FILMS from AFAR

There's no denying that what Celine Dion is going through is terribly taxing, and this documentary explains in spades why she's disappeared from the international spotlight. It's quite difficult to watch the singer spasming into near paralysis -- I Am: Celine Dion begins with a viewer-discretion advisory about "powerful scenes of medical trauma." There are two shocking scenes of this, and there's much discussion online about the decision to film through the crises and include them in the documentary. Throughout the film, Dion appears make-up free, tired, and weepy. The exception is when she needs to record cheerful greetings for others or she's spending snippets of time with her sons. A melancholy score is woven throughout. Around the 20-minute mark, Dion takes the cameras on a tour of a warehouse full of couture clothing and designer shoes and other memorabilia, and she brags about fitting her feet into shoes that didn't fit. Home video footage is spliced in soon after showing a very pregnant Dion complaining in front of a closet with seemingly hundreds of shoes that she doesn't have the right pair to wear. It's just one example of where the editing allows for a subtle critique of its subject, intentionally or not. It's hard to deny Dion's privilege or the fact that she has enjoyed more success and lived a fuller life than most. This isn't the film or the moment for gratitude or celebration of what has been. Yet surely her family and fans want to see her well, with or without future concerts. Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Amazon Prime Video.

This intimate and engaging documentary does justice to the fascinating way the fashion designer's life has paralleled many of the biggest global events and social changes of the last 75 years. Yet, as Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge demonstrates, this is also a story about a woman ahead of her time. The documentary's keen interviewers allow von Furstenberg, with additions from friends, family, and admirers, to provide firsthand accounts of her story, including the moment she realized how essential her mother's survival of the Holocaust was to her own life. She reveals her feelings about the men in her past, her shortcomings as a parent, her professional highs and lows, and her notoriously uninhibited sex life (she even dishes on some of her starry affairs). Sure, she lets the camera follow her into the bathroom and sit with her at her planned gravesite, but the real intimacy comes from her willingness to answer probing questions and reflect honestly on her life. That alone makes this a worthwhile documentary, but the filmmakers have additionally edited their footage with great confidence, weaving in photos from her family albums, interviews with celebrities, and footage of events from her long life and career. Sections are set apart using quotes from the woman in charge herself, illustrated with bright, collage-style graphics. This film has few dull moments, much like von Furstenberg's full life. Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Hulu.

This action film does a proficient job sustaining tension, but its settings, characters, and plot feel like a blend of ideas you've seen before. Trigger Warning's political message is also a little spotty, making a tenuous connection between the supply of military-grade weapons, faith-based political conservativism, and domestic terrorism. We're meant to accept that its bad actors deserve death, while its increasingly violent heroine should face no consequences for her own vigilantism. The rural Southwest setting has all the stereotypes of an isolated small town, but it provides a picture-perfect background for landscape shots. Despite its questionable elements, the film keeps up its momentum and sets a definitive tone. Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Netflix.

Using Federer's retirement as a starting and closing point, filmmakers Kapadia ( Amy ,  Diego Maradona ) and Sabia celebrate the icon's 24-year career and significance to the sport of tennis.  Federer: Twelve Final Days  won't appeal to audiences unfamiliar with tennis. But those who are familiar with the sport are also likely to be fans of Federer's. The legendary player has long been considered not just one of the best, but also one of the most graceful professional players, on court and off. This film reinforces that image. Federer is shown as a loving husband and father, and a player demonstratively attentive to others, from staffers to journalists to fans. The one revelation here might be some of his feelings about other players, and their captured locker-room conversations. Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Amazon Prime Video.

The achievements and passion of the WNBA players profiled in this documentary are indisputable, even if the film lags at times by relying too heavily on interviews with them. Power of the Dream gives viewers a behind-the-scenes overview of the influential activism of professional female basketball players, including their pivotal role in getting Raphael Warnock elected to the Senate in 2021, an election with national repercussions. Director Dawn Porter lets these impressive women construct their own oral history, which is admirable but also overly repetitive as a viewing experience. This unfortunately makes the film feel long (which it is, at over two hours). Considering we're now two presidential elections away from where this film starts, and so much takes place during the COVID shutdown, it might also feel out of date to some (which it's not). Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Amazon Prime Video.

