and dystopian neon lights and features coordinated song and dance routines that make them look robotic. Plus the microphone holding, slick talking, smartly dressed preacher gives off hints of snake oil salesmen before we see his ‘miracles.’ The whole radical Christian experience is designed to indoctrinate Mariana and her friends. Plus as a reward, they get friends like them, and corresponding male counterparts in the beefy ‘Watchmen’ group that attends their same church.
Problem is they can’t control everything in their own lives. They’re still victims to the patriarchy that plays them – both represented in the male religious pastor they fervently follow and the male ‘Watchmen’ they’re expected to date and marry. They can either continue to live for the radical Christian patriarchy and stay in their bubble, or break free by expanding their bubble until it pops.
Head to our AFI Fest 2021 Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2021.
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