Dad Doesn’t Know What’s Best in New Directors/New Movies


With a springy sign of optimism – misleading or otherwise! – these years New Directors/New Movies going full throttle to the movies. New York’s Covid numbers are climbing again, but the festival, a joint venture of the Film and Museum of Modern Art at Lincoln Center, has left the virtual for the physical. So if you want to check out the selections in the 51st edition, which runs until May 1st, you’ll have to do it in person. Masks are not required, but are recommended by the organizers.

From its inception, New Directors has focused on young or at least less established filmmakers, many of whom grapple with social and political issues. In a bad year, that means the event is little more than a nice bag of tries and misses. In a good year though – and this is one – the event can feel like the rebellious, sometimes more adventurous little brother of the New York Film Festival. The strength of this year’s cast is by Audrey Diwan’s “Happening,” a gritty, clever French drama about a college student’s agonizing effort to secure an abortion in 1963 at a time when the procedure was illegal. is heralded. I’ll have more to say about the movie when it hits theaters on May 6.

As usual, most of the roster has been picked from other festivals, including Sundance’s half-dozen selections. These include a young Senegalese woman who works for a white Manhattan family with a charming daughter of Nikyatu Jusu, and Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny” about the kind, painfully kind, broadly smiling parents who, if a little more bizarre, could be in a movie. there is. The sequel to “Get Out”. With tight directorial control, an expressionistic palette, and a surprising leading spin from Anna Diop, “Nanny” cunningly draws on African folklore and old-school Hollywood horror sprees to tell an emotionally compelling, second-rate story. , gender and race – which means it’s about power.

Unlike “Nanny,” most of the picks lack American distribution. That could change, of course, but given the fragile state of foreign language distribution in the United States, it’s doubtful most will secure a theatrical release. This makes an event like New Directors even more necessary and also gives off an air of quiet urgency. To that end, try watching Laurynas Bareisa’s eerie, perfectly controlled Lithuanian nail-biting “Pilgrims” about a man and woman who revisit the gruesome murder of a lover. As they stubbornly track down crime by uprooting the past, exploring dark vaults and confronting unwanted bright faces, they banish personal demons and end World War II. The long shadow of World War II approaches them.

Another must-see is “Riotsville, USA,” a fascinating documentary essay by Sierra Pettengill that traces American anti-Black racism through disturbing, at times super-gruesome, 1960s archival footage. The title refers to several strange Potemkin-like towns that the United States military built in the wake of the civil unrest of the era. There, against the rows of cardboard displays with ordinary names, military personnel – some in uniform, others in plain clothes – perform pantomimes of violence, exercises observed by local politicians who learn from these war games to the domestic front. While the Johnson administration was publicly grappling with home fires, including the Kerner Commission, which investigated the roots of the unrest, it was also fueling future fires.

There are also predictable disappointments, notably Eskil Vogt’s “The Innocents,” which he co-wrote with Joachim Trier, known for his screenplays, including “The World’s Worst Person.” With its themed and spooky vibe, “The Innocents” stands closer to one of their previous collaborations, “Thelma”about a woman with telekinetic powers. Set in an ominous, isolated residential complex next to one of the woods where the wind always blows ominously through the trees, “The Innocents” – the title seems to be a nod to the 1961 psychological horror movie with Deborah Kerr – follows the very, very bad. things that happen to a few kids. The results are frustrating, pristinely crafted, and utterly tasteless.

Like “The Nanny,” some of the most memorable choices in New Directors use families to explore a range of ideas about contemporary life, pressures, and formidable complexities. In films as diverse as “Father’s Day” (from Rwanda), “The Cathedral” (United States), and “The Fairies of Shankar” (India), the family is both an intimate unit and a microcosm of larger cultural and social relations. A significant number of headlines in the program are directed by women, and not by accident, patriarchy also emerges—overtly or otherwise—as an instrument of internal control, an arm of the state, a lethal presence, or a constructive absence. Whatever the case, the father certainly does not know best.

One of the most exciting discoveries, Kivu Ruhorahoza’s “Father’s Day” brings together three loosely connected stories that explore the painful burden of historical and intergenerational traumas. In one story, a blindfolded masseuse mourns the sudden, seemingly random death of her son, and loses her job in the course of her poor husband’s dreams and plans. Elsewhere, a girl receives a painful share of her dying father and her control over him. In the brutal third story, a petty thief brutally trains his young son (and be warned, some of these scenes can be hard to watch). An unspoken evil, holocaust haunts this film, and while the men haunt the present, the women—hopefully, movingly—look to the future.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s slow-boiling, visually stunning drama “The Cathedral” follows a boy played by disparate actors who grow old in a lower-middle-class family that is slowly falling apart each year. one loss and disappointment at a time. Starting in the 1980s, the story charts the bleak breakup of the family through a series of precisely framed and staged chronological scenes where little or nothing happens. With off-balance acting, outbursts of paternal violence, and occasional nods to the outside world (the gulf war, a Kodak commercial), D’Ambrose combines the personal and the political with a predatory composure and a boldly deployed anti-aesthetic.

In vivid contrast, Irfana Majumdar’s silently piercing drama “Shankar’s Fairies” uses beauty for sharp critical impact. Set on the lush grounds of a sprawling estate in India, the story centers around the daughter of a wealthy family and one of her many servants. As news of the 1962 Sino-Indian war rolls in periodically, the film shows the bonds and radically unequal lives of this boy and his loyal, exploited caretaker with British schooling and etiquette. With scant narration, breathtaking gleams of brutality, and banal moments filled with meaning—a maid cuts the crust off white bread sandwiches while listening to Prime Minister Nehru on the radio—Majumdar measures both colonialism and neocolonialism.

Tonally and visually different, “Dos Estaciones” and “Robe of Gems” take place in a contemporary Mexico consumed by violence. In “Dos Estaciones,” director Juan Pablo González links the suffering of the owner of an artisanal tequila factory to the brutality of global capitalism: his family legacy and future are existentially jeopardized by foreign rivals. In “Robe of Gems,” director Natalia López Gallardo focuses on women of different classes whose lives are turned upside down by the shocks of barbarism, mostly at home. Gallardo owes some a lot art-cinema effects, including Carlos Reygadas. But he – like many of the other new and new directors this year – is still a talent to watch.

New Directors/New Films continue until Wednesday, May 1st. newdirectors.org For more information.



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