Gen-X, this movie's for you.  Brats  is a walk down memory lane, populated by the now 50- and 60-something actors who starred in a body of youth-oriented movies in the 1980s that changed the trajectory of Hollywood. In fact, that might be the most interesting insight of this film, for those who hadn't previously given consideration to the idea that movies like  Pretty in Pink ,  The Breakfast Club  and  St. Elmo's Fire , among many others of the era, were responsible for showing Hollywood the size and value of the teen market. McCarthy does talk about other broader social implications of the "Brat Pack" with a range of interesting sources, but his real motivation is much more personal. This is really  his  walk down memory lane. Seemingly crushed by the weight of the 1985 "Brat Pack" label, McCarthy uses the film to work through his own feelings about the past. There's a 12-step feeling to this process, with the cameras following him closely, listening to his personal musings as he travels between visits as well as to his interviews. His old peers, most of whom he hasn't seen in 30 years, agree that the label undermined their professional profiles, though none seem to have been as affected as McCarthy. (Curiously, if you read the original article, available online, McCarthy is barely mentioned.) As a director here, his one-track focus on the past means he misses an opportunity to delve more into what the lives of these icons are like in the present. What has the Breakfast Club been doing for the last 30 years? The interviews and outtakes offer glimpses, but this film's audience of Gen X peers would have eaten up more. Read the full review at Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Hulu.

For a film about the deep connections we have with others and how destiny shapes which relationships come and go in our lives, it would seem appropriate that the talents behind the film also share deep bonds. In fact, Past Lives writer-director Celine Song says she’s convinced she was married to actress Greta Lee in a past life. That’s the kind of connection the two forged working on one of this year’s standout films, now widely considered a top contender for recognition this awards season. Song and Lee shared details of their work, and the meaningful on- and off-camera relationships behind their poignant film, during a virtual press conference organized Nov. 9 by producer-distributor A24. Read the full story at AWFJ.org. My review of Past Lives. Images courtesy of A24 and Berlinale archive.

The final climactic scenes of Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers track an epic court battle between two professional tennis players, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor). The story follows them as childhood best friends coming up in the world of pro tennis whose relationship is complicated by their love for the same woman, frustrated tennis star Tashi (Zendaya). Their own obvious mutual attraction adds another level of homoerotic friction. You’d expect nothing less from the director of Call Me by My Name. In the final sequence, the three-way pent-up tension explodes on the tennis court. Representing a potential resolution to on- and off-court rivalries, Guadagnino infuses the battle with layers of emotional turmoil that are paralleled visually in the match. He covers the two men in sweat while cool Zendaya observes from the sidelines, though her uncertainty rises with each smack of the ball. All of this is set to a pulsating techno beat, composed by Atticus Ross and Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor, reminiscent of 90s-era German thriller Run Lola Run. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom films the final scenes as if the camera were inside the balls ricocheting over the net, attached to players sprinting back and forth across the baseline, and hovering far above as well as seemingly underneath the court floor. All of these angles and perspectives build up to a fantastical final moment where one man leaps into the air and… well, I won’t spoil it if you haven’t yet watched, but suffice it to say that the audience in the theater where I saw the movie literally screamed at the film’s close and left the dark room laughing and buzzing. When was the last time you saw a tennis movie inspire that kind of response? The answer is never. But that doesn’t mean Challengers is entirely new as far as tennis movies go. In fact, the film pulls quite a few ideas from the existing tennis movie playbook, including a classic scene from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. As anyone who plays tennis will tell you, every match holds drama, suspense, a little comedy and a lot of passion. That’s why tennis works so well as a visual metaphor in films of any genre. Continue reading at AWFJ.org.

