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.
Pornomelancholia is a slow paced character study of a up-and-coming porn star navigating the Mexican porn industry. It has plenty of dry humor and an underlying commentary on social media culture.
The film starts with a mid-range shot of Lalo standing alone by a busy street in the city. People walk past him and cars pass behind him as we watch him peer around. It seems like he’s waiting for someone or taking a breather in a chaotic day. However, before the shot lingers further, Lalo breaks down into a soft sob as the title credits pop up: Pornomelancholia. It’s a prelude for the critique of superficial influencer-culture that Lalo uses to make his way into the porn industry.
Lalo is portrayed as a lonely man parading as a popular sex icon. His Instagram videos hide the fact that he works in a small factory with two other people that he hardly talks to. His confidence in his sexuality online contradicts his inability to come out to his family – shown in the rehearsed voice messages he can’t bring himself to send to his mother. It follows films such as Sweat in showing that the digital lives promoted by influencers don’t always reflect reality.
Despite the underlying commentary, there is dry humor in Pornomelancholia. This is probably the only film that you can watch that is built around a Zapata led Mexican revolution porn film. It also probably runs on for too much of the film, but the pornographic shots, which linger for more than expected are designed to make you awkwardly uncomfortable (like Lalo himself). The sex scenes are provocative, but not as outrightly as another Mexican festival film – Battle in Heaven.
Overall, if you’re looking for a slow-paced festival film that follows a gay man working his way into the porn industry, Pornomelancholia is worth a watch. Whilst the culture fostered by the industry and Lalo is portrayed as fake, his journey feels unique, real and believable.
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.
Wild Indian kicks off with a scene of a dying Indian covered in small pox ‘some time ago’ before it jumps forward to the 1980’s. The scene contextualizes the trauma of the present, experienced by two friends, Mukwa and Ted-O, situating it within years of pain, suffering, and oppression. It shows that the cycles of trauma are nothing new for this Ojibwe community, and the Indigenous community as a whole.
Moving forward to the scenes in the 1980’s, the trauma is inflicted on the children by their parents. Mukwa’s dad is ruthlessly violent, beating him up each night for nothing, whilst other kids are raised by parents lost to their drunkenness. Thanks to his Dad, and we can infer thanks to the generations above his Dad, it’s the trauma he inflicts on Mukwa that turns him violent. And whilst Mukwa’s not violent towards his son later in the film, his lack of warmth indicates that his trauma will be passed on. All of this stems from the widespread suffering of the Indigenous community referenced in the opening scene.
Mukwa tries to escape his trauma by exiling himself from his roots. He changes his image, becoming ‘Michael Peterson’ and cuts his hair. He goes all in on white corporate culture – becoming a wealthy businessman that plays a lot of golf, lives in California, and has a trophy white wife. The only signs of pride in his heritage is an overcompensation of Indigenous art on the walls in his house. Otherwise, he appears like a different person. His life contrasts strongly with his old friend Ted-O, who carriers his identity tattooed on his face and neck as he’s released from prison. Despite appearances, Ted-O is the warmer character. He makes time to bond with his nephew, whilst Mukwa shuns his wife and son.
Mukwa is one sinister character. He’s created brilliantly through Michael Greyeye’s acting and the style Lyle Corbine (the director) imbues into the film. The atmospheric music, that plays behind most of Mukwa’s scenes, combined with the slow camera movements (slowly creeping right to left and zooming in) creates a sense of eeriness surrounding Mukwa from the start. It reminded me a lot of the slow burn thrillers of David Fincher.
There’s also one recurring image that the director uses to create a lot of tension. He captures Mukwa’s evil side in moments where he has people’s lives in his hands – such as holding a knife by his sleeping father, and aiming a gun at his friend. Throwing these shots into the early part of the film makes us fear Mukwa’s unpredictability. It feels like he’s going to lash out violently and get revenge for the trauma inside him. This unnerving unpredictability makes him and the film so hard to look away from.
If you’re looking for a slow burning thriller along the lines of David Fincher’s Gone Girl with an unpredictable character like Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero, set within the Indigenous Ojibwe tribe, Wild Indian is the film you need to watch this year.
Whilst we weren’t able to catch any films in-person at the 30th edition of the Pan African Film Festival, the virtual screenings were almost enough to compensate. Like previous years, the international film slate at PAFF 2022 featured films from countries that other festivals in the U.S. rarely represent. Inspired by Burkina Faso and Africa’s world leading FESPACO film festival, PAFF is the best place to see films from the African diaspora in the U.S. So if you’re looking for films from sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Black directors around the world, you need to add the Pan African Film Festival to your list.
