Dracula [2025]

 Romanian provocateur and lampooner Radu Jude’s Dracula – his second outing in 2025 after Kontinental '25, both shot using iPhones – was a profane dissection of Romania’s most famous export, ferocious depiction of how troubling historical events are appropriated by consumerist societies into kitschy money-spinners, and lurid commentary on the blood-sucking vampirism of AI in cinema (and arts in general). After the relatively more restrained (though no less cutting) last film, Jude returned to his maximalist ways – and further amped up his preferred episodic form – in this unhinged and outrageous work that was a brutal parody, farce, burlesque, satire and critique rolled into one. Comprising of multiple chapters of disparate lengths and tones over a three-hour length and connected by a linked narrative, the film felt uneven and overdone on occasions, while unabashedly delivering a riotous potpourri of politics, history, sex, violence, comedy, metatextual referentiality, societal takedowns, celebration of lowbrow aesthetics, and chaotic experimentation. A gleefully vulgar filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) wants to make a commercial movie on Bram Stoker’s eponymous creation (which had been inspired from the 15^th century ruler Vlad the Impaler, who’d meted out savage punishments to his opponents and is a hero for ultra-right-wing nationalists), but is creatively blocked. He therefore makes use of LLM prompts for a series of gratuitous reimaginations. They include a smutty, Dracula-themed cabaret that allows tourists to engage in carnal and violent roleplays; a sham health centre summoning the Count for psychosomatic treatments; a Dracula reincarnate outraged by his bastardization to hapless visitors; Vlad calling his ghouls to viciously break a defiant union strike; and a PhD student falling for an aristocrat’s daughter in a town haunted by a vampire, amidst religious frenzy.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Experimental Film/Anthology Film

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Resurrection [2025]

Resurrection – Bi Gan’s return 7 years after his hypnotic last film Long Day’s Journey into Night – was as much a work of epic thematic preoccupations and stylistic ambitions, as a mind-bending, hallucinogenic and baffling exercise. Euphoric in its formal audacity, and melancholic in its tone, this elegy to cinema was a classic example of a work that dazzles with its visual splendour and scale – especially in how it glides across diverse filmmaking eras and genres, and serves as a successor to Méliès and Lynch – but also exasperates by its elaborate fantasies, flamboyant flourishes and metaphor-filled conceit. Its premise is an alternate world where humanity has sacrificed dreams to live forever. “Deliriants”, consequently, exist as an anachronism, as they secretly dream, thereby gradually withering away by refusing to conform. Sandwiched between a prologue made as an expressionist, sci-fi, silent film revealing a grotesque and dying “deliriant” that’s an embodiment of movies, and an epilogue mourning its death and culminating with “fin de cinéma”, were four compulsively staged dreams. The convoluted first dream was a 1940s noir and espionage thriller about a tormented musician on the run in sin city; the bleakly beautiful second dream, shot in wintry images, was focused on a lost monk in a derelict monastery haunted by his dead father’s ghost; in the picaresque third dream, a con artist takes an orphan girl under his wings to swindle an ageing mob boss; and in the pulsating final dream – spectacularly filmed in a single take and techno colours, thus recalling his previous feature – a self-destructive hoodlum falls for a mysterious girl employed by a violent gangster. Jackson Yee played the mythical “deliriant” as well as its four manifestations.

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Experimental Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Ten [2002]

 Ten – Abbas Kiarostami’s first film shot entirely in digital – formed a clear companion piece to his much-lauded Taste of Cherry from a structural standpoint, as both films comprised only of conversations inside a moving car between a person driving the vehicle and various people joining in the front passenger’s seat, and eschewed conventional narrative arcs in favour of fly-on-the-wall approaches. However, while the earlier film was a sombre dive into existential inquiries and moral quandaries, the latter may well remain the Iranian maestro’s sharpest political expression, as well as his most radically stripped-down tableaux. This engrossing and episodic docufiction set in Tehran – a chamber drama, if you will, in how it’s rigorously confined within a car and shot using two dashboard-mounted cameras – captured, through ten vignettes, the interactions between a beautiful, confident and fiercely modern woman (played with irresistible self-assurance by Mania Akbari), who’s always seen driving, and five different passengers, viz. her petulant son (played by Akbari’s real-life child Amina Maher) who’s angry with her for having divorced his father, her elder sister facing marital crisis, a delicate young woman jilted by her fiancé, a prostitute who uninhibitedly shares her opinions on the hypocrisy of men and idiocy of their wives, and a religious old woman. Kiarstoma’s belated answer to an Iranian critic’s question to him on the possibility of making films on independent and working Iranian women – repurposed from an earlier idea of a psychologist conducting her sessions in a car on account of renovations at her workplace – blurred the lines between private and public spaces through these nakedly intimate and free-flowing conversations that touched upon patriarchal norms, gender identities, cultural mores, societal impositions, and feminist assertions.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Experimental Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty [2000]