One of the less flashy novelties of this year's Cannes Film Festival, which kicked off last week in the south of France, is a new one-day market event called “Cannes Remakes,” where 11 movies from three European countries will be pitched to producers as fodder for new versions. The market takes place Monday, May 20. I’ve been thinking a lot about the format of the remake lately. I was recently tasked with reviewing two very different films on the same weekend – a new Spanish romantic comedy on Netflix called Love, Divided and the Max documentary Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion. The first is a Madrid-set remake of the 2015 French film, Blind Date, about a man and a woman whose apartments share a paper-thin wall through which they fall in love. The other offers an exposé of alleged exploitative practices and executive misbehavior at the global fashion brand Brandy Melville, and a condemnation of the practice and waste of wear-and-toss “fast fashion.” At first glance, the two films have nothing in common, but watching them back-to-back got me thinking about the parallels. It made me wonder: Are remakes the fast fashion of film? English-language remakes of international films are nothing new, but "local-language" remakes (eg, French to Spanish) are a growing trend. The new Cannes market is evidence of this. The festival announced the initiative as a way to tap into the increased demand for “intellectual property” – read: ideas and products – driven by the streaming platforms. “Film remakes, in particular, have established themselves as a lucrative venture in the marketplace as they offer lower risk and proven marketability,” the festival explained. Similarly, the clothes sold at Brandy Melville are low cost and low risk to make, sometimes based on other stores’ designs and marketed to a faithful yet vulnerable teen-girl audience, according to the Brandy Hellville documentary. The clothes are made quickly and cheaply, and they don’t last long, the film asserts, which is why they’re called “fast fashion” – you buy it, wear it and discard it. But where do the discards go? The documentary-makers travel to a port city in Ghana, where a bustling marketplace is inundated with used clothes tossed away by customers of brands like Brandy, Zara, Shein, H&M and others. It’s a dumping ground for unwanted fast fashion. Ghana is strong-armed by wealthier countries to receive this waste, according to sources interviewed in the film, and the clothes arrive by the boatload. The result doesn’t just impact the locals; muddy heaps of garments sit rotting on beaches, polluting our shared seas with microfibers. It seems we’re making movies only to toss them away, too. Where's the dumping ground for the original films sold for remake? Maybe it’s the back catalogues on streaming platforms, which – as anyone who has scrolled for something to watch on a Friday night knows – feel a little like an impenetrable pile of used clothes on a Ghanaian beach. I could be muddying my own waters with this analogy, but I think the parallel is there. In Brandy Hellville, an interviewee calls the situation in Ghana and the working conditions in some international production facilities, which especially impact women, a continuation of colonialism. In the film industry, when it used to be mostly Hollywood remaking international, non-English language films, people often decried an imperialist dynamic at work. Local-language remakes like Love, Divided might reveal less of a one-way industry structure, but they underscore that Hollywood is still the only consistently global film producer and distributor. What seems like a juicy business proposal for local businesses and talents, as the new Cannes market highlights, also feels like a somewhat bizarre cultural one, especially in this globalized day and age, where dubbing is increasingly an option on streaming services. If subtitles are no longer the main barrier for people not to watch films and series from other countries, what’s stopping us? Who are the victims of the fast fashion of film? I’d suggest we all are. Echo chambers exist in entertainment, too. The more we limit ourselves to our own ideas and stories, the less we know about each other. Maybe, as with our polluted oceans, we all lose out when we only think, act – and watch – locally. The article originally ran on AWFJ.org

