FNC 2024 reviews: Kalak, Barrunto, I'm Not Everything I Want to Be and Afternoons of Solitude

Our reviews from the 53rd Edition of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC 2024), running from Oct. 9 to 20.

Pepe

A cryptic and enchanting hybrid film about the first and last hippos of the Americas, Pepe defies easy plot descriptions. Narrated by a hippo, the film depicts the difficult story of how some hippos found their way to Colombia (specifically onto Pablo Escobar’s land). With a non-linear narrative, director Nelson Carlos de los Santos weaves in various facets of the hippo’s lives, from their difficult journey across the South American landscape in the back of a bumpy truck, to their shrinking habitat and inter-hippo power struggles.

In the era of Moo Deng, where hippos have had unprecedented media attention, Pepe could not have arrived at a more perfect moment. It’s a movie that pays homage to the power and fragility of one of the world’s largest mammals. The footage is unlike most of what you see in your average nature documentary, choosing poetry and incongruity instead of straight-forward documentary. The hazy history of American hippos is rendered through allusion and recollection in such a way that underplays some of the more dramatic elements of the story. After all, what do hippos know of drug lords?

As much as this is a film about the animal world, it’s about landscapes. The various aspect ratios and mediums reveal new textures in the various landscapes and locales. Spaces are transformed through perception, as if a new set of eyes can undo a space as much as it can build it. As the film goes on, rather than become habituated to their new landscapes, the hippos seem to be corrupted by it. Violence and alienation reigns, not only as their freedom is limited, but as they lose touch with the memories of their homeland. While not for everyone, those swayed by Pepe’s tangents (the film isn’t necessarily information-forward as a documentary, or straightforward in terms of narrative) will be rewarded.

Pepe is screening at Cineplex Quartier Latin (350 Émery) on Tuesday, Oct. 15 at 8:45 p.m.

Kalak

Kalak opens with a scene that is a contender for one of the most unsettling in the history of cinema. Its strange dreaminess gives way to horror as its events come into sharper focus. Set in Greenland, the film’s events take place decades after the horrors that unfolded on a small couch in Denmark. Jan (Emil Johnsen), a nurse with a young family, is trying to escape his past. He finds immense kinship and comfort within the native communities of Greelanders, learning about their food, language and culture. It’s not long though, as he buckles under the weight of past trauma, before he begins weaponizing his victimhood in service of his desires.

While Kalak borders on misery porn, as Jan’s life goes from bad to worse, the film manages to transcend pure tragedy through its nuanced characterizations and ironic distance. As he decides to give into his impulses and find a sense of community he’s always been longing for, he throws away his responsibilities. Often harrowing but also occasionally funny, the film intelligently mirrors Jan’s struggle with a grander metaphor about colonialism that uncomfortably grapples with systematic abuse, exploitation and white saviour narratives. Without tokenizing the struggle of the native Greenlanders, the film finds a way to balance Jan’s adoration of the people with how that same love can only turn towards something more sinister. Unable to see past his own suffering, he unwittingly spreads it through his carelessness.

Shot in beautiful 16mm, the film has an intimate feel that draws you in. Far from an easy watch, every scene seems to operate on a variety of tensions said and unsaid, pulling the characters and audiences through challenging ideas and experiences. It’s a movie that examines not only toxic masculinity but the insidious side of repressed Northern European stoicism. Not for the faint of heart, the film is nonetheless a compelling and creeping portrait of trauma and colonialism in Greenland.

Kalak is screening Cinémathèque Québécoise (335 de Maisonneuve E.) on Oct. 13 at 1 p.m.

Barrunto

With Barrunto, director Emilia Beatriz creates an experimental film that feels like an easy entrypoint for sceptics. Though relatively abstract in its approach, the film’s use of landscape and a vague speculative sci-fi framing create a bewildering momentum. Running at just 70 minutes, the film’s loose narrative brings us across the world and beyond. Though fragmented and poetic, the shape of the movie comes into sharper focus, as Barrunto examines the unseen threads that bind Scotland and Puerto Rico.

The personal drives the political in this sense as Beatriz examines the impact of colonialism from the place she was born, to the land she was raised. The film finds parallels between the spaces, though ones that exist beyond Wikipedia pages or political speeches; common lands, languages and struggles. She broadens her perspective to encompass a similar relationship to humanity and space; signalling the ways in which we relate not only to each other, but the lands we inhabit. This is done through editing that intertwines different spaces but also through voice overs and subtitles that intermix English and Spanish in really exciting and even playful ways. The film manages to transcend a lot of the tired clichés of the “everything is connected” narratives that proliferated in Hollywood just over a decade ago, without losing track of the very real political momentum at the heart of the project.

