Film Festival Coverage Hub - Reviews & Recaps

Land Of Ashes – Spain/Latin American Competition – SBIFF

In Land of Ashes, thirteen year old Selva lives in a small costal town surrounded by sea and dense forest. Her mother has passed away, so she shares the duties of looking after her frail old grandfather with Elena, an older woman who comes and goes as she wishes.

Elena is the only female role model that Selva has, but their relationship is a strange one. Selva obviously needs her for companionship and help navigating her path to adulthood, but she also despises her. She spits in her food and trades vicious insults with her over the dinner table which eventually unravels into laughs thanks to her grandfather. Later, Elena invites her dancing, but disappears soon after hitting the dance floor in order to score a few drugs and never returns. It reinforces Selva’s vulnerability and her inevitable life alone.

To keep herself company, Selva manages to conjure visions of her dead mother. These visions help to guide her through the challenges she faces, such as looking after her grandfather, and they also help her to come to terms with the impermanence of life and her future life alone. Her grandfather’s death is inevitable, but it’s not until Elena’s disappearance that she realizes that she will be living alone. Seeing her mother in the nature around her provides her with the comfort that her family will continue to live in her and her surroundings after her grandfather passes away.

Land of Ashes was one of the best films I saw at SBIFF. It creates a vivid world from just a few images of the natural world they live in – mostly of the night sky and dense jungle, but also of the local fauna. The magic in it adds some mysticism about Selva’s future alone and the life in the wilderness around us.

The Wolves (Los Lobos) – Berlinale 2020

The Wolves is a spiritual sister to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Instead of a boisterous white mum and daughter living in a motel by Disney World, The Wolves features a single mum with two young boys that have just crossed the border into the United States. The kids are happy to follow their mum and spend more and more days passing time in a shabby apartment on the understanding that they’re going to Disneyland.

The two boys are stuck at home everyday making their own entertainment whilst their mum works double shifts to try and create a better future. There’s no school for them to go to and they’re forbidden from leaving the apartment. Any chances of being caught and deported must be avoided.

Despite being stuck in the apartment all day, The Wolves is presented with a lot of warm nostalgia. There’s a slow and lazy guitar soundtrack that generates the same warm melancholic tones of films imbued in Americana like Mud, Bombay Beach, or even parts of Thelma and Louise. There’s also warmth in the games that the two boys play to keep themselves occupied and the drawings that come to life in their imagination. Even though the melancholic soundtrack and bleak surroundings hint that the American dream is out of reach, their playfulness shows it won’t stop them dreaming.

The Wolves is an ode to the faceless people of America. Not just the immigrants that cross the southern border seeking a better life, but the homeless, and anybody scraping together a life living below the poverty line. A few times in the film, Samuel Kishi Leopo (the director) inserts montages of portraits of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds living within the new family’s community. All the portraits feature people staring straight into the camera like you might see in a National Geographic magazine, showing them without anything to hide. It shows them purely, in front of their humble homes. What these people have in common is an absence of the white picket fenced house promised by the American dream. It’s a sign that being American, or simply being in America for those that migrate north, doesn’t automatically grant you a well spring to health and prosperity. The Wolves honestly highlights the people that the country has left behind.

For more films from the Berlin film festival, head to our Berlinale home page.

Black Mexicans – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In Black Mexicans, a fisherman splits his time between two women: his wife, Juana, and his lover Magdalena.

Neri, the fisherman, is an old Don Juan. He’s known in the community for his promiscuity, which doesn’t end with Juana and Magdalena. However, the film focuses on his two lovers and their two daughters of a similar age. Whilst Nero’s two families share similarities, they have different problems. Juana has Neri, but she’s dying from a terminal illness, whilst Magdalena lives waiting on Neri and the relationship with his wife to end. Magdalena isn’t hoping for Juana to die – she regularly donates blood and even offers her donating her liver to help her – but she does want clarity from her relationship with Neri so she can move on with her life.

The other difference between the two families is their wealth. Whilst neither family is wealthy, Magdalena at least has her health to continue earning money through her restaurant. She’s able to buy a new fridge, and isn’t too worried about Neri not being able to catch any fish. Her ability to earn money, also gives her daughter the freedom to do what she wants as she doesn’t have to help support the family. In contrast, Juana is too poorly to earn, and Neri can’t support them, so her daughter has to find work to keep them afloat. Juana’s daughter therefore doesn’t have the same freedoms as her step sister and resents her absent father more for it.

Black Mexicans is set along the picturesque Oaxaca coast within the Afro-Mexican community in Costa Chica. The remote and empty setting reflects the Afro-Mexican experience in Mexico. Just like Afro-Mexicans in Mexico, the setting is hidden away from the rest of Mexico. No one makes the effort to take the boat trip there, except for the rare pair of backpackers. There’s also no sign of any non-black Mexicans here, just as the Afro-Mexicans here are hidden away from the rest of Mexico. The empty beach chairs and beach restaurants show that people just don’t care about the Afro-Mexican community. It’s isolated enough to pretend it doesn’t exist and empty enough that it doesn’t attract any attention.

