AFI FEST-AFM: The Perils of Online

The Perils

November 2021: as I prepare, confident in my virtual screening accreditation, to make my film selection for the AFI Fest, a bad surprise is in store for me: virtual screenings represent only a fraction of the films invited at the Festival. Producers, distributors and agents may have gotten cold feet, and be afraid of piracy and overexposure, and important films such as Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Doraibu Mai Kâ (Drive my Car), Zhang Yimou’s Yi miao Zhong (One Second), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Diàrios de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries) by Maureen Fazendeiros and Miguel Gomes, or The Cow by Andrea Arnold were not available in virtual viewing. (This year “World Cinema” included American indies, which means that Sean Baker’s Red Rocket – also not available – was part of this section.) And the Red Carpet screenings – including four world premieres: Haile Berry’s Bruised, Garth Jennings’s Sing 2, Benjamin Cleary’s Swan Song and Lin- Manuel Miranda’s tick…BOOM! — were all in-person . (I guess you can’t get the Red Carpet magic if you watch a film on your computer). I was all the more surprised that the other “hybrid” festivals I had attended, from Sundance to Outfest, didn’t have such drawback. At AFI, only four international features were available for the remote viewer. In addition to the well-reviewed Les Olympiades, Paris 13e (Paris 13th district), and the incomparable Petite Maman by Céline Sciamma, it offered another Cannes favourite, Jadde Kahki (Hit the Road), the debut film of Panah Panahi, worthy son of his father; but by the time I selected tickets, the film was sold out, both in-person and on-line.

Remained an off-beat entry, a North American premiere to boot, the first feature by Kaltrina Krasniqi, a young female director from Kosovo¹, Vera Andrron Detin (Vera Dreams of the Sea), which, in spite of winning the Grand Prix at the Tokyo Film Festival, has so far gathered relatively little critical attention – but for a very complimentary review by Jessica Kiang in Variety. Female-centric Albanian-language films are a long way from Hollywood’s fads, and also, alas, international cinephilia’s concerns. Wanting to pay homage to the hidden resilience of women of her mother’s generation, Krasniqi boldly constructs her fiction around the dowdily-clad body and the soulful gaze of a consummate theatre actress, Teuta Ajdini Jegeni, who appears in almost every shot of the film. In her 60s, Vera, a respected sign-language interpreter, is married to Fatmir (Xhevat Qorraj), a former judge who, since his retirement, spends most of this time sullenly lounging in pyjamas at home. The film opens on Vera busily preparing a celebration for Fatmir’s birthday: buying him more elegant pyjamas, and securing a full load of baklava for the party. She also has a surprise for Fatmir: a decrepit little house he has inherited in the countryside can now be sold for about the double of what they expected, as it is on the way of a highway to be constructed. And with the money, says tenderly Vera, “you and I can go to the beach, relax and drink piña coladas” – a dream that necessitates extensive – and expensive – travels since Kosovo is landlocked.

Vera Andrron Detin (Vera Dreams of the Sea)

Unbeknownst to Vera – and to the spectator until the end of the film, for the story has multiple layers of interpretation – this innocuous and affectionate little sentence is what’s going to cause the catastrophe, turning her into a widow, a single woman facing the machismo chauvinism of the Kosovan patriarchy. Yet, from the get-go, Vera is unflappable: “It’s not because somebody is dead that you shouldn’t celebrate his birthday,” making sure that the last-minute purchased baklavas are eaten properly. At Fatmir’s funeral dinner, though, it’s another affair, and Vera is both furious and upset by cousin Ahmet (Astrit Kabashi)’s claim that Fatmir gave him the house. The only thing Vera has to do is to sign a paper for the lawyer. Here two worlds, two mentalities collide: the modern, urban environment of the capital city of Pristina where Vera lives, and the countryside, still entrenched in antiquated structures of power, local councils, clientele, deals consecrated with handshakes and slaps on the back, deals “witnessed” by men who may have been “convinced” or bought, and where women don’t matter much. Yet Vera steadfastly refuses to sign. She only starts to cave in when Ahmet’s wife tells her, crying, that the country mafia may be after her son – but mostly when an attempt is made against the life of her daughter Sara (Sara (Alketa Sylaj), a struggling actress and a single mother. And thus she signs – but she is not defeated, and will find an efficient way to strike back.

