It appears the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has spent the last 14 months watching the same six to twelve films. There were a lot more out there. I have spent eons writing about the films of 2020, but through technical disasters have lost untold hours of it. Here's what little is left (and the images will probably not come through):
DOCUMENTARIES
Our Time Machine (China)
The opening title card quotes H.G. Wells:
"We all have our time machine, don't we. Those that take us back are
memories... and those that carry us forward are dreams."
Had my dear friend,
painter Vikki Fields, not recommended this 86-minute Chinese film to me, I
might never have watched this remarkably moving film, and what a loss that
would have been. This has to be one of the most artistically profound films of
2020. “Our Time Machine,” co-directed by Yang Sun and S. Leo Chiang, chronicles
the herculean effort of Shanghai artist and puppeteer Maleonn to realize a
production of his theatrical puppet creation in honor of his father, Ma Ke, who
was director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater and responsible for a
remarkable 80 productions during his prolific career -- but is now a victim of
Alzheimer’s. Maleonn’s wood and metal and nuts and bolts and found object
puppets have a bit of a Steam Punk aesthetic, but they are perhaps more
compellingly, emotionally life-like than any puppets ever created. The stage
production that ultimately ensues is heartrendingly magical. A stunning
meditation on creativity, art, love and legacy.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
The Mole Agent (Chile)
In this fascinating
semi-documentary, Maite Alberrdi enlists octogenarian Sergio Chamy as an
undercover detective to infiltrate a nursing home and investigate possible
abuse. What he encounters is anything but abuse. Rather he finds a loving,
supportive community of which he becomes the most integral part. One of the
most touching films of the year.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
Welcome to Chechnya
We naively want to
believe we have evolved, but reality perpetually tells us otherwise. Inspired
by the New Yorker article “Forbidden Lies: The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s
Purge” (Masha Gessen, June 26, 2017), director David France’s “Welcome to
Chechnya” invites us to witness the late winter of 2017, when a drug raid
triggered a witch hunt against the LGBT community, which has resulted in a
perpetual onslaught of extrajudicial torture and killings. Chechnya is
primarily Muslim and is now controlled by Putin appointed strongman Ramzan
Kadyrov. Our narrator, a human rights activist with the Russian LGBT Network
that resettled 151 people abroad in the two years since 2017 explains, “It is a
disgrace to be gay in Chechnya. And for a family to find out someone is gay? It
is a shame so strong, it can only be washed away by blood.” Ordinary citizens
and police alike claim, “All of our problems are because of you.” A whole cast
of face and voice doubles was employed to provide digital disguises for the
persecuted who were willing to speak out. The end title cards inform us that
“Canada granted refugee status to 44 [refugees] with the help of Toronto-based
Rainbow Railroad. The Trump administration has not accepted any LGBT refugees
from Chechnya.”
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy and HBO
Collective (Romania)
Romanian director
Alexander Nanau’s “Collective” investigates the October 15, 2015 fire at a
Bucharest nightclub with no fire escapes and the consequences for those trapped
inside in its aftermath. The deaths of 27 people in the fire would have been
tragic enough, but the known septic conditions in Romanian hospitals that
eventually killed 37 more burn victims is the more shocking story in this
relentless investigative story.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
The Cordillera of
Dreams (Chile)
Patricio Guzman's
phenomenal documentary begins with an exquisite meditation on the Cordillera of
the Chilean Andes -- a sculptor, a writer, an historian and the filmmaker all
reflect on the profound experience of living under the spiritual aura of this geographical
phenomenon, but it gradually shifts into an equally deep inquiry into the
bloody Pinoche coup d'etat and the neoliberal economic capitalism it left in
its wake. "Cordillera" concludes a trilogy that began in 2010 with
"Nostalgia for the Light" (available on Amazon to rent/buy) and
2015's "The Pearl Button." Guzman sees the Cordillera as an
eye-witness to his homeland's fate.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
DRAMA
Family Romance, LLC (USA/Japan)
Werner Herzog doesn’t
reference “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry,” an April 30, 2018 article in the
New Yorker, but his remarkably touching and engaging film “Family Romance,
LLC.” certainly came about as a result of his awareness of an odd industry
emerging in that country. As Herzog says, in the must-see interview after the
conclusion of the film, he foresaw as early as 1980 that the cascading
communication possibilities multiplying before us at that time would have
consequences of greater and greater “solitudes.” To this end, Japan has developed
enterprises that – for a fee, and with agents and stables of role-playing
actors – provide substitute companions, dead relatives, estranged spouses,
absent parents, et al.
“Family Romance, LLC.” is not a documentary.
Rather, it is a Russian doll of a film. Herzog enlists the talents of
non-actors, central to which is the star of the film, entrepreneur Yuichi Ishii
who does and does not play himself. Among other relationships he cultivates as
an avatar for his clients’ wishes, is his central role as father to Mahiro, a
ten-year-old girl whose father left her mother when she was a tot. This
relationship is the thread that creates the through-line for the film and acts
as its moral compass as we explore what love, family, and human connection in
general mean – in the contemporary world of technology and robotics, as well as
in the most ancient sense of human community.