It’s no surprise then that the Juana’s daughters efforts to make a life for herself appear hopeless. Her father will always be promiscuous and forget about her, her mother is terminally ill, she’s in inescapable debt, and there’s no support from the government (as indicated when a highway policeman says she’s not Mexican on a rare trip outside the community). Without her mother she’s alone. Her hopelessness is expressed through her stoic expressions. She never smiles or frowns, and never appears disappointed or angry. She’s aware of the hopelessness of her situation and her inevitable prostitution to pay off her debts.

Black Mexicans is the first feature film that tries to depict the Afro-Mexican experience with an all Afro-Mexican cast. It does have its problems: some Afro-Mexicans have called out the stereotypical depictions and the ignorantly prejudiced comments of the director. However, separating the director from the film, Black Mexicans deserves credit for depicting a community invisible to the rest of Mexico. Well constructed images and storyline might remind you of Costa Rica’s Land of Ashes or Eve’s Bayou. It’s use of setting and the stoic character of Juana’s daughter highlight the lack of opportunity and support for the black community in Mexico and their exclusion from their Mexican identity.

Lane 4 – Spain/Latin American Competition – SBIFF

In Lane 4, Amanda is most comfortable in the water. Lacking her parents’ attention at home, swimming is the only thing she has. But she’s not alone in the pool. Priscila, the star of her swim team, becomes her friend and rival in the pool and in life.

The film starts with Amanda completely still, floating underwater in the fetal position in a swimming pool. By comparing the swimming pool to a womb, the opening image shows Amanda’s desire to return to the womb, to escape all the stresses of her daily life (see Freud’s Thanatos Instinct). In the pool, she can escape from her parents who don’t understand her, the social pressures of maintaining a ‘cool’ image, and her own growing pains. However, unfortunately for her, she cannot stay underwater forever. Eventually she has to surface for air. When she breaks from the fetal position and swims to the surface, it’s symbolic of her second birth. It’s her rebirth as a woman and a world full of expectations for her.

The scenes of Amanda underwater are the corner stones of Lane 4. Each one of them indicate her underlying desires. First, as mentioned above, she’s reborn from a girl into a woman, even though she desires to return to the simplicity of the womb. Secondly, she dives to the bottom of the pool on her own to reluctantly collect a hairband given to her by her mother. This image symbolizes her reluctance to grow up and tie back her hair – something that her mum thinks she should do to show off her ears. The third underwater scene shows her diving towards Priscila’s boyfriend. This scene starts to reveal her desire to assume Priscila’s position as the coolest girl on the swim team which are confirmed in the last underwater scene to end the film. Above water, Amanda is mostly silent and rarely reveals what she thinks, but underwater, she reveals all of her underlying desires and urges.

Lane 4 contains most of the typical coming of age film tropes, such as:

Dealing with absent parents.
Dealing with friends who have grown up before you.
Dealing with a dad that still sees you as a little girl.
Jealousy of the popular girl at school.
Wanting to go out with most attractive boy at school.
Her first period.

As a result, it will feel very familiar to other coming of age films, such as Alba. The main thing that sets apart Lane 4 from other films is that it’s set within a competitive swim club. This environment, and the underwater scenes that reveal her hidden desires, made Lane 4 one of the most memorable films at SBIFF.

Only The Animals – International Competition – SBIFF

Only The Animals features a bunch of interconnecting narratives spanning across France and Cameroon. Each narrative is connected to the murder of a French woman during a snow storm in rural France. It’s weird, entertaining, and satisfying as every piece of the puzzle falls into place. Even the initially out of place opening of a man riding his bike through Abidjan with a goat on his back is eventually linked in and understood.

It’s a fun ride but I haven’t figured out what’s the point or message beyond ‘things happen by chance’. Not saying that it has to have a message – this film was enjoyable to watch – but it would turn a showy multiple narrative film into something better. Maybe I’m asking for too much after seeing the Trump era unravelling of a white upper class family in 2019s stand out murder mystery, Knives Out.

If anything it could be that everything the people aren’t grateful for gets reversed on them. E.g. Joseph is an inanimate loner who can’t love that ends up loving an inanimate loner who can’t love.

Only The Animals covers a lot but doesn’t feel slumped. While every character could have been given more of a backstory, it does fit the movie to not dwell so much. The fun is in watching the transcontinental story slowly unravel as each characters viewpoint layers onto the next.

Side note: slightly stereotypical story of witch doctors and scammers in Africa, even if it is hilarious watching them do their work to a horny middle aged white guy.