Film

In Radical, Eugenio Derbez (CODA, The Valet) goes to the head of the class as Sergio Juarez, the new sixth-grade teacher at José Urbina López Elementary in Matamoros, Mexico, one of the worst-performing, and ridiculously underfunded, schools in the country. Directed by Christopher Zalla (Sangre de Mi Sangre), Radical follows a true story that was covered in an article by Wired reporter Joshua Davis about the teacher and his students.

It was the 2023 Sundance Film Festival opening night feature.

One of the students we meet in the film lives near a landfill, which she searches daily for items to sell to help her and her father survive; one is continually pressured to leave school to join a gang; and one is charged with being the primary caregiver for her younger siblings. Juarez sees potential in all of them and employs an unorthodox method to bring it out, which, seemingly, won’t help the school achieve its goal of increasing its low assessment scores: teaching the kids to be freethinkers and allowing them to dictate their own lesson plans.

Derbez’s comedic chops come in handy as we’re treated to lighthearted, corny class scenes, including a humorous lesson on mass, volume and density and another on division, which are quickly juxtaposed by reminders of how seemingly inescapable the children’s living situations are, despite their hopes and dreams for the future. Amid all this, Radical also makes a striking commentary on corruption in the school system.

While glorifying teaching, above all, the film also shines a light on the bright minds in the class, and, despite the bleak situation, shows that hope can be found in unlikely places.

If you don’t see Radical at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, you’ll surely have more opportunities.

Radical screens again on Jan. 23 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in SLC, Jan. 24 and 25 at the Library Center Theatre in Park City, Jan. 28 at the Holiday Village Cinemas in Park City, and Jan. 29 at the Rose Wagner Center in SLC. Visit the Sundance Film Fest website for more info.

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Find all our Sundance coverage from this year and year’s past. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah.

Many layers of menace emerge rather quickly in Sofia Alaoui’s feature debut from Morocco, Animalia. The film opens with a Kubriackian walkthrough of the baroquely decorated, nevertheless sterile home of Amine, husband to the film’s very pregnant protagonist Itto, who we finally discover in the one room in the house filled with life, sound, and pleasure: the kitchen. Itto is working there, alongside several young maids, cutting up a chicken as she listens to the other women’s gossip and Arabic pop. The entrance of Itto’s mother-in-law silences everyone. The maids, nearly standing at attention, look on uncomfortably as Itto finishes chopping through a tough joint. “Go change,” the older woman orders with quiet disdain, her manner seeming to confirm what Itto will confide later to her husband: she’s hated in that house, looked down upon, considered a penniless hick, no one Amine was meant to marry. As we learn, Itto, though she seems to have taken quite well to the high life, comes from much humbler stock. Her parents, she tells a friend later, were an embarrassment to her because they let their honesty be exploited, and they couldn’t just buy things as “others” did—others like Amine’s family, who are not only wealthy, but connected. They dine regularly with the provincial governor.

But Animalia is not just a tale of Itto’s struggles in the entangled webs of family, class, and power. The film’s original French title is Parmi nous, meaning “among us.” In Morocco, producer Margaux Lorier told her audience in Park City, the term has implications of wealth, of being part of the moneyed class. (French, the colonist’s tongue, is the common language of Morocco’s rich and educated in the film, while Berber is used by the lower classes.) But parmi nous, Lorier explained, may also be a reference to aliens, who, some believe, already live amongst us, remaining unnoticed—the poor, for example, and so many others, human and nonhuman alike. 

Bowing to his wife’s feelings of alienation, Amine makes an excuse for Itto with his family so she skip the clan’s latest social call to Khouribga, the provincial capital. For a few hours Itto revels in her solitary pleasures, until she receives word from Amine that a mysterious occurrence has drawn out the military, and roadblocks will keep the family away for some time. Meanwhile, strange weather phenomena have moved in—a weird funnel of fog over the nearby lake, a torrential rain—and something’s unsettling the wild and domestic animals all around. These last remain mostly unnoticed by Itto, who remains cloistered in the family mansion, turning to her faith for comfort in the darkness.

