January 1, 2025

Favourite Films of 2024

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Bangladesh, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of Hong Kong, Cinema of India, Cinema of Italy, Cinema of Mexico, Cinema of Romania, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the USA, Lists | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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With only a handful of posts published, the blog pretty much went into hibernation this year. While 2024 was full of opportunities, encounters and discoveries that I am immensely grateful for, it was also, personally, a year of greater flight from the world, including the world of cinema in some ways. I cut myself off more and more from the news cycle and social media for sanity’s sake, which has meant that I’m woefully unaware of, among other things, what’s making waves in the awards circuit and what the “important” films of this year are. At a glance, I don’t recognize most of the titles featured on major year-end lists.

At the same time, I find myself more embedded than ever in the professional world of cinema, working with different film festivals in various capacities, minor or otherwise. While I haven’t been able to write and translate as much as I would love to, I’ve found myself increasingly involved in programming and selecting films. This has had, I think, considerable consequence on the way I watch and write about cinema.

Firstly, the majority of the titles I saw this year were works-in-progress (WIP): projects in post-production, without CGI, colour grading, sound-mix, and even some shots or subplots. Such a ‘pre-natal’ view of films tends to put the viewer in a state of disenchantment in which one becomes too aware of the strings being pulled: actors simulating shock, disgust or joy in front of blank screens, interacting with inexistant elements of the décor, suspended on ropes, drowned in ambient noise or struggling to convey an emotion, hoping that the music will do that rest.

Over time, watching such volumes of unfinished films could also make a year-end list like this a hassle, since it I have to constantly check whether a particular WIP that I liked last year has released this year or is still waiting for a premiere. More crucially, such lists will likely be even more aleatory and subject to the vagaries of my viewing assignments rather than, as in the past, seeking to take into consideration, even if nominally, consensus titles and popular favourites.

The bulk of my writing this year has also been of a private nature, tied to the programming work. Destined for a handful of known people within a festival, instead of a wider readership online, the texts have undergone a change in kind. If they have gained in freedom and concision, they have lost the rigour and rhetorical force that comes with public writing. I can’t yet imagine what kind of impact this might have on my instincts – and mental capacity to engage with films – in the long run.

All this preamble to say that this blog may continue to remain inactive in the coming year(s). While that is nothing new – it was already in cold storage along with my cinephilia from 2016 to 2019 – it does feel different not to be identifying primarily as a critic/translator anymore. Interesting times ahead.

Here’s wishing a happy new year.

 

1. The Adamant Girl (P.S. Vinothraj, India)

When Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) released in theatres, miraculously, in August in Tamil Nadu, it was accompanied by substantial popular backlash. Admittedly, Kottukkaali is a tough-minded work, one that is perhaps harder to instantly ‘like’ than Vinothraj’s debut Koozhangal (2021). Like the latter, it makes us intimate with the unbridled rage of its male lead, but it does so without the emotional cushion of a child’s perspective. Instead, the film performs a high-wire act, tensely balancing different, conflicting points of views towards its protagonist, Meena, a young lovelorn girl deemed possessed and taken to a local godman for exorcism by her extended family that includes Pandi, the hot-tempered cousin she is betrothed to. While the entourage constantly discusses what is to be done about the girl, Meena herself remains resolutely mute, her silence conveying both defiance and stoic resignation. Kottukkaali explores both the horrific dimensions of this pervasive practice and the subversive space of resistance it offers to the ‘possessed’, temporarily immune from secular violence. At once sophisticated and utterly simple, Kottukkaali respects its audience’s imagination and intelligence while withholding nothing from them. In its formal wit, its trenchant social portraiture and its uncompromising humanism, it represents a significant leap forward for Vinothraj. [World Premiere: Berlin International Film Festival]

 

