New Directors/New Films 2019

I also gathered early impressions of Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined, a noir-tinged investigation into the case of a missing construction worker, when it won the Golden Leopard in Locarno last summer. Two ND/NF titles won awards in Venice: Sudabeh Mortezai won the Hearst Film Award for best female filmmaker and the Europa Cinemas Label prize for best European film when Joy, the story of a young Nigerian woman forced into prostitution in Vienna, premiered in Venice Days. And Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Manta Ray, winner of the top prize in the festival’s Orizzonti section, is the story of the friendship between a Thai fisherman and a mute Rohingya refugee from Myanmar. At Slant, Joshua Minsoo Kim notes that the Thai government’s “treatment of the refugees has been deplorable—human trafficking camps and mass graves have been found—and Manta Ray functions as an oblique portrait of Aroonpheng’s anger about the situation.”

Guide to the Guides

New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott have selected eleven titles to recommend. Belonging opens with a “just-the-facts description of a murder,” notes Dargis, before writer-director Burak Cevik “flips the switch and the movie shifts into a more lyrical narrative register, one that fills in all the little nuances, most notably the intimate in-between moments that both explain and obscure so much.” One of Scott’s choices is Lila Avilés’s The Chambermaid, which sticks close to Eve (Gabriela Cartol) as she goes about her work cleaning in a high-rise hotel in Mexico City. “Our sense of exploitation and alienation is palpable,” writes Scott, “but the moments of beauty, tenderness and freedom that punctuate the drudgery provide flickers of humanity that feel almost miraculous.”

In the Notebook, Ela Bittencourt writes about three films, including Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage, a portrait of a gay hustler roaming the streets of Paris. “Not since Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) has there been a film in which the main character drifts into willful dissolution with as much abandon and panache as Léo (Félix Maritaud, BPM),” writes Bittencourt.

Slant hasn’t gathered all its ND/NF reviews under one handy link, but if you poke around, you’ll find, for example, Ed Gonzalez on Lucio Castro’s End of the Century. For Gonzalez, this decades-spanning story of a relationship between Argentinian man from New York and a Spanish man from Berlin is “a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.”

The writers at the Film Stage have covered every film in the program, and one of the most intriguing—recommended by Manohla Dargis as well—looks to be Qiu Sheng’s Suburban Birds. Two stories, both set in the same suburban landscape, seem to be running parallel to each other, even intersecting now and again, though there’s also a hint that they’re taking place in different time periods. Mark Asch suggests that “viewers shouldn’t approach this ambiguously bifurcated narrative expecting the visual ambition or narrative invention of Bi Gan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Suburban Birds is more studious—even if Qiu is a student with real promise.” The young director manages to strike a harmony between “metaphorical form and naturalistic content, and the note he hits is rich and tantalizingly unresolved.”

Meantime, IndieWire’s contributors are previewing eight “must-see” titles, and Screen Slate has opened a rolling column where fresh reviews will be appearing throughout the festival. Topping that alphabetical stack is Angelo, Markus Schleinzer’s portrait of an African slave brought to the Viennese court in the eighteenth century. Cosmo Bjorkenheim suggests that Angelo plays as if François Truffaut’s The Wild Child (1970) “were given the Haneke treatment—not surprisingly, since Schleinzer worked with him several times as casting director.” 

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