Landlady aka Abstract White opened with a nice improv set, as we sat down in front at the Blue Note. Solid film, made by professionals, unlike certain other things we’ve seen this week. Fiction about a pregnant teen runaway hoping to become a movie star. Lead actress Camila wants to meet actual pregnant teens and have discussions to understand her character. In the second half of the movie the actually-pregnant kids take over and start playing the roles. Dominican Republic, all lower-class girls whose moms also got pregnant young and were hoping to break the cycle, but it’s established that all the local males are shits. Victoria’s second feature after It Runs in the Family, which she brought back to the fest this year along with a key influence, Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.
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Milisuthando (2023, Milisuthando Bongela)
The Onions opened, incongruously to the film, three goofy white guys playing bright pop songs. Movie starts with a way-zoomed-in cellphone video of a woman disrobing before a Mandela statue. Director’s family is from South Africa, grandma disparages Mandela for ending apartheid. Then we get educational segments on history of the black-only Transkei district, featuring excessively unedited news archives interviewing relentlessly optimistic Black kids and their parents on the eve of integration. Movie goes off the rails with two (not just one!) extended conversations between the filmmaker and her white friends about privilege and prejudice revealed by some minor personal interactions, the visual in these sections just subtitles over an annoyingly dark-grey screen with a couple lines visible on the edges.
Three Women (2022, Maksym Melnyk)
Bjork-voiced loop-harpist Moriah Bailey opened, then after the film we saw her again at a free concert in a church. Good crowd response to this one, beginning before the film started when the one-minute fest trailer had no sound so we provided the footstep foley by stomping at our seats. Fun to see the director in person who we’d just watched onscreen too – Ramona might’ve been our True/Falsiest film this year, but this was our True/Falsiest theatrical experience. The three women are Post Office Worker, Poop Scientist, and Lonely Widow Hannah. Maksym and his cameraman “The German” start out in observational mode, then befriend Hannah and the movie becomes about their little community. She cooks for them, they buy her a pig. We also follow the scientist counting cave bats and witness her great triumph in finding bear shit in a field.
Forms of Forgetting (2023, Burak Çevik)
Drona opened, singing their earnest young sibling pop in unison. Burak finds a hole in a frozen lake where someone has been net fishing. A person seen only torso-down pulls up the net partway, drops it. Next guy pulls up the net partway, drops it, and so on. Is this a form of forgetting? Many other such forms appear… elephants, who never forget… buildings being constructed and demolished… buried bodies in a shipyard which was once a prison. The most extreme form is when a dead person’s brain is removed during autopsy, as seen via Brakhage film playing on a laptop. The centerpiece scene, a multi-layered couple conversing about their (fictionalized) relationship, each one sharing a dream they’d had, was inspired by a love of DVD commentaries.
Burak is probably the biggest name director we saw at T/F, with his Blake Williams / Bohdanowicz crossover movie currently in Cinema Scope and his Belonging making a splash a few years ago – or maybe he’s a tie with Stratman.
Tension Envelopes (2023, Robert Greene)
A new depopulated Greene short played before the feature – thoughts from within an envelope factory appear as titles over shots of city landscapes. A playful little experiment with some horrors-of-capitalism thrown in.
Last Things (2023, Deborah Stratman)
Kicking off Saturday with lovely mellow music by Mold Gold. Trying to tip the artists after the fact – it’s not their fault that stupid venmo won’t let me add a credit card in their broken app.
Lost Things has a beautiful ending, choir with titled lyrics into a field of star people, the artistic peak of the festival for me. Rocks, tho. Visible rocks, and microscopic, and caves made out of rock. The coolest images, with apocalyptic sci-fi voiceover blending with proper-sci explanations, all kinds of spacey music with a minimum of high-pitched drone.
NOV 2025: Watched again at home.
