News Analysis India

Tag: Cinema Without Borders

  • Cinema without borders: Mistress America — The persistence of alienation

    Express News Service

    Noah Baumbach’s 2015 film Mistress America, is bookended by two lovely lines. It begins with Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke)—a pivotal character, narrator, and interpreter of the story—describing Brooke Cardinas (Greta Gerwig): “She would say things like—isn’t every story a story of betrayal?” Things come full circle with her parting shot and that of the film, eulogising Brooke: “Being a beacon of hope to lesser people is a lonely business.” In between spans a wacky tale about these two ordinary, whimsical women, who are soon-to-be stepsisters, the equally quirky, average folks around them and their many capricious businesses of life. What’s more, as Brooke is prone to postulate, the story they share also has to do with treachery and deception.

    Google “Greta Gerwig” and you are likely to find your screens turning the right shade of bright pink with the hype and hoopla around the much-anticipated release of her big-ticket directorial venture Barbie, this Friday. She has co-written it with the filmmaker, and her partner, Baumbach. Perfect time then to visit one of their earlier screenwriting collaborations.

    However, unlike the deliberately extravagant Barbie, Mistress America feels resolutely muted and indie-spirited and fittingly opened at the Sundance Film Festival. Not much transpires in it by way of action but a lot happens through interminable, winding conversations, one leading to the next. The entire film is structured around the chatter of its dramatis personae. 

    Mistress America Tracy is unable to adjust well in Barnard College and feels lonely amid snobbish fellow students at Columbia University. On her mother’s advice, she reaches out to Brooke hoping that the one with a life in New York will help her feel at home in the city. Tracy is 18, and Brooke is 30, both are in search of their true selves and have a future in common—their parents are about to get married to each other. Brooke isn’t just fun; she also inspires Tracy, the author in search of a compelling character, to write a story for the college literary magazine. But without Brooke being privy to the fact that her protagonist draws a lot from her.

    Meanwhile, when Brooke’s boyfriend withdraws financial support for her dream restaurant project, she along with Tracy, her collegemate Tony and his jealous, suspicious girlfriend Nicolette, travel to Connecticut to meet Mamie Claire, who had, in the past, stolen a T-Shirt business idea of Brooke’s and her cat and fiancée as well. They crash her Faulkner reading party for pregnant women and later pitch to attract investment from her and her husband Dylan, but not quite successfully. Things come to a head when Tracy’s secret story gets spotlighted much to Brooke’s offence. It’s back to square one with Tracy just as ill at ease in her world and Brooke trying another new move in life to find herself. The persistence of alienation continues.

    Gerwig and Baumbach fashion an interesting bunch of edgy characters that are in a state of constant formation, with a defined core to them. There are no arrivals in their journeys. Since these are inner quests of life rather than outward strolls, it’s words that help spell out the individual drifts. A trifle self-aware and indulgent at times, especially in articulating the engagement with and selling away of oneself on social media— “must we document ourselves all the time”—the film is sparkling with wit in most instances, especially in underlining the kookiness of individuals.

    The camera feels like the proverbial fly on the wall, the filming is improvised, and the situations and performances have a natural and impromptu touch. You come out feeling a lot for Gerwig as Brooke, the so-called “last cowboy who is all romance and failure”. Now whether Margot Robbie does the same for the audience in Barbie as the imperfect doll on a journey to self-discovery in the human world.

    Cinema Without  BordersIn this weekly column, the writer explores the  non-Indian films that are making the right noises across the globe. This week, we talk about  Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America 

    Noah Baumbach’s 2015 film Mistress America, is bookended by two lovely lines. It begins with Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke)—a pivotal character, narrator, and interpreter of the story—describing Brooke Cardinas (Greta Gerwig): “She would say things like—isn’t every story a story of betrayal?” Things come full circle with her parting shot and that of the film, eulogising Brooke: “Being a beacon of hope to lesser people is a lonely business.” In between spans a wacky tale about these two ordinary, whimsical women, who are soon-to-be stepsisters, the equally quirky, average folks around them and their many capricious businesses of life. What’s more, as Brooke is prone to postulate, the story they share also has to do with treachery and deception.

    Google “Greta Gerwig” and you are likely to find your screens turning the right shade of bright pink with the hype and hoopla around the much-anticipated release of her big-ticket directorial venture Barbie, this Friday. She has co-written it with the filmmaker, and her partner, Baumbach. Perfect time then to visit one of their earlier screenwriting collaborations.

    However, unlike the deliberately extravagant Barbie, Mistress America feels resolutely muted and indie-spirited and fittingly opened at the Sundance Film Festival. Not much transpires in it by way of action but a lot happens through interminable, winding conversations, one leading to the next. The entire film is structured around the chatter of its dramatis personae. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    Mistress America Tracy is unable to adjust well in Barnard College and feels lonely amid snobbish fellow students at Columbia University. On her mother’s advice, she reaches out to Brooke hoping that the one with a life in New York will help her feel at home in the city. Tracy is 18, and Brooke is 30, both are in search of their true selves and have a future in common—their parents are about to get married to each other. Brooke isn’t just fun; she also inspires Tracy, the author in search of a compelling character, to write a story for the college literary magazine. But without Brooke being privy to the fact that her protagonist draws a lot from her.

    Meanwhile, when Brooke’s boyfriend withdraws financial support for her dream restaurant project, she along with Tracy, her collegemate Tony and his jealous, suspicious girlfriend Nicolette, travel to Connecticut to meet Mamie Claire, who had, in the past, stolen a T-Shirt business idea of Brooke’s and her cat and fiancée as well. They crash her Faulkner reading party for pregnant women and later pitch to attract investment from her and her husband Dylan, but not quite successfully. Things come to a head when Tracy’s secret story gets spotlighted much to Brooke’s offence. It’s back to square one with Tracy just as ill at ease in her world and Brooke trying another new move in life to find herself. The persistence of alienation continues.

    Gerwig and Baumbach fashion an interesting bunch of edgy characters that are in a state of constant formation, with a defined core to them. There are no arrivals in their journeys. Since these are inner quests of life rather than outward strolls, it’s words that help spell out the individual drifts. A trifle self-aware and indulgent at times, especially in articulating the engagement with and selling away of oneself on social media— “must we document ourselves all the time”—the film is sparkling with wit in most instances, especially in underlining the kookiness of individuals.

