Directors’ Fortnight Extended

Three films will screen in both cities, including the new restoration of Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989). Shot in Brooklyn, Histoires gathers stories told by Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century and recited by actors including Living Theatre cofounder Judith Malina. “The colorful, soulful stories of hope and despair are balanced by the garlicky comedy of Catskills jokes, acted out on a D.I.Y. outdoor set of an old-style delicatessen,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Amid the schmaltz and the shtick, Akerman highlights the forthright display of a distinctive Jewish-American diaspora culture, which she contrasts with the private and wary sense of Jewish identity on view in her European work.”

Frieze describes Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel as “a contemporary duo whose work critiques and explores philosophical responses to rapid technological advancements, expressing post-humanist themes that reflect and articulate technocratic anxieties.” In their latest feature, Eat the Night, brother and sister Pablo and Apolline hang out in the role-playing game Darknoon, where Pablo falls for his new business partner, Night. In her program notes for the Viennale, Beatrice Loayza writes that Eat the Night “offers a striking vision of modern France and its new generations: queer, multicultural, and very much online.”

In Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around, filmmaker Ale (Itsaso Arana) and actor Alex (Vito Sanz) decide not only to break up after fourteen years but also to celebrate their split by throwing a party. Reviewing “this silvery, end-of-summer-y film” for Variety, Jessica Kiang notes that references to such classic comedies of remarriage as Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937) on the one hand but also to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) on the other will keep movie-literate audiences guessing. “Such homages contribute to the early-Woody Allen vibe,” writes Kiang, adding that “at times the film feels one ‘La-di-dah’ away from Annie Hall.”

MoMI’s program opens with the New York premiere of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, the third feature from Tyler Taormina (Ham on Rye, Happer’s Comet). Four generations of an Italian American family gather for what may be their last holiday blowout together. Dispatching to the Notebook from Cannes, Leonardo Goi noted that there are “strange characters—none more so than a couple of cops played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington—and stranger apparitions, including a firetruck bedecked with Christmas lights and a life-sized cardboard cutout of a model which someone stuck to the Roomba and left dancing in the garage. But mostly, there’s a vibe: a preemptive nostalgia and heartfelt wonder for a time and place that will soon evaporate. With just three features to his name, Taormina has cemented himself as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of U.S. suburbia, a world that’s only boring for those who don’t know where and how to look.”

East of Noon, the second feature from Egyptian artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy, is set in a timeless industrial wasteland, where a childish tyrant imposes his will on members of a theater company. At In Review Online, Öykü Sofuoğlu suggests that “calling Elkoussy’s vision in East of Noon dystopian would be too reductive and oversimplifying, for she never loses sight of the humor and surreal absurdity within her makeshift set pieces.”

To create Ghost Cat Anzu, an adaptation of Takashi Imashiro’s manga, Nobuhiro Yamashita (Linda Linda Linda) first directed sequences with human actors. Animator Yoko Kuno and her team then drew over those sequences to tell the story of an otherworldly guardian tasked with watching over a young teen. “While the plot takes some jarring turns,” writes Carlos Aguilar for Variety, the film’s “impish tone stays consistent throughout, making for a wildly enjoyable (if a bit perplexing) Japanese animated effort on its own wavelength.”

Actor, writer, musician, and programmer Ariella Mastroianni stars in Gazer as a single mother in trouble. Suffering from dyschronometria, a condition that warps her perception of time, she undertakes a risky robbery. “Marrying the manic paranoia of After Hours with a Memento-esque unreliable protagonist and touches of flesh-bending body horror that could be ripped straight from Videodrome,” writes Christian Zilko at IndieWire, “Gazer is the kind of debut that should restore your lost faith in independent cinema. Self-financed by rookie director Ryan J. Sloan and shot in between shifts at his day job as an electrician, the 16 mm thriller is a white-knuckler that feels consistently fresh.”

When the head of a family running an underground gambling business in Buenos Aires passes away, the women take over in Hernán Rosselli’s second feature, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed. “Rosselli’s 2014 debut Mauro also explored lives at the criminal edge,” writes Jonathan Holland for Screen, “but this time the canvas is wider, skillfully juggling a documentary-style insider view of murky goings on, a tricky, noirish plotline, and a tale of a young woman’s yearning for freedom from family. The air of claustrophobia and grunginess remain powerfully in evidence, though, in a film that sweats authenticity from every pore.”

Holland finds Paulo Carneiro’s Savanna and the Mountain to be “an unusually gentle David and Goliath tale, a winsome, slow-burning charmer whose warm heart means it can be forgiven for failing to address some of the large climate change issues that it is implicitly raising.” Blending in fictional flourishes, Carneiro focuses on the genuine struggle between the Portuguese community of Covas do Barroso and Savannah Resources, the British company that aims to mine nearby lithium deposits.

“Boasting a barnstorming performance from Yuumi Kawai (Plan 75),” writes Clarence Tsui at the Film Verdict, Yoko Yamanaka’s second feature, Desert of Namibia,“takes a seemingly banal love-triangle premise and runs with it in the most surprising, gripping, and anarchic fashion possible. Unleashing a fiery beast of a character who questions everything and accepts nothing as an answer in nearly every interaction in her life, Yamanaka has delivered a film that is as raw and dynamic as her 2017 no-budget indie debut Amiko.”