 Jonas Mekas’ magnum opus – with a title that mirrored its achingly intimate self-expression, moving tone and expansive length – both underpinned and subverted the idea of experimental filmmaking. At close to 5 hours runtime, it was his longest film; that, along with its fragmentary, loosely-strung, collage-like nature, bereft of any narrative patterns or pay-offs, and unhurriedly paced, emphasized its alternative form. Covering a staggering 30 years – from 1970 to 1999 – it was also the most monumental diary film of his career. That said, it was plaintive, lyrical, effervescent and self-effacing – a “masterpiece of nothing” in his words – which imbued it with joyous simplicity and accessibility. Forming an unintended New York triptych along with Walden and Lost, Lost, Lost – and ‘Diary of an Exile’ tetralogy of sorts when one also includes Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania – this was a home movie in the purest sense as it captured moments that weren’t just autobiographical but also profoundly personal. Composed of a vibrant flurry of 16mm footage shot primarily in New York City but also elsewhere in the US and Europe – which he then assembled in a randomized order (as opposed to chronologically) – it’s lovingly centred on his vivacious wife Hollis, their cherubic daughter Oona and their son Sebastian. These three individuals and the memories they shared – daily life in their Manhattan apartment and outside, lazy Sundays at Central Park, noticing his children’s first steps, celebrating birthdays, loving moments with his wife, playing with his pet, experiencing new places, observing seasons change – represented paradise for him. These laced this exquisitely poetic memoir and most unassuming epic – accompanied by Mekas’ lilting narration and a wistful score – with radiance, melancholy and a gossamer-like delicacy.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania [1972]

 Jonas Mekas’ poetic and profoundly personal 2^nd feature-length diary, made 4 years after the sprawling and absorbing Walden, formed a vital companion piece to his spellbinding next diary – and possibly his greatest masterpiece – Lost, Lost, Lost. In the latter, he’d powerfully evoked his finding a new habitat and home as an émigré and displaced person. This, conversely, chronicled his brief trip back to his erstwhile home which he was compelled to leave forever many years back. After over 2 ½ decades of leaving Lithuania with his brother Adolfas – they’d left in 1944 and emigrated to the US in 1949 – they were finally able to visit the village of Semeniškiai, the place of their birth and formative years. It began with a short preface that comprised of footage shot on his first Bolex during his initial years in America. The central segment, titled “One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania”, was a syncopated montage – a simultaneously playful and evocative collage shaped through varying film speeds, exposures, colour palettes and camera motions – which took us into that agrarian, impoverished and sparsely populated village, the rickety house where they lived, their aged mother who likes to cook outdoors, their gregarious relatives who frequently drop by, and the villagers who love dancing and drinking. The high-spiritedness transitioned into bitter melancholy in the epilogue that captured their visit to an establishment in Elmshorn – a town on the outskirts of Hamburg – which’d served as a labour camp during WW2 and where they were interred for nearly a year. Mekas, incidentally, interlaced the film with oblique social/political observations, while cheekily remarking, “You would like to know something about the social reality… but what do I know about it?”.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches [1968]