As the mystery of the disruptive event deepens, Itto is instructed to ride with a neighbor to reunite with the family in Khouribga. Interestingly, though the neighbor may live nearby, maybe even next door—whatever that means in the vast desert landscape where the film takes place—he’s nowhere near Amine’s social equal. Nevetheless, he loads Itto up alongside his own family for an uncomfortable ride on rough roads. Worse for Itto, her driver is not so compassionate as he seems, and she soon finds herself abandoned in a small mountain town, watched with equal predatory interest by groups of single men and the wandering pack of street dogs, the latter strangely attuned to some presence in the atmosphere beyond human perception.

For the devout, including Itto, this presence—which seems to bind sentient beings in strange ways—is easily labeled the Devil, a numinous threat from which only trust in God can provide protection. Certainly the acts of violence the presence inspires in animals and its subtle expressions of interspecies communication evoke an imminent horror in the viewer. But as Itto and her new guide, Fouad, ride through great ridges and canyons on the road to the capital, accompanied by a creepy young hitchhiker, a teen who’s clearly been stricken by the presence, the film’s horror is reframed as something closer to the sublime, a feeling of overwhelming awe in the presence of a phenomenon bigger than the individual, something too grand or terrible to be described. “Don’t let fear stop you,” the young passenger says to Itto as she initially resists what will be a transformative encounter for herself and Fouad. The latter, a nonbeliever, goes easily into this moment, less restrained by what he considers a hollow moral opposition to the alien presence. “God is for the rich,” he tells Itto with some bitterness. “If he exists,” he argues, “he’d help poor people…. If this is the Devil, I want to see him.”

The vision, rapture, or conversion Itto experiences in her moment of contact produces a new feeling about the lives around her that’s otherwise been impossible within the confines of the crassly capitalist social world she’d previously hoped would comfort her. In this respect, much more than horror or sci fi, Animalia reveals itself as a thoughtful, politically and ethically engaged imagining of the erasure of human dominance, of human motives, of the corrupt, or corrupted, nature of humanity full stop. It’s a film well worth viewing for its visuals alone, but its subtle and disturbing social and spiritual propositions, sensitively performed by a cast of mostly local actors, provide an even greater and provocative pleasure.

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1995 was tough on Japan. Already in the midst of a “lost decade” of economic stagnation, that January the country experienced a devastating earthquake, near Kobe, that killed more than 6000 people. Then, in March, the Tokyo subway was the target of a domestic terror attack, in which members of the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent, on three train lines converging on Kasumigaseki, the seat of the national government. Though the casualties of the attack (13 killed, about 1000 injured) were a fraction of those caused by the earthquake, its psychological effects and legal ramifications had their own aftershocks. Unlike an earthquake, however, the Aum attack seems to have been entirely predictable, as shown by the new documentary AUM: The Cult at the End of the World, co-directed by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, and based on the book of the same name, by journalists David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall. Both writers contribute interviews to the film, though Marshall, a longtime resident of Tokyo, and Japanese journalist Shoko Egawa provide the most extensive commentary.

On the first day of 1995 both Marshall and Egawa were alarmed by a report that traces of sarin had been discovered in the small town of Kamikuishiki, at the base of Mount Fuji. If the event was strange, it nevertheless tracked to troubling reports both journalists had heard about Aum’s years-long presence in the town. Notoriously bad neighbors, the cult had occupied several abandoned factory buildings, which came to emit noxious fumes along with the group’s persistent chanting. It was later discovered that Aum’s so-called scientific wing was producing massive amounts of chemical weapons in these warehouses. 

Through various informants, including former Aum members, their victims, and Fumihiro Joyu, the cult’s spokesperson until its breakup, Braun and Yanagimoto track the group’s history to its foundations, in the mid-1980s, when Asahara (born Chizuo Matsumoto) was leading a spiritually informed yoga practice. In 1987 he founded Aum Shinrikyo, eventually declaring himself fully enlightened, and giving himself ever grander titles as he gained substantial positive media attention. Through savvy information and marketing techniques, including manga and anime, the group had attracted 3000 followers by 1989, many of them young Japanese who, the film argues, were seeking spiritual education and fulfillment as Japan’s booming ‘80s economic success quickly cooled. They were, it’s said, deeply pessimistic about their future and had little faith in the guidance of their parents’ generation. 

While the story of Aum’s rise, its crisis and denouement, including the day of the gas attack, are dramatically narrated and recreated through interviews and ample, often disturbing, contemporary video, a viewer may be left with some questions about the goals of this otherwise well-constructed documentary. A central intent, the directors told their audience at the premiere, was to inform, using a strong narrative that puts viewers in the moment of the events. The film accomplishes this quite well.