2. Twilight of the Warriors – Walled In (Soi Cheang, Hong Kong)

Decades in the making, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Soi Cheang’s supremely kinetic martial arts epic, forges a double legend linking the mythical past of the now-demolished Walled City and a vibrant, close-knit Hong Kong of the eighties before the island’s handover to China. In gargantuan sets of stunning detail, the film recreates the ramshackle complex, not just the densely packed mass of its buildings, but also the thriving economy and community of this dizzyingly vertical ghetto. Desperate to evade the police and gang members, scrappy refugee Lok enters the Kowloon Walled City, a seedy, crime-ridden slum complex exempt from the law and run under the benign authority of Cyclone. Lok’s diligence and fighting spirit attract the paternal Cyclone, but when the young man’s past comes to light, the very existence of the Walled City is endangered. A masterclass in modern cinematic action, the film conceives its astonishing martial-arts sequences in a close co-choreography of camera movement, continuity editing, geometric décor and athletic performers, the whole presented at human scale and close to real-time speed. With every shot having the force of an abstract painting in its dynamic sight lines, Walled In delivers a sweeping, sensational spectacle. [WP: commercial release]

 

3. Who Cares? (Alexe Poukine, Belgium)

Kneel down, and you will believe, said Pascal. In That Which Does Not Kill (2019), Alexe Poukine had actors re-enact another person’s reason-defying testimony of sexual assault, allowing them to find pathways to empathy through text, performance and the spoken word. Deeping this line of inquiry, Who Cares? looks at a soft-skill course in Lausanne, Switzerland, in which trainee doctors and caregivers engage in simulated conversations with actors playing patients, with the goal of being more mindful of patients’ feelings during diagnosis. At the heart of this course aimed at humanising healthcare is the belief that empathy, like other qualities, can be learnt through performance, repetition and critical feedback. Even as it brings us close to this view, Poukine’s film qualifies it, presenting us another theatre-based training session in which real medical staff grapple with their professional frustrations born of difficult working conditions, revealing how individual goodwill finds its limits in institutional realities. Like Harun Farocki’s best work, Who Cares? zeroes in on the niche rituals of a highly specialized field, only to lay bare broader civilization and historical undercurrents; in this case, the contradictions generated by the high premium placed on individual wellbeing in western societies. [WP: Cinéma du Réel]

 

4. The Damned (Roberto Minervini, Italy/USA)

In 1862, during the American Civil War, a troop of Union soldiers is sent to survey the uncharted territories of the West. The young men only have a vague understanding of the reasons for the war, but have their own motivations for donning the uniform. They bide their time, play cards and baseball, and engage in occasional skirmishes against a looming, largely invisible enemy. In his first fictional feature, Minervini forges a spare, brooding Western featuring the rural White southerners who populated his documentaries on backwoods America. Their dialect, diction and body language are modern, and this deliberate anachronism lends the film the texture of a filmed performance. In casting marginalized, stereotyped individuals as Union soldiers and placing them at the very origin of the creation of the United States, Minervini monumentalizes them in the vein of Straub-Huillet’s peasants-turned-gods. At the same time, the counter-casting obliges the non-actors to creatively participate in a founding myth that is very different from the “lost cause” narrative dear to the South. The result is a kind of Lehrstück for both the participants and the audience, a vital gesture of bridge-building in a house that finds itself divided once more. [WP: Cannes International Film Festival]

 

5. Kiss Wagon (Midhun Murali, India)

In a film culture where a project shepherded through half-a-dozen funding bodies, script labs, residencies and international co-producers is deemed ‘indie’, here is a film that obliges us to recalibrate our notions of what independent cinema could mean. The credit roll of Midhun Murali’s animated digital saga is entirely split between the filmmaker, his creative partner Greeshma Ramachandran and the voice actor Jicky Paul. Kiss Wagon charts the sprawling odyssey of Isla, a cocaine-addled courier girl, who leads a disengaged life in a police state under the sway of a powerful, puritanical cult. When she is entrusted by a mysterious client to deliver a kiss to an encrypted address, Isla finds herself on the wrong side of a massive military-theocratic conspiracy. Narrated in a mix of tongues real and invented, using a range of animation techniques classical and cutting-edge, Midhun’s film tells a mythical tale of the planetary struggle between the darkness of religious dogma and the light of cinema. A revisionist testament in four chapters, Kiss Wagon is an epic ballad of a paradise lost and regained; regained not through the force of institutionalized virtue, but through the agitations of outsiders, non-conformists, misfits and weirdos. A homemade cinematic A-bomb, delivered with a kiss. [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

