Four New Directors, Four New Films
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Back in February, jurors selecting the winner of the Berlinale’s Best First Feature Award—filmmaker Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), TIFF Cinematheque and Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard, and producer Katrin Pors (The Worst Person in the World, Godland)—had sixteen debuts to choose from, and they went with Pham Ngoc Lan’s Cu Li Never Cries. Lan, a photographer who studied urban planning at the Hanoi University of Architecture, had already filled a shelf with awards picked up at festivals around the world for his short films, including Another City (2016), which Chloe Lizotte calls “an atmospheric and enigmatic tale of urban alienation”; Blessed Land (2019), currently featured on the Criterion Channel; and The Unseen River (2020), which Le Cinéma Club is now streaming through Thursday.
Cu Li Never Cries is one of four features that Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art will screen for the first time in New York on Tuesday as part of this year’s New Directors/New Films. As Susanne Gottlieb points out at Cineuropa, the Vietnamese term cu li can refer to a low-wage worker, a pygmy slow loris, or an organic cure for back and bone pains. Mrs. Nguyen (Minh Chau) is “the embodiment of these three cu lis,” writes Gottlieb. She returns to Hanoi from Berlin with her husband’s ashes and the tiny, glassy-eyed primate Cu Li, “whose outrageous cuteness makes half the film.” Her niece, Van (Ha Phuong), is scrambling to get married to her slacker boyfriend before her pregnancy starts to show.
Shot in black and white and cowritten with production designer Nghiem Quynh Trang, Cu Li Never Cries is “a peculiar but enthralling story of identity and grief,” writes Matthew Joseph Jenner at the International Cinephile Society. At the Film Verdict, Clarence Tsui finds the film “imbued with moments of magical realism. With its swerving tracking shots through empty downtown alleyways and nocturnal forests, Lan’s feature teases lyrical beauty from its seemingly quotidian storyline.”
Named one of the top ten Spanish films of the year by critics for El Cultural and El Mundo, Laura Ferrés’s The Permanent Picture premiered in competition in Locarno and won the Golden Spike for Best Film in Valladolid. The story begins in rural Spain some fifty years back as a teenage mother disappears into the night, leaving her baby behind. In the present, that baby has become Carmen (Maria Luengo), a casting director who happens upon Antonia (Antonia Ortega), a street vendor—and the mother who abandoned her.
The Permanent Picture is “an enchanting and playful postmodern curio of elegant compositions and offbeat asides,” writes Carmen Gray at the Film Verdict. “Its bare-bones story feels more or less incidental; a mechanism to hold together its idiosyncratic and enigmatically couched musings on photographic reproduction and, by extension, cinema. Ferrés channels, or rather nimbly interrogates, her own experience as an advertising industry casting director, framing non-professional faces head-on in casting sessions for us to decipher what we can from them.”
When Stephan Komandarev’s Blaga’s Lessons premiered at Karlovy Vary, it won the top prize, the Crystal Globe, as well as the Grand Prize from the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actress award for Eli Skorcheva. A star of Bulgarian cinema in the 1980s and ’90s, Skorcheva plays a retired and widowed teacher who finds she has no choice but to work for the Romanian phone scammers who stole her life savings. “Besides working as a crackerjack thriller,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck, “Blaga’s Lessons (part of a trilogy by the director, also consisting of 2017’s Directions and 2019’s Rounds) functions beautifully as an astute character study of a judgmental, uncompromising woman.” Skorcheva “commands the screen in the title role with the authority of the elderly Simone Signoret or Ingrid Bergman.”
In Grace, one of the ND/NF films discussed on a recent episode of the Film Comment Podcast, a nameless man (Gela Chitava) and his teenage daughter (Maria Lukyanova) roll across Russia in the van that serves as their living quarters, a bootleg DVD shop, and a cinema on wheels. “Over the course of their journey,” writes Wendy Ide in Screen, “tension builds between them. This is atmospheric, if inscrutable, filmmaking from Ilya Povolotsky, a picture that explores generational tensions and a coming-of-age narrative distinctively and originally.”
“Characterized by austere tableaus, unhurried rhythms, and spare dialogue,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, Grace “takes a while to warm up—the oblique opener and long takes suggest that you’re in for some warmed-over moves—but it pulls you in with its unforced realism and low-key exploration of that blurry gray space between adolescence and adulthood, ignorance and knowing. Equally striking is its vision of Russia as a terminally barren wasteland of nyet and more nyet.”
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