Yet, one wonders, if the subject had been someone else’s national tragedy, say, 9/11, if an American audience would welcome a similarly affect-forward recreation of the event, including amateur video, images of shock and pain and devastation. (Braun, whose elementary school sat in the shadow of the twin towers on September 11th, explained that the trauma of that event drew him to the Aum story.) Is that the documentary one would want, or one that followed questions (admittedly complex and likely never fully answerable) of responsibility, legal, moral, and cultural, a film that was even more interested in the why than the horrifying what, in more assiduously exploring the how-did-we-get-here and the how-do-we-keep-this-from-happening-again?

In AUM, substantial blame is laid at the feet of the Japanese police for not investigating the cult more aggressively in the years before the gas attack, and the media for amplifying Asahara’s fame during the same period. Yet no representatives of either institution are questioned in the film about these accusations, even as Egawa wonders if they (the media) have learned their lesson. Braun and Yanagimoto admitted that they’d interviewed investigators, but made a “creative decision” to follow, instead, the story of those who experienced the attack directly. That decision, while nicely serving the directors’ aims, seems rather cynical, ultimately, a market-oriented calculation that privileges “strong narrative” and spectacle, while coordinating poorly with the film’s wan closing gesture. Intended to argue for this almost 30-year-old story’s current relevance, Marshall is asked to make the case that Asahara’s charismatic command over his followers was similar to the influence more recent, anti-democratic politicians and their media apologists wield over their supporters. 

Perhaps…and? Should we be even more worried (as AUM’s ominous electronic soundtrack rises in the background)? 

Finally, while the film does provide some concise, even convincing arguments about the social ills that may have contributed to the success of Aum’s recruitment and control of young people and scientific professionals, there’s still too little interest in analysis here to really decenter the narrative of horror and get at some substantive and truly relevant considerations of the failures of Japanese culture and society, as well as those of the West with which Japan is deeply entangled.

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The first few minutes of Mad Cats screams torture cult. White-clad women stand watch on a picturesque hillside before we’re taken to a prison cell where one of the captives, who doesn’t know where he is or what the hell is going on, comes face-to-face with one of those women, an executioner.

Then, in sharp contrast, we meet Taka (Shô Mineo), a clumsy drunk struggling to make rent. He is provided with information on the whereabouts of his missing brother, an archeologist who disappeared after returning from his far-off fieldwork, and sets off to save him. He later partners with Takezo (Yuya Matsuura), a cat food connoisseur living on the street, and Ayane (actress is named Ayane as well), a young woman who does the heavy lifting for the team, including supplying guns and training the two amateurs.

Those creepy women on the hillside are actually cats out to get revenge on humanity… If this is where the film loses you, maybe find something else. Still with us? Good! Because it’s self-aware cringe and well-done action sequences from here, as we see how each “cat” the heroes fight has her own speciality weapon and we’re treated to the trio’s clever banter. 

Director Reiki Tsuno told us the vengeful cats offer a deeper meaning: “I had always wanted to make a movie about animals taking revenge on humans. I get angry and feel sad whenever I hear news about animals being put down due to the existence of inhumane pet stores and evil breeders. The numbers of them have been decreasing, but not zero yet,” Tsuno said. “This is a very shameful act of humanity. Nobody has a right to force animals to breed and then trash them only because of human ego.” 

While he could have made the film about mad dogs, snakes or hedgehogs, Tsuno said he chose cats since he’s a cat lover who has taken in his own abandoned felines. 

The animal rights aspects, aside from one clear example, seem lost amid the battle scenes. While it would have been nice to see those points made more clear, Tsuno told us he didn’t want to leave viewers depressed. “It’s also a tale of friendship. It’s also a tale of brothers. It’s also a tale of a cat and her owner. I put them all together in one movie and turned it into a comedy,” he said. “I didn’t want to express it in a depressing way, even though the theme is serious. I want to make movies that make you feel happy.”

The film features songs by Birthday Girl, a new artist for us, who is now on the reviewer’s Spotify. Overall, it’s a fun dose of comedy and action. The film feels like a wild dream. Keep in mind that there’s no need to question their practicality.

Mad Cats is presented in Japanese with English subtitles. It made its world premiere at the Treasure Mountain Inn Ballroom on Jan. 21 and will screen again at 3:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 24.

Visit the Slamdance website for more details.

