Homework [1989]

 Kiarostami’s meditation on what it means to be a child in an adult’s world, and in how behavioural dynamics of kids – demonstrable even by something as seemingly ordinary as school homework – are moulded and shaped by both familial contexts and political forces, achieved multi-hued dimensions in this bravura documentary. Furthermore, its nuanced, ironic and disarmingly radical elucidation of the form’s fluidity – achieved through manipulation of the camera’s gaze and inducing of fictive elements that undermine the truth-seeking role that documentaries are expected to play – magnificently presaged his dazzling form-smashing masterpiece Close-Up. It also capped a sublime triptych on pedagogy along with the terrific docu First Graders, which recorded a teacher’s incessant instilling of behavioural traits in a school, and the timeless film Where Is the Friend’s Home?, which portrayed how homework can elicit heroic camaraderie. Influenced by the difficulty that he himself faced while helping his son, he ostensibly formulated this “visual study” and “research project” to comprehend this ubiquitous phenomenon. However, by training his disarmingly equanimous lens on first graders at a working-class boys’ school, he crafted something that transcended the said premise. What emerged through the “interviews” of his adorable subjects is a society driven by punitive culture and fear of reprisals – the kids innately associate “punishment” with belts, aren’t aware of what praise means, and promptly rate their love for doing homework over watching cartoons, even though that’s manifestly untrue – as well as how they’re oftentimes helped by their elder sisters as their parents are either illiterate or too busy or both, and the regrettable seeping in of political narratives even in the “safe” space of schools, as evidenced by references to then ongoing Iraq-Iran War.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

First Graders [1984]

 Made under the auspices of ‘Kanun’ (local parlance for the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults) – as were most of Kiarostami’s films during the 1970s and 80s, in keeping with the fact that he himself had set up its filmmaking department in 1970 – First Graders was a remarkable early work in the Iranian giant’s canon. It reiterated his impressive ability to evoke nuanced renderings from children that he’d already demonstrated until then, exquisitely presaged the two magnificent films that he made subsequently which arguably remain among the greatest works involving children (Where Is the Friend’s House? and Homework), and provided glimpses of his adroitness in complementing wry social observations with bold modernist impulses. This simultaneously deadpan and playful documentary – it impishly subverted the form through recording of seemingly spontaneous interactions that must’ve been subtly coloured by the presence of a camera in the periphery, albeit a hidden one – was set completely within the confines of a school for boys from lower economic backgrounds and located at a working-class neighbourhood in Tehran. Filmed alternatively among chaotic outdoor gatherings and in intimate indoor spaces, differential focus was accorded to how the school’s surprisingly patient and ostensibly even-handed principal – manifesting the paternalistic and moralist tendencies of the larger society – spends an inordinate amount of time disciplining, chiding, instructing and counselling kids at his chamber, for a variety of childish infarctions that were as deeply revelatory of their social contexts as the carefree worlds that they inhabit. Though mostly tight in scope and framing, Kiarostami at times delectably cut loose by amusingly observing kids in candid group settings, and even through something as digressive as a euphorically floating plastic bag.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

First Case, Second Case [1979]

 Banned upon its release and largely buried for next three decades, Kiarostami’s discursive, loosely structured and deceptively piercing essay First Case, Second Case was, primarily, an astute pedagogic examination. Made for Kanun – the filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults that he helmed – it presented two alternative outcomes to seven students being thrown out of the class by their teacher, as one was creating disturbances, with all suspended for a week unless they reveal the miscreant. In the first scenario, one of the students eventually divulges the perpetrator to be able to get back in, while in the second, they refuse to budge and continue to remain outside for the entire stretch. Kiarostami used this as springboards for inducing reflections and opinions from an extraordinarily diverse group of people, ranging from parents, teachers and education board members to intellectuals, artists, political activists and religious leaders. What unfolds is a fascinating debate on informing on one’s comrades vis-à-vis demonstration of collective solidarity, along with underlying structural critiques, and thereby a fascinating Rorschach test on the experiment’s self-consciously serious participants. The work, incidentally, got interlaced with sharp political undercurrents and topicality as the Iranian Revolution was transpiring when it was in production. He made shrewd changes in his contributors to underscore that tumultuous moment in time, which moulded it into an allegorical document on children of the revolution and foreshadowed an inevitable cycle wherein calls for solidarity during a popular uprising oftentimes regresses into informing on others once the new status quo has set in. On a wry note, the picture that the teacher is seen drawing, viz. an ear, was an allusion to surveillance.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