The Pay-Off

The one official competition at the AFI concerns the shorts, and the Festival offered a generous selection, all available on-line. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise: how many times had I not felt slightly ashamed when reading, in the bio of an up-and-coming director, “So-and-so was revealed, xx years ago, when their short, xxxx, was screened at the Festival (or even received an award)” – a short I had blindly ignored, hemmed in my self-imposed duty of writing about or pre-selecting feature films. Not all shorts will blossom into a filmmaking career for their author, but there is not such a difference in the cinematic vocabulary in the feature and the short filmmaker. It’s a question of scale, and of means of production, i.e. money. So this was my chance to write about shorts, facing an embarrassment of riches.

The majority of the films were not fully experimental; but they were exceptions, including a couple of animation entries that had already been seen in Locarno. The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Animation, Milý Tati (Love, Dad) by Diana Cam Van Nguyen had already received prizes in Bucheon International Animation Film Festival and Montréal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. Weaving an arresting visual texture between hand-drawn animation, live action, written words and collage, Cam Van Nguyen, who had studied at the prestigious FAMU in Prague, lets the emotion seep in the fracture or the juxtaposition between the different media she uses. When her Vietnamese father was in prison in Austria, and they were writing to each other regularly, this is the time when they were closest to each other. Later, she finds that her father’s misbehaviour and the tension between her parents had a destructive effect on the family. Still, she tries to understand. Love, Dad brings forth not only the to-and-fro estrangement of a daughter from her father, but also the estrangement of a mixed-race family in Central Europe.

Milý Tati

Winner of a Leopard of Tomorrow in Locarno, In Flow of Words, a superbly mastered film by Dutch filmmaker Eliane Esther Bots, uses ellipsis, chiaroscuro images of small objects – a vase, figurines of animals and toys – and voiceovers in English, Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, to evoke the invisible. What is the intimate experience of three interpreters working for La Hague International Tribunal on War Crimes having taken place in the former Yugoslavia? Their voices, their bodies are used as vessels to translate the “flow of words” coming from the witnesses or the accused. “How can I translate the words of a torturer, ponders a woman, when I have translated the testimony of one of his victims two days before?” Detachment and neutrality are required, which takes an emotional toll through empathy with the victims, or when the acts depicted took place in or near their hometown. With visual strength but haunting restraint, Bots turn these conscientious interpreters into modern heroes of our multilingual age.

In Flow of Words

On the side of the supernatural and its relationship with the human, Jennie Williams, an Inuk photographer and filmmaker (and throat singer) from Labrador, Canada, devoted the black-and-white footage of Nalujuk Night to the ethnographic documentation of a little-known yet beloved annual tradition (every 6th of January) of the Inuit² of the community of Nain, in the autonomous region of Nunatsiavut³. In the cold of night, in front of expectant townspeople and their children, strange creatures arrive from the frozen sea; they walk on fur boots, and their heads are covered with frightening masks, half human, half animal. They run very fast, so there is no escaping them, as they come to punish and beat up boys who have been “naughty”. Immersing the viewer in the encounters, Williams keeps their magic and their threatening otherworldly aspects; she makes no attempt to explain who are the Nalujuit, or where they are coming from, or how they know which children have been “good” and which have been “bad”. She opens up our knowledge and understanding of a community currently fighting for its political, cultural and linguistic rights.

Nalujuk Night

What is precious about the short format, is that it lends itself more easily to the depiction of these small gestures, whose accumulation simply makes our life. African American history can be recounted in epic or tragic ways, but its texture depends on small moments, and Kevin Jerome Everson has become a master in extracting a cinematic kernel of truth from such mundane happenstances. With Pride, he signs his ninth collaboration with his colleague at the University of Virginia, historian and cultural critic Claudrena N. Harold. It is the 1990s; a group of black students are putting together a newspaper called Pride, and the film shows the last stages before publication. There are what we guess to be passionate discussions among the writers and the editors, but we do not hear what is being said. Instead, the film focuses on the body language of the protagonists, and, finally, the physical labour of putting out an independent publication in that time, and we follow the mechanism of the mimeograph machine – one page at a time – as a student cranks it and another collects the printed page.