6. We Are Inside (Farah Kassem, Lebanon)

The family documentary may currently be the most shopworn, convention-ridden genre in non-fiction film. But Farah Kassem’s three-hour-long domestic epic We Are Inside represents a sweeping personal work that makes a strong case for its continued existence. Following the demise of her mother, thirty-something European resident Kassem returns home to Tripoli, Lebanon, after fifteen years of absence to live with her cantankerous octogenarian poet-father. She spends her time learning Arabic from him, cutting his hair, tending to his wounds, sorting his medicine, driving him around and, most entertainingly, participating in his old boys’ meetups. Poetry becomes both an heirloom the filmmaker inherits and the means through which she concretises the daughterly bond. As the world outside falls apart, with Lebanon experiencing one shock after another, the film turns into a rumination on the role of artmaking during times of political crises, the artist oscillating between the pursuit of beauty and the reflection of truth, between the personal and the political, between inside and the outside. An instructive companion piece to Abbas Fahdel’s Tales of the Purple House (2022), We Are Inside offers a rich, funny and moving work that deserves wider viewing.  [WP: Visions du Réel]

 

7. Wikiriders (Clara Winter, Mi(gu)el Ferràez, Megan Marsh, Mexico/Germany)

If you ever wondered where the missing Human Surge sequel was, here is a less punishing proposition. A super-chill hangout film, Wikiriders centres on a multilingual band of three friends – one speaking English, the other Spanish and the third German, interchangeably and out of lip sync – who undertake a road trip from Mexico to the USA in search of a powerful (fictional?) family that has had an outsized influence on the history of the two countries. The trio may be navigating the Mexican landscape, but they are also virtual surfers, following the rabbit hole of Wikipedia edits about/by the members of the family. Wikiriders takes the epistemological processes of the internet as inspiration for its structure, hopping from one narrative tab to another, featuring memes for characters and making maps of meaning out of digital babel, while also raising pertinent questions about the rewriting of popular history and the resistance to it through voluntary international collaboration. Imbibing the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague as well as the road movies of Monte Hellman, Ron Rice and Wim Wenders, Wikiriders embraces the fact that it’s largely discovered on the editing table. Fun, experimental and very accessible. [WP: Berlin Critics’ Week]

 

8. Kajolrekha (Giasuddin Selim, Bangladesh)

Adapted from a medieval folk ballad from the Mymensingh region of present-day Bangladesh, Giasuddin Selim’s sumptuous, widescreen musical fairytale Kajolrekha is a melodrama in the etymological sense of the word: music + drama. The film employs nearly twenty songs, sung by characters and narrators alike, to advance the plot, deepen emotions, comment on actions and, at points, critically distance the viewer from the story. Bankrupted by his gambling addiction, merchant Dhwaneshwer is given a second chance when a mysterious monk gifts him a soothsaying bird. The bird restores Dhwaneshwer’s lost glory, but also instructs him to exile his 13-year-old daughter Kajolrekha. Forced to lead a life of anonymity and hardship, Kajolrekha perseveres until the tides turn, even if it means paying a heavy price. Selim’s actors adopt a precisely stylized repertoire of theatrical gestures, postures and voice tones to express the essence of their roles, be they slaves, merchants or aristocrats. This conscious revival of a classical narrative tradition isn’t carried out ironically, but with a modernist sense of the latent possibilities of a lost artform. Moving tragically flawed characters across a perfectly orchestrated chessboard of fate and destiny, Kajolrekha reaffirms the inevitability of a just and benevolent world. [WP: commercial release]

 

