AFI Fest Recap, Part One — “True” Stories
by William J. Hammon, ActuallyPaid.com
The 2023 edition of AFI Fest took place last week at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Presented by the American Film Institute, this year’s theme was “Film is for Everyone,” and the five-day celebration of cinema emphasized a wide array of diverse stories from diverse storytellers. The festival showcased over 140 projects, from shorts to narrative features to documentaries, animated and live action, including 20 films submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by various countries to compete for next year’s Oscar for Best International Feature Film.
I had the distinct pleasure of attending this year’s program for the first time, taking in a whopping 15 features, or about 10% of the total films screened. As it turned out, the marathon of myriad art fit rather nicely into three groups for the purposes of review. The first subset is what I will refer to as “True” Stories, either documentaries or dramatic films based on actual events. The festival was a wonderful whirlwind, so let’s get right to it!
The Bikeriders
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols (he previously helmed the gripping Loving among other projects), the film is based on the nonfiction photobook by Danny Lyon about the Chicago chapter of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Lyon (played here by Mike Faist from the West Side Story remake) embedded himself with the club during the 1960s, learning about biker culture and documenting their experiences through interviews with members and their wives.
This fictional film is largely inspired by those spousal interviews, as the picture is framed around two meetings with Kathy, played spectacularly by Jodie Comer affecting a very convincing midwestern accent. She met and fell in love with Benny (Austin Butler coming off his Oscar-nominated performance in Elvis last year), a literal rebel without a cause, who only feels free when he’s riding. He’s part of the Vandals, a club founded by a mechanic named Johnny (an excellent Tom Hardy) who acts like a surrogate father to Benny.
In addition to some stellar camera work, the bulk of the story focuses on the rise of the club from a group of friends having fun to a legitimately dangerous gang, with Johnny slowly losing control as its influence grows. The entire cast is solid, including supporting roles from Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, and Boyd Holbrook, all doing their part to capture the spirit of films like Easy Rider and The Wild One, the latter of which is directly referenced.
It’s a really fun film that was assumed to compete for Academy hardware. Unfortunately, during the festival, on the same night it was screened, the studios pulled it from its scheduled release this fall, attributing the move to the continuing SAG-AFTRA strike. Hopefully if things get resolved soon, maybe it’ll be put back on the docket, as Comer and Hardy’s performances, the cinematography, and the editing are all worthy of consideration. If not, we’ll see where it ends up next year.
Io Capitano
Italy’s official submission for International Feature is technically fictitious, but it is based on the actual experience of African immigrants, and serves as a sort of companion piece to the 2016 documentary Fire at Sea, which was also submitted by Italy and was eventually nominated by the Academy for Documentary Feature.
Director Matteo Garrone (whose 2019 version of Pinocchio garnered Oscar nominations for Costume Design and Makeup & Hairstyling) noted while introducing the film at the festival that most Italian stories about African migration to Europe focused only on the final leg of the journey, the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, where thousands tragically died. In dedication to all those lost trying to find a better life, his commitment was to show the entire odyssey.
The story focuses on two Senegalese cousins, Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall), aspiring musicians who save up their money in hopes of moving to Europe to pursue their dreams. Despite warnings about the danger, the pair sneak away from their Dakar slums, leaving their families behind, and begin the long, arduous trek to Libya to make the crossing. Like Homer’s epic poem, the trip is filled with harrowing detours, slavery, torture, death, and solitude, as Seydou and Moussa are met with just about every hardship imaginable, culminating with Seydou being forced to captain a ferry with no experience in order to guarantee passage.
The images are hard to watch, but nonetheless engaging, and Sarr and Fall give incredible performances for actors as young as they are. This is due to two clever bits of verisimilitude that Garrone included in the film. The first is the music, most of which was written by Sarr and Fall themselves. This demonstrates their skill and helps the audience connect with them and their characters’ ambitions, because we’re really seeing what they’re capable of. The second is that Garrone shot the movie in chronological order, not giving the actors the necessary scene scripts until basically the day of filming. Essentially, Sarr and Fall didn’t even know their characters’ fates until they had to be on set and react to it in real time. This creates genuine pathos because the actors are learning what’s going to happen to them at the same time the characters do. That makes for some powerful storytelling.
Occupied City
Directed by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), this co-production of the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands is an epic documentary of living history, emphasizing the need to learn from the past so as not to repeat it, and showing in very thorough fashion just how far we’ve come as a people after some of the worst moments we’ve collectively experienced.
Based on his wife Bianca Stitger’s extremely detailed book on Occupied Amsterdam during World War II, this four-hour exploration of the Dutch capital is, on the surface, quite simple. Filmed during the COVID pandemic and its aftermath, the film is simply a fly-on-the-wall account of Amsterdam today contrasted with Amsterdam under Nazi rule. The crew goes to several locations throughout the city, each of which is the address of some significant event during the five-year occupation by German forces. Melanie Hyams serves as a stalwart narrator, dispassionately providing the details of what happened in each spot during the war, including whether or not the original buildings still stand, while McQueen and crew monitor how these spots operate in the modern day.
What makes the film compelling despite its lengthy runtime is the progression of Amsterdam’s recovery from lockdown. While each scene is a capsule of an individual address, the order of their placement in the film reflects how the city handled the beginning of the pandemic and how it gradually got back to normal. We see contrasting locations that show us moments like a wedding over Zoom, a public tram running on empty streets, and a shuttered Red Light District early on, and then eventually come back to those same neighborhoods on the back end, with weddings in churches, bustling streets, and a more vibrant atmosphere once the health emergency begins to abate.