    The camera feels like the proverbial fly on the wall, the filming is improvised, and the situations and performances have a natural and impromptu touch. You come out feeling a lot for Gerwig as Brooke, the so-called “last cowboy who is all romance and failure”. Now whether Margot Robbie does the same for the audience in Barbie as the imperfect doll on a journey to self-discovery in the human world.

    Cinema Without  BordersIn this weekly column, the writer explores the  non-Indian films that are making the right
     noises across the globe. This week, we talk about  Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America 

  • Cinema without borders: Home, hope, and healing Riceboy Sleeps

    Express News Service

    There’s something heartachingly delightful and funny about the young Korean boy Dong-hyun, who has recently immigrated with his mother So-young to Canada, wanting to change his name to Michael Jordan. Who better to help him belong in an alien world than a universal icon? But the effort to blend in demands more than merely acquiring a Western tag. Like a shift from a lunch box of bibimbap to a pack of sandwiches. Then there are also bits about himself that he can’t quite change: his appearance, for instance.

    Riceboy Sleeps, Canadian filmmaker Anthony Shim’s second feature film is loosely based on his own childhood experience of moving with his family from Seoul to a Vancouver suburb. It faithfully showcases the essential immigrant reality of many but also movingly layers it with distinctive subtexts of orphaning, illegitimacy, and persistence of loss, unique to the mother-son duo. So-young is a survivor. Having never known her parents, she has grown up in various orphanages. When she loses her partner and their lovechild is denied citizenship in his own country, she decides to make a final move to secure him a better life in Canada.

    There’s as much to identify with their attempts to integrate as there is with their assertion of their identity and culture. The Korean lunch might get dumped in the bin in school to escape the barbs of fellow students, but Dong-hyun will still relish Kimchi for dinner at home. A co-worker’s offensive gesture is rightfully met with a fiery threat from So-young: “You don’t touch me or I’ll kill you”. She is similarly aggressive in fighting racism at her son’s school. She wants her son to fight for himself and not to cry, a sign of weakness, she says. 

    Despite these conflicts, she brings up the boy in a personal bubble, never quite answering why he doesn’t have a dad. A class on ancestry and family history and a quote from Maya Angelou—If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going—brings the question of ancestry into focus, pushing the mother and son to take a trip back to their roots in Korea. Much of Riceboy Sleeps is eminently predictable, you can anticipate life throwing a curveball at the mother-son duo. However, Shim makes it work with his low-key, subdued narrative and languorous, long takes. He sides with sensitivity rather than sentimentality. Much as you fear the isolation and loneliness of the two, the journey back home to Korea becomes one of healing and hope.

    Despite the cultural specificities, Riceboy Sleeps is also universal at its core. So-young’s experience of single parenthood would be relatable to someone from any culture. How she worries for him even in her own worst moments tugs at your heartstrings. Much as she is the guardian and figure of authority, there’s also a sense of respect in dealing with the child. Shim’s vision is wonderfully realized by the accomplished cast, especially Choi Seung-yoon who, as So-young, is a picture of strength in her fragility, elegance in her ferociousness, tender even when angry. Her fortitude and stoicism despite the unfairness of life lend her persona a tragic dimension.

    Riceboy Sleeps joins the list of South Korean migrant narratives in cinema that began catching the world’s eye a couple of years back with Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and are back in the spotlight now with Celine Song’s Past Lives. All of them tell distinct stories of individual relationships and families in their own unique way, all of them make one wonder about what and where is home and all are similarly imbued with strains of compassion, grace, and gentleness. A genre powered by poignancy.

    There’s something heartachingly delightful and funny about the young Korean boy Dong-hyun, who has recently immigrated with his mother So-young to Canada, wanting to change his name to Michael Jordan. Who better to help him belong in an alien world than a universal icon? But the effort to blend in demands more than merely acquiring a Western tag. Like a shift from a lunch box of bibimbap to a pack of sandwiches. Then there are also bits about himself that he can’t quite change: his appearance, for instance.

    Riceboy Sleeps, Canadian filmmaker Anthony Shim’s second feature film is loosely based on his own childhood experience of moving with his family from Seoul to a Vancouver suburb. It faithfully showcases the essential immigrant reality of many but also movingly layers it with distinctive subtexts of orphaning, illegitimacy, and persistence of loss, unique to the mother-son duo. So-young is a survivor. Having never known her parents, she has grown up in various orphanages. When she loses her partner and their lovechild is denied citizenship in his own country, she decides to make a final move to secure him a better life in Canada.

    There’s as much to identify with their attempts to integrate as there is with their assertion of their identity and culture. The Korean lunch might get dumped in the bin in school to escape the barbs of fellow students, but Dong-hyun will still relish Kimchi for dinner at home. A co-worker’s offensive gesture is rightfully met with a fiery threat from So-young: “You don’t touch me or I’ll kill you”. She is similarly aggressive in fighting racism at her son’s school. She wants her son to fight for himself and not to cry, a sign of weakness, she says. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    Despite these conflicts, she brings up the boy in a personal bubble, never quite answering why he doesn’t have a dad. A class on ancestry and family history and a quote from Maya Angelou—If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going—brings the question of ancestry into focus, pushing the mother and son to take a trip back to their roots in Korea. Much of Riceboy Sleeps is eminently predictable, you can anticipate life throwing a curveball at the mother-son duo. However, Shim makes it work with his low-key, subdued narrative and languorous, long takes. He sides with sensitivity rather than sentimentality. Much as you fear the isolation and loneliness of the two, the journey back home to Korea becomes one of healing and hope.

    Despite the cultural specificities, Riceboy Sleeps is also universal at its core. So-young’s experience of single parenthood would be relatable to someone from any culture. How she worries for him even in her own worst moments tugs at your heartstrings. Much as she is the guardian and figure of authority, there’s also a sense of respect in dealing with the child. Shim’s vision is wonderfully realized by the accomplished cast, especially Choi Seung-yoon who, as So-young, is a picture of strength in her fragility, elegance in her ferociousness, tender even when angry. Her fortitude and stoicism despite the unfairness of life lend her persona a tragic dimension.