9. Sleep #2 (Radu Jude, Romania)

Culling from four seasons’ worth of footage from EarthCam’s live-stream of Andy Warhol’s tomb in Pennsylvania, Radu Jude fashions a spiritual sequel to Warhol’s blockbuster of boredom, Sleep (1964). Where the older film turned the dormant body of Warhol’s lover into a monument comparable to the Empire State Building, Jude’s film, almost equally unwatchable, fixates on Warhol’s own body repurposed into a public monument. As fans and curious passersby click pictures, pose flowers, decorate it with Campbell soup cans and even organize parties around it, the artist’s tomb becomes something like a collective work of art, vested with a social signification. A modern cinematic readymade, Jude’s desktop documentary crafts an unassuming essay on celebrity and fame, entirely in line with Warhol’s work. What happens when television ceases to be the arbiter of mass taste and simply becomes the condition of everyday life? Not fifteen minutes, but the possibility of eternal fame? Just as the visitors bestow the grave with meanings it doesn’t possess in itself, the act of watching the live-stream turns out to be the means by which operational images become aesthetic objects. Critically interrogating spectatorship, Jude’s fascinating film affirms the triumph of life over eternal sleep. [WP: Locarno International Film Festival]

 

10. Journey of the Shadows (Yves Netzhammer, Switzerland)

Once living a life of harmony in a dystopian world, two bipedal figures – humanlike but featureless, genderless – fall out under the influence of a mystical pet fish. One of them perishes, and the other embarks on an odyssey across the seas, intermittently led by a book and a candle. After countless catastrophes, this wandering being washes ashore on a pristine island, where it tries to overcome its loneliness, alas in vain. This probably isn’t what happens in Swiss multimedia artist Yves Netzhammer’s wordless, mind-bending first feature, in which identities, relations and situations are in such a flux as to resist any kind of linear synopsis. Where traditional animation advances evermore towards a utopian combination of naturalism and expressivity, Journey operates at a zero degree of digital image-making, dealing in primitive figures, bald volumes, harsh lighting, rudimentary physics, sickeningly unmodulated colours, oneiric movements, and an oppressive clarity of visual field recalling Dali or Magritte. At its best, Netzhammer’s abstract film has the subversive, Kafkaesque quality of Central European animation from the 1960s and ‘70s. Defying binaries of nature/civilization, human/technology, organic/synthetic, Journey crafts a deeply disturbing meditation on freedom, creation and self-discovery whose brutality shocks all the more in a universe so unreal.  [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

Special Mention: Dahomey (Mati Diop, Senegal/Benin/France)

 

Favourite Films of

2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2015

2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

 

November 19, 2020

2020 Roundup #3

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Romania, Cinema of the Philippines, Roundup | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel)

A young man at a bus stop glimpses a girl across the road. She gives him directions, and they board a bus together. There’s a spark between them. They look at each other, making sure their eyes don’t meet. The girl has fallen in love, the man hopes for a sexual encounter that doesn’t happen. “I’ll never forget you”, he says before he leaves town. Weeks later, the girl sends him a card, pouring out her feelings for him. He reads it and locks it up in a drawer without a thought. It’s hard to describe The Salt of Tears, or any of Garrel’s recent films for that matter, without running the risk of making it sound like a bundle of French art movie clichés. These films are all resolutely focused on romantic and sexual entanglements between young, heterosexual people and the seemingly infinite range of emotions they sustain in the participants. Digital black and white cinematography, a voiceover articulating the protagonist’s predicament and a sweet piano score all attest to a grand decadence at work. But Garrel is able to infuse these abstract, almost archetypal character relationships with a vitality, thanks to the extremely controlled actor gestures that concentrate the whole emotional force of these relationships.

