NYFF: "Union" documents a worthwhile cause with insight and intimacy

by Nick Taylor

How is it that two of the year’s best documentaries currently have no major distribution team behind them? Actually, given the subject matter of both films, the logic for each case makes too much sense, but I’ll be using my little bully pulpit to rage against this. One of those films, the Palestinian documentary No Other Land, has already been covered by our beloved Cláudio Alves. The second film in this position is Union, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s chronicle of the Amazon Labor Union’s grassroots campaign to be recognized by Amazon at the company’s Staten Island facilities in 2021. As an industrial giant whose tendons continue creeping deeper into every industry on the planet, it’s almost funny to watch them take such umbrage about this film when they might save more face by just letting it emerge into the world, rather than giving the ALU yet another chance to raise hell about Amazon silencing unions. In a very real way, the cooperative effort from so many of Union’s producers and backers to give it an Oscar-qualifying release mirrors the grassroots spirit of the film itself. Its release won’t be huge, but Level Ground is making sure it gets out into the world, and hopefully word of mouth praise for its timely subject should be enough to get butts in the theater.

If you want to hear more, join me under the cut . . . .

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NYFF '24: “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” sings an unusual song

by Nick Taylor

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire presents the most concrete details about Suzanne Césaire's life - perhaps the only concrete details about her life - in its opening title cards. Born in 1915 in Martinique, Césaire was a poet and essayist who began publishing her essays in 1941. Her work was heavily influenced by feminism, communism, and anti-colonial theory, and she achieved a degree of sociocultural prominence before 1946 when she vanished from the literary circles she'd held so dear. One character, an actress playing Césaire in a film about her life, wisely notes, "We're making a movie about a woman who didn't want to be known." And this sentiment informs this thesis in a nutshell. To compensate, director Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich has nestled her work in a metafictional story around a largely fictionalized treatise on Césaire. It's a strange proposition, but is it an effective one? Let's talk about it...

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TIFF '24: "All We Imagine As Light" is one of the year's best films

by Cláudio Alves

France went with Emilia Pérez and Luxembourg chose not to submit a film at all. India was the last hope, but, as expected, went a different route, choosing a Hindi title, Laapataa Ladies, and ignoring the work of a director who's been outspoken against injustices in her country. Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is officially out of the Best International Film Oscar race – a pity, for it's one of the year's best films, a miracle of grace that's as close to cinematic perfection as one can get. So much so that talk of awards feels improper, an anodyne aspiration in the face of what Kapadia unleashes on screen. Awards are too small to do this narrative feature debut justice. Even the Cannes Grand Prize feels insufficient, for All We Imagine As Light is one for the ages…

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TIFF '24: "The End" of the World is a Marvelous Musical Mess

by Cláudio Alves

Ambitious mess will always be more exciting and artistically valuable than cautious mediocrity. The timid filmmaker has their place, but they'll never rise above those whose ideas reach for the sky, the heavens, the likely impossible. Or, in Joshua Oppenheimer's case, those who burrow down below, digging to the center of the Earth, mayhap to hell. For his feature debut, The End, the director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence goes underground, setting the scene in a not-so-distant future when the Earth has been left ravaged by climate change and other related catastrophes, virtually inhabitable, so hostile to life that those who survive must fight one another for the scant resources around…

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TIFF '24: The Art of Dying in One's Own Terms

by Cláudio Alves

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR won the Golden Lion on the same day it first screened at TIFF.
Whether programmed with that intention or bonded by coincidence, one can often find films in conversation at festivals. Echoed themes and varied approaches to the same idea occur, often across sections, tying works together that were never meant to be considered in those terms. Some might disagree, but I find it to be a valuable experience, oft conducive to deeper thought, comparison and contrast. At this year's TIFF, for example, mortality was on many an artist's mind, from Godard, knowingly at the end of his rope, to the apocalyptic visions of Oppenheimer, Ostrikov, and Thibault Emin. From Cannes, there came meditations from Cronenberg and Schrader, films laden with grief, loss, and the need to take control. In documentary land, there are the recollections of an erstwhile death row inmate in The Freedom of Fierro.

Still, the most apparent conversation partners were two Spanish filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar and Carlos Marques-Marcet, telling two euthanasia stories in The Room Next Door and They Will Be Dust…

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