    Riceboy Sleeps joins the list of South Korean migrant narratives in cinema that began catching the world’s eye a couple of years back with Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and are back in the spotlight now with Celine Song’s Past Lives. All of them tell distinct stories of individual relationships and families in their own unique way, all of them make one wonder about what and where is home and all are similarly imbued with strains of compassion, grace, and gentleness. A genre powered by poignancy.

  • Cinema without borders: Final call for solidarity

    Express News Service

    It doesn’t take long for Ken Loach to underline the fact that the two warring factions we witness at the very start of his new film The Old Oak are two sides of the same coin. On one end, we have the residents of a down-and-out, unnamed village in the northeastern UK and on the other end, we have the Syrian refugees given shelter in the unoccupied homes in the village.

    The mining village had seen more prosperous times till the colliery accidents, strikes, and administrative apathy towards the workers gradually reduced it to a ghost town. Ignored and unaccounted for, its people are angry and frustrated at their present condition while being hopeless and cynical of their future. The tired and frightened Syrians, fleeing the war and violence at home, are trying to build a new home from scratch in a country and culture that’s alien to them. However, even while the villagers and the Syrian refugees express their inner struggles through persistent conflicts with each other, both are united in having faced enormous losses.

    It’s the local pub The Old Oak, the only community space left, that becomes a site for their traumas—personal as well as collective—to find a release. Its present-day shabby glory and the precariously dangling letter K on the signboard are symbolic of the perilous state of the town and the many insecurities in the lives of its people. It represents a way of life that is gone forever, a place lost to over 30 years of steady neglect. The disintegration of the outer world and the sense of inner desperation and despair of its people, go hand in hand. Loach is sympathetic as he goes about explaining the socio-economic-political realities with a documentarian’s attention to detail and an activist’s zeal for change. He doesn’t turn the xenophobic locals into outright villains even when they complain about their village becoming a “dumping ground” for “parasites”. He sees a possibility of reform.

    The filmmaker understands that it’s hatred borne out of fear for one’s own well-being than any real anger against the other. Instead, Loach’s reproach and indictment are targeted at the government. He is optimistic when it comes to people themselves. The pub owner’s (Dave Turner) friendship with young Yara (Ebla Mari), a passionate photographer, holds the promise of healing and restoration. Like them, the two communities might come together someday and forge strong ties. The backroom of the pub, locked for twenty years, becomes a place to cook and share free community meals. As someone from the group chimes, “Sometimes in life, there is no need for words, only food”. Loach sees individuals as the ones with the power and confidence to turn things around with unity, compassion and community spirit. Too idealistic? Misplaced? Perhaps.

    The Old Oak does get lumbering, didactic and a bit too on the nose with its messaging. The simplistic, naive finale tugs at the heartstrings and plays with the audience’s emotions in a cringingly obvious manner. However, strangely it leaves you utterly affected even when you are fully aware of your feelings being manipulated.  

    86-year-old Loach’s 14th film to feature In Competition at Cannes Film Festival might be one of his lesser works but that less is still a lot more than what we usually see most at the cinemas. Supposedly his last film, The Old Oak is a fitting final call for solidarity from a filmmaker who has stood steadily with the poor, downtrodden and deprived all through with his remarkable body of work. 

    Film: The Old Oak

    It doesn’t take long for Ken Loach to underline the fact that the two warring factions we witness at the very start of his new film The Old Oak are two sides of the same coin. On one end, we have the residents of a down-and-out, unnamed village in the northeastern UK and on the other end, we have the Syrian refugees given shelter in the unoccupied homes in the village.

    The mining village had seen more prosperous times till the colliery accidents, strikes, and administrative apathy towards the workers gradually reduced it to a ghost town. Ignored and unaccounted for, its people are angry and frustrated at their present condition while being hopeless and cynical of their future. The tired and frightened Syrians, fleeing the war and violence at home, are trying to build a new home from scratch in a country and culture that’s alien to them. However, even while the villagers and the Syrian refugees express their inner struggles through persistent conflicts with each other, both are united in having faced enormous losses.

    It’s the local pub The Old Oak, the only community space left, that becomes a site for their traumas—personal as well as collective—to find a release. Its present-day shabby glory and the precariously dangling letter K on the signboard are symbolic of the perilous state of the town and the many insecurities in the lives of its people. It represents a way of life that is gone forever, a place lost to over 30 years of steady neglect. The disintegration of the outer world and the sense of inner desperation and despair of its people, go hand in hand. Loach is sympathetic as he goes about explaining the socio-economic-political realities with a documentarian’s attention to detail and an activist’s zeal for change. He doesn’t turn the xenophobic locals into outright villains even when they complain about their village becoming a “dumping ground” for “parasites”. He sees a possibility of reform.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    The filmmaker understands that it’s hatred borne out of fear for one’s own well-being than any real anger against the other. Instead, Loach’s reproach and indictment are targeted at the government. He is optimistic when it comes to people themselves. The pub owner’s (Dave Turner) friendship with young Yara (Ebla Mari), a passionate photographer, holds the promise of healing and restoration. Like them, the two communities might come together someday and forge strong ties. The backroom of the pub, locked for twenty years, becomes a place to cook and share free community meals. As someone from the group chimes, “Sometimes in life, there is no need for words, only food”. Loach sees individuals as the ones with the power and confidence to turn things around with unity, compassion and community spirit. Too idealistic? Misplaced? Perhaps.

    The Old Oak does get lumbering, didactic and a bit too on the nose with its messaging. The simplistic, naive finale tugs at the heartstrings and plays with the audience’s emotions in a cringingly obvious manner. However, strangely it leaves you utterly affected even when you are fully aware of your feelings being manipulated.  

    86-year-old Loach’s 14th film to feature In Competition at Cannes Film Festival might be one of his lesser works but that less is still a lot more than what we usually see most at the cinemas. Supposedly his last film, The Old Oak is a fitting final call for solidarity from a filmmaker who has stood steadily with the poor, downtrodden and deprived all through with his remarkable body of work. 