Luc (Logann Antuofermo), the young man, aspires to study carpentry on the wish of his father (a wonderful André Wilms), whom he loves and looks up to. Something of a skirt chaser and a jerk—wholly inadequate words, for Garrel is interested precisely in a detailed exploration of what these judgments and coinages mean—Luc abandons Jemila (Oulaya Amamra), the bus stop girl, because he is too cowardly to tell the truth to his current girlfriend Geneviève (Louise Chevillotte), who gets to bed with him right after they meet. He abandons Geneviève too and tells himself that he was never in love because his feelings for neither woman could overpower his professional ambition or his bond with his father. So despite being focused on the sex, Luc has a little of the tragic romantic, looking for love even though he believes that finding it with wreck all his current certainties in life. It’s a characteristically French type, also seen in Jean Paul Civeyrac’s Le Doux Amour des hommes (2002), in which a world-weary young man wants to experience a love so Deep that it will rescue him from his emotional tundra.

The strength of the writing is that it doesn’t categorise Luc’s relationships into love and sex, and instead lets them hover on a fuzzy zone between and around these poles. Why he continues to stay with Betsy (Souheila Yacoub), his third girlfriend with whose male colleague he shares a ménage à trois, is no more a mystery than why he chooses to leave Jemila and Geneviève. What is sure is that Luc destroys one life after another with his behaviour, leaving the kind of lifelong scars he himself is unconsciously wishing for. When he does find in Betsy the love he was looking for, he loses his ties with his father, as he expected and wanted, but also becomes vulnerable, beset by jealousy and helplessness. Nuances of character description aside, much of the film’s pleasures are on its surface: in the way actors look at or hold each other, in the calming interludes with Luc or his father working on pieces of wood. There is a dance scene at a disco with Luc and Betsy that is a thrilling number hinged on Betsy’s energetic, sensual movement around the floor. Someone watching The Salt of Tears without an idea of who made it might take it for the work of a 21-year old. That, I suspect, is both its strength and weakness.

Uppercase Print (Radu Jude)

Found footage filmmaking, especially the kind that seeks to perform an ideological interrogation of the past, and particularly of a socialist past, seems to have a special power to produce some astoundingly lazy works. The end of the Cold War has meant that younger audiences cannot relate to accounts of life in communist regimes except in an ironic, patronizing way. We get it: the politicians are conmen, the people sheep, the fashion corny and the media so crude and manipulative. Nothing that a video search wouldn’t throw up. To be sure, Uppercase Print isn’t wholly a found footage film. Adapted from a ‘documentary play’, Jude’s film intersperses archival footage from Romanian television shows and news reports of the early eighties with dramatizations of a police case file from the same period. The case involves pro-freedom messages written in chalk on the walls surrounding the party headquarters. The security office takes accurate measurements of the messages written in uppercase, analyses the handwriting and convicts a teenager in the locality. Jude employs a set of gigantic sound stages designed like a pie chart. He has his primly dressed actors utter lines from the report—charges against the teenager, testimonies by his family and friends, and records of the security personnel tailing him—in a declamatory manner staring at either the camera or each other. The boy confesses, but claims he was inspired by messages on Western radio, while his parents chide him and urge him to recant. His friends and teachers turn against him and his seemingly innocuous deed marks him for life (and beyond). All this dramatization goes in circles, and is pretty testing, and saps all our interest before it moves ahead narratively.

Some of the archival material is thematically linked to the case files, as when a graffiti about food shortage is cut to a TV report about new refrigerator models. But most seem to have been picked as quaint documents from the era: street interviews with traffic rule violators, Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers, televised cooking recipes, countless clips of children singing and as many of pageantry organized in honour of Nicolae Ceaușescu. With these assorted extracts, Jude may have been intending to give a picture of life in communist Romania comparable to what Harun Farocki did in How to Live in the German Federal Republic (1990). But, unfortunately, Uppercase Print doesn’t have necessary spirit of synthesis. The critique is hardly earned, and the film is even less instructive about life communist Romania than a broad comedy such as Tales from the Golden Age (2009).