Zonder Meer (internationally premiered at the Berlinale) by the Belgian filmmaker Meltse Van Coillie, is one such “small story”, as it deals with five-year old Lucie’s attempt to understand death. In a working-class campsite around a lake where the children like to swim, a boy has disappeared, feared to be drowned. At first, it’s an inconvenience for Lucie: the lake is now off-limits. But then she starts asking herself questions. The strong penultimate image of the film is an overhead shot of Lucie lying, eyes closed and holding her breath, on the ground of the campsite main thoroughfare, with bicycle wheels, skateboards, and sneakers narrowly avoid stepping on her. In her approach of the “young feminine”, its emotions, its rituals, Van Coillie is in the distinct lineage of Céline Sciamma; I can’t wait to see her next film.

Zonder Meer 

On the other hand, while Bar Cohen’s Rikud Hassidi (Her Dance) received a Special Mention from the Jury, it feels very much like a student’s film. And it is. (NYU Tisch School in Tel Aviv). Cohen constructs her fiction like a writers’ brainstorming concept. What happens if you put face to face a transwoman and the guests of an Orthodox Shabbat? She depicts the benevolent Orthodox gathering with care and affection, but I doubt she has any familiarity with the trans community. Transwomen are smart. Who would barge into a Shabbat dinner in a flowery short dress, with hair flowing around your shoulders – unless it’s to make a point? Which is what the film tries to do, and Aya/Ariel is not a real person, but a symbol, a cypher. 

Only Something About to Disappear Becomes an Image

Shot by a crew of film professionals who opted to remain anonymous, Red Taxi positions the camera in the backseat of dozens of taxicabs as they crisscross from Hong Kong Island to the Kowloon Peninsula and to the adjacent newly developed city of Shenzhen in the PRC, across the frontier. Through the windshield, you see the unrest: demonstrators fighting the police, the police attacking and arresting demonstrators, protesters gathering en masse… and monstrous traffic jams. Inside the cab, the drivers – grumpy, no-nonsense, older working-class dudes – volunteer comments (their faces obscured for safety). They go from “The government is made of bastards in bed with the police” to “the protesters are bastards bought by foreign governments” and to “Hong Kong is a pawn in the game of influence between China and the West” (this, at least, is true). A courageous, important work, Red Taxi shows a city and its surroundings in turmoil and profoundly divided. While it may appear that the sympathies of the filmmakers are with the Democracy Movement, they are not advert to echoing the bitterness, the suspicions and the traces left by the previous colonial situation. It will remain to be seen whether, after the latest legislative elections of December 19 2021 films like this will still be possible, or whether these images will become Our Precious Last⁴.

Deine Strasse (Your Street) by the Turkish-born, Swiss filmmaker Güzin Kar is a simple film: grey, uninviting shots of a deserted no-end street lined up with low industrial buildings, on the outskirts of Bonn, Germany. The voiceover commentary, however, is harrowing. The street is named Saime-Genç-Ring, after the youngest victim of a 1993 right-wing terrorist attack in the near-by city of Solingen, during which a house inhabited by Turkish immigrants was set on fire. “You had the choice between suffocating to death, being burnt alive, or jumping into the street, says Kar, addressing Saime Genç; this is not a choice a four-year old should have to make”. Yet her mode of address is to us, to contemporary Germany: what kind of a memorial is this? A desolate street where nobody goes…

Deine Strasse (Your Street)

Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day, by African American director Christine Turner who has a rich history of working both independently and for television or mainstream outfits is a documentary that, with a few reservations, I am grateful to have seen. Lynching is an indelible stain on American history, yet many of us have had a false idea of it. We used to imagine a posse of muscular, angry and bigoted white men kidnapping an African man and hanging him (or burning him) in a secluded spot. The 1993 restoration of Oscar Micheaux’ earliest surviving silent film, Within our Gates (1920) was for many of us the opportunity to see represented a crowd of “harmless”, ordinary townspeople having come to witness the lynching of three black men⁵. Still, pictures of lynching were few and far between, and we used to see the same ones, recycled in documentary films or in academia, including this odious, well-circulated image (also reproduced in the film) of a charred man raising what is left of his arms, in the convulsions of death. What we (I) didn’t know was how pervasive these images were. Between 1880 and 1968, over 4,000 lynchings were perpetrated in America. Yet, even if we knew this, statistics are abstract. What touches and frightens us is the “banality of evil”, to quote Hannah Arendt, as it appears in these postcards, culled from research in several dozen archives, private, public and academic. Lynchings were community affairs, gathering hundreds of spectators, young and old, men and women, adults and children; local photographers were invited, took snapshots and later made and sold postcards as “memories” or “token” of the “great day”. Like the work of memory done by historians of the Shoah or the Khmer Rouge genocide, the film retrieves the names of some of the victims, who are no longer anonymous bodies. We also learn that there were roughly two kinds of lynching: hanging and hanging with burning “like in Waco” – the Texas town having led the way in this atrocity. Maybe the most disturbing is that these pictures were used to send news or say hello to your family and friends. A few comment on the event: “This is the barbecue I was telling you about” writes a man on the picture of a charred body.

Produced by Firelight Films, the company of Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith – who have, for decades, excavated, analysed, put forward archives of some of the less-known aspects of African American history⁶ – Turner takes her educational role seriously, and interviews academic “experts” about the historical and sociological context of lynching, which is a little bit clunky, but probably necessary in a country where most people ignore history. I would have preferred for more time to be spent on each photograph (but for this, maybe, we need a feature film?) and that most of the commentary be provided by the seemingly trivial (or not) notes on the back of the postcards. It is in the discrepancy between the banality of American life and the cruelty of racist murder that lies the horror.

Takeover by the activist/documentary filmmaker, 2017 Union Doc alum⁷ and 2020 Ford Foundation grantee Emma Francis-Snyder was another important piece. The film was premiered at Tribeca and is currently streaming on New York Times Op-Docs. It starts with a b/w recreation of the event. Over a contemporary female voice that recounts the evening, young people are invited to a “party” in a small apartment. Except there is no music and no festive “party” – but a meeting to prepare for the takeover of the Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx by the Young Lords.

Takeover

In the 1960s, New York City saw an influx of Puerto Ricans, who became rapidly politicised, inspired by the Black Panthers and the Independence Student Movement in Puerto Rico; and founded an organisation called the Young Lords Party. In 1968, after Martin Luther King’s assassination 125 US cities erupted in riots. On July 14, 1970, at 5:15, 150 activists led by members of the Young Lords stormed and occupied the Lincoln Hospital, hoisted the Puerto Rican flag on its top, as well as banners that read (in English and Spanish) PEOPLE’S HOSPITAL. Catering mostly to the poor and minorities⁸, the hospital was a sorry example of the inequality of health care. The building was in a state of disrepair and understaffed, there was blood on the walls and the floor, health care was often inadequate and sometimes resulted in unnecessary deaths, because, for example, the medical technician didn’t have time to read the file report on the patient… To show what happened and what was at stake during the 12 hours of occupation, Francis-Snyder edits together seamless re-enactments (directed by cinematographer Tine DiLucia), archival footage and contemporary interviews with former members of the group, such as Iris Morales, Felipe Luciano, Juan Gonzalez⁹, Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, and Denise Oliver-Velez. The Young Lords were polite with and respectful of the medical staff, and care continued to be provided to the patients. Yet they were stern with the administrators, demanding from the director of the hospital that he leave his office at once. In collaboration with HRUM (Health Revolutionary Unity Movement – created in 1969 as an organisation of the hospital workers in opposition to the established hospital unions), they made their demands clear: building a new hospital and accessible, quality care for all.