 Jonas Mekas – towering godfather of American underground cinema and pioneer of diary films – made a momentous feature-length debut, composed of ecstatically shot “haikus” or short reels, with Walden. At once epic, pulsating, freewheeling, elegiac and intimate, he made this 3-hour kaleidoscopic work by stitching together a dazzling blend of encounters, moments, happenings, portraits, events and experiences, that he shot from 1964 to 1968 using 16mm Bolex camera – his comrade of 50 years from 1950, when he purchased his first Bolex upon arrival in the US as a displaced person, through to 2000 when he finally switched to digital – via an intensely subjective lens. With its title borrowed from Thoreau and imbued with Cartesian spirit – “I make home movies, therefore I live” – it was particularly remarkable in its capturing of a vital period in New York’s trailblazing art and culture circuit, as we see gatherings featuring Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground’s first performance, fellow avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage at his getaway mountain cabin, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s visit to the city, John Lennon and Yoko Ono carrying out their radical 1969 “bed-in”, etc. Mekas alternated these with moments embodying 1960s zeitgeist – e.g. street protests by a feminist group and African-American construction labourers spotlighted as “back power” – as well as kinetic bursts of “pure cinema” – observational shots of streets and Central Park, an ecstatic montage on a circus, etc. – and even some anachronistic wedding sequences. These protean images – possessing different colour tones, frequently overlapping and often at accelerated speeds – were accompanied by an eclectic audio track which ranged from jazz riffs to throbbing percussive sounds that he mixed by playing his vinyl records and radio, and occasionally also his lilting, chirpy voiceovers.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) [2010]

 With Certified Copy, the great Abbas Kiarostami joined an exclusive group of non-francophone filmmakers like Buñuel, Kieślowski and Losey who made cinematic masterpieces in French. At once deliciously beguiling, seductively beautiful and disarmingly ingenious, this breathtaking exercise subtly channelled Rosellini’s Journey to Italy, the distinctive flavours of archetypal European arthouse cinema and his own marital disintegration, and echoed the futility of authenticity and originality, while ironically being a ravishingly original piece of work. It began like a dry essay – a form that Kiarostami had extensively partook in since his earliest days – with British writer James Miller (English opera singer William Shimell in a fine acting debut) introducing, at a gathering in Tuscany, the Italian translation of his eponymously titled book which posits the relevance of reproductions. After the lecture he meets the unnamed “Elle” (Juliette Binoche in an effortlessly triumphant turn) – a French woman and single mom who runs an antiques store selling replicas – and the two strangers decide to chat while exploring the charming locales. They initially drive and then stroll around, with their freewheeling and intelligent conversations bearing edgy undertones. The gently ambling narrative underwent a stunning pivot at a trattoria where they’ve stopped for coffee. The café’s matronly owner assumes that they’re a married couple, and they seemingly decide to participate in this charade. However, one soon starts wondering if they’re playacting or they’re indeed an estranged couple carrying years of differences, disappointments and bitterness. Magnificently shot in fluid long takes – a sequence where they’re driving with the gorgeous surroundings reflected on the windshield was especially captivating – this enigmatic and richly textured film delivered sharp reflections on both art and relationships over one sumptuous Tuscan afternoon.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marital Drama/Avant-Garde

Language: French/English/Italian

Country: France

April [2024]

 Déa Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April, like her shattering debut film Beginning, was an austere, minimalist, brooding, intensely intimate and formally rigorous work. Operating in the intersection of sparse and desolate realism, scorching social commentaries and undercurrents, and elemental body horror, the film was foremost – like its predecessor – a radical exercise in feminism and a searing investigation into small-town bigotry. Women’s mind, body and agency were evoked as political and personal battlegrounds through its protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an ob-gyn who complements her work in conventional hospitals delivering children with performing secret abortions and surreptitiously providing birth control procedures in intensely religious, conservative and patriarchal village communities. Her acutely isolated life – she fills up her spare time by either being lost in her ravaged interiority or dangerously picking up strange men while taking lonely long drives or engaging in emotionally vacant on-off physical encounters with a kindly ex-boyfriend (Kakha Kintsurashvili) who’s also a respected colleague at the hospital where she works – is punctuated when a baby dies upon a natural delivery performed by her. The grief-stricken father, associating the tragic occurrence with her rumoured work as an abortionist, accuses her of wilful murder, leading to growing scrutiny on the hospital and in turn on Nina’s professional ethics and morality. Sukhitashvili gave a spellbinding turn in portraying her solitary, troubled and defiant character’s emotional struggles and existential crises. The film comprised of a string of viscerally unsettling sequences – including a “live” birth like Márta Mészáros’ Nine Months and a clandestine abortion like Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3, Weeks and 2 Days – shot with gripping exactitude in bravura long takes, while its “slow cinema” aesthetics were accompanied by disquieting imagery and nightmarish atmosphere.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Social Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia

Calcutta 71 [1972]

 In Calcutta 71, Mrinal Sen constructed a fierce and subversive examination of impoverishment, deprivation, exploitation and the seeds of revolutionary politics, with irony, eclectic influences informed by European New Wave and Third Cinema, and a powerful Marxist lens. Shaped like a multi-act piece, the second film in his magnificent ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ – bookended by Interview and Padatik – was as ferociously political and biting in its social observations as it was dazzling in its blend of formal choices, narrative devices and cinematic styles ranging from classical to experimental. Following an arresting montage, The droll prologue – in the veins of farcical political satire – finds the protagonist from the previous film (Ranjit Mallick) facing an absurdist trial for having exhibited anti-capitalist angst by defiling a mannequin, and featured a hilarious anti-proletarian war waged by the bourgeoisie. That segued into four thematically-linked episodes (adapted from stories by Manik Bandopadhyay, Probodh Sanyal, Samaresh Basu and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay) – a destitute family in the 1930s who’re forced to seek an alternative shelter from incessant rains; a family forced to meet ends through prostitution, while struggling to maintain middle-class respectability, during the 1943 famine; a group of rebellious teenagers smuggling rice by train, braving righteous cops and overbearing middle-class men; and a cocktail party filled with self-centred wealthy humbugs. The first three were made in the neorealist tradition, while the fourth was a quintessential Felliniesque parody. The film ended with a scorching agitprop epilogue where a young Naxal revolutionary, killed by the cops, holding the audience to account. The ensemble cast included Utpal Dutt as a sneering prosecutor, Haradhan Bandopadhyay as an irate judge, Madhabi Mukherjee as a troubled working woman, and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay as a pompous hypocrite.

p.s. This is a revisit.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Political Satire/Black Comedy/Omnibus Film/Experimental Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Interview [1971]

 Mrinal Sen made a fabulous entry into radical political cinema – blending plucky insouciance, subversive wit and searing angst – with Interview. It, in turn, laid the foundations for his blazing ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ – which also comprised of the scorching Calcutta 71 and the scintillating Padatik – and demonstrated his love for counterpointing Marxist discourse and dissent with formal bravura and postmodernist playfulness. The slice-of-life dusk-to-dawn premise is centred on the titular interview. A young, personable, middle-class guy (Ranjit Mallick) – eager to ascend the social ladder – has landed an opportunity for a lucrative job at a foreign corporation, thanks to his uncle. All he must do is arrive in a dapper Western suit. His plans, unfortunately, go haywire, as his only suit is in a laundry which is shut on account of a flash labour strike, and thereafter for being unable to remain insular in a crowded bus. The only option left to him, ultimately, is to arrive at the prized interview in a scandalously inappropriate attire. The film, interestingly, began with the dismantling of a statue representing colonial past and culminated with the disrobing of a mannequin embodying consumerist present, whilst the tone transitioned from wry and amusing for most parts to seething fury at the end. Around the one-third mark, the protagonist dramatically breaks the fourth wall while traveling in a tramcar, and sheepishly informs that he’s an actor being followed by a movie camera, his onscreen mother is played by Karuna Bannerjee (Pather Panchali’s Sarbojaya), and his story is real despite the artifice. This Brechtian departures, combined with satirical liveliness and ingenious use of street photographs and footage (shot by Sen himself), made it a work of impish, idiosyncratic audacity.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Political Satire/Experimental Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Thampu [1978]