To be fair, the juxtaposition of archival footage and the case files is interesting on paper. It taps into a fragility and paranoia underlying the functioning of the state which triumphalist propaganda tries to conceal: that the state perceives a boy’s zestful scribbling as a security threat is so absurdly out of step with the paeans to youth beamed across television sets. But there’s hardly anything here that hasn’t been explored already, and much more successfully, by the work of Andrei Ujică. For a film leaning so much on television footage, Uppercase Print intriguingly omits the televised struggles of the Romanian revolution itself. That’s because Jude’s film is less interested in TV as a medium than the messages its shows convey, among others the gradual incursion of capitalism into everyday life. To this end, the narrative makes a startling leap from 1985 to present day. As the camera pans across a cityscape in which large commercial banners cover drab, low-income housing, we hear the actors playing the security personnel justify their actions (of surveying and recruiting schoolchildren as informers), the implication being that these regime criminals have succeeded in blending into the anonymity of the new market economy. Nothing prepares us for this critical coup, though, and it’s a tedious journey by the time we arrive there.

Summer of 85 (François Ozon)

Whether Summer of 85 is in autobiographical in any way or not, I don’t know, but it certainly gives that impression. Adapted from the 1982 novel Dance on My Grave by British writer Aidan Chambers, the film tells the story of Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), a timid working-class teenager who finds love in a Jewish boy named David (Benjamin Voisin) after the latter rescues him from a boating accident. The year is 1985 and Alexis is 17, just about the age Ozon was at the time. When the film begins, he is in police custody, talking to us in a voiceover. As Ozon cuts between this gloomy present and the sunny few weeks preceding it, we are drawn into the mystery that looms over Alexis’s current situation and his relationship with David. We share Alexis’s confusion as David, aided by an excessively indulgent mother, seduces him, convinces him of their closeness and persuades him to work at his shop, even as David’s professor (Melvin Poupaud, the star of Ozon’s previous film, By the Grace of God (2018)) at school urges him to continue his literature studies. David seals Alexis’s trust by making a pact with him: the one who outlives the other will dance over the latter’s grave.

The ‘mystery’ itself is of no great interest; it’s Ozon’s highly cinema-aware way of unfurling it that holds the viewer’s attention. Ozon is evidently a cinephile, and while this sophistication weighed down heavily on the laborious Double Lover (2017), it treads rather lightly here. There are, firstly, the direct references to Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, which features two queer stars, not to mention gay icon Liz Taylor) in the film’s title, the poster in David’s bedroom, the plot elements of David’s mother ‘procuring’ boys for him and Alexis’s explaining the mystery through a therapeutic confession. Consciously or otherwise, Ozon also draws on several Hitckcockian elements here: a gay romance sealed by a pact (Rope, Strangers on a Train), the creepy, mollycoddling mother figure (Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Birds etc.), the beautiful sea cliff against which the action takes place (North by Northwest, Suspicion), a violent outburst at a fairground (Strangers on a Train, Stage Fright), an older teacher who solves the mystery (Rope), David’s remaking of the docile Alexis’s look (Vertigo) and Alexis’ obsession with exhuming David’s dead body (The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo). And the diminutive Alexis’s insecurity recalls Polanski’s reworking of Hitchcock. There’s a very morbid, very funny scene in a morgue involving a cross-dressed Alexis and David’s corpse that is something Hitch would’ve fondly approved of.

Like Hitchcock, Ozon seems to have precisely story-boarded his sequences to the last gesture, last glance, especially in the early stretch of the film, where the dynamic between Alexis, David and his mother is conveyed with great economy and efficacy. But Ozon is also trying to go beyond Hitchcockian mechanics to something more tender, less cynical. Once the film reveals its entire mystery about one hour in, it becomes something of a coming-of-age tale, turning its focus to Alexis’ heartbreak over David’s betrayal, his confusion with his sexual identity, his nuanced relationship to his blue-collar parents and his grief over David’s death, which was so far only a theoretical preoccupation for him and which is now seen as another betrayal. There is a good amount of nostalgia and a desire to imitate the ‘eighties aesthetic’ at work in the film, especially in its choice of costumes and colour composition, but Ozon’s sense of time and place, as always, is very sharp. Shot through what seems like a diffusion filter, the film captures the sights and sensations of summer in a memorable manner. Summer of 85 may be one of the few films set in the Normandy region that doesn’t provide a lugubrious image of the place. The muted colours and the low-income housing complexes, for once, don’t take on a moral quality. They simply are.

