LFF 2015 Highlights: The Discoveries
We've already shared our Best of LFF featuring the established filmmakers, now is the turn of the six less-celebrated filmmakers who screened kickass films this year
Evolution
Dir: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Ever since writer/director Lucile Hadzihalilovic teased that she was working on an original feature over a decade ago, fans of unsettling, Gallic Gothic cinema have been waiting with baited breath. The resulting Evolution makes for a fittingly uneasy diptych with her debut Innocence (2004). Whereas Innocence brought the uncertainty of postmodern cinematography and storytelling to a traditional Female Gothic tale, Evolution is a queer science fiction body horror in the vein of Lovecraft and Cronenberg.
Nic, a young boy on the cusp of adolescence, lives a simplistic littoral life in a mysterious, austere village populated by other uniform boy/mother pairings. Haunted by the visceral sight of a dead boy’s decomposing body that Nic discovers while diving, his mother tries to console him, “The sea makes you think horrible things.” This consolation is prophetic, as Nic’s mère and la mer blur, a most disturbing vision of conception, birth and childrearing unfurls. [RB]
James White
Dir. Josh Mond
A troubled, white twenty-something New Yorker, who’s an aspiring writer, struggles to take control of his self-destructive tendencies. Based on logline alone, James White sounds like a simple rehash of storylines and character clichés that are beyond exhausted in American independent cinema. Don’t trust that preconception. Hinged on blazing, brutal performances from Christopher Abbott (best known to UK viewers as Charlie in Girls) as the eponymous lead and Cynthia Nixon as his cancer-ridden mother, this is a low-key but devastating drama with more raw authenticity to it than a hundred examples of Sundance landfill. Or, to put it another way, it's much closer in spirit and execution to John Cassavetes than Zach Braff.
Director Josh Mond, making his feature debut, has been part of the band of producers behind Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer, and his film is similarly evocative of the wild emotional states brought on by disorientating circumstances and conflicts of communication. [JS-W]
A Poem is a Naked Person
Dir. Les Blank
Between 1972 and 1974, the great documentarian Les Blank filmed the country-blues-rock musician David Russell at his recording studio on Grand Lake, Oklahoma. But this resulting movie was vaulted until this restoration efforts of Blank’s son, and is just being seen now. It’s easy to see why Russell might have been baffled and disapproving at the time. There are plenty of great tunes, but rather than a straightforward music documentary, this is a free-associative ethnography about the life and local colour of Grand Lake, of the 70s, of mankind. It seems made of the parts other documentaries would throw away, cutting from recordings and concerts to groupies backstage, neighbourhood kids playing, a swimming pool being painted, a local man eating glass, a deadly and philosophical duel between a snake and a chick, and much more. It’s a marvelous, spirited time capsule. [IM]
Son of Saul
Dir. László Nemes
László Nemes’s stunning first-person journey into the charnel houses of Auschwitz features Géza Röhrig as Saul, an inmate who sees his own son killed and takes on a mission – to get the boy buried by a rabbi. Röhrig plays a character of few words and an expressionless face – is it the trauma, or is he mentally handicapped? – and it’s that face the camera mostly stays on through Saul’s journey through the concentration camp, as hellish horrors are seen out of focus in the background or are heard on the soundtrack. The result is an immersive journey through nightmare and desperate sadness. This is a masterpiece that, while memorialising the Holocaust, also uses Saul’s futile journey to question whether we ignore present tragedies by focusing on past ones. [IM]
Tangerine
Dir. Sean Baker
"Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!" So goes the opening line of Tangerine, a single night screwball set on the West Hollywood strip that comes at you like a Jim Jarmusch movie on amphetamines.
This exchange is between Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), who are best friends, trans women, and working girls. They’re celebrating Sin-Dee’s recent emancipation over a donut when Alexandra let’s slip that Sin-Dee’s pimp/boyfriend has been cheating on her with a “real fish” (meaning, a non-trans woman). So sets off an apoplectic Sin-Dee out for revenge and a hilarious chain of events that ends before the night is through at the same crummy donut shop.
Director Sean Baker’s expressive camera (remarkably this gorgeous film was shot using iPhone 5s) keeps pace with his firecracker heroines – both non-actors – following their adventure through LA’s shimmering afternoon light. The film is so rambunctious and face-paced that you hardly notice it slip into a humanist drama just sweet enough to oust It’s a Wonderful Life from your Christmas movie rotation. [JD]
The Witch
Dir. Robert Eggers
The Witch’s closing title imbues Robert Eggers’ already tense, psychological chiller with a depth of dread that every horror film “based on a true story” can only dream about. Stating that it is based upon an archaeology of recorded 17th century folklore, liturgy and bona fide witness testimonies from witch trials, The Witch is a historical artifact of sorts. Set 60 years before the infamous Salam trials, The Witch functions both as art as a medium to process our long held traditions of cultural misogyny (this film could screen in a gallery alongside Goya’s and Fuseli’s witches) but also as a means of forcing a 21st century audience to empathise with the kind of puritan mindset that allows for a loving father to denounce his child as a witch. Diegetically lit and performed in period dialogue, The Witch’s hysterical, uncanny logic unravels to an ecstatic, divisive conclusion. [RB]