Crucially, we also see the evolution of discourse, as the capitall fell quickly to the Third Reich during the war and the city was full of collaborators. In the film, we see how ignorance, selfishness, and hatred still exist in the form of an early antagonistic protest against lockdown restrictions and masks that requires suppression from law enforcement. But pointedly, it’s rather small, with only a handful of idiots shouting about their “freedom” to infect others with a deadly disease just so they can go to a bar. Compare that to later scenes of massive peaceful demonstrations for social goods like climate protection and civil rights late in the film, with much larger crowds working together in common cause for the advancement of more noble ideals (and notably a much more diverse crowd, demographically speaking). It shows that while there are still problems, we as a society are learning how to better ourselves. The Nazi occupation lasted for five years, and it took a long time for residents to come together in resistance. When faced with a modern crisis that threatened people’s lives, the citizenry knew to do what was necessary, and because of that they were able to emerge much quicker, having gained new wisdom in the process.
Pictures of Ghosts
Brazil’s Academy entry is a documentary from acclaimed director Kleber Mendonça Filho, known for films such as Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, the former of which was also submitted for the Oscar. Produced over seven years, the movie is a deeply personal story about Filho’s love of the artform, a sort of real-life version of Cinema Paradiso.
While there are multiple chapters, the core of the story is in two major sections. The first deals with the apartment in Recife where he grew up and began making movies. Filho has retained decades of tapes in various formats (VHS, Betamax, MiniDV, etc.), all of which he personally digitized for this project, to show how important his old home was, not just as a family domicile, but as a living set for his work. He notes that literally every square centimeter of the place has likely been filmed from several different angles, fueled by a passion for change and rebuilding fostered by his late mother.
The second expands this love letter to the now dilapidated downtown area of Recife, particularly its old movie palaces. From the 1950s through the mid-90s, these cinemas were his second home, a living embodiment of the city’s economic peak and eventual decline. Similar to Giuseppe Tornatore’s self-reflexive masterpiece, Filho goes in depth about his friendship with — and education from — the projectionist at one such theatre, now shuttered.
The overarching theme of the entire work is that of preservation and moving on. Filho’s love of his hometown is worn on his sleeve, and he fixates on the importance of remembering the past while still forging forward. For the purposes of this film, it’s him and his family eventually moving out of that coastal apartment and the restoration of one of the palaces. For the grander idea, demonstrated by a staged scene of a cab driver who has the “useless superpower” of invisibility, it’s about making sure that people, culture, and art continue to be seen, even if the literal subject might consider itself insignificant. You never know what legacy you’ll leave behind.
The Settlers
We conclude this first part with a look at Chile’s Oscar submission, The Settlers, directed by Felipe Gálvez Haberle in his feature debut. It was the first Chilean film ever to win the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Set at the turn of the 20th Century, the film is a graphic, New Hollywood-style Western loosely based on Chile’s colonial history that shows the folly of toxic masculinity and the death of indigenous culture through assimilation.
Most of the film centers on a cross-country trek to the Pacific Ocean at the behest of José Menéndez (played here by Alfredo Castro), a real-life wealthy landowner and businessman who controlled vast areas of Chile and Argentina in the early 1900s. Wanting to “cleanse” his property of natives who supposedly kill his sheep, he enlists a former British soldier, Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley, best known as Night’s Watchman Grenn on Game of Thrones) to patrol and secure his personal borders, creating a clear grazing path to the sea. MacLennan is reluctantly accompanied by an American mercenary named Bill (Benjamin Westfall, who gives off strong Jason Biggs vibes), and a half-native Ona sharpshooter called “Segundo” (literally “second” in lieu of a name, played by Camilo Arancibia).
What is ostensibly a land survey quickly turns into a thinly-veiled excuse for genocide, as MacLennan’s orders are to kill any natives they encounter along the way, with gruesome results. As the trio goes along, the viewer is subjected to many over-the-top representations of male dominance, including contests of strength, assertions of superiority, threats of violence (Bill constantly wants to kill Segundo out of sheer racism, for example), and tense displays of the chain of command courtesy of a British officer played by Sam Spruell from Snow White and the Huntsman.
The entire film has a distinct 70s feel to it, which really aids the presentation, but there was one lingering concern I had for much of the runtime. In order for a film to be eligible for International Feature, at least half the dialogue must be in a language other than English. For the first three acts (of four), this was not the case, as Segundo is a largely silent character, while MacLennan and Menéndez only occasionally speak Spanish. I’d say about 70–80% of the dialogue is English until the final act, which is entirely in Spanish. I think it ultimately meets the requirement, and there’s a case to be made that the inclusion of so much English is itself a subtle jab at assimilation, but I’ll admit I was worried about potential disqualification for what turned out to be a pretty strong film.
Most of these movies are slated for theatrical release in the United States. Occupied City has a confirmed date of December 25th, while The Bikeriders, as previously mentioned, is in something of a limbo state until the strike is resolved. As for the foreign entries, MUBI has acquired the distribution rights to The Settlers with a planned North American release, Io Capitano has secured distribution with Pathé International, and Pictures of Ghosts has been picked up by Urban Sales, which plans to release it domestically in early 2024.
Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on November 1, 2023.