 Aravindan’s gently observational, lyrical and understated docufiction Thampu delicately straddled between fact and fiction. Alongside its form and aesthetics that were shaped by verité and fly-on-the-wall filmmaking, through portraitures deeply rooted in social realities, fragmentary structure, poetic visual language, and startling instances of breaking the fourth wall, it manifested that through its making too. Aravindan travelled to a coastal hamlet in Kerala with few former circus artistes; they set up tent, called the villagers to view performances, and shot the acts juxtaposed with the audience’s enthralled reactions; the villagers eventually got involved in the preparations of an upcoming festival, which therefore led to closure of this setup that merged avant-garde filmmaking with social experiment. Its spare three-point arc – viz. a traveling circus troupe arrives from somewhere to a nondescript village; temporarily sets up shop, provides performances to paying audience during evenings, while practicing during the days; and quietly departs for some other destination – was accompanied with fleeting insights into the group’s long history, current financial challenges, and growing weariness among its older crew members, and interspersed with the aforementioned local festivities and existential crisis of a young guy belonging to an upper class family who’s at odds with his father on account of his love for arts and music instead of worldly affairs. The cast comprised of non-professionals as well as few professional actors like Bharath Gopi as the troupe’s brusque manager who wields his power over this motley group of impoverished, marginalized, disenfranchised and nomadic performers. Shot in austere B/W by veteran cinematographer Shaji N. Karun, it wasn’t surprising that Aravindan displayed such profound empathy for his subjects considering that, like them, he too existed in the margins.

Director: G. Aravindan

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Docu-fiction/Experimental Film

Language: Malayalam

Country: India

Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) [1986]

 John Abraham didn’t just embody his trailblazing mentor Ritwik Ghatak – his cinematic dare, blazing left-wing politics, defiant anti-establishmentarianism, self-destructive alcoholism and tragically curtailed life – but perhaps even took these a step further. His iconoclastic final feature Amma Ariyan – he died a year later upon a terrible accident – vividly manifested his fierce radicalism in every aspect. Made under ‘Odessa Collective’ that he’d formed with dreams of making filmmaking a political act that’s untethered from consumerist restrictions, he financed it through street contributions, made it through a participative process, and screened it in traveling shows. If his production and distribution decisions were stunning acts of rebellion, his formal choices were even bolder. It was, on surface, a road movie as Purushan (Joy Mathew), upon stumbling upon a dead young guy in Waynad who’s committed suicide, first decides to determine his identity and thereafter inform the latter’s mother who resides in Cochin. This journey mirrored the collaborative filmmaking process as what starts off with only Purushan, kept expanding and ultimately transitioned into a people’s movement by the time the targeted destination arrives. The revelation of the dead guy’s shifting backstory – amateur table player, jazz drummer, diffident political activist and Naxalite revolutionary, depending on who you’re asking – was alternated with recounting of and medications on historical acts of police brutality, class struggle and popular resistance that Purushan encounters along their route and which he chronicles in letters to his mother. The film, consequently, was heavily experimental and self-reflexive on one hand, and powerfully suffused with documentary references and political commentaries on the other, thus ensuring that this complex, quietly personal and searingly political work operated well outside both narrative conventions and easy interpretations.

Director: John Abraham

Genre: Political Drama/Road Movie/Experimental Film

Language: Malayalam

Country: India

Music [2023]

 It’s rare for a filmmaker to remain steadfastly committed to their politics or form or both over the entire stretch of their career, and to defiantly walk a rigorously crystalized path unconcerned with what’s considered de rigueur for the times. Angela Schanelec – co-founder of the “Berlin School” – belongs to the dwindling group of such outmoded giants as Ken Loach, Patricio Guzmán, Philippe Garrel, Hong Sang-soo et al. Music – the sexagenarian’s 10^th feature – is a spare, elliptical, elusive, experimental and characteristically Bressonian exercise exactly along the lines of her abstruse filmography. In other words, it definitely isn’t a film that one should approach either uninformed or expecting conventional storytelling. On paper, it’s an interpretative modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; however, it’s defined as much by its references to the Greek play as its departures from it. As a reviewer pithily remarked, it’s “a postmodern expression of a premodern text”. In its barest essence, it’s a tale of tragic union between Jon (Aliocha Schneider), an orphaned guy who serves a prison sentence upon inadvertently killing a man, and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a guard in that same prison where they get acquainted. Their seemingly contented marital life is short-lived as he starts losing his vision, though that’s partly compensated through his passionate vocation for singing. Their union, unfortunately, is based on a dark coincidence unbeknownst to either, which eventually and inevitably leads to suicide when that gets uncovered. Composed of sparse, austere and muted tableaux, and with long stretches of dialogue-free sequences interspersed with evocative classical diegetic music, this fleeting, exacting and stripped-to-bones work obliquely elucidates how a terrible price can be extracted by both knowing too much and too little.