If you know nothing about this fascinating and visually stunning film going in, you can conjecture all sorts of themes and meanings from it. Banel & Adama is an essentially feminist tale about a strong-headed and independent African woman restricted by tradition and duty, and seemingly falling into mental illness. It is also a film about the impact of climate change on one village, where food sources are drying up or dying off during a long season of drought. It could likewise be seen as a story about globalization and modernization, and the loss of local autonomy or traditions. Or maybe it’s simply a tragic love story, in the vein of Romeo & Juliet. That’s what director Ramata Toulaye-Sy, born to and raised in Paris by Senegalese parents, has said in interviews about her inspiration for the story, set in northern Senegal and filmed in local Fula language but intended to be universal in nature. She compares her female lead Banel (played by non-professional actor Khady Mane, across also non-pro Mamadou Diallo as Adama) to tragic characters like Medea, Phaedre, Antigone and especially Lady MacBeth. Banel’s story is indeed a tragic one. But before events take this turn, she is bold, empowered, self-assured and madly in love with her husband, Adama. We learn she was previously the second wife of Adama’s older brother, Yero, but she and Adama were always in love and wed after Yero died. Banel and Adama have big plans to move away from the family’s village. They work on digging out a nearby house from under a mountain of sand as their future home. Banel especially finds village life stifling, a place where women are expected to serve the community, cover their hair and above all give their husbands’ sons. She pushes against expectations on her and Adama – resisting traditions and the inherited limitations of village customs, ancestral beliefs, religion, family and gender. She convinces Adama to turn down the elders who call on him to become the next village chief, but when things start to go badly in the village, Adama gets blamed. The heat and accompanying drought lead to famine, killing off livestock and eventually people. Adama can’t help but care, detaching him from Banel, whose only desire is to live alone with her great love. Her initial passion begins to dry up and wither away, just like their water-starved village, and she begins acting less and less rationally. She hints she may have done things to bring them together (we’re left wondering what – did she have a role in Yero’s death? Her own pregnancy’s end?). The film’s look evolves with its characters. Color tones fade over the course of events. We see Banel’s bright yellow shirt slowly lighten. Leafy trees turn skeletal. Villagers go from bathing in a deep blue river to having to hide from billowing sandstorms. As shot by director of photography Amine Berrada, the village takes on an increasingly sandy appearance in the drought, a whiteness perhaps symbolic of the impact of Western countries on Africa, from colonization to global warming. These metaphorical readings don’t feel far-fetched in a film as visually poetic as this one. Images are framed in such a way as to leave a lasting impression, like the fiery glow the burning sun leaves on your closed eyelids. The glistening waters where Banel and Adama bathe are reminiscent of an impressionist painting. A scene where Adama turns to look at Banel, head covered with a red scarf and framed in front of a window, looks like an African Girl with a Pearl Earring. Banel & Adama premiered in the official selection at Cannes and played in other festivals such as Toronto and Melbourne, where it won a “Bright Horizons” award. It was also Senegal’s nomination to this year’s International Oscar, where it deserved to make the shortlist. But films like this one can feel impenetrable to audiences raised on faster-paced fare and cause-effect storytelling. The first eight minutes, before the title credit even appears, is an amalgamation of gorgeous snapshot images and the retelling of a local myth that set a tone but explain little and could feel disorienting. However, it is precisely the boldness of her visual style, the strength of her artistic inspirations and the fearlessness of her magical realist narrative that speak to the confidence in Toulaye-Sy’s directorial debut. This review originally ran on AWFJ.org Images courtesy of KinoLorber

