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September 7, 2026

Happiness Is So Close! (2026)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Switzerland, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

At the beginning of Manoel de Oliveira’s I’m Going Home (2001), Michel Piccoli’s aging actor Gilbert Valance is on stage playing King Berenger, the dying monarch from Ionesco’s Exit the King, in denial of his waning capabilities. When Valance is struck by tragedy himself, he responds by clinging to his daily routine, reprising familiar roles and putting up a front to keep grief at bay.

Jean-Luc, the main character in François-Christophe Marzal’s Ah que le bonheur est proche, shares something of Berenger and Valance’s rage against the dying of the (spot)light. Played by veteran of the Swiss stage and screen Jean-Luc Bideau – who yesterday received a Pardo Speciale alla Carriera in a ceremony at the Piazza Grande – this fictive Jean-Luc is an elderly actor prone to forgetfulness and even hallucinations, and inspires little confidence that he will be able to pull off the lead in a new Don Quixote adaptation he is helping to mount. Jean-Luc is furious when he discovers that the production, compelled by the insurance company, has hired an understudy to shadow him.

Driven by resentment but also curiosity, Jean-Luc attempts to follow his stand-in, determined to coax or threaten him to withdraw from the assignment – but he proves enigmatic. The old man’s Hitchcockian pursuit of his double takes him further away from sanity, blurring reality, memory, and fantasy. Does this mystery man, with a penchant for collecting celebrity teeth, really exist? His perception of the world completely warped, Jean-Luc becomes Don Quixote more thoroughly than he could ever be on stage.

Despite the sophisticated mise en abyme at its centre, Marzal’s compact film adopts an unpretentious form that keeps the narrative fleet-footed. Shot in an unadorned, almost sitcom style, this absurdist comedy weds viewers to the protagonist’s unreliable perspective, enlisting us as accomplices in his battle against the human condition. The secondary cast, with an evident flair for slapstick, is pitted against Jean-Luc’s irate, imposing seriousness to often hilarious effect.

Channelling his screen persona in a tongue-in-cheek manner, Bideau, who has collaborated with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Raúl Ruiz, and William Friedkin as well as Alain Turner and Michel Soutter, plays a version of himself – a fact underlined by a co-actor tossing famous film lines of his at him to test his memory. Hunched over a walking stick, Bideau portrays Jean-Luc as a wily, indomitable spirit unwilling to submit to the vagaries of age and health. Marzal’s film is above all a loving tribute to this revered figure of the New Swiss Cinema.

 

August 31, 2026

Bloody Tennis (2026)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the USA, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

What does the rarefied, ceremonial realm of professional tennis have to do with the gooey, grisly messiness of horror? Judging by Bloody Tennis, quite a bit. In his fourth feature, the German filmmaker Nikias Chryssos smartly grafts the bloody enticements of final-girl sagas onto the highly competitive world of elite sport.

Aspiring tennis star Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), from Detroit, is enrolled by her father in an exclusive, all-girls training academy in the sun-soaked stretches of southern Europe. At this secluded facility, where she must compete with five other Wimbledon hopefuls from across the globe, the young woman realises that the journey to tennis supremacy doesn’t begin with “Love all”.

Run by the macabre Mary Tyrone, an erstwhile champion with a fondness for leeches and surveillance systems, played by Elina Löwensohn – last seen at Locarno in Bertrand Mandico’s 2024 work, Dragon Dilitation – the academy fosters a cutthroat environment where interpersonal bonds are discouraged and only the ruthless survive. Learning to navigate this girl-eat-girl world, her days a cycle of brutal practice sessions, bizarre communal meals and tense standoffs with peers and teachers alike, Sophie finds provisional allies and even ascends the pecking order. As she does so, however, she’s confronted not just with the mysterious terrors that lurk within the academy, but also in herself.

Using the lens of survival horror, writer-director Chryssos shines a light on the loneliness that grips top performers in competitive individual sports. The tennis matches here don’t look like anything on television: they are filmed close to the players’ bodies, edited with a frenzy that echoes their inner turmoil. Rather than mastery of the court, the games become about survival – existential contests where life hangs by a racket string. This aesthetic reaches an expressionist crescendo in a grotesque, lushly operatic final match where Sophie faces off against her fiercest rival.