Director: Angela Schanelec

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: German/Greek

Country: Germany

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere [1971]

 Jacques Rivette eschewed time and narrative, and deconstructed the experience of making and watching movies, in Out 1, his grandest and boldest experiment. Often considered one of the "holy grails for cinephiles", it remains an audacious, enigmatic and baffling work, what with its staggering 13-hours’ length, wildly freewheeling structure, extraordinary exercises in improvisation, and unavailability for many years. It began with exacting and bemusing dives into the immersive workshops of two avant-garde theatre collectives rehearsing Aeschylus’ plays – a rigorously analytic troupe led by the avuncular Thomas (Michael Lonsdale) and an idiosyncratic one led by the spirited Lili (Michèle Moretti) – whose outré drills and heavy improvs metatextually mirrored the film itself. Two neurotic outsiders, meanwhile, provoke a parallel thread – one of paranoia, subterfuge and conspiracy reminiscent of Paris Belongs to Us – presented as a cackling anti-thriller. On one hand there’s Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a shapeshifting, harmonica-playing drifter who becomes drawn into a quixotic investigation to uncover a sinister secret society linked to Balzac and Lewis Carroll; on the other there’s Frédérique (Juliet Berto), an alluring hustler and vagabond who too loiters into an analogous quest. Packed with extraordinary long takes – including a bravura one following an increasingly manic Léaud through the Parisian streets – the film also had Françoise Fabian as a crafty lawyer, Bulle Ogier as the proprietor of a shady joint, and the great Éric Rohmer as a deadpan Balzac scholar. Claustrophobic interiors were juxtaposed with radiant exteriors in this wry, dazzling and monumental opus often interpreted as an expression of post-May’68 disillusionment and malaise. Rivette, interestingly, cut a four-hour version which he called Spectre – or “ghost” – as opposed to this longer version’s subtitle which ironically means “touch me not”.

Director: Jacques Rivette

Genre: Avant-Garde/Experimental/Social Satire/Black Comedy/Mystery/Mini-Series

Language: French

Country: France

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One [1968]

 Pioneering documentarian William Greaves’ formally daring exercise – albeit one that remained undistributed for 23 years, until its stunning “discovery” during a Greaves retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, thanks to its bold curator – blazingly blurred the boundaries between verité and artifice. For this film-within-film-within-film made in NYC’s Central Park, he ostensibly decided to shoot the auditioning process of a short film on marital breakdown, for which he deployed four camera setups – one for the primary shoot focussed on a middle-aged couple; a second one to record the shooting process; a third to provide a peripheral context by capturing passers-by in the park; and finally, the director wielding a mobile camera himself. Meanwhile, the crew are seen growing dissatisfied and potentially mutinous against Greaves – or rather the incompetent, sexist and nonchalant version of himself that he enacts – for his lack of vision and method, and he edits their free-flowing discourses into it, even if it isn’t clear if this was off-screen friction or purposely staged. Alongside its subversion of the lines between nonfiction, direct action and contrivances – reminiscent of the dazzling Moroccan docu-fiction About Some Meaningless Events – and striking use of split screens, this freeform work – jauntily accompanied by Miles Davis’ music – was political too; it was, after all, the time of the New Left, anti-government protests, and Civil Rights and counterculture movements. That an African-American filmmaker was making something as wildly experimental as this, with a predominantly white crew, advocating the idea of dissenting against an authority figure, and openly covering the topics of abortion and closet homosexuality – and thus providing trailblazing manifestations of Black cinema, queer cinema and New Hollywood – made it eminently political, even if not overly so.