30 Favourite Films from 2023

1. The Zone of Interest | Jonathan Glazer | UK/Poland
2. The Mother of All Lies | Asmae El Moudir | Morocco
3. Occupied City | Steve McQueen | The Netherlands
4. Bad Living / Mal Viver | Joao Canijo | Portugal
5. The Battle | Vera Egito | Brazil
6. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World | Radu Jude | Romania
7. El Juicio / The Trial | Ulises de la Orden | Argentina
8. Our Body / Notre Corps | Claire Simon | France
9. Afire / Roter Himmel | Christian Petzold | Germany
10. Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan | US
11. About Dry Grasses | Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Turkey
12. Youth (Spring) | Wang Bing | China
13. Living Bad / Viver Mal | Joao Canijo | Portugal
14. The Old Oak | Ken Loach | UK
15. And, Towards Happy Alleys | Sreemoyee Singh | India
16. Killers of the Flower Moon | Martin Scorsese | US
17. Four Daughters | Kaouther Ben Hania | Tunisia
18. Kayo Kayo Colour? / Which Colour? | Shahrukhkhan Chavada | India
19. Green Border | Agnieszka Holland | Poland
20. 20,000 Species of Bees | Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren | Spain
21. Yannick | Quentin Dupieux | France
22. The Delinquents | Rodrigo Moreno | Argentina
23. Against the Tide | Sarvnik Kaur | India
24. Aattam / The Play | Anand Ekarshi | India
25. Anatomy of a Fall | Justine Triet | France
26. The Teachers' Lounge | Ilker Çatak | Germany
27. The Plough / Le Grand Chariot | Philippe Garrel | France
28. Fallen Leaves | Aki Kaurismaki | Finland
29. Terrestrial Verses | Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami | Iran
30. La Chimera | Alice Rohrwacher | Italy

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

All of Us Strangers [2023]

 Adam (Andrew Scott), the protagonist in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, is a man shaped, bound and defined by internalized trauma – on account of his parents’ death when he was just 12, and growing up as an alienated orphan on account of his homosexuality – and the consequent rootlessness, social estrangement and deep-rooted feelings of otherness. He, as a result, exists in a liminal space haunted by past ghosts, detached present and formless future. His loneliness and melancholy are complemented by his sense of being stuck and intensely secluded life. A drifting television screenwriter, he lives alone in a swanky but thoroughly deserted upscale high-rise in London. Two parallel – and ostensibly unconnected – threads suddenly unfold that throw his ennui-filled life into an emotional whirlpool. On one hand he finds his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) at the suburban house he grew up in – exactly as they were just before they died, thus making the film seem an intriguing mix of magic realism, ghost story and a schizophrenic mirage induced by the subconscious – and starts reconnecting with them and bringing them up to speed about his life, including his being gay. On the other, he befriends and gets sucked into an intense relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), an enigmatic, volatile, borderline self-destructive younger guy – and seemingly the only other resident in that building – who exudes a troubled vulnerability. Led by powerhouse turns by Scott, Mescal and Foy, suffused with rippling emotionality, comprising of a glorious disco-era soundtrack, and adapted from the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, this achingly intimate exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and being queer boldly walked a delicate line between passionate melodrama and sentimental contrivances.