Bloody Tennis adeptly manipulates the conventions and tropes of the slasher film, its pleasures added to by a subtle cinephilic self-awareness. Shot in captivating widescreen by Constantin Campean, the film makes eye-popping use of colour, its images often awash in saturated reds and browns, while the layered musical score employs a chorus of soft voices that augment Sophie’s psychological torment.

Directed with a sure hand, Bloody Tennis isn’t afraid to be pulpy when needed, rejecting the comfort of irony and the philosophical pretensions of elevated horror. The result is a smart and sinister scary movie that goes for both guts and glory.

 

August 24, 2026

Übergang (2026)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Germany, Review | Tags: , , , , |
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[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

On New Year’s Eve 2024, Thomas Heise, restless chronicler of post-war German history, embarked on a new project centred on Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee, his home for decades. Tragically, the writer, theatre director, and documentarian passed away suddenly a few months later, aged 68. His crew, chiefly cinematographer Peter Badel and editor Chris Wright, continued shooting, supplementing their existing material with texts, photographs, film clips, and televised interviews from the filmmaker’s estate and other archives.

Übergang, “a film for Thomas Heise”, is a polyphonic object, a collective portrait of Heise as seen by his friends and collaborators. This mosaic-like structure offers a non-linear survey of the filmmaker’s life and work, one that also accommodates moments of dissonance – for instance, describing Heise’s youth at the Babelsberg University in East Germany, Badel reads out the Stasi surveillance file on the allegedly subversive student. Shortly after, a friend, a woman simply named Pit, cautions against taking the Stasi report at face value.

The most important voice, however, is that of Heise himself. He appears in photographs and interviews, and discusses the lives of his closest family members in voiceover. Through letters, we learn about his childhood, military service, romantic life, approach to artmaking, and his estrangement from his half-Jewish father, once a detainee in a Nazi labour camp. Heise also talks about the fleeting period of absolute freedom that he experienced during die Wende of 1989–1990.

These biographical details are intercut with street scenes from the Schönhauser Allee: interviews and silent portraits of New Year’s revellers, football fanatics, and homeless individuals hanging around the station. These vignettes seem out of context at first glance. But placed against accounts of Heise’s politicised youth in East Berlin, they acquire a historical dimension, suggesting the transmutation of collective energies under the sway of capital – the first signs of which the filmmaker witnessed in the reunified city’s anti-squatting operations in 1990.

For decades, Heise’s films brought the past, present, and future into fertile dialogue, capturing the glacial flow of history and its many ironies. Übergang honours this worldview in juxtaposing, for example, footage of East Berlin protests against impenetrable borders with contemporary rallies in the city against so-called “open borders”. In doing so, the film turns Heise’s own life into a repository of Berlin’s rich history. Shortly before his death, in 2024, Heise headed the Berlinale jury that awarded No Other Land the top documentary prize – an event that resulted in threats from German cultural authorities. Memorably, in his last media interview, Heise responded to that instance of state overreach: “Sorry, but that’s pure GDR; I’ve heard all that before.”

 

 

August 17, 2026

Cactus Pears (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of India, Cinema of the UK, Review | Tags: , , , , , , |
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[The following review was first published in the June issue of Sight and Sound.]

There are at least four instances in Cactus Pears of someone gently stroking the head of 30-year-old Anand (Bhushaan Manoj). Each of these caresses has a different meaning, a different affective shade, reflecting Anand’s evolving sense of his place in the world. Director Rohan Kanawade’s Sundance-awarded debut embraces its many characters with a similar gentleness, never allowing their harsh circumstances to be seen to stunt their rich inner lives.

After the death of his long-ailing father, Anand is asked by his mother (Jayshri Jagtap) to accompany her to their ancestral village to perform the final rites. Anand hasn’t been to the village in years and, as a closeted gay man, he is stressed about the prying that awaits him. Sure enough, family members first object to an unmarried man performing the funerary rites, then advise him to get married at the earliest opportunity. They place restrictions on what he can do, eat and wear over the next ten days of rituals.