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Find all our Sundance (and Slamdance) coverage from this year and year’s past. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah.

For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves, has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. So here’s his managerie of stars on Main Street Park City from Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023. All photos by Stuart Graves (the smiley guy). See his greatest hits from before the COVID-gap here.

Follow the links to see Stuart’s Day One Sundance 2023 #stuartselfies and take a look at his greatest hits from the Sundance Film Festival.

For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. So here’s his managerie of stars from Friday, Jan. 20, 2023. All photos by Stuart Graves (the smiley guy). See his greatest hits from before the COVID-gap here.

Click the links for Day Two, Day Three and (an increasingly less-valid) Greatest Hits.

Perhaps destined to become a new classic of the film nerd genre, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s documentary Kim’s Video is an entertaining, twisty, funny, dreamy, sometimes grumpy quest film, featuring co-director Redmon as its protagonist. He is our narrator and eyes, an ardent cinephile-cum-detective, seeking to locate and secure the Maltese Falcon of video archives: the holdings of the defunct titular video store, 55,000 VHS tapes and DVDs, ranging from canonic cinema classics and highbrow experimental films to bootlegged rarities, porn films and low budget productions depicting an engagingly gritty, dangerous, and long-lost New York. 

Redmon introduces himself as a classic loner, a rural Texas kid often left in the care of his grandparents, and drawn, in his loneliness, to the electrostatic magic of the small screen, which was always most animated for him, he says, by films. This personal history provides the foundation for Kim’s Video’s eclectic visual style, in which thought, event, and reflection are all filtered through the lens of “classic” cinema. Redmon’s hometown, he tells us, was close to Paris, Texas, a statement accompanied by a clip from the 1984 Wim Wenders film of the same name, showing a slack mouthed Harry Dean Stanton walking stiff-legged through a desert landscape. This technique of referential substitution recurs frequently, ultimately illustrating the broad range of Redmon’s personal filmic canon, while also backing his rather suspect, or at least narratively providential, claim that his obsession with film has made it difficult for him to tell fiction from fact. I don’t buy the claim on its surface, but I nevertheless accept it as a thesis for how the film wants to approach its ostensibly nonfiction narrative: despite its verité style, some apparently factual turns will be too weird, or convenient, to be believed. Truth is stranger than fiction, that is—or truth so closely mirrors the fictions of Redmon’s keystone films that it’s hard to say which is taking cues from which.

The founder of Kim’s Video, Yongman Kim is, indeed, movie star material. An enigmatic and handsome Korean businessman, who once had his own dreams of making films, Kim’s former employees describe him as both charming and a likely criminal mastermind. Ultimately, he came to support his immigrant family with an East Village dry cleaning store, running his video rental business as a side hustle. But in the high 80s, when VHS was king, Kim realized that his broad aesthetic tastes and innovative, even illegal, methods of procuring rare material could be hugely profitable. For hungry New York aficionados, like Texas-transplant Redmon, Kim’s massive lending library could also be transformatively educational, and it attracted a devoted base of members, none so fierce, it seems, as our protagonist. Kim’s stacks, Redmon tells us, “made me calm…[they] made me feel safe.”

Given this feeling that he’d found his true home (i.e., the embodied history of cinema itself), it makes perfect sense that the store’s sudden closure, in the early 2000s (a predictable victim of new technologies), would produce the deep, existential angst that drives Redmon’s increasingly edgy search for answers in the aftermath. It’s as if Redmon’s closest friends, his chosen family—the ghosts of cinema, he calls them—have been taken from him, kidnaped and absconded to, of all (cinematic) places, the town of Salemi, Sicily, so like (in fact so close to) the fictional Corleone of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films. Around 2009, we learn, Kim struck a strange deal with Salemi, and its then mayor, Vittorio Sgarbi (a Berlusconi crony), transferring his entire archive there on Sgarbi’s promise that the videos would be made permanently available, put on display in a perpetual festival, which, of course, would be free to any of Kim’s former members who came to visit. Enter Redmon, circa 2017, seemingly the only ever taker of the offer, who tells Salemi’s affable chief of police, “I’m going to be here. A lot.” His tone of menace, of course, is comic.