Genus Pan (Lav Diaz)

I haven’t followed Diaz’s work this decade as closely as I would’ve liked to. The few hours of The Halt (2019) that I saw at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival was very impressive in the way Diaz turns the film’s poverty of means into an advantage: the low-budget sci-fi atmosphere is so muted that it feels strangely contemporary. Clocking at 157 minutes—practically a short film by Diaz’s standards—Genus Pan is even more rudimentary in its production values. Three working-class men, Baldo (Nanding Josef), Paulo (Bart Guingona) and Andres (Don Melvin Boongaling), travel across the fictional island of Hugaw, returning from their temporary job. Baldo is mercenary and extracts commission money from the younger Andres, who wishes to save for his sister’s treatment. Paulo is a devout Catholic, and acts as a moderator between the other two, going so far as to reimburse Andres on behalf of Baldo. Not unlike the three characters in Stalker (1979), these men of different temperaments and beliefs wander about in a jungle where paranormal things may be happening. Hugaw, we learn, is a scarred land with several historical layers of oppression, violence and debauchery: once a trading post for intra-continental smugglers, it was successively colonized by the Spanish, the Japanese and the Americans. Today, it is ruled with an iron fist by a ruthless general who kills dissidents.

Diaz, as is his wont, is dealing in allegory, and we imagine that the island of Hugaw stands for all of Philippines. But there is also something universalist about Genus Pan, which is a reference to the undeveloped brain of the human animal. A radio broadcast tells us that many of us haven’t yet outgrown the traits of the chimpanzee. While parts of the film recall Hesus the Revolutionary (2002), the work that might be closest to this bitter, slightly misanthropic vision is Diaz’s Butterflies Have No Memories (2009), where too the political critique turns sour. The film changes rhythm once Andres comes back home to Hugaw to announce of the deaths of Baldo and Paulo. Paulo’s wife (Merly Bucong) and Baldo’s daughter (Diaz’s AD Hazel Orencio)—two of the most helpless creatures in all of Diaz’s cinema—suffer in silence, while one of the general’s slimy lackeys, Inngo (Joel Saracho in one of those sleazy roles that Diaz writes and casts so well), exploits them to exact personal revenge on Andres. The film is set days before Good Friday, and solemn processions of self-flagellating believers amplify the mournful ambience around Andres’s doomed fate. I’m certainly missing much of the social nuances of the story, especially concerning the tribes on the island, but I must add that Diaz himself abstracts much of the details, such as the Andres’ background as a dissident. It could be that these details were established in Diaz’s contribution to the omnibus film Journeys (2018) from which Genus Pan reportedly derives.

Diaz’s modus operandi is familiar: shooting almost exclusively outdoors, he plants his camera at such an angle that a deep field is carved out in the frame. There are no camera movements or musical accompaniments. Unlike The Halt, however, the deep space here remains largely static as the action unfolds in the foreground. Much of the visual interest lies in the specific ways actors enter and leave the frame or, in scenes where they don’t walk, remain scattered across it. Because Diaz shoots in vast open spaces, at times, we aren’t sure about the scale of things until the actors appear in the frame. As the film shifts to the village, the shades of the forest make way for stark sunlight; I get the impression that Diaz has deliberately overexposed his shots a little which gives a bleached out, slightly uncanny aura to human figures. There are two instances of flashback—a device I don’t recall in Diaz—including one which dramatizes a false testimony. Instances of violence are directed in a very offhand, amateurish way which, combined with the broad characterization of the general, gives the film an imperfect, agit-prop, ‘Third Cinema’ kind of quality. Finally, while the action is leisurely paced, the editing is functional, hinting at a desire to end shots quickly and move on. I think that it’s refinement at work.