Anand doesn’t feel particularly close to his extended family; even so, he cannot bring himself to defy his relatives. Unwilling to ruffle feathers, he absorbs the pressure, concerned that any show of dissent could affect his mother, now dependent on the wider family for moral support. He finds relief from this miasma of grief, frustration and anger when he reconnects with the goatherd Balya (Suraaj Suman), a childhood crush from the village who leads a closeted existence himself.

This film arrives amid a recent surge of Indian independent features that engage with rural queerness and explore questions of sexual identity in the country’s vast hinterlands, among them Valli (2023), Jhanjhaarpur (2024), Parajya (2024) and A Life Inside Me (2025). The most prominent film in this wave, Cactus Pears subverts expectations of queer stories set in a pastoral milieu. Kanawade neither romanticises villages nor casts them as a hotbed of political reaction. Certainly, tradition, culture and, as Balya’s situation illustrates, economic necessity exert pressure on young villagers to conform to social norms around gender roles. But the filmmaker leaves ample room for the possibility of individual understanding and acceptance. The film is most touching in the benevolence and good faith it extends not just to Anand’s parents or lover, but to his relatives, who rise above their function as dramatic foils.

In fact, Kanawade avoids overt drama, conveying the friction between Anand and his relatives through little more than offhand remarks, stray words overheard. The emphasis is instead on Anand’s interiority, his constant unease and his self-imposed isolation from his family. The filmmaker introduces elements of subjectivity within the film’s otherwise cool, realist style. Early on, as mourning relatives carry away the body of Anand’s father from an ambulance, Anand reluctantly following, the camera remains behind the vehicle’s closed doors, the now-muffled soundtrack echoing Anand’s feelings of estrangement.

Cactus Pears is shot by cinematographer Vikas Urs in painterly tones, with impressionistic use of available light and static wide shots, occasionally relieved by sensual close-ups. The actors, largely drawn from local theatre troupes, exchange long, measured dialogue with studied pauses, their bodies often clustered in painterly tableaux. Their grief-sapped faces, well-worn costumes and practised gestures of everyday labour, whether milking cows or making ropes, attest to Kanawade’s keen observation and desire for authenticity.

In interviews, the filmmaker has said that his protagonist’s rural sojourn was inspired by his own experience of performing his father’s final rites in 2016. Anand’s relationship to his father is indeed the film’s emotional core and palpably its most personal aspect. The rapturous romance with Balya, in contrast, is the fruit of fantasy. In marrying the intractable facts of memoir with the restorative power of fiction, Cactus Pears radically expands the experiences that queer people have been permitted on Indian screens. The result is a luminous work, brimming with grace and delicacy.

 

August 10, 2026

Letter from My Village (1975)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Senegal, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[The following text was originally published on the website of the Locarno Film Festival.]

“You’re going to spend some time at my home,” remarks a calming voice over images of modest rural life. These words, by pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye, are at once an invitation and an instruction. They introduce Faye’s piercing debut feature Letter from My Village (Kaddu Beykat, 1975), winner of the third edition of Locarno Heritage Restoration Contest – following Alberto Cavalcanti’s A Real Woman (1954) in 2023 and Liliana Cavani’s The Year of the Cannibals (1969) in 2024 – which has been restored by Cinegrell and is being presented at this year’s Festival.

Born in Dakar in 1943 and a teacher by trade, Faye was drawn to filmmaking out of a desire to learn more about her own Serer heritage. In 1966, at the World Festival of Black Arts, she met the prolific French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch, who cast her in his keen ethnographical satire. Little by Little (1970) – a shoot that took her to Paris, among other cities. A few years later, Faye moved to the French capital to study ethnography at the Sorbonne, and soon decided to supplement those studies with training in filmmaking at the Louis Lumière Film School. Her doctoral research, which she defended in 1979, became the bedrock for Letter, a docudrama she made with minimal means over the course of two trips back home in as many years.