    Film: The Old Oak

  • Make love, not war: Cinema without borders introduces ‘Fallen Leaves’

    Express News Service

    Ansa and Holappa have just come out of their first movie date at the Ritz theatre. How did she like the film, he asks her. “I never laughed so much,” she says. Ansa (Alma Poysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are the protagonists in Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki’s new film Fallen Leaves which premiered in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film under discussion within the film is Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die that, incidentally, was the opening film at Cannes in 2019.

    Later, outside the theatre, standing by the poster of David Lean’s 1945 classic, Brief Encounter, Holappa tells Ansa that he doesn’t even know her name. “I’ll tell you next time,” she says, scribbling her phone number on a piece of paper. Time spent well together at the movies holds the promise of another date.

    “In a crooked little town, they were lost and never found. Fallen leaves, fallen leaves, fallen leaves on the ground”—the opening lines of the popular song Fallen Leaves by Canadian rock band Billy Talent could well be a description of Ansa and Holappa—single, lonely, cast adrift in Helsinki. She works in the supermarket and, later, sorts out plastic to make a living.

    He is also from the working class, an alcoholic. Both are seeking love yet unsure of it, hesitant about giving in to it. An accidental meeting throws a possibility at them of finding companionship in each other. Will love find a way to them? Or will it be another lost chance? What follows is a tale of a relationship taking a wrong turn because of a lost piece of paper and an unforeseen mishap. Is romance impossible for them, like it was for Laura and Alec in Brief Encounter?

    Fallen Leaves might feel like a very simple and straightforward film on paper, and it truly is, but in a good way. There are the poker-faced characters, their banal routines, the automated existence finding release in alcohol, cigarettes and karaoke. It is matched by the film’s own formal, staccato rhythm and aesthetic minimalism. However, the invocation of solitariness is not entirely marked by sadness. Then there are sudden, brilliant bursts of characteristic Scandinavian deadpan humour that make you smile. Like a macho singer at the karaoke reminding that “tough guys don’t sing”. Or two cinephiles discussing Jarmusch’s film in the same breath as Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson.

    Love might be reticent in Kaurismaki’s world but not entirely absent. It comes home to Ansa in the form of a stray, who she names Chaplin. Dogs after all are unconditionally giving where humans stay woefully stingy with emotions. Incidentally, the mutt who played Chaplin won the Grand Jury prize in Palm Dog, the independent canine competition at Cannes, even as the film itself won the jury prize in the official competition section.

    Like the filmmaking itself, the romance might feel spartan but eventually turns out rich, beautiful and affirming with the deceptively easy but fabulously synergistic performances from Poysti and Vatanen. And more so with Kaurismaki’s thoughtful and thought-through homages to Cinema. The radio broadcast of the Russian aggression in Ukraine forms a permanent soundtrack in the film as much as Kaurismaki’s pick of his own favourite songs. The choice of music along with Jarmusch’s film on the zombie apocalypse becomes emblematic of the larger catastrophes and devastation in the real world.

    Ansa and Holappa’s concerted search for love then is like a counter-dote. The two might be in need of it but so is the world at large, more now than ever before. Kaurismaki fashions a gentle, profound, hopeful cinematic gem about the human condition in Fallen Leaves that is of the times yet timeless.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film:  Fallen Leaves

    Ansa and Holappa have just come out of their first movie date at the Ritz theatre. How did she like the film, he asks her. “I never laughed so much,” she says. Ansa (Alma Poysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are the protagonists in Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki’s new film Fallen Leaves which premiered in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film under discussion within the film is Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die that, incidentally, was the opening film at Cannes 
    in 2019.

    Later, outside the theatre, standing by the poster of David Lean’s 1945 classic, Brief Encounter, Holappa tells Ansa that he doesn’t even know her name. “I’ll tell you next time,” she says, scribbling her phone number on a piece of paper. Time spent well together at the movies holds the promise of another date.

    “In a crooked little town, they were lost and never found. Fallen leaves, fallen leaves, fallen leaves on the ground”—the opening lines of the popular song Fallen Leaves by Canadian rock band Billy Talent could well be a description of Ansa and Holappa—single, lonely, cast adrift in Helsinki. She works in the supermarket and, later, sorts out plastic to make a living.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    He is also from the working class, an alcoholic. Both are seeking love yet unsure of it, hesitant about giving in to it. An accidental meeting throws a possibility at them of finding companionship in each other. Will love find a way to them? Or will it be another lost chance? What follows is a tale of a relationship taking a wrong turn because of a lost piece of paper and an unforeseen mishap. Is romance impossible for them, like it was for Laura and Alec in Brief Encounter?

    Fallen Leaves might feel like a very simple and straightforward film on paper, and it truly is, but in a good way. There are the poker-faced characters, their banal routines, the automated existence finding release in alcohol, cigarettes and karaoke. It is matched by the film’s own formal, staccato rhythm and aesthetic minimalism. However, the invocation of solitariness is not entirely marked by sadness. Then there are sudden, brilliant bursts of characteristic Scandinavian deadpan humour that make you smile. Like a macho singer at the karaoke reminding that “tough guys don’t sing”. Or two cinephiles discussing Jarmusch’s film in the same breath as Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson.

    Love might be reticent in Kaurismaki’s world but not entirely absent. It comes home to Ansa in the form of a stray, who she names Chaplin. Dogs after all are unconditionally giving where humans stay woefully stingy with emotions. Incidentally, the mutt who played Chaplin won the Grand Jury prize in Palm Dog, the independent canine competition at Cannes, even as the film itself won the jury prize in the official competition section.

    Like the filmmaking itself, the romance might feel spartan but eventually turns out rich, beautiful and affirming with the deceptively easy but fabulously synergistic performances from Poysti and Vatanen. And more so with Kaurismaki’s thoughtful and thought-through homages to Cinema. The radio broadcast of the Russian aggression in Ukraine forms a permanent soundtrack in the film as much as Kaurismaki’s pick of his own favourite songs. The choice of music along with Jarmusch’s film on the zombie apocalypse becomes emblematic of the larger catastrophes and devastation in the real world.

