Wild Indian

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.

I feel like it is a good idea to start some lists so you know where to start with film from each country around the world. I will update these as I watch more and more films from around the world and would appreciate your input as well!

To start with, here’s my top films from Mexico, a country which has produced the likes of Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Guillermo Del Toro in recent years.

1. Y Tu Mama Tambien

Shot beautifully as always with Alfonso Cuaron, this film follows two young privileged students on a road trip. They travel across Mexico unaware of the ‘real’ Mexico they pass by.

2. Amores Perros

Translated roughly as ‘Love’s a bitch’, Amores Perros marks the start of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s feature film career. Based in Mexico City, we follow three different storylines connected by a car crash. The three story  is also copied in Inarritu’s next two films (21 Grams and Babel).

3. El Infierno (El Narco)

One of my personal favourites, El Infierno is a dark comedy about Mexico during the Mexican Drug War. It follows Benny, recently deported from the U.S. who finds his home-town empty and without any jobs. As a result, he pretty much stumbles into drug trafficking. This one points a comic finger at politicians, drug trafficking, and organized corruption.

4. Sin Nombre

Directed by the guy behind the True Detective (Cary Fukunaga), Sin Nombre is an action-adventure film that spans Central America. It is an introduction to both the vicious Mara Salvatrucha gang and ‘La Bestia’ the train network that many Central Americans use to try and reach the U.S. It is gripping right until the final minutes and is complemented by some beautiful scenery.

5. Pan’s Labyrinth

This Spanish/Mexican film is Guillermo del Toro’s most famous and best. It’s fantasy matches the imagination of the Studio Ghibli animated classics. Set in Civil War Spain, this film is filmed along the boundary between reality and mythical. It received a 22 minute standing ovation after it’s screening at Cannes, and would be placed higher on this list if it’s honours were not shared with Spain.

6. Heli

Heli is brutal. It is a shocking examination of the effect of the Mexican drug war on a small town in northern Mexico. Director Amat Escalante won the Best Director award at Cannes for this one – a testament to it’s barren landscapes and bare editing. One word of warning before you watch this one though – it isn’t happy or light-hearted in any way.

7. Cronos

Another debut feature from one of Mexico’s most well known directors. Cronos is Guillermo del Toro’s Vampire horror flick that is characterised by his imagination. Eternal life, Ron Perlman, and a cute relationship between a granddaughter and grandfather that make this film great.

8. Miss Bala

Another brutal drug war flick, Miss Bala follows the life of a beauty paegeant queen who gets trapped within the wrath of a drug cartel. Gang leader Lino will haunt you for a while after this one – he is crafty and elusive. The film is gripping, and horribly fatalistic, just like Heli.

9. Instructions Not Included

At last, a cheesy comedy to lift your spirits. Instructions Not Included follow the feel-good story of a Mexican playboy who travels to the United States to return his American daughter to her mother. The film will have you laughing and crying for a very entertaining 2 hours.

10. Cesar Chavez

A Mexican-U.S. film about American Labour Leader, Cesar Chavez sees Michael Pena in his best role. The biographical film follows Chavez from his move to Delano, California though many of the non-violent campaigns he led. Alongside McFarland, Cesar Chavez is a timely portrait of migrant families in the San Joaquin Valley.

 

I have not seen as many Mexican films as I should have, so I have probably missed some greats. Please leave a comment if you think there should be another film in this list!

Dadli

Dadli Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Dadli features a boy’s narrative over a montage of shots of Antiguan life. It’s a brief but incredibly immersive 15 minutes in Antigua & Barbuda that any fans of Jonas Mekas and Khalil Joseph should love.

From: Antigua & Barbuda, North America
Watch: Vimeo, IMDb
Next: Process, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, Right Near the Beach

Dadli – The Breakdown

Dadli is short, but it doesn’t need time to build its beautifully immersive aesthetic. The quick editing and dulled diegetic sound (the music and narrative are the focus in this film) don’t allow you to think of anything else apart from the images and atmospheric sounds you are hearing, whilst the natural home video style texture of the film – which is taken to the next level with the cinematography – and the mid to close range shots draw you in further. This combination of techniques makes it feel both immersive and intimate – as if you are experiencing a Fast-Forwarded snippet of life on the island. The texture of the film even sweats the close-mugginess of the night, the warm melancholy of the sunsets, and laid back vibrancy of daytime. It feels like you’re there. Whilst other movies capture island life over the course of a feature film, Dadli manages to do it in a compact 15 minutes.

The young boy’s narrative is what separates the immersive style of Dadli from Khalil Joseph’s art-films and music videos. He’s a kid playing an adult – with no role models or parents. He talks of murder, drugs, and poverty, giving us an ‘underground tour’ of the island. However, his narrative never feels completely believable, which makes the film feel like it could be a twisted fantasy or exaggerated memory (of the brief adult narration) instead of a harsh reality. The fleeting shots of the montage helps to blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, turning it into an even more trance-like, immersive experience.