Faye set her film in her ancestral village of Fad’jal, a drought-stricken agrarian community in Senegal’s west, near the coast. Caught between traditional practices and a modern global economy, its inhabitants experience the pangs of aggressive nationalisation. Farmers, forced to produce groundnuts for upmarket European export, see their sustenance threatened, while children, in imitation of what they witness, play games involving evil tax collectors. Against this backdrop, Faye introduces the young lovers Ngor (Assane Faye) and Coumba (Maguette Gueye): they hope to get married, but an inadequate monsoon means that Ngor is unable to grow enough produce to secure the dowry money.

Ngor and Coumba’s love story helps Faye to lay bare the gendered division of labour in the village: men till the land, and women perform household duties in addition to tilling the land. Children, meanwhile, are enlisted to help the older women, who are also obliged to work the fields. A delay in the rain means that the men get a break, but there’s no end to the women’s responsibilities – a situation that Faye would examine to harrowing effect in her 1983 short Selbe: One Among Many. Hoping to raise money for the wedding, Ngor moves to the city to look for work. There, gender roles are ironically reversed, as he performs domestic chores for demanding middle-class housewives.

With unflinching patience, Faye and her cinematographer Patrick Fabry film people engaged in unceasing work. Their repetitive gestures acquire a lyrical, rhythmic quality that is reflective of the cyclical nature of agrarian life. In her next feature, Fad’jal (1979), Faye would organise these gestures into an audiovisual symphony of tremendous force, an electrifying cine-ballad that weaves together labour, leisure, ceremony and laughter. “Fad’jal means ‘work’,” notes a griot in that film. “He who works is happy, he who doesn’t is ridiculed.” In both films, work becomes both an existential necessity and an expression of vibrant communal life.

Remarkably, Letter prefigures modern documentary style in how it conveys factual information largely through fictionalised exchanges between real individuals rather than through voiceover or intertitles. Most memorable in this respect are the film’s ensemble scenes, in which village elders, seated under a palaver tree, reminisce about a time of abundance in their lives and rue present-day scarcity. At one point, they interrupt the local teacher reading out a news item on Senegal’s lofty new political vision: “For me, politics means I eat only one meal a day for half the year,” one declares. “For us, politics means our daughters get no dowry and young men have no money,” adds another.

Letter echoes this chorus of laments, making a scathing assessment of the newly independent nation’s agricultural policies, still hostage to colonial economic mandates. With stunning clarity, Faye illustrates the fallout of the government’s ruthless push for cash crops: shortage of cultivable land for food, soil depletion, vulnerability to weather phenomena, diminishing purchasing power, and second-order effects such as urban migration and the increasing workload of rural women. The film illustrates these issues not in the manner of a lecture, but as concrete dramatic forces that work to thwart Ngor and Coumba’s marriage.

Despite the romantic subplot, Faye’s film refrains from getting into the inner lives of its young leads – that would be the purview of her last, and only fictional, feature, Mossane (1996) – instead maintaining a certain observational distance. However, the matter-of-fact way in which their bare bodies are filmed, free from colonial notions of shame, and their religious rituals presented, without editorial comment, clearly mirrors the intimate view of an insider. Mixing ethnography with a dash of fiction, Faye’s trenchant film paints a wide-ranging picture of life in the village – her village, but also a stand in for rural economies in newly independent nations across the globe.

 

December 11, 2025

Silence (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Spain, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Glancing back at life during the Covid-19 outbreak, the atmosphere of dread that reigned – the pervasive fear of infection, suspicion of the other, the heightened awareness of the fragility of civilization – feels a little quaint and remote. The swift response of modern medicine in curbing the pandemic has made a cataclysmic past seem somewhat abstract, even if the ravages of the virus were anything but.