The International Films at PAFF 2022
As per previous years, we focused our coverage on the International films screening at PAFF. The Pan African Film Festival typically offers one of the most diverse film festival slates in the U.S., and this year was no different. 55 countries were featured along with 18 languages, including Papiamento, Swahili, Wolof, and Yoruba. The festival also does it part to foster new talent from around the world with 61 of the feature films coming from first time directors. The only improvement we’d love to see in future editions is equal gender parity in the director’s screened, especially within the international categories. Whilst 40% of the films featured were directed by women, it felt like this was boosted by the U.S. and short films.
Quality-wise, most of the films we saw this year beat the worst films from the 2019 and 2020 editions. Here’s how they ranked.
1. Bantu Mama (Dominican Republic)
Bantu Mama was the most polished movie we saw at this year’s edition. It has art-house production quality, memorable acting and characters, and it tells its story incredibly efficiently (clocking at just 77 minutes long). Plus the soundtrack was on point – sonically representing the meshing cultures in a tribute to their shared African heritage.
Like Bantu Mama, Tug of War‘s high production quality and art-house film language has helped it to screen at a few international film festivals already. It sets an anti-colonial romance within the picturesque island of Zanzibar and gives it a lot of Wong Kar-Wai style. World Cinema fans will find plenty to appreciate here.
We loved the relaxed pacing of The Crossing. There’s rarely a moment where it feels preachy or designed to provoke. Instead, the light comedy and hang-out vibes turn the often traumatic topic of Africa to Europe immigration into an easy and humorous watch.
Africa & I is the perfect viewing experience for anyone who wants (or wanted) to travel across the African continent. Othmane Zolati’s journey from Morocco to South Africa is unique and inspirational even if the narrative structure is fairly unoriginal. He shows you how to travel on a budget whilst deconstructing the tourist misconceptions of Africa.
5. Doutor Gama (Brazil)
Like Bantu Mama, Doutor Gama features another great soundtrack, this time courtesy of Tigana Santana. His voice gives a melancholy calmness to Dr. Gama’s traumatic life. Whilst the biopic is good, it feels a bit short. It jumps from slavery to an established civil rights lawyer in just a flash, when it could have done with covering more of his life in between.
6. Ayinla (Nigeria)
Ayinla‘s plot is a bit undercooked; hitting beats in Ayinla Omowura’s life without piecing them together. However, the music makes up for it, even if the lyrics aren’t always subtitled. For anyone into Nigerian music, or biopic style movies on making it in the music industry, Ayinla is worth a watch. It’s a decent tribute to both Ayinla Omowura and Abeokuta, the colorful city that both the director and the music star share.
If you’re looking for a well made film from Martinique that gives a sample of Martinican culture, watch Zepon. Whilst it falls into some tired World Cinema tropes, there are some brilliant moments in the film that are supported by light humor that carries the film from start to finish.
The Zoom call format of Tales of the Accidental City is a bit limiting, and already feels dated as quarantine restrictions have largely disappeared. However, if you’re simply looking for a quick Kenyan comedy, this film is worth a watch. It playfully makes fun of a few stereotypes of the city, giving the audience a few laughs and a small understanding of Nairobi society.
Israeli history is complicated, as any documentary on its formation and relationship with Palestine and the West can confirm. However, With No Land focuses on an overlooked prejudice – the rejection of the Black Ethiopian Jews into the Israel state despite the Israeli Citizenship Law that grants every Jew in the world the unrestricted right to become an Israeli citizen. However, whilst the topic is interesting and eye-opening, the abundance of talking heads interviewees makes it very dry.
10. Hairareb (Namibia)
Whilst there are some nice shots of the rural/desert landscape, Hairareb failed to live up to the blurb. It’s not about the drought that brought the two main characters together, and it’s not about the newlyweds past lives, or living in rural Namibia. All of the narrative development is sacrificed for the sake of creating domestic melodrama, leaving the film feeling pretty hollow.
Juwaa is a well produced movie from the African diaspora. However, it’s incredibly bleak. It hits all the genre tropes of misery porn, starting with a traumatic childhood event which destroys the characters later happiness. Whilst there is some sort of resolution at the end, it’s not enough to make up for the depressing time spent watching the rest of the movie.
Visit the Pan African Film Festival 2022 page for all our full reviews from the 30th edition of the festival.Reviews from past editions of PAFF can also be found here: 2020, 2021.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.