Herzog and the other
great contemporary documentarian Errol Morris share a quest into the question
of truth. Art is artifice and yet it reveals truth with a capital “T.” Morris
wrote an entire book exploring this question on the subject of photography,
“Believing Is Seeing.” Once we distill anything, it is no longer lived
experience. So, is it truth? That is the question.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
Leap (China) Based on a True Story
The Painted Bird (Czechoslovakia)
“The Painted Bird” is
the brilliant creation of Czech filmmaker Vaclav Marhoul – who wrote, directed
and produced. The film is adapted from Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel and has been
compared to the sensibility of Andrei Tarkovsky. As a Tarkovsky devote, I beg
to differ. Though apparently many film critics walked out on its various 2019
premieres, citing its violence as gratuitous, I found it rather tame by
comparison to Elem Klimov’s 1985 “Come and See,” a much more parallel
comparison. Both films see the devolution in Eastern Europe of fascism into
nihilism, as WWII wore on, from a child’s point of view. The power of this
perspective cannot be overstated. Adults are already inured. The film has also
been described as a catalogue of Nazi atrocities. As a percentage, the Nazi
atrocities figure to a much lesser degree in the film than the sadism mounted
by peasant superstition, scapegoating and misdirected revenge. I see "The
Painted Bird" not so much as a film about the evils of Nazism as about the
eternal evils of the human race.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
Beanpole (Russia)
Russian director
Kantemir Balagov's “Beanpole” is another WWII narrative (and as far as I am
concerned, there can never be enough). New York Times critic Manohla Dargis
makes the insightful observation about this post WWII drama, set in 1945
Leningrad, that "the men and women in this startling movie don't complain
or even speak much about their suffering, perhaps it would be because it would
be like describing the air they breathe."
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
Mr. Jones (Poland)
Based on the true story
of Welch journalist Gareth Jones (James Norton), who, in 1933, attempted to
reveal the truth of Stalin’s politically created famine (known as the Holodomor
or the Terror-Famine), which killed an estimated 3.5 million, Agnieska Holland’s
film, in its early scenes, rhythmically shifts between its primary narrative
and George Orwell penning his allegorical masterpiece "Animal Farm."
Juxtaposed against the investigative journalism of Jones is New York Times
Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), who won a Pulitzer for
his Stalin apologia reportage -- an honor that has never been revoked.
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
Buoyancy (Cambodia)
In his 2011 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined," Steven Pinker argues that, historically, violence has been
abating globally. He cites a decrease in war and improved conditions for
children, claiming that we now live in the most peaceful time in the history of
humanity. May I call upon Voltaire's rejection in "Candide" of
Leibniz's position: "If this is the best of all possible worlds, what then
are the others?" Were we to take into account human trafficking in all its
horrific manifestations: sex, child labor, and slave trafficking, ad nauseam,
would our present moment be our best possible world? (Take a look at your
computer or cell phone and consider the human misery that went into the mining
of tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold and other rare metals that allowed its
manufacture and function.)
Rodd Rathjen's
"Buoyancy" follows the horrific plight of a 14-year-old Cambodian boy
who, in trying to escape his father's exploitation, inadvertently finds himself
enslaved on a Thai fishing boat. Though the film is a dramatic narrative, the
story is all too true. The film's penultimate title card cites an anonymous
Cambodian survivor: "Torture is every day and killing about every second
day. You are afraid of people, even of daylight. No one can hear you out there.
You have no papers, nobody knows you exist. I want to tell people about our
nightmares."
The final title card
"...gratefully acknowledges the many survivors of modern slavery in South
East Asia who shared their stories. An estimated 200,000 men and boys are
thought to be in slavery and forced labour in the fishing industry in South
East Asia. It is an industry worth over $6 billion that supplies fish products
to the world." (The same is true of Mexicans held hostage to harvest
tomato crops in the U.S. And the list goes on...)
Amazon Rent
The Wolf House (Chile)
Bacurau (Brazil)
House of Hummingbird (South Korea)
Amazon Prime Rent/Buy
The Man Standing Next (South Korea)
Another Round (Denmark)
Tommaso (Italy)
A White, White Day (Iceland)
Tigertail (USA/China)
In Alan Yang's
"Tigertail," a parentless young boy, Pin-Jui (Hong Chi-Lee as the
young Pin-Jui and Tzi Ma as the adult) works his grandparent's rice fields. In
an odd coincidence, he befriends a girl of means, but their class disparity
ensures their estrangement. As a young adult working in the brutal factory
where his mother is employed, the factory boss makes a deal with Pin-Jui: in
exchange for marriage to his daughter, he will pay for the couple to move to
New York City. "Tigertail" turns the feel-good immigrant story on its
head.
Netflix
The Wild Goose Lake (China)
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