    Ansa and Holappa’s concerted search for love then is like a counter-dote. The two might be in need of it but so is the world at large, more now than ever before. Kaurismaki fashions a gentle, profound, hopeful cinematic gem about the human condition in Fallen Leaves that is of the times yet timeless.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film:  Fallen Leaves

  •  Of continuities in the end

    Express News Service

    The worst of horror often lurks in the banal daily rhythms of life, in its essential evanescence and unpredictability, interrupted by tragedies that come unannounced. But then can you ever be fully prepared for misfortunes and mishaps even when you can see them coming?

    Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada’s Love Life, which premiered in Venice, gave me the scariest moment at the movies in recent times. Its memory still sends a chill down the spine more so because Fukada creates it on screen ever so quietly, gently, and stealthily. It breaks the heart of the audience just as it shatters the characters on screen. But Fukada doesn’t rest at that. The bolt out of the blue also marks a seismic shift (quite like the passing earthquake shown in the film) in certain relationships, marriages, and family dynamics.

    Taeko (Fumino Kimura) is happily (seemingly so) married to Jiro (Kento Nagayama) who regards her son from the first marriage, Keita (Tetsuta Shimada), as his own. While her father-in-law dislikes Taeko, the mother-in-law (Misuzu Kanno) longs for the couple to have another child. Her own personal grandkid so to speak. A celebration in the family leads to an unforeseen loss and grief. It also makes the past come back to haunt the present as Taeko’s former husband—deaf, decrepit vagabond Park (Atom Sunada)—returns to her. It puts emotions in a tizzy and relationships in a spin.

    At first, Park seems to add another layer of distress and awkwardness for the family in mourning but gradually becomes a device through which Fukada delves into the themes of guilt, responsibility, fidelity, abandonment, and betrayal. Taeko decides to take care of him, despite his trespasses, to atone for what she thinks are her own errors and lapses. So, what initially seems like the end of the road becomes, for her, the beginning of a new journey through penance to a possible redemption.

    But, in doing so, isn’t she overlooking and shutting herself off from the many knots that are beleaguering her marriage with Jiro? There’s a lot that is complicated and unresolved in it, what with Jiro afflicted with his own demons from the past. Fukada brings the growing estrangement in a marriage under the scanner in a way that is acutely observational yet politely distant at the same time. He is masterful in pivoting the narrative on such contradictions—the immense turmoil inherent in the situation is evoked with a touch of placidity in the tone and tenor. The searing is encased in the soft, the morbid underlined with the mellow. It helps the film steer clear of sentimentality and gain poignancy and profundity.

    A similar contrariety marks other aspects of his filmmaking as well—the feverish action in the background playing off against the stillness of the foreground or the hubbub amid friends, family and neighbours as opposed to the tranquillity of personal introspection. The filmmaker excels in portraying the distances creeping up between individuals despite their shared anguish. 

    Long after having watched the film a dialogue—about how there can be no safeguards against mortality—continues to haunt me: “Saving people doesn’t mean they don’t die”. Love Life encompasses this gist of human existence. And, in the face of this reality, it’s about continuity, faith, hope, healing, and rediscovering the ability to communicate, the true mileposts in the circle of life.

    The worst of horror often lurks in the banal daily rhythms of life, in its essential evanescence and unpredictability, interrupted by tragedies that come unannounced. But then can you ever be fully prepared for misfortunes and mishaps even when you can see them coming?

    Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada’s Love Life, which premiered in Venice, gave me the scariest moment at the movies in recent times. Its memory still sends a chill down the spine more so because Fukada creates it on screen ever so quietly, gently, and stealthily. It breaks the heart of the audience just as it shatters the characters on screen. But Fukada doesn’t rest at that. The bolt out of the blue also marks a seismic shift (quite like the passing earthquake shown in the film) in certain relationships, marriages, and family dynamics.

    Taeko (Fumino Kimura) is happily (seemingly so) married to Jiro (Kento Nagayama) who regards her son from the first marriage, Keita (Tetsuta Shimada), as his own. While her father-in-law dislikes Taeko, the mother-in-law (Misuzu Kanno) longs for the couple to have another child. Her own personal grandkid so to speak. A celebration in the family leads to an unforeseen loss and grief. It also makes the past come back to haunt the present as Taeko’s former husband—deaf, decrepit vagabond Park (Atom Sunada)—returns to her. It puts emotions in a tizzy and relationships in a spin.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    At first, Park seems to add another layer of distress and awkwardness for the family in mourning but gradually becomes a device through which Fukada delves into the themes of guilt, responsibility, fidelity, abandonment, and betrayal. Taeko decides to take care of him, despite his trespasses, to atone for what she thinks are her own errors and lapses. So, what initially seems like the end of the road becomes, for her, the beginning of a new journey through penance to a possible redemption.

    But, in doing so, isn’t she overlooking and shutting herself off from the many knots that are beleaguering her marriage with Jiro? There’s a lot that is complicated and unresolved in it, what with Jiro afflicted with his own demons from the past. Fukada brings the growing estrangement in a marriage under the scanner in a way that is acutely observational yet politely distant at the same time. He is masterful in pivoting the narrative on such contradictions—the immense turmoil inherent in the situation is evoked with a touch of placidity in the tone and tenor. The searing is encased in the soft, the morbid underlined with the mellow. It helps the film steer clear of sentimentality and gain poignancy and profundity.

    A similar contrariety marks other aspects of his filmmaking as well—the feverish action in the background playing off against the stillness of the foreground or the hubbub amid friends, family and neighbours as opposed to the tranquillity of personal introspection. The filmmaker excels in portraying the distances creeping up between individuals despite their shared anguish. 

    Long after having watched the film a dialogue—about how there can be no safeguards against mortality—continues to haunt me: “Saving people doesn’t mean they don’t die”. Love Life encompasses this gist of human existence. And, in the face of this reality, it’s about continuity, faith, hope, healing, and rediscovering the ability to communicate, the true mileposts in the circle of life.

  • ‘No Bears’ review: The filmmaker who wouldn’t flee

    Express News Service

    Two days after he went on a hunger strike, auteur Jafar Panahi was released from captivity in Iran on February 3. He had been sentenced to six-year imprisonment in July 2022 on charges of propaganda against the regime. Interestingly, Panahi’s most recent work No Bears was completed in May 2022, just before his arrest. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize.