Director: William Greaves

Genre: Documentary/Experimental Film/Avant-Garde

Language: English

Country: US

You Have to Come and See It [ 2022]

 Spanish director Jonás Trueba’s deceptively conceived, structured and titled film You Have to Come and See It – a playful post-pandemic work – was laced with Rohmer’s enchanting influences with its lyrical, disarmingly intellectual depiction of two gentle-natured bourgeois couples. It also had a dash of Godard’s impish subversion with its meta, self-referential coda, and a touch of Woody’s deadpan neurosis too with its urban malaise and rambling conversations. I wonder how many filmmakers can speak of such eclectic references! It began with a rapturous opening montage – Chano Domínguez’s “live” performance of his intoxicating new composition Limbo at a jazz bar in Madrid, counterpointed by alternately lingering on the faces of the four protagonists through soft close-ups that provided observant introductions to them – that, with its leisurely evocation of a relaxing mood through the beguiling choice of devoting nearly 8 minutes in a slender runtime of an hour, was gloriously immersive. The strikingly lovely, bespectacled and erudite Elena (Itsaso Arana) and doodling, fidgety Daniel (Vitor Sanz) – who live in the city – and the pretty, friendly Susana (Irene Escolar) who’s expecting and the casual, carefree Guillermo (Francesco Carril) – who’ve recently moved to the countryside – are old friends meeting after a long gap, presumably on account of Covid and the latter couple’s decision to relocate. The former couple make a reluctant trip by train to the exurbs six months later – accompanied by Bill Callahan’s melodic “Let’s Move to the Country” – and the group have a lazy time catching up on their intimate personal developments, having an al fresco lunch, indulging in political/philosophical banter courtesy Elena’s passionate discourse on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, playing ping pong, and exploring the surrounding environs.

Director: Jonas Trueba

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

See You Friday, Robinson [2022]

 Mitra Farahani is Iranian by descent and Parisian by residence; further, she produced Godard’s The Image Book and has been involved in the restoration of Ebrahim Golestan’s films. These parallel strands both informed and shaped her epistolary, experimental and irreverently staged documentary See You Friday, Robinson. In 2014 she engineered a weekly email correspondence between the trailblazing Franco-Swiss auteur and the relatively lesser known but nevertheless important Iranian filmmaker – both important cultural icons, but who’d never crossed paths despite having been key figures in French and Iranian New Waves, respectively, which happened concurrently – and as part of which the two veteran giants exchanged messages every Friday, over 29 weeks, from late-2014 to early-2015. Godard – being the gargantuan intellectual that he always was and the mischievous, elusive non-conformist that he remained until his demise – filled his mails with cryptic, satiric, pun-laden missives, and attachments that ranged from Goya to Matisse, and Shakespeare to Joyce. And, alongside these – in what remains a memorable takeaway for JLG aficionados – deadpan home-made videos of him chomping on his cigar, drinking red wine diluted by water, and even doing something as hilariously banal as hanging clothes to dry. Golestan’s responses were no less interesting, wryly expressing his inability to fully decipher the messages while emphatically acknowledging Godard’s brilliance. Golestan’s massive mansion, meanwhile, made for a dramatic contrast to Godard’s cosy house. In a poignant coincidence, both men experienced hospitalization and were reminded of their mortality during this period, which perhaps forged a deeper kinship. The film was whimsical, playfully essayistic and consciously oblique, even if lacking in any significant reflections or insights emerging out of its fascinating juxtaposition, and felt tad unfinished in its assemblage.

Director: Mitra Farahani

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: Persian/English/French

Country: Iran

EO [2022]

  Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was an unclassifiable viewing experience, considering its bold narrative experimentations on a premise that walked a fine line between simplicity and simplistic; its balancing between tonal solemnity and demonstrations that veered towards cloying and cartoonish; its simultaneous espousal of the kind of themes and “radical sympathy” that aren’t really new, but situated in a modern-day European setting filled with topical social abominations that provocatively pointed towards its “rotten core”. These dichotomies were especially manifested by the way it unequivocally evoked Au Hasard Balthazar – which had made a profound impact on Skolimowski when he’d watched it sixty-seven years back – and in its dramatic departure by replacing the earlier film’s austere and rigorous form with an overly eventful sequence of tableaux and stylistic spectacle. The protagonist, like the Bresson classic, was the eponymous donkey who observes, experiences and journeys through long stretches of apathy, abandonment, dislocation, desolation, misery and cruelty – sparingly separated by brief yet unanticipated moments of love, tenderness, empathy, companionship and beauty – and becomes a mute, unwitting and oblivious witness to zealous animal rights activists who spark the first of its string of separations, casual exploitation of vulnerable immigrants, horrific hooliganism, humans’ shocking capacity for violence, decrepit aristocrats and whatnot. Its tad overdone journey began with a traveling circus that it was a part of and bleakly ended in an industrial abattoir, and traversed through Polish countryside, lonely highways and Italian towns. The hyperactive direction, therefore, was marked by mordant world-view, dazzling camerawork and hallucinatory visuals on one hand, and corny moments, glib humanity and showboating artifice on the other. Isabelle Huppert featured in a short, enticing cameo as a cold, frustrated countess.

