Second Look

Adapting Joseph Conrad’s 1895 debut novel, Akerman shifts the focus to Nina (Aurora Marion), the mixed-race daughter of Almayer (Stanislas Merhar), a Dutch trader in Malaysia. “A lush yet fragmented tale of colonialism, one could mistake it for the work of Claire Denis if not for the more hushed, deliberate camerawork,” wrote Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert in 2012. “Akerman’s personal, peculiar methods of storytelling leave Nina unknowable but never exoticized. She’s in a dialogue with the filmmaker, not the subject of another’s art. A colonialist casualty, she has struggled to find her identity. But like the greatest Akerman heroines, she owns her physicality.”

Last week, we noted that Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass (2018) is returning to theaters in Ghent and Berlin. Now Film Movement has picked up North American rights to Donbass as well as to two other Ukrainian films, Natalya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads and Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, both from 2020. Donbass, a succession of thirteen episodes drawn from actual incidents that took place during the conflict in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian separatists in the mid-2010s—“pathetic scenes alternating with grotesque comedy,” as David Bordwell writes—will screen on Saturday before opening at New York’s IFC Center on April 8.

In another infuriatingly relevant Second Look selection, Putin’s Witnesses (2018), documentarian Vitaly Mansky revisits the footage he shot when he was hired to create a sympathetic portrait of Vladimir Putin, who had just been appointed acting president of the Russian Federation by Boris Yeltsin—a feature-length campaign ad, essentially. Putin won his first election in March 2000 and was inaugurated two months later.

“In a damning centerpiece,” wrote Guy Lodge in his 2018 review of Putin’s Witnesses for Variety, Mansky “reviews footage of Putin’s election campaign team, recapping their individual biographies, and drily noting the number of them who have since crossed to the political opposition, been demoted or exiled, or died in highly suspicious circumstances.” In Reverse Shot, Emma Piper-Burket found it “impossible to ignore” Manksy’s “own form of defection through the creation of this film and the questions it poses. As the film unfolds, it’s hard not to feel anxious for Mansky and his family, as if examining the past is a betrayal of his own role in it.”

Second Look will wrap on Sunday with a longish short and a shortish feature. Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei’s Three Songs for Benazir, nine years in the making and one of the five documentary shorts up for an Oscar this year, is a portrait of Shaista and Benazir, a loving couple in a refugee camp in Kabul. The film “not only compels its audience to look at Afghanistan beyond the immediate context of war,” writes Bedatri D. Choudhury at Reverse Shot, “but also reconfigures the set ideas of marriage and romantic love they may have within the context of Islam.”

In You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (2016), Polish director Pawel Lozinski cuts between three close-ups as a therapist oversees an encounter between a mother and her daughter. You Have No Idea is “immersive, intimate, and revealing,” writes Little White Lies’ David Jenkins, “a naked torrent of pure emotion and a paean to the power of verbal self expression. The film—named after a line uttered by the mother as tears stream down her cheek—operates as a loud endorsement for diplomacy when it comes to matters of the human heart, and it’s also representative of how, even when we can’t find the words to match our sentiments, there are always alternative and roundabout ways to communicate our true feelings.”