If you’re a fan of movies that use sound and editing to immerse viewers into an environment, you should watch Dadli. It creates a feeling of life on Antigua that you probably wouldn’t experience as a tourist or visitor.

What to Watch Next

For more immersive films that rely on sound, check out Khalil Joseph’s catalogue of music films such as Process (featuring Sampha) and Good Kid m.A.A.d City (featuring Kendrick Lamar). Both, like Dadli create a strong sense of place through the editing and sound of their movies.

You could also try the films of Jonas Mekas, such as Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania and Lost, Lost, Lost. These films use home-video style footage and quick editing to immerse viewers into the narrators stories.

Or for more immersive editing from the Caribbean, try Jamaica’s Right Near the Beach.

Stateless

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity or a homeland. Stateless follows Rosa Iris, an attorney with family who have been exiled by the country’s recent laws, as she mounts a grassroots electoral campaign to advocate for social justice. But it also follows her antithesis, Gladys Felix, an outspoken supporter of the nationalist movement, fighting for for stricter immigration control.

Like Softie, Stateless is an observational documentary that captures an activist from outside of the system fighting against corruption. Through Rosa’s story we’re exposed to the emotional trauma of the country’s recent anti-immigration policies. Simply put, they’re racist, and this is obvious right from the opening scene in which Rosa is representing a client in a government office. Her client is applying for an updated citizenship card but is being denied by the officer because “he doesn’t speak clear Spanish”. This is not an isolated incident. Rosa’s activism is also justified by her personal stakes. She has the same Haitian lineage as the people she’s representing that the country is persecuting. So she runs for government to represent people like her exiled because of their race.

However, unlike Softie, which focuses solely on Boniface’s family life and his campaign for government, Stateless also documents the other side of the fight against racism by following Gladys Felix, a member of the country’s anti-immigrant nationalist movement. We follow her as she spews racist rhetoric about the nature of Haitian immigrants and gaslights the experiences of Haitians she meets at a government built camp for sugar cane workers near the border. Whilst it feels odd to have their stories running alongside each other, it makes Stateless stand out. It allows us to see how present the threat is – not just to Rosa and her cousin Teofilo, but to all Haitian immigrants and Black Dominicans. Gladys adds a face (and very present reality) to the sometimes invisible state sanctioned racism of the Dominican Republic. She gives the audience something visual to root against.

If you’re looking for a documentary that examines racism in the Dominican Republic’s past and present through two women campaigning at either end of the political spectrum, this is the film you’re looking for.


Check our Pan African Film Festival 2021 page for more reviews coming out of the 29th edition of the festival.

Geographies of Solitude

Geographies of Solitude has many impressive shots of Nova Scotia’s Sable Island, a remote island almost 200 miles off the Canadian coast in the Atlantic Ocean. It starts with one of the most memorable shots, a night sky with more stars than you’ve likely ever seen in the sky before. The sheer number of stars makes the shot appear like an impressionistic painting, and the light is so bright, you even get to see a very clear silhouette of a person walking across the horizon. It’s an almost ASMR-type experience watching the opening with its complimentary ambient soundscape. It feels like you could watch the whole film without dialogue as the images and sound lull you into a trance, that it’s a surprise when there’s speech and we’re introduced to Zoe.

Zoe has been living on the island for over 40 years, mostly alone. We follow her as she explores the 12 square mile island every day to log any changes in the environment. She carries a kit with sampling pots and a notepad to capture anything new and log anything different she might see. Some days she might find a dead bird and on others she might encounter a new insect she hasn’t seen before, however, most days are repetitive logging exercises that track very small changes on the island. Despite the beautiful remote location, Zoe’s existence feels very monotonous and lonely.

The filmmaker, Jacquelyn Mills, takes the filmmaking to similarly exhaustive levels. Almost everything is shot using 16mm film, some of which is processed with a variety of experimental methods such as with peat, yarrow, and seaweed. Mills also pushes the soundtrack to the extreme with insect inspired melodies – literally music created to the steps of the local bugs. Both fit the subject of the documentary, as the experimental filmmaking matches Zoe’s own scientific experiments. However, the experimenting feels too exhaustive. There’s so much experimenting, it feels like the point of the experiments in the first place has been forgotten.

There’s a moment near the end of Geographies of Solitude in which Zoe questions the meaning of her own life. Her answer is a little melancholic as she seems to express doubt about her choice to live on the island for 40 years. She wonders if she’s stretched her life too long on the island and spent too much time away from everything else. The film feels a bit similar. The filmmakers have gone to extraordinary levels to make something unique – soaking film in peat and making music from bugs, but like Zoe’s endless logging, what is the point. Despite the beautiful location and beautiful shots, Geographies of Solitude is imbued with a melancholy for the futility of it all.


Head to our AFI Fest 2022 Hub for more reviews from AFI Fest 2022.