Highlights from the Mill Valley Film Festival

6 min readOct 15, 2023

Running for over 40 years and operated by the California Film Institute, the Mill Valley Film Festival in San Rafael, CA is one of the premiere prestige festivals on the Awards Season circuit. Over the course of 11 days, hundreds of creators hoping for a piece of hardware screen their work in what is arguably the largest festival on the west coast. The program consists of a litany of shorts, narrative features, and documentaries both foreign and domestic, including several official entries submitted by different countries for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

I had the privilege to watch several diverse stories at this year’s festival, and here are some of the highlights.

Farming While Black

Focusing on three separate farms, including Penniman’s Soul Fire Farm, the film is both a history lesson in how black involvement in farming has dramatically decreased over the last century, as well as a purposeful affirmation of how minorities can form a thriving, united community through the literal act of growth.

What I loved most about the film was its commitment to showing the agricultural experience as being anything but monolithic. Soul Fire is an ambitious project where Penniman, her husband, and her sister bought and cultivated land in upstate New York despite significant obstacles. Blain Snipstal, originally part of a Maryland farming co-op, has to balance his family and work obligations in a way that can still move forward. Karen Washington, Leah’s mentor, shows how a movement can blossom from even the smallest of spaces, as she began in small community gardens in disused lots in New York City. All of these stories show a unique and enthralling perspective on an often overlooked aspect of the American Dream.

Patrol

In Nicaragua, the beef trade is big business, to the point that cattle ranchers and land settlers are constantly encroaching on the protected rainforest belonging to the Rama-Kriol people, basically with no consequences. Joining forces with an American conservationist, the natives embark on daily missions to document illegal squatters and the decimation of their land to create grazing space, non-violently battling not just the trespassers, but also the elements and Nicaragua’s government.

Watching the film, I was immediately reminded of a documentary from last year, The Territory, which was shortlisted for the Oscar for Documentary Feature, but ultimately not nominated. That film took place in Brazil, and dealt with obstacles posed by the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was openly hostile to environmentalism and all indigenous people, along with the same greedy land brokers who have no qualms about their practice, justifying it as them having a God-given claim to the land that supersedes the laws of man. The major difference here is that the Rama-Kriol are much more organized than their Amazonian counterparts, working with grassroots groups and local journalists to expose the corruption on a viral scale, and it’s beyond cathartic and heartwarming to see them make even incremental progress.

The Promised Land

Three years ago, they won the International Feature category with Another Round, starring Mads Mikkelsen, who also carried 2012’s The Hunt, which was nominated by the Academy. In this adaptation of Ida Jessen’s novel, The Captain and Ann Barbara, Mikkelsen plays Ludvig von Kahlen, the bastard son of a noble landowner (the film’s Danish title literally translates to Bastard) who, after rising to the rank of Captain in the Danish military, seeks royal permission to cultivate the heretofore untamable heath land in the Jutland region and start a colony in exchange for the noble title he was denied through his illegitimate birth.

Kahlen is stymied at every turn by the machinations of Frederik de Schinkel (a fantastically slimy performance from Simon Bennebjerg, who reminds me of Matt Smith in appearance), the county judge and plantation farmer who corruptly uses his office to exact authoritarian rule over the whole region. The class warfare between the two, along with the budding love interests and commentary on 18th Century slavery, are not only engaging, but downright masterful, capped by the type of dignified, stoic, and yet still quite emotional performance that only Mikkelsen can give. I would not be surprised to hear this title come up again when the Academy releases its shortlists in December.

The Teachers’ Lounge

but one that arguably shows the futility of conflict in more relatable terms. Leonie Benesch stars as Carla Nowak, an elementary school teacher caught in the middle of a disciplinary catch-22, as a string of thefts has caused suspicion among the students, with no way of getting to the bottom of things without singling out individuals and opening them up to scrutiny and bullying.

The situation comes to a head when Carla secretly leaves her computer’s webcam on in the teachers’ lounge in hopes of catching the thief in the act. Finding a suspect, things quickly spiral as she’s eventually attacked on all sides by the accused, the rest of the faculty, the school newspaper, and a revolt of her own class charges, led by the exceedingly smart Oskar (a tremendous performance from young Leonard Stettnisch, carrying a lot of the emotional load of the story). Before long the fact that Carla is the only true victim of an actual crime gets completely lost in the shuffle, as everyone looks to her as a lodestar for blame. The tension throughout is palpable, because you’re never quite sure when the next shoe is going to drop, or how. I’ll admit I was disappointed in the ending, but that doesn’t mean the journey isn’t well worth the time.

They Shot the Piano Player

Using the framing device of a book tour and the vocal talents of Jeff Goldblum, the movie is an absolutely gorgeous look at a modern tragedy: the disappearance and presumed death of bossa nova pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior.

Goldblum plays a fictional American music journalist researching bossa nova for a new book when he comes across a piano riff that he’s never heard before. Seeing the unfamiliar name of Tenório Jr., he makes his way down to Brazil to investigate, uncovering a sad and compelling tale of collateral damage in the face of dictatorship, and the loss of a generational talent to what amounted to simple bad luck. The film incorporates tons of interviews and archival footage from actual South American jazz legends, both living and deceased, covered in a bright, vibrant animation scheme that feels like what would happen if you just straight up painted the music. It reminded me quite fondly of Loving Vincent, which posited a Citizen Kane-esque exploration into the death of Vincent Van Gogh through animated oil paintings in his style. That film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Will this one see similar accolades? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on October 15, 2023.