Director: Andrew Haigh

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Fantasy

Language: English

Country: UK

May December [2023]

 As Todd Haynes’ May December opens, we see a warm social gathering, on a sunny day, at the charming house of Gracie (Julianne Moore), genially hosting her guests, and her husband Joe (Charles Melton), operating a barbecue grill. Something, however, is clearly off, as Gracie seems overly effusive, while Joe appears withdrawn. And, if their massive age difference doesn’t mean anything in itself, it gains disturbing ramifications when it's eventually revealed that 23 years back, the then 36-year-old Gracie was caught being intimate with 13-year-old Joe. Loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, this had created a massive public scandal, evoked media frenzy, and led to her arrest and prison sentence during which she ended up giving birth to Joe’s child; most bizarrely, she resumed this paedophilic affair upon release, left her husband and son, and married Joe; furthermore, they had more kids, and even ended up staying together since then. The film’s opening added an intriguing parallel dimension in the form of acclaimed actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) joining them to initiate her preparedness for portraying Gracie for an “independent film” in the making, thus cheekily alluding to greater nuance and respectability vis-à-vis lurid tabloids and exploitative telenovelas. Elizabeth walks a fine line between detached observations and sly manipulations, as her voyeuristic curiosity and saviour complex get simultaneously stoked while embedding herself into their lives. Meanwhile, in parallel, we see Gracie’s conniving relationship with the thoroughly lost Joe, who she bullies, stonewalls and weepily manipulates depending on what the situation demands. Shot in overexposed images resembling soap operas and led by the two solid lead turns, it captured the double manipulations and fraught relationships with cool rigour and parodic self-awareness.

Director: Todd Haynes

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: English

Country: US

Living Bad (Viver Mal) [2023]

 In Living Bad – João Canijo’s riveting reverse shot to the magnificent Bad Living – the Portuguese filmmaker shifted his gaze from the women running the decadent, crumbling hotel in Ofir to the guests visiting it over the same weekend. While it had interesting departures – three episodes in place of a single thread, the tone more cutting, and the colour palettes tad brasher – it too centred on feral, mutually lacerating relationships with manipulative matriarchs. Further, like its companion piece, the same exchanges between the hotel’s proprietors and guests reappear here, albeit foregrounded on the latter POVs this time, while conversations from the other side continue bleeding in; and this formal ingenuity added playful layers to the abrasive tales. These, alongside the choice of often filming the charged interactions from outside glass panes and through reflections – the sumptuous visual compositions were orchestrated in both films by cinematographer Leonor Teles – reiterated the diptych’s decidedly voyeuristic overtones. Canijo adapted motifs for the vignettes, each featuring toxic three-way relationships, from three plays by August Strindberg. In ‘Playing with Fire’ – tad reminiscent of Östlund's wickedly funny Triangle of Sadness – a photographer (Nuno Lopes) is intensely jealous of his alluring, successful, narcissistic and possibly cheating wife, and their marriage is further strained by his mom’s incessant phone calls. In ‘The Pelican’, a self-serving woman (Leonor Silveira) is having a secret affair with the opportunistic husband of her anxiety-ridden daughter (Lia Carvalho). And in ‘Motherly Love’ – the best of the three – a possessive, elitist mother (Beatriz Batarda) is clinically undermining her fragile daughter’s (Leonor Vasconcelos) intimate relationship with another woman (Carolina Amaral), because she can’t accept losing the “apple of her eyes” to someone from a lower class.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama/Omnibus Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Bad Living (Mal Viver) [2023]

