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BERLINALE19 REVIEW: Kameni govornici [The Stone Speakers] [2019]

2019/02/152020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

We need both spiritual and physical healing. Writer/director Igor Drljaca takes us on a contemplative tour through four towns in Bosnia-Herzegovinia with his documentary Kameni Govornici [The Stone Speakers]. We never hear him speak nor watch any of his subjects respond. All we hear are their disembodied words atop static portraits of them standing against the backdrop of their environment and all we see are the remnants of and creation from destruction post-World War II and civil ethnic unrest. There are the locals lamenting their dying land as its unable…

REVIEW: Zama [2017]

2019/02/072020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Europe is best remembered by those who were never there. A man speaks about a fish rejected by the water it needs to breathe, swimming back and forth to fight that current of repulsion and stay alive in the hopes of earning an opportunity to be desired, valued, and worthy of the life God has given to it. He could very well be talking about the titular put-upon protagonist of Lucrecia Martel‘s Zama. The character’s name is Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and he’s desperate for validation whether…

BERLINALE19 REVIEW: Breve historia del planeta verde [Brief Story From the Green Planet] [2019]

2019/02/052020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Don’t be scared of what you’re about to see. I have no idea what’s happening inside Santiago Loza‘s Breve historia del planeta verde [Brief Story from the Green Planet]. This quest on behalf of three outcast best friends since childhood to deliver an ailing alien to the place where one’s grandmother found it is disorienting and obtuse, but above all else beautiful. There are parallels running through every scene whether the sense of “other,” the desire to feel included and at-home, or the notion of embracing one’s origins no matter…

BERLINALE19 REVIEW: Querência [2019]

2019/02/022020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Treme Terra. You don’t have to look much further than the definition of the title to understand writer/director Helvécio Marins Jr.‘s goals with Querência. Its English translation is “homing” and actually does a good job at getting to the heart of its Spanish metaphysics. The former deals with an animal’s ability to return to a destination after being far away—like a trained pigeon. The latter goes deeper into metaphor, springboarding off its usage in bullfighting terms (the place a bull goes to feel safe within the ring) towards a psychological…

SUNDANCE19 REVIEW: Esto no es Berlín [This Is Not Berlin] [2019]

2019/01/292020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

You’re not your parents. It opens in slomotion with teenage bodies wrestling and punching inside chaotic dust swirls, one boy (Xabiani Ponce de León‘s Carlos) caught isolated in the middle of the frame. He’s not looking to hit any of the others. In fact he’s barely dodging out of the way when they come too close. It’s almost as though Carlos isn’t even there, his mind and body separated as two halves of the same conflicted whole. He knows he should be present with his friends to show his machismo…

REVIEW: Fauve [2018]

2019/01/242020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

First one to laugh is dead. Youthful thoughts of immortality have a way of getting children into trouble as well as teaching them lessons able to scar them for life. For Tyler (Félix Grenier) and Benjamin (Alexandre Perreault) it’s a seemingly innocent game of one-upmanship wherein an indefinable state of superiority earns each a point on their way to a winning total of six. So if one feigns an injury and the other is gullible (read compassionate) enough to help, the trickster adds to his total. If one is in…

REVIEW: Marguerite [2017]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I won’t live forever, you know. Stereotyping is proven real when an elderly Marguerite (Béatrice Picard) asks her nurse Rachel (Sandrine Bisson) if the person she was talking to on the phone was her boyfriend only to hear, “My girlfriend” instead. The woman’s face drops in surprise with an, “Oh” before finding a smile and the kindness to ask her name. We wonder if things will now change between them, assuming a senior citizen wearing a crucifix might not “approve” of such behavior. How will Marguerite react the next time…

REVIEW: Madre [Mother] [2017]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Why hasn’t he come back? A woman (Marta Nieto‘s Marta) and her mother (Blanca Apilánez) arrive at the former’s apartment talking about men. Marta speaks about friends, her mother leans into romanticism when the subject of a handsome gentleman comes up, and some jealousy arrives when it’s explained that he’s already attached to someone else. The stakes are thus very low at the start of Rodrigo Sorogoyen‘s short film Madre [Mother]—innocuous, every day fodder to create conflict where none exists as a means for intrigue. We are thus allowed to…

REVIEW: Komunia [Communion] [2016]

2019/01/022020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I’m not the air. While learning about what to share with the priest during his first confession, young Nikodem is told that stuffing his face with food is a sin known as gluttony. The autistic boy giggles and jokes that he believes gluttony to be a virtue instead—one to replace love since it being prone to kissing should render it the real sin. This sequence initially feels of a comedic, throwaway sort when compared to the rest of Anna Zamecka‘s harrowing documentary Komunia [Communion] and yet that thought couldn’t be…

REVIEW: Lazzaro felice [Happy as Lazzaro] [2018]

2018/12/152020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

He’s staring into the void again. Writer/director Alice Rohrwacher asks an interesting question with Lazzaro felice [Happy as Lazzaro]. How would we treat a saint? Would we acknowledge his/her goodness and understand their grace to be something to mirror? Or would we scoff at their innocence to call them naive, their loyalty to call them stupid, and their charity to call them a pushover? You’d like to think the former and yet it doesn’t take much of a history lesson to prove the latter. There’s a reason a majority of…

REVIEW: Roma [2018]

2018/12/142020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

We are alone. To know that Roma is a semi-autobiographical account of writer/director Alfonso Cuarón‘s own childhood growing up in a Mexico City middle class family is to truly understand the weight of personal events opposite public ones. Placing the timeframe as 1970-71 means something for this country with a government takeover of poor village land and the infamous Corpus Christi Massacre’s death toll of around 120 people at the hands of a CIA-trained group of citizen militia coined Los Halcones. But what did those things mean to a child?…