Mouseover to get flashed by the star people:
That Day on the River (2023, Lei Lei)
This played first but deserves to be mentioned last. Artificially degrades its archive images with screens and grains, slows down and Martin Arnoldizes the motion and adds clunky sounds of analog tape cueing and fluttering, while telling a couple unilluminating stories from a son’s and dad’s childhood. Mostly excruciating. I wouldn’t want to see the director’s 100-minute feature about his family history, but I would check out the 6-minute photo flicker.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2022, Michèle Stephenson & Joe Brewster)
Inspired by Montage of Heck, they wanted to make a musical but found a poet as their subject. Virginia Tech mass-shooting was cut from the film because test audiences thought it gave our complicated figure too much of a movie-triumph moment. Opens more spacey and abstract (the people in front of us, terrified of abstraction, fled before the movie even started) before settling into a portrait of the late-career artist, recently reconciled with her son and getting to know her granddaughter. Poetry spoken in context with her life story and media appearances worked great, much better than the written samples I read on my phone to prep for the movie. Katy thinks it didn’t get inside Nikki, that it’s all public image. The filmmakers signal that we’re not gonna get some late-life emotional breakdown by including TWO instances when Nikki refuses to answer Q&A queries about painful moments in her past. Michèle has previously made a couple of Haitian/Dominican docs, Joe has made a Giancarlo Esposito drama, and most recently they made “a magical realist, immersive, episodic virtual reality experience” about American racism.
Serotonin Shorts
Moomin (Zach Dorn)
Desktop video (cellphone in portrait mode) dude telling story of trying to win a claw-game moomin for his Canadian girlfriend. After they break up he combs through their text messages emphasizing the in-joke importance of the moomin, then fails to win one in an online app. Fine as a short opener, demonstrates the difference between cute and good.
Love at First Byte (Felizitas Hoffmann & Theresa Hoffmann)
Sentient public transit surveillance system falls in love with a passenger. Blurry and repetitive, Katy has tried to forget this ever happened.
Example #35 (LucÃa Malandro & Daniel D. Saucedo)
Cubans love Santiago Alvarez! Reversed and inverted images, okay, but leave your colonoscopy footage at home, please.
No Elements (Barbara VojtaÅ¡áková)
A broken-up couple had shot lots of film around the city and down by the river, her film project that he’d picked up during their relationship and now wants to take over and complete, while she is ambivalent. Nice reversed-footage tricks.
While The Night Falls (Amir Aether Valen)
You Are Not Here (Nastia Korkia)
Afraid I didn’t take notes on these two, but recall that Katy was concerned about consent in the Russian funeral film. That movie’s director Korkia was returning to T/F after her feature GES-2 played last year.
Crossing Voices (2022, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré)
Our seventh True/False. Travel is exhausting, so we took Thursday off and started early on Friday… earlier than musician Cemone James, who arrived late. Seems like only her guitarist and keyboardist were awake. The movie is a quite long and rambling montage of archive footage, still photos, video, film, computer map imagery, and radio broadcasts. Protests and strikes, neverending for decades, trying to be able to live and thrive in their own land. At one point Touré nicely sums it up, panning over the photos and posters covering the wall of his room, saying “life is a struggle” again and again and again. He stays in France, spends a few months a year back in Mali. Between protests he became a photographer and hung out with Med Hondo. He died in early 2022, his close collaborator Grisey finishing the film.
In Front of Your Face (2021, Hong Sang-soo)
Two sisters go out for a walk and the stars of the previous movie I watched walk by – it’s another day in the Hongverse.
Lee Hye-young is a former actress back in Korea and staying with her sister Cho Yun-hee (lead guy’s mom in Introduction‘s restaurant scene). She has a meeting with director Kwon Hae-hyo (Yourself and Yours) who wants to film a feature with her, but would settle for a short film, but would settle for sleeping with her. She tells him (before telling her sister) that she’s dying, has a few months, and he leaves her a bittersweet message the next morning (“What I promised yesterday can never happen.”). Elsewhere on the trip, she haunts the house where she used to live, reminiscing and coping (“I believe heaven is hiding in front of our faces”) and visiting the cafe run by her nephew (the star of Introduction).
Antoine Thirion in Cinema Scope:
In a body of work whose narrative scope seems to diminish a little more with each film, In Front of Your Face is still surprisingly laconic: its story unfolds over 24 hours and has barely ten scenes, one of which takes up a good third of the film … While the film’s deceptive structural simplicity seems to adopt its heroine’s fixation on presence and the present, things never cease quietly going off the rails.