Meanwhile, thousand armed policemen were standing in front of the building; as Lincoln was a municipal hospital, its occupation was a major offence. Tension mounted – especially since it was a few months after the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the Chicago police on December 4 1969 – but the Young Lords and the militants of the HRUM did not lose their poise nor their sense of purpose, which involved negotiating with Mayor Lindsay’s administration as long as they could leave the building unharmed. And unharmed they were, which is pretty remarkable for such a takeover. The police had sealed all entries and exits to the hospital, but there was one door they did not secure: the one used by patients and medical staff to leave, and, mingling with them, the Young Lords managed to exit. Not a drop of blood was shed. 

“To get the system to change, you have to disrupt it,” Juan Gonzalez commented later. And, within seven years, a new hospital was built, and the Patients Bill of Rights was drafted, which has since become the standard in all medical facilities in the US. The film emphasises that the takeover is a fine example for young, contemporary activists of the efficiency of direct action, but also acknowledges that there is still a lot of work to do. In 2020 (when Takeover was being completed), the South Bronx was the epicentre of the Covid pandemics: Blacks and Latinx were dying at twice the rate as white people…

The Rewards of Online

The split between the AFIFEST and the American Film Market (AFM) is now well consummated. There is no overlap of dates – the AFM took place November 1-7 and AFIFEST November 10-14 – and none as far as the films showcased in both events were concerned. The offering of the films in the Market was less rich and varied than last year – but this may have been due to the change of plans. Originally, the AFM had boasted they were going to take place in person. Yet, on August 26, they announced the sensible and courageous decision to move entirely on-line. Courageous because they must have undergone a lot of pressure from the City and the businesses of Santa Monica to keep the Market in-person. Still, the Market remained a hub for the trading of information and the purchasing of mainstream projects—such as Phillip Noyce’s upcoming vehicle for Pierce Brosnan, Fast Charlie, bought by Screen Media’s Foresight Unlimited, after having already acquired by a majority of outfits in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, The Middle East and South Africa. Such news is sobering. We’re going to have more opportunities to see Pierce Brosnan than, say, a Jonas Mekas retrospective. Go, Pierce, Go!

However, the pandemics has provided the industry with the time and space to reflect on itself, and some of the panel discussions dug further than the usual production or distribution stories. Two panels, in particular, were articulated at vanishing points of the field, (re) defining it and helping to open new perspectives. The first one, presented in partnership with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) held the promising title “International Film Market: Consumption of Black Culture, Rejection of Black Stories” and was moderated by Kyle Bowser, of the Hollywood Bureau of the NAACP, who, after introducing the panellists, posed the often-asked question: what is a black film? A film directed by a black person, even if all the performers are white? A film providing an opening, an insight about black culture that can be shared with the audience? A film that foregrounds black talents, both on and behind the screen? The question of what is a black film kept hovering over the conversation. For, even though it’s the same blackness, African stories and African American stories are not received the same way. For Mo Abudu, CEO of the Nigerian company Ebony Life Group, “It’s been a real struggle, getting our foot in the door with African stories that are also black stories. Even if I’m knocking on the door of an African American, they’ve got African American stories they want to tell…. There are three levels of discrimination for an African woman – number 1, you are a woman, number 2, you are a black woman, number 3, I am an African black woman trying to sell an African story to either a white person or an African American person.” Kyle Bowser and UCLA Professor Darnell Hunt (who is white and the author of an annual Industry Report in Diversity) cast the blame on Hollywood gate keepers who are “supporting a norm that was established long ago…” “White supremacy is real – some of it is intentional, some of it is implicit bias…some of it is lack of imagination to appreciate and recognize a quality story when you see it because your experience does not support it… 92% of studio heads and CEOs are white, and about 87% are male – that freezes out a range of voices.” Adding that American audiences are a rainbow of diversity, Hunt noted that during the pandemics, smaller films were released on streaming platforms and they showed much more diversity than theatrical releases.