 João Canijo’s Bad Living – which formed an ingeniously imagined and magnificently shaped diptych with Living Bad, where the two counterpointed and bled into each other like reflections on a shattered mirror – is a work of such dazzling formal exactitude, simmering emotional ferocity and hypnotic visual compositions that it leaves one crushed and exhilarated in parallel. It, incidentally, eloquently recalled the supercharged undercurrents of Bergman and the unsettlingly visceral palettes of Martel, while retaining a distinctive perspective and texture. Set in a hotel in the coastal town of Ofir – its retro décor, forlorn atmosphere, and interplay of spaciousness and claustrophobia made it a brooding character, in the same way as the sublimely beguiling and instinctively unnerving Saint-Tropez villa in Deray’s mesmeric La Piscine was – the deceptively fluid narrative is structured akin to a fiendish voyeur gliding along the different spaces in order to snoop at what’s transpiring, and weaving those intensely private conversations into an impression of complex intergenerational fault-lines that’re coloured by unresolved past contexts, memories, blames, wounds and deep-set misunderstandings. Over the course of a weekend, we witness the devastatingly fateful unravelling of the dysfunctional relationship between four troubled women – the abrasive matriarch Sara (Rita Blanco) who owns the failing property, her irrevocably crumbling elder daughter Piedade (Anabela Moreira) and volatile younger daughter Raquel (Cleia Almeida) who manage operations, and Piedade’s ravishing, estranged, grief-stricken daughter Salomé (Madalena Almeida) – who’re craving for their respective mother’s love, but continuously scarring each other in the process. Rapturously shot in arrestingly framed long, static shots – with the vibrant colours beautifully juxtaposing the moody, lonely atmosphere – the astonishingly enacted film substantiated Tolstoy’s hypothesis that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Director: Joao Canijo

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Portugal

Youth (Spring) [2023]

 Shot over 6 years (between 2014 and 2019), and condensed from a staggering 2600 hours of footage into an immersive and observational 3 ½ hour documentary essay – which, incidentally, made this a relatively concise work in Wang Bing’s formidable canon – Youth (Spring) is composed on a canvas that’s simultaneously expansive and intimate, rigorous and free-flowing, focussed and digressive. The first chapter in his planned ‘Youth Trilogy’, it comprises of vignettes stitched into a long-form impressionist reflection on the textile hub of Zhilli – the town, located close to Shanghai, has over 18,000 privately-run workshops catering mostly to the domestic market – where around 300,000 migrant youngsters work. With thematic preoccupations, understated tone and unassuming aesthetics that reminded me of Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary masterwork Still Life, the film painted a picture of grind, compounded by the gritty complex and claustrophobic spaces where they both slog and stay. Yet – and this is what made it such a gently affective exercise – it was never oppressively dreary or pedantic, despite the undertones of melancholy and urban desolation. Rather, it’s easy, organic, lively, jaunty and even hopeful at times, as we see kids in late teens and early 20s horsing around, flirting, indulging in silly and carefree frolic, acting like cool hipsters, lip-syncing to bouncy pop music (played at the shop-floors to alleviate monotony), creating pipe dreams, having relationships, and building camaraderie, despite the grimy environs and exhausting labour. Yes, they also recognize the exploitation and participate in collective wage negotiations with their stuffy bosses, even if these end in futility. What emerged through Bing’s empathetic gaze on a slew of individuals, was a vivid, kaleidoscopic and eloquently real portrayal of community and life in action.

Director: Wang Bing

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Yannick [2023]

 Yannick, Quentin Dupieux’s sharp and subversive cultural satire – and one of two films that he made this year alongside the surrealist farce Daaaaaalí! – packed considerable punch despite its unassuming setup and narrative brevity. It touched upon the relationship between art/artistes and the audience – especially the unsaid and sacrosanct social contract that one enters into while partaking in that relationship – and the exponential rise of boorish trolls, who’d like nothing more than to heckle, disrupt and even cancel anything that offends their sensibilities. This darkly funny, impishly acrid and brilliantly staged work, therefore, also emerged as remarkably topical. The compact chamber-piece, ensconced nearly completely within a small Parisian theatre, starts off with a play in progress – a domestic dramedy called “Le Cocu”, featuring a self-effacing ménage à trois and being performed by three actors (Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin and Sébastien Chassagne) – watched by a spattering of audience. The show, however, is brought to an awkward halt by the eponymous Yannick (Raphaël Quenard), a watchman at a night parking, who’s taken a rare day off and travelled a fair bit in order to catch it. He’d come expecting to forget his personal woes and be entertained; however, upon finding it despairing instead of uplifting, he interrupts the play to express his indignation, unbothered by the mix of bemusement, irritation and anger that it elicits. And, upon realizing that his outrage isn’t being taken seriously, he decides to take control of the situation in the most unexpectedly absurdist manner. Led by an incredible turn by Quenard as the neurotic working-class anti-hero – ridiculous, exasperating, amusing and vulnerable in turns – this irreverent little gem certainly doesn’t run the risk of not being enjoyable enough.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France