    You can’t separate Panahi’s cinema from his politics. So, in the case of reel approximating the real, the film examines complex ideological, moral and ethical issues about freedom and responsibility in filmmaking. But Panahi does so in his characteristic open-ended, philosophical manner. A film that sets the audience thinking, alongside its ruminating maker, without offering any easy answers to the many questions nor any instant solutions for the pressing problems.

    Panahi plays a fictional version of himself in the film, living in the far-flung town of Joban so that he can be close to his crew that is shooting a film across the border in Turkey under his remote instructions. His assistant director delivers the hard disk of the rushes back to him to edit even while surreptitiously taking him location scouting. Ironically, the film being shot within the film is itself a kind of hybrid, docu-fiction about two real-life lovers trying to flee the oppressive country by securing fake passports to France.

    Meanwhile, in the parallel narrative track, the photograph of a young couple that Panahi is alleged to have taken while filming at random in the village finds him in the eye of the storm. The village lovers want to elope from their superstitious, regressive world what with the girl being forced to marry the guy she was betrothed to as a newborn at the time of her umbilical cord-cutting ceremony. The conservative villagers want the incriminating evidence against them to pin them down. Unfortunately, both stories don’t quite meet the desired happy end.

    The border then becomes an emblem for curbs of all kinds—institutional, political, societal, and artistic. It seems as easy as it is tough to cross it. There is as much a social commentary on the constraints imposed by the polity as against the authoritarianism rooted in the fractured Iranian society.

    But Panahi doesn’t become caustic. There’s humour, humanity, curiosity and affection with which he looks at the innocent but conventional villagers. Quite like his recent work Closed Curtain, Taxi, and 3 Faces, No Bears was also made secretly in the face of the ongoing ban. Bear becomes a metaphor for fear. The filmmaker is not frightened of any dire forces. But he is also not willing to flee the consequences of his attempts at truth-telling.

    In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban was imposed on him against directing or writing any movies.On getting released from the prison, Panahi is reported to have said: “I look behind me and there are so many students, teachers, workers, lawyers, activists still in there. How can I say I’m happy.” Just like his counterpart on screen, Panahi has no bears to be scared of. He will speak his truth whatever the repercussions. No Bears will be brought to Indian screens by Impact Films.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you  to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film: No Bears

    Two days after he went on a hunger strike, auteur Jafar Panahi was released from captivity in Iran on February 3. He had been sentenced to six-year imprisonment in July 2022 on charges of propaganda against the regime. Interestingly, Panahi’s most recent work No Bears was completed in May 2022, just before his arrest. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize.

    You can’t separate Panahi’s cinema from his politics. So, in the case of reel approximating the real, the film examines complex ideological, moral and ethical issues about freedom and responsibility in filmmaking. But Panahi does so in his characteristic open-ended, philosophical manner. A film that sets the audience thinking, alongside its ruminating maker, without offering any easy answers to the many questions nor any instant solutions for the pressing problems.

    Panahi plays a fictional version of himself in the film, living in the far-flung town of Joban so that he can be close to his crew that is shooting a film across the border in Turkey under his remote instructions. His assistant director delivers the hard disk of the rushes back to him to edit even while surreptitiously taking him location scouting. Ironically, the film being shot within the film is itself a kind of hybrid, docu-fiction about two real-life lovers trying to flee the oppressive country by securing fake passports to France.

    Meanwhile, in the parallel narrative track, the photograph of a young couple that Panahi is alleged to have taken while filming at random in the village finds him in the eye of the storm. The village lovers want to elope from their superstitious, regressive world what with the girl being forced to marry the guy she was betrothed to as a newborn at the time of her umbilical cord-cutting ceremony. The conservative villagers want the incriminating evidence against them to pin them down. Unfortunately, both stories don’t quite meet the desired happy end.

    The border then becomes an emblem for curbs of all kinds—institutional, political, societal, and artistic. It seems as easy as it is tough to cross it. There is as much a social commentary on the constraints imposed by the polity as against the authoritarianism rooted in the fractured Iranian society.

    But Panahi doesn’t become caustic. There’s humour, humanity, curiosity and affection with which he looks at the innocent but conventional villagers. Quite like his recent work Closed Curtain, Taxi, and 3 Faces, No Bears was also made secretly in the face of the ongoing ban. Bear becomes a metaphor for fear. The filmmaker is not frightened of any dire forces. But he is also not willing to flee the consequences of his attempts at truth-telling.

    In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban was imposed on him against directing or writing any movies.On getting released from the prison, Panahi is reported to have said: “I look behind me and there are so many students, teachers, workers, lawyers, activists still in there. How can I say I’m happy.” Just like his counterpart on screen, Panahi has no bears to be scared of. He will speak his truth whatever the repercussions. No Bears will be brought to Indian screens by Impact Films.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you  to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film: No Bears

  • Cinema Without Borders: A place in the mind

    Express News Service

    Fremont in California is known for its proximity to Silicon Valley. It is also known for being home to Afghan immigrants. In Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali’s Fremont, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, it becomes a place in the mind. Fremont is the feverish inner world of the refugees, squaring up with the trauma of displacement, searching for belongingness away from home, and trying to strike new roots in fresh soil.

    Jalali locates a community’s anguish in the stolid presence of its stricken people. He renders it specifically from the standpoint of a young woman Donya (played by a real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada), once a translator for the US army in Kabul, now working in a Chinese-American fortune cookie-making factory where she is given the onerous task to write fortune messages.

    Her droll presence, and a circumscribed daily life, far from blunting or obviating the human tragedy that she is a part of, lend it a singular poignancy. In much the same way Jalali’s stylistic choices, the black and white palette, beguiling characters, terse, muted narrative punctuated with meaningful moments and an atypical, unpredictable way of addressing the immigrant crisis don’t turn his work slight or insignificant.

    There is deep despair in Donya’s persistent request for sleeping pills from her therapist. Just as the prosaic mentions of visits to the psychiatrist by other residents of her Afghan cluster are enough to hint at the enormity of their shared mental injuries and pain. They all seem to be living in a pandemic of insomnia fueled by the guilt of having left their near and dear ones behind, wallowing in the feeling of being a traitor to the family, country, and fellow countrymen and unable to stop worrying about them despite trying out the available distractions like the television soap operas. Yet the film has a delicate way of easing off, if not entirely erasing the communal remorse.