For Johnny Jones – an older black man who is Executive Director of Worldwide Marketing Content at Warner Bros. Pictures, who has overseen the successful career of African American titles such as Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah (a fictionalisation of the events leading to Fred Hampton’s murder) and Aretha Franklin’s posthumous concert film, Amazing Grace – “It’s show business, and the larger companies such as Warner Bros., Disney, etc., they want a big return on their investment. So they’re going after the largest common denominator in terms of what they’re producing, what they know the consumers will consume.”

Comparable roadblocks have existed in the strategy of streaming platforms, who have wilfully ignored the billion people living in Africa. One exception, says Abudu, is Netflix, that has “trailblazed” through the continent. “There is a massive audience there, they are getting subscribers, so they are deciding to invest in local stories for local and local stories for global.”

“The gatekeeper system says ‘we want to dictate what goes forward’”, concludes Tirrell D. Whittley, CEO of the US company, Liquid Soul. To get more stories greenlighted, you have to put more young people, and especially more women “on that side of the table”.

Another highlighted panel, moderated by Ben Dalton, International Reporter for Screen International, was “Animation: A Growing Territory for Independents”, and, from this point of view, it was a bit of a letdown for me, for the perspective was decidedly corporate. “Independent” has different meanings and here it meant independent studios, which are not affiliated with Disney et al – after all this was the AFM. Have the pandemics changed the situation? After a period of adjustment, said Tania Pinto Da Cunha, Vice President of Pink Parrot Media, an international sales company of animated content based in Montréal and Madrid (CGI and 2D, television series, family-oriented stories with a magic element and “with humour”, the animation sector slowed down, indeed, but less than live action. Yet, “the financing of an animated film versus a live action movie is a lot more complex,” said Michael Ryan, a Partner of the independent company GFM Animation, and the Chairman of IFTA (Independent Film and Television Alliance, the entity that produces the AFM). “When you have an animated movie, what do you sell? You might be able to sell your buyer on the voices if you have famous actors but in most of the territories it’s going to be dubbed anyway so it doesn’t always matter.”

Independent commercial animation is an industry determined by technique (CGI or stop motion versus 2D) and by age groups. “It’s difficult to have content for very young children – preschoolers. In cinema, it doesn’t work. For us you have to have a target family audience and make family animation – it has to be aimed to 6 or 8 year old plus.” (Da Cunha) Adds Edward Noeltner, President of the International Sales Company Cinema Management Group:

A lot of distributors are always looking for the inclusive…animals, talking animals. They want a good story with a lot of humour, a little bit of edginess here and there that will play to an older audience. Animation on human characters is the absolute hardest to achieve so if you set it in the animal world, independents see a lot of success with that…

For Ryan animals is what kids like but it stops at a certain point, for “kids, especially boys, past 10 don’t go to animated movies”. And for their parents “If you’re going to write in the animated field, you have to be a pretty good comedy writer. All these audiences want to do is to laugh, laugh out loud.”

The focus on animals and funny ha ha humour makes one realise how original and ground breaking is Dash Shaw’s Cryptozoo (which I reviewed in my report on Sundance last year): a sophisticated, witty tale for adults, with fantastical animals à la Borges, ecological concerns and full female nudity. In the US the film was sold to the platform MUBI, which seems to go in the direction of Ryan’s assessment “If you are writing something like [Jérémy Clapin’s J’ai perdu mon corps] (I Lost My Body) or [Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary’s Flugt] (Flee), those are all beautiful movies and all well written amazing screenplays, you just have to know that your audience is going to be limited but maybe you’ll earn Oscar nominees.” The panellists were impressed by the way animated features are received in Western Europe, especially in France where they receive government subsidies. Co-productions may be part of the game in the future. Yet nothing was said about the animation tradition in Eastern Europe, and, more surprising, the anime films in Japan. It seems that what is called “independent animation” at the AFM is going to remain limited to cute funny little creatures for a while.

The panellists also deplored that most streaming platforms don’t show animated content, except the omnipresent Netflix. But even this is a double-edge sword, because there is a risk that the audience might stay home and watch Netflix, while what is needed is “get people back to the cinema!” (Ryan)¹⁰.

Endnotes