Spanning three eras, writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s sprightly tragicomedy Silence contemplates not one but two epidemics from the vantage point of the present. The first act, set in a gothic mansion in the 14th century, centres on a family of vampires grappling with an existential threat: with the bubonic plague raging, there are fewer healthy people left to feed on. Worse, one of them, Veronica (Ana Polvorosa), has fallen in love with a human, to the great dismay of her orthodox sisters. Seeking to save him from her siblings’ wrath, Veronica reveals the truth about herself to her lover, only for her trust to be betrayed.

Cut to the 20th century. It’s the late 1980s, and the plague has given way to the AIDS epidemic. Broke, bedridden and as conservative as her sisters once were, Veronica is under the care of her daughter Malva (Lucía Díez), a bleeding heart who prefers synthetic blood to the real thing. Malva is in love with a human too, a drug addict to whom she isn’t confident enough to disclose her identity. But when the contagion outside comes home knocking, she is forced to set things straight.

Full of comic situations and lines, dramatic compositions, rapid-fire editing, and baroque musical passages, Silence is a buoyant, quick-footed work. It bends vampire lore to humorous ends, using it, for instance, to satirize generational differences and political correctness. Yet an unmistakeable tragic undercurrent courses through the film. In the figure of the vampire, Casanova locates both the shame of having to lead a double life and the anguish of having to outlive your loved ones.

More importantly, Silence processes the trauma that the queer community had to suffer during the AIDS epidemic, or what was dubbed the “gay plague” in an act of political weaponization. The prohibitions on love, the stigma of contamination and the self-imposed invisibility that Veronica and Malva endure mirror the experience of the protestors outside their apartment. “Silence = Death,” goes their slogan, questioning the omerta that reigns around the subject of HIV.

Looking back from a more humane world in 2030, the closing stretches of the film evoke at once a sorrow for those who succumbed to AIDS and a relief at the normalization of the disease, which has ceased to be the death warrant that it once was. As Malva and her lover exchange bodily fluids in passionate embrace, Silence becomes as much a celebration of this freedom from mortal fear as the inescapable sensuality of cinema itself.

 

December 6, 2025

The Bride (2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Rwanda, Review | Tags: , , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Strolling home through the countryside, insouciant teenager Eva plays mock bride, gathering white flowers to adorn her billowing hair. Her aunt warns her about the danger that lies buried in these parts. “Keep playing in those bushes, and you’ll say bye to those legs,” she cautions. In a few moments, Eva’s life will indeed turn upside down, but these landmines, remnants of the recent civil war in Rwanda, won’t have been the cause.

After her aunt walks ahead, Eva’s dreamy idyll is interrupted by a group of young men who whisk her away. Eva, now a kidnapped bride, finds herself in a suburban house, married to a functionary named Silas. If the casualness with which Eva loses her freedom is shocking, it pales in comparison to what follows. Deferring to tradition, Eva’s relatives advise her to accept her fate, which entails not just a psychological adjustment to her new situation, but also painful acts of forced sexual maturity.

Eva spends her days in silent protest, yielding to Silas physically but without an iota of emotional involvement. However, she finds solace in the company of Silas’s female cousin, residing in the same house, who informs Eva of the unfathomable trauma their family had to endure during the Civil War.

Bonding over a shared history of deprivation, the two women forge an empowering dynamic that oscillates between the maternal and the sisterly. As Silas’ cousin, Aline Amike cuts a wise, world-weary figure who navigates this male-centric world with a mix of resignation and caution. Sandra Umulisa’s Eva is the image of innocence defiled, her residual girlishness exorcised in agonising routines of precocious conjugality. Together, the women engage in nourishing conversations and rituals of mutual care, carving out a space of healing from the violent strictures of family life.

The premise of The Bride is the stuff of high melodrama, but in her assured debut feature, director Myriam U. Birara adopts a measured, pared back approach that keeps the temperature of the material in check. There is no musical score here to amplify the emotions, only occasional acapella vocals of a haunting quality. The austerity of the sound design makes Eva’s helpless cries all the more harrowing.

To the same end, Birara develops her scenes entirely in static shots whose simplicity belie their exquisite colour and compositional balance. Shot by Bora Shingiro in soft natural light and an earthy palette of browns and whites, the film keeps us at a critical distance from Eva even as it makes us intimately familiar with her predicament.

