Welcome to our hub for Film Festival coverage on FilmRoot. Please find direct links below to our most recently covered Film Festivals including reviews and recaps.
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.
The Sole family have farmed fields in the small municipality of Alcarras in Catalonia for generations. However, the wealthy landowner that owns the property has found more profitable ways to use his land, which doesn’t involve farming or what the Sole family wants. He’s looking to destroy the orchards that provide the Sole family’s livelihood to install more profitable solar panels.
What Alcarras does brilliantly is tell a very specific local story in order to highlight how capitalism is affecting not just the Sole family, but the local community and many other people around the globe. It’s set completely in one small municipality in Spain centered one family, all played by non-actors from similar backgrounds to the family on screen, living on one farm. Through the film’s run-time, we get to intimately know each member of the Sole family to understand their life on the farm as well as how they are each affected by the threatening eviction. We see why they love the freedom and independence of farming their own land as well as how they’re pulled apart by an uncertain future. Whilst a multi-family or multi-country film might fail to generate sympathy for it’s characters because of it’s broad scope, Alcarras, in spending time with one family in one region, gives the audience more time and closeness to sympathize with not just them, but everyone affected by capitalism around the world.
The hidden message in Alcarras is that the Sole family’s experience is not isolated to Alcarras, nor Spain. The few short scenes showing the community’s labor strikes, which Quimet and his son join, show that the Sole family’s experiences are not isolated. The priority of progress and profit over personal and community happiness is destroying families across the world.
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.
AFI Fest brought some of the most highly anticipated international films to Hollywood from the 2025 film festival circuit for a long-weekend celebration of film. AFI Fest gives locals a chance to see a experience a wide range of global stories and film critics a chance to catch up on films from Sundance, Berlin, Venice, and Cannes ahead of any general releases. We broadened our viewing habits this time to include a mix of short films – see our short film recap linked here – to look out for some up-and-coming filmmakers. Our feature film recap below spanned 3 continents – highlighting some stand-out films from Colombia, Armenia, and Spain!
Our Top Three from AFI Fest 2025
1. A Poet (Colombia)
Imagine a tragicomic white-savior movie with the energy of Uncut Gemsand you’ll find yourself close to A Poet. Oscar Restrepo, a proud poet fails to recapture his former success in the empty bottles that leave him shouting drunken verses at transients in the middle of the night. To try and reconnect with his teenage daughter, he turns to teaching, and finds an unpolished gem in one of his students to live his dreams through. However, not everyone understands his intentions. Class and race collide in this roller-coaster tragicomedy powered by an anxious, always moving camera, sudden cuts, and Oscar’s winning smile.
2. My Armenian Phantoms (Armenia)
When I think of compilation films, I think of Los Angeles Plays Itself, and the diary films of Jonas Mekas. The first uses archival clips from a wide range of films set in Los Angeles to show how the city has changed alongside Hollywood, whilst Jonas Mekas uses raw personal footage to document his experiences in a diary format. My Armenian Phantoms borrows from both of these styles to take you on a journey through Armenian film history – spinning you onto a bunch of Armenian films to watch next – whilst writing a moving love letter to her father and Armenia itself.
3. Romería (Spain)
Carla Simon is establishing herself as one of the top filmmakers in Spain. This is just her third feature, but watching it feels like she has been making movies for decades. Just like in her Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Simon creates a incredibly strong sense of setting and fully fleshed characters in such a short time. In Romería, we swing across Spain, displacing the hot summer of Catalonia’s peach harvest for the grey buildings, overcast skies, and frigid Atlantic seas of Vigo. The setting works to hide family secrets as Marina returns to the city in search of her lost past.
Honorable Mentions
We Believe You (Belgium)
Tensions rise and family secrets unravel over the course of a crucial day in a cleverly crafted court-room drama. The director’s choice to shoot this entire film in tightly framed close-ups keeps the full-picture deliberately hidden from us. Just like the civil court judge, we have to make a leap of faith to believe the words of a strained mother fighting for her children.
Young Mothers (Belgium)
Young Mothers is another authentic drama to add to the already impressive filmography of the Dardenne brothers. The film pieces together 5 unique portraits of 5 different girls at a maternal support home near Liège to paint a picture of the social challenges of teenage motherhood.
Kontinental ’25 (Romania)
Radu Jude always has something to say. Whilst Kontinental ’25 may not as politically powerful as his previous films – such as Do Not Expect too Much from the End of the World and I Do Not Care if we Go Down in History as Barbarians – it still contains his very obvious dark humor. It shifts Europe ’51by laughing at the main character, a bailiff consumed by guilt from an eviction gone wrong, to show the lack of meaningful action taken to reverse the inhumanity of crony capitalism.
Another year, another great slate of films from AFI Fest. We strongly encourage everyone to check out next years edition. Please find previous coverage of AFI Fest here.
If you’re looking for an inspirational documentary that follows a group of trailblazing women in India, consider Writing with Fire. It follows a group of Dalit women – Dalits being the lowest caste in the Indian caste system – that start a newspaper in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest and most politically important states. The newspaper, Khabar Lahariya, stands out from the others both because it’s written only by women and because of its emphasis to seek out the truth no matter what.
It starts with one of the paper’s lead journalists reporting on a local rape case. In it, we witness their reporting process. Meera first interviews the victim’s family for first hand info, then heads to the police station to press them further on the crime, before beginning to form a report. We see this process a few times throughout the film as they interview politicians, Dalit women without sewage systems that the government has promised, and worker’s strikes. Because of the topics they shine a light on and their determination to find answers, they face a lot of trouble.
This is clear when the reporters are out in the field. One reporter has to confront one union leader who at first refuses to talk with her because she’s a woman. Another reporter covering the upcoming elections has to banter with the male politicians just to try and get comments from them. It’s clear that being patronized is a part of their day job in the patriarchal society. However, they also have to put up with it at home from husbands that berate their independent working spirit.
It’s not just the patriarchy that is framed as dangerous to the reporters as the rising Hindu nationalism within India is posed as a threat too. One example is the young member of some kind of Hindu Youth League that patrols his neighborhood armed with a machete to fight crime. His role feels a lot like the Hitler Youth from Nazi Germany. He doesn’t appear to have much direction apart from his hatred of Muslims. The rhetoric of the local politicians are equally alarming, with the directors pointing out the new state leaders remarks that Islam is intrinsically linked with Terrorism. It feels like that the freedom of Khabar Lahariya and its female journalists are threatened by the continued rise of the male dominated BJP Hindu political party.
Lastly, it’s quite interesting to see exactly how a start-up newspaper is run. In addition to seeing how they gather a story from outside, we get to see how the newspaper is run at the office. We see their daily meetings – including one where one reporter gets disciplined for a low output – and hear about their growth strategies. Currently, they’re all embracing the switch to the growing digital reality by equipping all their reporters with camera phones and giving them lessons about YouTube. As the film runs, these YouTube clips are inserted into the narrative as milestones for their growth as their subscribers rocket to a few thousand after a few weeks work.
Whilst it’s probably a bit longer than it needs to be, Writing with Fire is well worth a watch for anyone interested in learning about inspirational women battling the patriarchy around the world. If anything, you’ll learn a bit about the current state of India and running a newspaper.
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