Daaaaaalí! [2023]

 Daaaaaalí!, one of two films that Quentin Dupieux made in 2023 – the stunning cultural satire Yannick being the other one – is neither a biopic of the enormously famous painter Salvador Dalí nor a homage to the maverick surrealist. Rather, it’s a quirky evocation of what he symbolized through his eccentric nature, grandiloquent persona, gigantic ego, mythical fame and distinctive artistic voice, which Dupieux – as the title joyously alludes to – captured using zany, ingenious, unpredictable and deliciously confounding absurdism that’s representative of his colourful subject. Invoking the form and tenor of Buñuel’s extraordinary surrealist satires, the film – in an oddball stroke of creative expression – has five separate actors boisterously playing Dalí (Édouard Baer, Gilles Lellouche, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand), with each in different scenarios, at different times, signifying different ages, but on occasions also interchangeably and even simultaneously. This latter aspect reminds one of Haynes’ I’m Not There where six different actors had portrayed Bob Dylan. However, unlike both Buñuel and the Haynes, its farcical bursts and formal adventurousness were an end in itself, thus making it not just funny and farcical, but also, quite unapologetically, frothy and frivolous. The movie’s most basic premise involved a naïve but diligent journalist (Anaïs Demoustier) trying to interview the mercurial artist, but her ardent efforts are repeatedly foiled for increasingly hilarious, incongruous and silly reasons, ranging from Dalí’s infuriating obsession with “caméra cinématographique” and his maddening vanity, to – in arguably the whimsical script’s most madcap component – a seemingly endless, infinitely digressive and impassively outlandish dream-within-dream recounted by an unassuming priest over a simple dinner. The nutty series of events are accompanied by an irresistible score by former Daft Punker Thomas Bangalter.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Surrealist Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

Poor Things [2023]

 Poor Things is possibly Lanthimos’ most unreservedly ambitious film to date – ribald, outré and gleefully grotesque – while also being situated in his distinctively weird aesthetic palettes and expressions. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, it conjured a wildly imaginative blend of period setting and punk-dystopia, and thereby a mix of black humour, body horror, sci-fi fantasy, existential inquiries and feminist fable. Yet, for all its absurdist splashes, it was also ultimately an exercise in humanism and morality, and therefore bereft of the wickedly savage and deadpan nihilism that he’d pursued so far. Consequently, for all its fantastical imagery, extravaganza and provocations, it demonstrated that he’s either mellowing with age or attempting an expanded audience (or both). Set in cartoonish Victorian England – flamboyantly evoked through zany cinematography, garish backdrops and discordant scores – it’s centred on Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of a child in the body of a woman. This freakish contradiction is the result of the handiwork of mad scientist Godwin (Willem Defoe) – who she unironically calls “God” – as he revived a woman who’s committed suicide by transplanting an unborn child’s brain into her. Unapologetically gauche, outrageously libidinous and infinitely curious, she embarks on a wild adventure of self-learning, first with the gloriously louche Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) – their romps represented the film’s most enjoyable sections – and then as a prostitute at a Parisian brothel where she’s drawn to socialist ideas. The drab final segment and some self-consciously serious set-pieces, unfortunately, were dampeners. Excellent performances aside – Stone was particularly fearless and nuanced – the film comprised of a charming cameo by Hanna Schygulla and droll inter-species hybrids reminiscent of Sukumar Ray’s unforgettable nonsense poem ‘Khichuri’ (“Hodgepodge”).