 

December 1, 2025

Some Notes on the Current Situation (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

What are conscientious artists to do, especially those dependent on state support for their work, when their country is waging a lopsided, genocidal war? Challenging the state, if it is possible at all, could invite reprisals. Dramatizing one’s personal anxieties risks producing narcissistic exercises in self-flagellation. Trying to find nuance might amount to little more than well-intentioned handwringing, while dodging the political altogether would smack of cynicism.

In Some Notes on the Current Situation, Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin gestures at one possible way out of this impasse, crafting a work where politics exists as a substructure, as a kind of collective unconscious that rises to the surface in all its nastiness every now and then. Bearing the subtitle “a film set before World War 3”, Kolirin’s 79-minute feature is divided into half-a-dozen loosely connected chapters, several of them set in nondescript countryside, devoid of all signs of the ongoing war. In fact, if not for its title, one could hardly say that the film deals with “the current situation” at all.

Kolirin, though, is no stranger to tackling politics head-on. His last feature, Let It Be Morning (2021), was an Arabic-language adaptation of Palestinian author Sayed Kashua’s Hebrew-language novel of the same name. It featured an all-Palestinian cast that boycotted, with Kolirin’s approval, the Cannes premiere of the film in protest against what they perceived as the Israeli state’s appropriation of their work. Like Morning, Notes is backed by the Israel Film Fund, but it’s a much smaller project with a cast of Jewish actors donning multiple roles.

Each chapter of Notes is something of an absurdist sketch, centring on rituals or interactions that defy rational explanation. In the film’s overture, for instance, a woman pushes against a concrete building with all her might, in the zealous belief that it is collapsing. She demands a passerby to lend her a hand. The man is confused, but obliges nonetheless. With the help of two others, they manage to prevent the impending catastrophe and, in the process, restore colour to their monochrome world. What begins as an individual delusion snowballs into a collective psychosis.

In another segment, a couple drives endlessly around the desert, their delivery truck loaded with snow, looking for the set of Theo Angelopoulos’ new movie. It turns out that the pair are time travellers from the past who have teleported themselves to a country they don’t recognize anymore. Elsewhere in the film, a sadistic military drill becomes the occasion for a return of the repressed.

This mosaic of humorously bizarre vignettes, a little reminiscent of the work of Roy Andersson, doesn’t yield easily to interpretation. The pleasure, on the contrary, is in their thought-provoking elusiveness. In the film’s Coen brothers-like coda, an elderly rabbi encounters a wayward husband and tells him the tale of a young Jewish scholar who meets his Inuit fiancée’s family. Suffice to say, the story ends with broken teeth and a tear-filled feast.

What moral lesson the husband, or we, are to draw from this outlandish parable is not immediately clear. But the inchoate, oppressive feeling of meaninglessness that it leaves behind is undeniable. Faced with film’s many Kafkaesque situations, we find ourselves in a state of fugue, just like the characters. Coursing through Notes is a strong sense of confusion and dislocation, the sentiment of finding oneself profoundly out of step with the logic of the world. In that, the film is perhaps entirely emblematic of “the current situation”.

 

November 26, 2025

Nova ’78 (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Portugal, Cinema of the UK, Cinema of the USA, Review | Tags: , , , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

 

In December 1978, the Entermedia Theatre in East Village, Manhattan, was host to a three-day celebration of writer William S. Burroughs and his vision of the space age. Titled Nova Convention, the event brought together a range of avant-garde artists and thinkers who responded to Burroughs’ work through readings, conversations and performances. The then-64-year-old writer was a central presence himself, dressed in grey suit and a green fedora hat, reciting various unpublished pieces with his distinctive nasal twang.

A student at the New York University, Howard Brookner filmed the convention as part of his ongoing documentation of Burroughs’ life. Much of this material remained unseen until 2012, when Brookner’s archive was rediscovered in Europe and the USA, and subsequently restored through the efforts of his nephew, the filmmaker Aaron Brookner. In Nova ’78, the younger Brookner and co-director Rodrigo Areias offer a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of the event, liberally mixing on-stage performances with intimate behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with friends and other everyday vignettes.