At its heart, Barrunto examines the ways in which our struggle for liberation is intertwined with ecological and environmental questions. To Free Puerto Rico or to Free Palestine becomes an interdisciplinary (or interplanetary plea) to reimagine a world unbound by the invisible but violent threads that currently hold it together. Barrunto has a utopian vision driven by hope and freedom that manages to be wistful, honest and transcendent.

Barrunto is screening at Cinémathèque Québécoise (335 de Maisonneuve E.) on Oct. 14 at 4:30 p.m. and Oct. 17 at 9:30 p.m.

I’m Not Everything I Want to Be

In a documentary narrative that spans decades, I’m Not Everything I Want to Be uses a lifetime of photographs taken by Libuše Jarcovjáková to tell the story of her life. The film’s journey begins not long before the 1968 Soviet invasion of her homeland, Czechoslovakia. Built entirely around her body of work, the film features hundreds of photographs of her experiences, drawn together through her wistful, forceful and paradoxical narration about her quest for autonomy and freedom under a variety of different pressures — political, patriarchal and personal.

While the use of still images may seem simple, the movie sorts through thousands of photographic experiences through Jarcovjáková’s eyes. The film’s treatment of archive feels extremely contemporary, as the sorting through images of landscapes are intercut with blurred selfies, missed shots and empty plates. Though operating on a more elevated level than most of us with our cell phones overflowing with tens of thousands of images, the film’s conceit hints at an obsessively modern trait of documentation, as if we’re desperately trying to make sense of our existence and surroundings through photography.

In many ways, Jarcovjáková does not have an easy life. Her relationships are strained, sometimes abusive. She’s limited by her womanhood and living under oppressive dictatorships. Her personal struggles are also simple and familiar, exceptionally unexceptional as she attempts to forge a place for herself in the world. Director Klára Tasovská manages the difficult feat of allowing us to see the world through its subject’s eyes, illuminating a life in a way that doesn’t shy away from ugliness, while it also captures fleeting moments of beauty. It’s a movie about living through history and the lifelong quest to form and reform ourselves. It’s powerful and challenging.

I’m Not Everything I Want to Be is screening at Quartier Latin (350 Émery) on Oct. 13 at 4:30 p.m. and on Oct. 14 at 8:45 p.m.

Afternoons of Solitude

There’s nothing typical about Albert Serra’s cinematic approach. With his latest, Afternoons of Solitude, he takes the audience into the intimate world of bullfighting as he follows Peruvian bullfighter, Andrés Roca Rey, into the ring. Using digital cameras and new, longer lasting, audio equipment – the breadth of the film is immense even if the world it brings us into feels infinitely tiny. We follow Rey into the ring, into dressing rooms and on the bus afterwards. The camera feels apart of the space and creates a kind of bubble around him; the crowd remaining completely offscreen and the modern world almost an afterthought. In many ways, it is; the brutality and violence of the bullfight feels anachronistic to the contemporary. Serra, without judgement, forces us to witness the magisterial ritual between life and death; man versus nature.

Many other critics have been astute to point towards the alignment between the contemporary bullfight and fascism. It’s a ritual without meaning and a grand celebration of power. The illusion that it’s man versus nature is a false dichotomy as well; even if the bull prevails, killing the bullfighter, the animal will still be lead to slaughter. The subjects uphold a vision of strength that is founded in artifice and misanthropy; everyone and everything is worthless and meaningless. Everyone but Rey is disposable; his followers building him up as a God by tearing everything else apart. The world is full of bastards and motherfuckers, the bulls are “cowards” and “motherfuckers.” The violence of the world of bullfighting isn’t just the killing and torturing of a living bull, it’s the whole ethos.

Amidst that, Serra finds incredible sensuality. Though Serra has insisted his view on the subject is one without judgement, his edit paints a different story. It’s a world of nihilism but also incredible, fleeting beauty. It’s obvious that part of the film’s appeal lies in these connections between men and also animals, despite their obvious contempt. We not only watch the fights, but long sequences of our bullfighter getting dressed, which reveal enormous fragility and intimacy. As his companion asks about his wounds, it almost seems as though Rey’s body no longer belongs to him but to those around him, perhaps even to the country itself. A compelling, frustrating, ghastly film, Afternoons of Solitude is easily one of the best films of the year.

Afternoons of Solitude is screening at Quartier Latin (350 Émery) on Oct 18 at 7 p.m.

For the complete Festival du Nouveau Cinéma program, please visit their website.

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