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Sci-Fi/Black Comedy/Fantasy/Romantic Comedy/Existentialist Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

Last Summer [2023]

 Catherine Breillat proves with Last Summer that, even in her mid-70s, she hasn’t lost either her propensity or her appetite to defy norms and push the envelope in matters involving uncomfortable, unorthodox and amoral expressions of women’s private desires. Made a decade after her previous film Abuse of Weakness, this remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts marked an intriguing overlap between prestige cinema aesthetics and dangerously salacious themes. Its central crux – viz. a forbidden affair between a middle-aged woman and her teenage stepson – might’ve been tailormade for an exercise in saucy softcore in most other filmmakers’ hands; but, not in Breillat’s, as her objective was a non-exploitative and non-judgemental dive into a queasy and murky quagmire that a problematic relationship such as this constitutes, alongside the associated elements of sexual politics and power, and made in the kind of measured, unsentimental and analytic style that’s – in absence of a suitable term – oh-so French. In the narrative’s sharpest irony, Anne (Léa Drucker) is a capable and committed attorney who represents victims of sexual abuse, which therefore underscored how transgressions can often defy easy pigeonholing. Furthermore, the way her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), with whom her marriage has long entered a stage of convenient stasis, decides to believe her over his moody and rebellious son Théo (Samuel Kircher) – when he decides to reveal the secret liaison on account of the angst he experiences upon Anne’s decision to break-off – disconcertingly presaged the devastating revelations concerning Alice Munro. The film was at its strongest in the first and last thirds, separated by a relatively staid middle section when the affair actually unfolds, and was led by a courageous turn by Drucker.

Director: Catherine Breillat

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marital Drama

Language: French

Country: France

El Conde [2023]

 In Pablo Larraín’s grisly, hyperbolic, farcical and pungently satirical horror-comedy El Conde, the despotic former Chilean dictator is both literally and metaphorically a hideously decrepit, blood-sucking and heart-chomping vampire. Made as a zany overlap between German expressionism, bawdy humour and political absurdism – and deliberately as an exercise in lowbrow grotesquerie to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1973 coup – the film recalled two thematic tropes that’ve recurred in the filmmaker’s splendid oeuvre, viz. memories from the military dictatorship years (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) and unconventional stabs at biopics (Neruda, Jackie, Spencer). This oddball mix of aesthetic experimentation and narrative flippancy sees Pinochet – a French royalist who’d fought against the dissidents during the French Revolution, and finally fulfilled his lust of royal grandeur by illegally grabbing power in Chile – living a banished, ignominious existence since being kicked out of power, with his scheming wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra), and Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), his macabre White Russian butler who loved exterminating Communists. When his conniving kids get a hint of Pinochet’s suicidal tendencies – ironically, he’s more pissed at being called a thief than a murderer – they descend like a pack of vultures to seize his ill-gotten wealth. Meanwhile, a saucy Catholic nun straight out of a lurid Verhoeven slasher (Paula Luchsinger), in the guise of an accountant, arrives to track his dirty money trail and thereafter exorcize him. Shot in deliciously high-contrast B/W, filled with droll set-pieces, and imbued with a gothic and wintry atmosphere recalling earlier Scandinavian cinema, the freakish power struggle is dryly narrated – as it hilariously turns out – by the hawkish former British PM Margaret Thatcher, who isn’t just a fellow blood-sucking vampire but Pinochet’s borderline-incestuous mother too.

