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‘It Is Night in America’
You can view this film on Mubi.
“It Is Night in America” is Ana Vaz’s debut documentary feature that takes us on a nocturnal ethnographic journey that offers a fresh perspective of the world around us. The film captures Brazil’s capital city of Brasília through a veil of obfuscation – grainy, expired 16-millimeter film stock, and a blue tint that imbues even daytime scenes with a sense of surreal twilight. Among the wildlife captured on the silent streets and in the Brasília zoo are a range of creatures including owls, capybaras, foxes, snakes, and more. The soundtrack is a fog of ambient noise composed of crickets, wind, and vehicle horns mixed with recordings of phone calls to forest officers reporting sightings of animals. This dreamlike movie builds a parable about aggressive urbanization and invaders. Vaz suggests that we should learn to look not just straight ahead, but to the periphery, to the things which take refuge in the darkness, in the background, and in the night.
‘Social Hygiene’
This movie can be rented or purchased on Apple TV.
“Social Hygiene,” is a smart and witty feature film by Quebecois director Denis Côté. In an unrecognizable setting, a petty thief named Antonin (Maxim Gaudette) is berated in a series of long, staged vignettes by several women including his wife, sister, mistress, and tax collector. The content of their conversations is contemporary, mixed with mundane references to Facebook, Volkswagen, and discount mattresses, while their drama unfolds in traditional, dramatic French accents. All of this leads up to an extended gag of chasms between art and life. Antonin sees himself as a tormented protagonist, a morally sound thief, and a thwarted artist, but he is merely a self-centered, posturing, millennial who has done little with his life. In Coté’s cool and detached tableaux, the characters resemble marionettes, fake and small in the face of his arch incongruities.
‘Zana’ is a heart-rending Kosovan movie that starts with Lume (Adriana Matoshi), a woman, taking a cow through the woods when she stumbles upon a bloodied bovine skull. Director Antoneta Kastrati lost her own mother and sister in the Kosovo War, and this film is a remarkable portrayal of a community struggling to deal with unimaginable trauma. Lume lost her 4-year-old daughter in the Kosovo war in which thousands of civilians were casualties. She has been unable to conceive since then, much to the annoyance of her mother-in-law who takes her to healers and doctors and threatens to find Lume’s husband a second wife. Her intense grief is dismissed by the in-laws and parents as demonic possession. Matoshi’s formidable performance as a woman who can’t express her intense pain is all-encompassing
“Factory to the Workers” is a powerful Croatian documentary about the ITAS machine parts factory in Croatia, which became the site of the first successful occupation of a European factory by its workers after efforts were made to privatize it. Srdjan Kovacevic, the director, visited ITAS a decade later to capture its inner workings and outward challenges in a new, ruthlessly capitalist Europe. Kovacevic follows the workers’ labor, relationships, and self-fashioned bureaucracy for five years, forming a remarkable fly-on-the-wall portrait of the workers and their struggles. The movie feels like a thriller, both cynical and galvanizing, with a striking reminder that it takes a crowd, or rather, a collective, to make any kind of change in this world.
‘The Substitute’
Stream this film on Netflix.
This Argentine drama, “The Substitute,” directed by Diego Lerman, takes a hackneyed, often misguided genre: films about teachers, and adds new dimensions to it. Lucio (Juan Minujín), a prestigious novelist, is subbing as a literature teacher at a school totally different from his usual works. His teenage students live lives worlds apart from his own, filled with violent intrigues of drug lords and corrupt politicians. But the heart of the story is not about Lucio’s pedagogic brilliance or the transformative power of books. Instead, it’s an intimate portrait of a man realizing that he can be an ally in life, not just in school, towards his students. Lucio learns to get his hands dirty in ways he’s always sought to avoid, and the film masterfully captures the messiness of reality compared to the neatness of a story.