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Polish

Country: Poland

No Bears [2022]

 Does a filmmaker really ever become a martyr at cinema’s altar? While such a statement may appear disingenuous and even pompous in most cases, not so for Jafar Panahi, who continues to undermine legal restrictions, defy punitive retributions and push boundaries. No Bears – the fifth film that he’s made since being banned from making movies, barred from leaving Iran and intermittently placed under house arrest, and completed just prior to being handed a fresh prison term on old charges – organically manifested and was powerfully informed by these extrinsic realities, thus coalescing political with personal. Suffused with bristling meta-commentary, rich self-reflexive aspects, moments of unsparing self-criticism, and tones that veered between ironic and bitter, the film was as much a brilliant and complex formal exercise as it was a bold and incisive use of cinema as an agency of subversion and dissidence. Panahi, once again playing a version of himself with self-effacing elan, is remotely directing a staged docudrama – about an Iranian couple, playing themselves, who’re trying to emigrate to France using fake passports, with the shoot taking place in Turkey – on account of being disallowed from making movies and leaving Iran. He’s stationed himself at a remote village on the country’s border in order to have proximity with his crew, while barely controlling the urge to cross the imaginary lines that separate the two countries. Meanwhile, courtesy his love for photographing locals, he becomes unwittingly embroiled in a sensitive situation upon being charged with capturing a couple in a forbidden relationship on camera. Both narrative strands escalated unpredictably and with tragic consequences, which Panahi navigated – as filmmaker, dissenter, observer, individual – with a wry blend of incredulity, resentment and melancholy.

Director: Jafar Panahi

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

India Song [1975]

 Marguerite Duras was a complex, multi-faceted and non-conformist individual, avant-garde artist, left-wing intellectual and defiant feminist, whose eventful life was defined by her diverse lived experiences, progressive politics, activist involvements and polyphonic artist pursuits. India Song, Duras’ most celebrated work – which she herself adapted from her unproduced play, which in turn was based on her novel Le Vice-Consul – provided a fascinating manifestation of her multi-dimensional identity and voice. This was, on one hand, a haunting, hypnotic and aesthetically splendorous work that pulls one in with its beauty, melancholy and mise-en-scène; portrayal of a lavish, decadent and doomed world; tactile evocation of ennui, existential torpor, overpowering memories and oppressive ambiance; and crafted a confounding house-of-mirrors reminiscent of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. On the other hand, it was an abstract, dense, distancing and highly experimental exercise that eschewed narrative elements, radically decoupled image and sound, and interlaced seething critique on the alienating, dehumanizing and rotting effects of colonialism. Delphine Seyrig – in the same year as she starred as a disaffected single mother and reluctant prostitute in Akerman’s devastating masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – played Anne-Marie Stretter, the bored, lost, detached and promiscuous wife of the French colonial Ambassador in 1930s India, who’s spent her life across different colonized nations. Set within the premises of the diplomat’s luxurious embassy in Calcutta, she’s seen in a slow, dazed and bemused tango involving multiple paramours who she’s having affairs with – albeit, with real and dreams blurred – including the disgraced Vice-Consul of Lahore (Michael Lonsdale). Carlos d'Alessio’s intoxicating score provided a parallel tango with the magnetic visuals, various voices reflecting on a myriad digressive topics, and the film’s poetic ambiguity.

Director: Marguerite Duras

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Experimental Film

Language: French

Country: France