Director: Pablo Larrain

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Horror

Language: Spanich/English

Country: Chile

Viduthalai Part 1 [2023]

 Vetrimaaran’s blistering Tamil film Viduthalai Part 1 – it was planned as a single work, but later decided for release in two parts – delved into inflammatory political topics and fearlessly questioned mainstream narratives, over its expansive scope. The director used both popular and agitational narrative devices while depicting how those fighting for their rights are branded enemies of the state; civic and judicial boundaries are brazenly transgressed – in the name of ushering “development” and battling “militancy” – while suppressing any dissidence against the state; flagrant police brutality and custodial tortures; and the ironic scenario wherein those representing the lowest rung within the armed forces – paid pittance, denied basic conditions, and treated like non-entities by the chain of command – are made to sacrifice their lives and their humanity while waging brutal wars. The said lowest common denominator here is the newly-recruited Kumaresan (Soori), who’s joined a police unit stationed at a dense forest in order to eliminate the rebel tribal leader Perumal (Vijay Sethupathi), who’s violently opposing handing over of their lands to a mining company. The naïve protagonist, employed as a driver and factotum, immediately falls foul of the savage OC upon disobeying orders while helping a villager; this, in turn, leads to a touching romance with an orphaned tribal girl (Bhavani Sre), growing consciousness upon witnessing the bending of truths and perpetration of brutality by his colleagues, and increasing awareness of the man who the state calls a villain but respected as “teacher” by the local villagers. The film’s bravura and stunningly orchestrated 8-minute single-take opening sequence – capturing the grief, chaos and myriad activities at the site of a devastating train derailment – had set the stage for this riveting work.

Director: Vetrimaaran

Genre: Crime/Thriller/Action/War

Language: Tamil

Country: India

Four Daughters [2023]

 The line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking – and in turn between the supposed candour of the former and the inherent artifice in the latter – was boldly blurred by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania in her stunning genre-bending documentary Four Daughters. What unfolded in her formally adventurous work – that involved gutsy deconstruction of truth, memory and complex past experiences – was ultimately a daring psychoanalytic exercise in therapy and catharsis, wherein renewed interpretations of past traumas through the prism of time are hoped to enable clarity and peace. The film’s tricky hybrid setup is established at the outset. Olfa Hamrouni’s two eldest daughters Ghofrane and Rahma disappeared in 2015 while still teenagers, in order to join ISIS; Ben Hania, in order to understand what led to their descent into lunacy and the bruise that was left in its wake, deployed two female actors to enact them, well-known actress Hend Sabri to play Olfa when things got emotionally difficult, and a male actor to play the abusive men in her life, along with Olfa and her two younger daughters Eya and Tayssir – playing themselves while recreating key stages from their shared lives – to craft this devastating tale of grief, anguish and loss. The docu comprises of underlying elements of enactment and simulation, and the manipulative possibilities therein, made it an uncomfortable watch at times, aside from being an unsettling one too. These, nevertheless, complemented its formal audacity, and the extraordinary courage that Olfa, Eya and Tayssir displayed in reliving their intensely private anecdotes. Furthermore, it’s also filled with disarming humour, deep sincerity and delicate tenderness that mellowed its darker, painful and harrowing components, and took exploitative possibilities out of the film’s framework.

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Tunisia

The Mother of All Lies [2023]

 Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s extraordinary documentary The Mother of All Lies, through defiant remembrances, delivered a powerful affirmation of how a rebellion can be delivered by reinstating suppressed memories and shattering the veil of silence. Furthermore, it demonstrated how an act of recollecting and articulating old trauma can heal wounds and enable reconciliations. That a tapestry that’s so fragile and complex can be weaved with such formal dare, narrative idiosyncrasy and stylistic ingenuity – with the director both orchestrating and participating in this expression of personal and collective catharsis – made this a work of singular brilliance. Its starting point is the lack of photographs of El Moudir’s family and herself on account of their prohibition by her stern and authoritarian grandmother Zahra. Hence, to circumvent this chasm, her father has recreated her childhood home in Casablanca, immediate neighbourhood and residents. This meticulously designed and exceptionally constructed miniature diorama added an absorbing sense of here-and-now to reminiscences of quirky old habits, memories both fond and disquieting, unreconciled familial fault-lines, and eventually a dark political episode. In 1981, the soaring prices of breads had been the final straw for the eruption of riots, which were violently crushed by the military, followed by attempted erasure, resulting in hundreds of deaths and bodies thereafter buried in nameless graves. The filmmaker’s neighbours – Said, who wrote protest poems; Abdallah, who was illegally jailed for many years; the mother of 12-year-old Fatima who was shot and her body disappeared, and finally memorialized decades later – shared their devastating stories, situating them in the miniature installations. Zahra, incidentally, might well have been personating a version of herself, and this potentially performative element further emphasized the work’s audacious fluidity.

