Los Angeles

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.