“Neither Wolf nor Dog,” opening Friday on limited release at the Yakima Cinemas, stars the Yakima-born actor Christopher Sweeney in a film about a man’s journey into the heart of Lakota culture. The Yakima premiere is part of a targeted distribution of the film begun more than a year ago and billed as the longest theatrical release of 2017. The movie was seven years in the making for the film’s director, producer, cinematographer, co-scripter and editor, the Scotland-born Steven Lewis Simpson, and the third film he’s shot on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. “The most beautiful, humbling thing for me is I’ve never been anywhere where doors have more of a right to be closed in my face,” Simpson said in a phone interview on Monday. “Yet I’ve never been welcomed more anywhere in the world.” Based on the award-winning novel and co-scripted by Kent Nerburn, “Neither Wolf nor Dog” was financed through three different Kickstarter campaigns that pulled together $90,000, about a third of which went towards an 18-day, two person-crew shoot. That’s a fraction of what it takes to make most features, but you wouldn’t know it by the look of the movie, which beautifully captures the contrasts of the reservation’s vast landscape with the extreme poverty of its inhabitants. It's a film worth seeing on the big screen, and not just for its aesthetic qualities. As Simpson noted from screenings across the US, the story has an emotional component for audiences, who find themselves “deeply moved, and they’re walking out of the theatre satisfied.” “Silence is stronger than words” For Simpson, this has everything to do with the film’s diminutive yet captivating star, the 95-year-old Dave Bald Eagle. “They’re falling madly in love with Dave Bald Eagle’s character, and that doesn’t have to do with budget or even with craft. It has to do with this man and what he represents.” With a parallel life experience, Bald Eagle fully inhabits the character of Dan, the wizened and wry Lakota elder who summons the writer Nerburn (Sweeney, matching his co-star’s authenticity with an admirably sincere performance) to the reservation to compose a book based on the elder’s vanishing wisdom and living history. We are only nine minutes into the film when Nerburn heeds the mysterious call and sets out in his red pickup truck from Minnesota to the Dakota plains. If the set-up feels a bit quick, the unhurried pace of the rest of the film compensates. Nerburn is a young dad mourning the recent death of his father. Dan is grieving his own son’s death and, moreover, seems to carry the weight of the historical suffering of his people on his shoulders. Both men are on a journey, at once personal and communal, one inching towards death and the other seemingly finding new life, as they set out across the reservation with Dan’s nephew Grover (Richard Ray Whitman), an uncompromising Indian suspicious of Nerburn’s presence. It’s an uncertainty Nerburn shares, quitting repeatedly even as Dan keeps pulling him back in. “Nothing more suspect than a white man trying to tell an old Indian’s story,” he riffs. “Listen before you can learn to see” “Neither Wolf nor Dog,” an expression signifying the hazy identity of a person living among a people not his or her own, illustrates how cross-cultural communication is about more than just language. Grover and others repeatedly admonish Nerburn for his cultural missteps, his erroneous presumptions, his frivolous first-world complaints. When Grover suspects Nerburn of buying into a romanticized view of his Native subject, he warns: “You’re writing a book about Indians. Put it all in. Old man ain’t no show dog.” It’s a line that underscores this film’s intense desire to offer a clear-minded portrayal of a people and a place. If it stumbles in this aim, it’s in privileging the Native experience and perhaps preying too hard on ‘white guilt.’ No matter how justified, the binary worldview may feel heavy-handed to some audiences. And Dan is a show dog here, in some ways. As is Nerburn, in this tale. Archetypes of the ‘wise Indian’ and the ‘well-meaning White Man,’ the two symbolize their communities as a whole and the deep need on both sides to face the past and reconcile the future. “I need to learn to forgive,” Dan tells Nerburn in a moving climactic scene at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, a scene Simpson says Bald Eagle, who died less than two years after the film was made, largely improvised. “It was my people that did this to your people,” Nerburn replies. “I feel responsible.” Dan urges Nerburn to go out and tell his people what he’s learned. With his original book, the real-life Nerburn did just that. And with this film, Simpson has done it again.

When Gaby Natale looks back and connects the dots of her own life story, she sees a thread uniting her experiences. “As a journalist, as an immigrant, as an author, as a speaker, the commonality is a story of breaking barriers,” she says. The Argentina-born author, entrepreneur and popular SuperLatina TV show host and executive producer calls this breaking of barriers part of the “pioneer spirit.” She often says that being a pioneer is the story of her own life. “As a journalist, I am the first Latina to win three daytime Emmys back-to-back,” she explains. “As an author, I am the first Latina author published by the Leadership Division of HarperCollins, and as a speaker, way, way too many times I am either the only woman or the only Latina or the only woman of color, and for sure the only one with this accent.” “It was a long road of embracing my uniqueness and celebrating my uniqueness,” Natale reflects. “The more comfortable I felt in my own skin and with who I was, the better things went for me.” Read the full interview at SUCCESS magazine.