Director: Asmae El Moudir

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Morocco

Bye Bye Tiberias [2023]

 French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem’s delicately strung, lyrically shaped and deeply intimate diary film Bye Bye Tiberias, like Karim Aïnouz’s similarly evocative ciné-memoir Mariner of the Mountains, is an eloquently crafted expression of the search for one’s homeland and roots, guided by memories, and driven by the longing for a lost space and time. A journey like this, therefore is as much temporal as it’s spatial, and equally emotional and physical. It’s also a moving expression of female and familial solidarity, through its remembrance of and meditations on four generations of women whose lives have been one of displacement and exile. What emerged through this deceptively intricate assemblage is a layered tapestry informed by the interconnectedness of the personal and the political. Hiam Abbass – professional movie actress, amateur poet and the filmmaker’s mother – had emigrated to France in her 20s to escape and pursue acting. Her daughter’s birth had restored the shaken ties to her family. And now, in her 60s, she agrees to recount their family saga –grandmother Um Ali who, along with her family, was forced to leave their home in Tiberias during the 1948 Nakba; granddad Hosni who died of grief; aunt Hosnieh who’d taken shelter in a refugee camp in Syria and was separated for 30 years; mom Nemat who became a teacher and raised eight kids; her father who loved recording family events on camera; her sisters who’ve lived under the occupation – and take a cathartic trip along with her daughter. This, therefore, was simultaneously a tale of violence, loss and anguish – and, in turn, a bleak reminder of the unabated persecution of the Palestinian people across generations – as one of resilience, resistance and reconciliation.

Director: Lina Soualem

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film

Language: French/Arabic

Country: Palestine

In Flames [2023]

 It’s perhaps neither coincidental nor surprising that in the two films from Pakistan that gained international acclaim in consecutive years – Salim Sadiq’s sublime and rapturous Joyland, and Zarrar Kahn’s eery and visceral In Flames – women’s fierce desire to exert their agency in defiance of patriarchy were incontestably manifest. The Western liberal backgrounds of both filmmakers undeniably influenced, informed and shaped their films’ feral thematic undercurrents and bold storytelling. The pervading everyday horrors of the real world – misogyny, gender violence, predatory behaviour and familial abuse – were interwoven into the film’s milieu and tapestry, and in turn counterpointed as well as triggered and even amplified the horrors emanating from the supernatural realms in this gripping work. Set in the gritty city of Karachi, a compelling mother-daughter relationship – both trying in futility come to terms with grief and trauma – foregrounded the tale. Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) is a strikingly independent-minded twenty-something girl who’s studying medicine, while her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar) is a single woman taking care of her two kids through her job as a schoolteacher; the violent conclusion to Farah’s abusive husband when Mariam was little, meanwhile, continues to haunt both. The demise of Mariam’s maternal grandfather has suddenly placed them in a financially vulnerable position, and her slimy uncle descends like a vulture with his eyes on their modest property. The situation’s grimness is marginally allayed when Mariam gets in a tender relationship with a gentle-natured Canada-returned guy (Omar Javaid). However, when their romantic getaway to the seaside goes awry, a malignant can of worms is thrown open, taking them on a hellish spiral. Nawal and Mazhar’s competent turns aided the commendable interplay between chilling atmosphere and sharp social critique.

Director: Zarrar Kahn

Genre: Horror/Family Drama/Supernatural Drama

Language: Urdu

Country: Pakistan