    Is it normal to think about love when Kabul is burning, wonders Donya. So long as her beautiful heart is willing to bear the burden of suffering, it’s her right to fall in love, she is told. It’s these ghosts that Donya is haunted by that also give her an edge. Her Chinese-American employer values her for her quiet, unresolved memories. “People with memories write beautifully,” he says.

    One of the residents, Salim (Siddique Ahmed), tells Donya how the stars on his window back in Afghanistan were static, fixed, while in the US they aren’t constant. “How do people feel safe in a place where the stars change so much?” he questions. The irony couldn’t be starker, given the frailty of human life in his home country and the refuge granted in the US.

    There’s something admirable about Donya negotiating her own way out of the emotional deadlock, breaking out of the reality of the ghetto.  There’s an awareness and stoic acceptance of the situation and an effort to try and work around it. Donya must connect, and seek out companionship.The isolation, however, is not hers alone. Jalali locates it within an all-embracing loneliness, a kind of civilizational scourge.

    The brief to her for writing fortune messages is very clear—they should neither be lucky, nor unlucky; shouldn’t kindle undue hope, nor offer unending hopelessness, given the fragility and tenuousness of the lonely minds that might be reading them.

    There’s Donya’s colleague who keeps going out on blind dates just to keep meeting people. The mechanic (Jeremy Allen White) she randomly meets admits talking a lot when he gets those rare, sporadic chances to be with others, in one shot crystallizing the alienation at the heart of Fremont. But is solitariness such an abnormal feeling? Wouldn’t it be odd if people never felt lonely?

    All characters in the film are kindred spirits, who, as Donya would put it, are “desperate for dreams”. Life in Fremont is like a dance in which humans are frantically seeking other fellow beings to jive with. But a dance that is wistful and quaint than sprightly.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film: Fremont

    Fremont in California is known for its proximity to Silicon Valley. It is also known for being home to Afghan immigrants. In Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali’s Fremont, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, it becomes a place in the mind. Fremont is the feverish inner world of the refugees, squaring up with the trauma of displacement, searching for belongingness away from home, and trying to strike new roots in fresh soil.

    Jalali locates a community’s anguish in the stolid presence of its stricken people. He renders it specifically from the standpoint of a young woman Donya (played by a real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada), once a translator for the US army in Kabul, now working in a Chinese-American fortune cookie-making factory where she is given the onerous task to write fortune messages.

    Her droll presence, and a circumscribed daily life, far from blunting or obviating the human tragedy that she is a part of, lend it a singular poignancy. In much the same way Jalali’s stylistic choices, the black and white palette, beguiling characters, terse, muted narrative punctuated with meaningful moments and an atypical, unpredictable way of addressing the immigrant crisis don’t turn his work slight or insignificant.

    There is deep despair in Donya’s persistent request for sleeping pills from her therapist. Just as the prosaic mentions of visits to the psychiatrist by other residents of her Afghan cluster are enough to hint at the enormity of their shared mental injuries and pain. They all seem to be living in a pandemic of insomnia fueled by the guilt of having left their near and dear ones behind, wallowing in the feeling of being a traitor to the family, country, and fellow countrymen and unable to stop worrying about them despite trying out the available distractions like the television soap operas. Yet the film has a delicate way of easing off, if not entirely erasing the communal remorse.

    Is it normal to think about love when Kabul is burning, wonders Donya. So long as her beautiful heart is willing to bear the burden of suffering, it’s her right to fall in love, she is told. It’s these ghosts that Donya is haunted by that also give her an edge. Her Chinese-American employer values her for her quiet, unresolved memories. “People with memories write beautifully,” he says.

    One of the residents, Salim (Siddique Ahmed), tells Donya how the stars on his window back in Afghanistan were static, fixed, while in the US they aren’t constant. “How do people feel safe in a place where the stars change so much?” he questions. The irony couldn’t be starker, given the frailty of human life in his home country and the refuge granted in the US.

    There’s something admirable about Donya negotiating her own way out of the emotional deadlock, breaking out of the reality of the ghetto.  There’s an awareness and stoic acceptance of the situation and an effort to try and work around it. Donya must connect, and seek out companionship.The isolation, however, is not hers alone. Jalali locates it within an all-embracing loneliness, a kind of civilizational scourge.

    The brief to her for writing fortune messages is very clear—they should neither be lucky, nor unlucky; shouldn’t kindle undue hope, nor offer unending hopelessness, given the fragility and tenuousness of the lonely minds that might be reading them.

    There’s Donya’s colleague who keeps going out on blind dates just to keep meeting people. The mechanic (Jeremy Allen White) she randomly meets admits talking a lot when he gets those rare, sporadic chances to be with others, in one shot crystallizing the alienation at the heart of Fremont. But is solitariness such an abnormal feeling? Wouldn’t it be odd if people never felt lonely?

    All characters in the film are kindred spirits, who, as Donya would put it, are “desperate for dreams”. Life in Fremont is like a dance in which humans are frantically seeking other fellow beings to jive with. But a dance that is wistful and quaint than sprightly.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film: Fremont

  • ‘Cinema Without Borders’ review: A poignant testimony

    Express News Service

    Sometimes a film can acquire added significance and nuance in conjunction with another. I saw Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 just the day after having wrapped up Netflix’s Trial By Fire. On the face of it, they have very little in common despite both being based on real events. Both stories are set in different periods and places.

    While one is set in 1984-85 in the newly democratic Argentina, after the end of the military dictatorship that lasted from 1976-1983, the other captures the aftermath of Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema Fire Tragedy of June 13, 1997. But both resonate deeply in their persuasive portrayals of the vital, tenacious, protracted, and never-ending fights for justice.

    Mitre’s account of the Trial of the Juntas focuses on prosecutor Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darin) and deputy prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani) in their efforts to get the commanders of the violent military dictatorship convicted for their crimes against humanity. It is also about an entire nation, split wide open in its opinion on the issue, squaring up with its essential conscience. On the one hand is the abduction, detention, interrogation, torture, disappearance, and death of innocent citizens. On the other hand, is the assertion by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. It was all part of a necessary war against the subversive, anti-national forces funded by the foreign hand. The world seemingly pared down to two camps—“fascists” and “guerillas”.