Each number is emblematic of the freewheeling nature of the convention: Philip Glass producing hypnotic loops on a synthesizer, Merce Cunningham dancing to a baritone vocal piece by John Cage, Patti Smith offering to reimburse disappointed viewers before shredding her guitar, Frank Zappa reading the ‘talking asshole’’ bit from Naked Lunch (1959), or Laurie Anderson performing her song “From the Air”, assisted by Bobby Bielecki’s electronic effects.

Armed with a zoom lens, Brookner’s nimble camera floats around the artists and the audience, now capturing Burroughs lost in thought, now filming street scenes around the theatre. Inspired by the writer’s style, Nova ’78 juxtaposes starkly disparate material, such that actual poetry often rubs shoulders with poetry of a more mundane kind, one that grasps life in motion. Emerging from the film is an image of Burroughs as a fiercely independent, politically committed figure, opposed to every stripe of fundamentalism and authoritarian control.

Above all, Nova ’78 provides a precious glimpse into a creative community untouched by the logic of technocracy and corporatization. The convention isn’t any ‘gig’, and the artists and thinkers gathered here register as real individuals with eccentricities, not self-styled brands in thrall to showbiz mandates. The ease and spontaneity with which they participate in the event, and the unaffected warmth and respect with which they speak of Burroughs, attest to a high degree of personal integrity as well as a sense of genuine camaraderie. In that, Nova ’78 truly feels like a time machine.

 

November 21, 2025

The New Man (2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Cape Verde, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Time seems to stand still in the village of Ribeira Funda, tucked between the boundless ocean and the majestic mountains on the island of São Nicolau in Cape Verde. The moss-laden rocks, dilapidated stone houses, jagged pathways that comprise its expressionistic scenery appear to have existed since time immemorial.

Haunting this eternal landscape is old man Quirino, at once a king and a castaway, who leads a self-sufficient life in one of these houses, with a rooster for company. Signs of history soon surface — a radio bringing news from elsewhere, batteries, razor blades, cigarettes — cutting down this mythical figure to human scale. On the voiceover, Quirino recounts his memory of Ribeira Funda, once a thriving agricultural land, now drought-stricken and deserted.

The old man, we learn, has continued to live in this ghost village decades after its original inhabitants abandoned it for greener pastures. But now his faculties are failing him, and he must prepare for the great voyage beyond.

In his second feature The New Man, Carlos Yuri Ceuninck adeptly blends historical fact, lived experience and personal memory, crafting an ambitious, contemplative work that ventures beyond simple documentary portraiture. Part a sociological sketch, part a philosophical parable, Ceuninck’s film interweaves intimate observational vignettes, breathtaking landscape photography and a polyphonic voiceover in a way that both explains its subject and endows him with an irreducible mystery.

The New Man stands in interesting conversation with Wang Bing’s Man with No Name (2010), another absorbing record of a recluse at the edge of civilization. But where Wang remains a strict chronicler of the present, Ceuninck introduces what seem like visions from the past and the hereafter. Unfolding on a metaphysical stage lit by the celestial bodies and the scored to the churning seas, The New Man seamlessly melds myth, dreams and reality, illustrating that even a single, unremarkable life embodies the drama of the cosmos.

Ceuninck keeps pace with Querino’s quotidian rhythms, developing his film in long shots with little dramatic action, relieved regularly by glimpses of young boys playing, dancing or working the fields. Are these images from Querino’s own youth? Or are they part of the many legends that surround the village?

Querino’s sense of self is evidently bound to his memories of growing up in Ribeira Funda, but we also perceive that the land has an identity only insofar as its inhabitants bestow it with meaning. “There were many storytellers here,” Querino laments, “but death came, and it spared nothing and no one.” The New Man thus registers as an elegy, not for the man or his land, but for the intangible ties that bind them together. Death is on Querino’s mind as he too prepares to leave the village, but something far more significant will have died before his mortal end.

 

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