    Mitre starts by establishing the murky times with the overwhelming sense of suspicion rife in the political space, entering even the familial zone. Strassera is wary of his daughter Veronica’s boyfriend and has his son young son Javier spy on his sister. Meanwhile, there are apprehensions about the trial remaining stuck despite the new government being in power for seven months.

    “History is not made by men like me,” says Strassera. But it’s for him to be on the right side of history by prosecuting the most important case in the history of Argentina. It has its repercussions—threatening calls, getting shadowed by moles and a persistent sense of danger against which he must stand tall. It’s tough not to admire him, his gutsy family or his deputy Ocampo who dares to go against the dominant ideology of his family at the risk of becoming a castaway.

    Mitre mixes courtroom drama with the elements of a thriller and manages to spotlight humour even in dark and dreary times. A chuckle-worthy sequence is when Strassera struggles to find any associates to work with him on the trial because ostensibly everyone has turned a “super fascist”. With older lawyers scared to be part of the trial and the bourgeoisie sympathizing with the military, he must put together a team of young, inexperienced lawyers. Apart from the case, they would also help win over the old-fashioned middle class and won’t see them as communists or human rights activists—two of the most reviled categories of citizens in its eyes.

    The selection of the young team is one of the most entertaining segments and brings the “triumph of the underdog” arc into the film. Will they be able to dig out the information that no one is willing to share to prove the systematic excesses of the commanders? Dismissed and laughed at as chicas (young girls), they eventually deliver evidence in the form of 16 volumes of 4000 pages with 709 cases and over 800 witness testimonies, literally like hitting the ball out of the park or scoring a sixer or landing a goal. However, the poignant testimonies give the film its emotional weight. Especially, a pregnant woman who was tortured and denied the right to hold the child she gave birth to in detention.

    It all comes together in the rousing closing argument of Strassera that stresses respecting memory, siding with truth and delivering peace and justice. A nation must confront its history, however problematic, to resurrect itself for the future and make a vow that, “never again” shall the grotesque deeds be repeated.

    Argentina, 1985 won the Golden Globe in the Best Picture—Non-English Language category, beating RRR, Decision to Leave, Close and All Quiet On The Western Front. The film, which opened at the Venice International Film Festival last year and is a front-runner for the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, is available worldwide on Prime Video. My only grudge is that the English dubbed version leaves the film curiously disembodied, shorn of an all-out heft and impact. It would have packed in a wallop and been better heard, understood, and heeded if it spoke in its forceful language and the strong original voice.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film: Argentina, 1985

    Sometimes a film can acquire added significance and nuance in conjunction with another. I saw Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 just the day after having wrapped up Netflix’s Trial By Fire. On the face of it, they have very little in common despite both being based on real events. Both stories are set in different periods and places.

    While one is set in 1984-85 in the newly democratic Argentina, after the end of the military dictatorship that lasted from 1976-1983, the other captures the aftermath of Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema Fire Tragedy of June 13, 1997. But both resonate deeply in their persuasive portrayals of the vital, tenacious, protracted, and never-ending fights for justice.

    Mitre’s account of the Trial of the Juntas focuses on prosecutor Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darin) and deputy prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani) in their efforts to get the commanders of the violent military dictatorship convicted for their crimes against humanity. It is also about an entire nation, split wide open in its opinion on the issue, squaring up with its essential conscience. On the one hand is the abduction, detention, interrogation, torture, disappearance, and death of innocent citizens. On the other hand, is the assertion by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. It was all part of a necessary war against the subversive, anti-national forces funded by the foreign hand. The world seemingly pared down to two camps—“fascists” and “guerillas”.

    Mitre starts by establishing the murky times with the overwhelming sense of suspicion rife in the political space, entering even the familial zone. Strassera is wary of his daughter Veronica’s boyfriend and has his son young son Javier spy on his sister. Meanwhile, there are apprehensions about the trial remaining stuck despite the new government being in power for seven months.

    “History is not made by men like me,” says Strassera. But it’s for him to be on the right side of history by prosecuting the most important case in the history of Argentina. It has its repercussions—threatening calls, getting shadowed by moles and a persistent sense of danger against which he must stand tall. It’s tough not to admire him, his gutsy family or his deputy Ocampo who dares to go against the dominant ideology of his family at the risk of becoming a castaway.

    Mitre mixes courtroom drama with the elements of a thriller and manages to spotlight humour even in dark and dreary times. A chuckle-worthy sequence is when Strassera struggles to find any associates to work with him on the trial because ostensibly everyone has turned a “super fascist”. With older lawyers scared to be part of the trial and the bourgeoisie sympathizing with the military, he must put together a team of young, inexperienced lawyers. Apart from the case, they would also help win over the old-fashioned middle class and won’t see them as communists or human rights activists—two of the most reviled categories of citizens in its eyes.

    The selection of the young team is one of the most entertaining segments and brings the “triumph of the underdog” arc into the film. Will they be able to dig out the information that no one is willing to share to prove the systematic excesses of the commanders? Dismissed and laughed at as chicas (young girls), they eventually deliver evidence in the form of 16 volumes of 4000 pages with 709 cases and over 800 witness testimonies, literally like hitting the ball out of the park or scoring a sixer or landing a goal. However, the poignant testimonies give the film its emotional weight. Especially, a pregnant woman who was tortured and denied the right to hold the child she gave birth to in detention.

    It all comes together in the rousing closing argument of Strassera that stresses respecting memory, siding with truth and delivering peace and justice. A nation must confront its history, however problematic, to resurrect itself for the future and make a vow that, “never again” shall the grotesque deeds be repeated.

    Argentina, 1985 won the Golden Globe in the Best Picture—Non-English Language category, beating RRR, Decision to Leave, Close and All Quiet On The Western Front. The film, which opened at the Venice International Film Festival last year and is a front-runner for the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, is available worldwide on Prime Video. My only grudge is that the English dubbed version leaves the film curiously disembodied, shorn of an all-out heft and impact. It would have packed in a wallop and been better heard, understood, and heeded if it spoke in its forceful language and the strong original voice.

    Cinema Without Borders

    In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world

    Film: Argentina, 1985