What actually happened with the archive, Redmon finds, is a sad travesty of cynical political maneuvering, emitting a sour whiff of mafia intervention, but the inventive and erstwhile director, inspired by his encyclopedic cinephilia and the ultimately endearing and amenable Kim, is up to the challenge of saving film history. (Some muscle provided by Redmon’s ghosts helps, too.) Kim’s Video may not fully convince us, or even really wish to argue, its deepest metaphysical claims (e.g., “cinema is a record of existence”), but it most certainly entertains as Redmon’s kooky gambits and pressure campaigns become increasingly unhinged and risky. Perhaps the film’s most deeply felt theme, rather, is that for the truly obsessed film otaku absolutely nothing is more valuable, worth risking everything for its preservation, than film knowledge and the physical documentation, however grainy, within which it resides.

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Every January, Sundance Film Festival offers a platform for filmmakers and artisans to share their stories with the world. Acting as a gatekeeper to Hollywood, the films that premiere at Sundance go on to reach global audiences and skyrocket entire filmmaking teams to the top. Historically, most of the movies embraced by the big shots are centered around a singular American experience—a white experience. To break away from this homogenized tradition, diversity-focused organization The LatinX House is heading up to Park City to hold space for black, brown, and indigenous storytellers at Sundance.

Activist Mònica Ramírez, actor/producer Olga Segura and writer/producer Alexandra Martìnez Kondracke co-founded The LatinX House in 2019 when they noticed the underrepresentation of the Latinx community at Sundance and in film as a whole. “We know there’s a huge problem in the way our community is represented on screen,” says Ramírez. They launched their inaugural house in 2020 during the festival’s first virtual format and have since held in-person activations at SXSW, and their own festival in Aspen called Raizado. Each new festival allows the LatinX team to create an inclusive and welcoming space for meaningful conversations. “It’s important to create a gathering place of filmmakers and creatives alongside activists and other kinds of leaders in our community to be able to share ideas, tackle social issues, get creative and hopefully form really great collaborations,” says Ramírez. 

This year, the team at The LatinX House has organized their first in-person activation at Sundance, including a full schedule of panels, private screenings, moderated conversations, and awards ceremonies. Between the packed program, Ramírez and her team included plenty of time for socializing and community building. “We’ve built in these community hours so that people can be in the space and let the conversation marinate, get some creative juices flowing in terms of how they might want to work with other people.” Above all, the Sundance house was built around love. “We build our houses with a lot of love and authenticity,” Ramírez beams. “People walk into that house and take notice of all these little special touches. They understand that we developed this experience with a lot of heart.” 

Outside of its own programs, the LatinX House also takes on a larger role in cross-cultural programing throughout the festival. “This year, we’ve been able to do cultural programming and collaborating with the Sunrise House, The Blackhouse Foundation, IllumiNative and a few other partners,” says Ramírez. “There are some really special moments coming throughout the festival that we’ll all be able to come together across the houses.” 

After the dust settles on Park City and the sundancers have departed, The LatinX House will continue efforts to uplift diverse experiences in film. Following the success of their 2022 Adelante Directors Fellowship Program and their own 2022 Raizado film festival held in Aspen, the LatinX team is ready to maintain the momentum. And as for our own Salty city, Ramírez says she is proud to see Latinx leadership that are making strides for a broader national agenda, “It’s really wonderful to see communities continuing to grow here, and the leaders on the ground making sure to address specific issues that are important to our community.” 

You can find The LatinX House’s full schedule on their website, follow them on socials to stay up to date with all their Sundance happenings. 

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There are few things on the cultural calendar in Utah that are as out of sync with the traditional, quaint Beehive lifestyle as the Sundance Film Festival. Each year, thousands of people in black descend upon Park City like a plague of Mormon crickets: Publicists, industry wonks, filmmakers, photographers, celebrities and their handlers, and a host of hangers-on crowd fresh from L.A., be-scarved, be-turtlenecked, be-satcheled and shod in impractical shoes.

Of course, we Utahns love Sundance. It’s a brush with the larger world that all Utahns secretly crave. (See: The Winter Olympic Games, 2002.) Despite the changing landscape of Utah (especially Park City), we maintain our low self-esteem problem—an underdog, outsider stance that hearkens back to the days of Brigham. On one hand, we’re proud of our weird heritage and, on the other, we seek approval like a middle child. We are the Jan Brady of the United States.

Each year, the crowd that arrives from the coast and the local crowd that arrives from the Salt Lake Valley mingle on Main Street to babble in two separate languages. (Park City residents usually bug out during the January invasion—ironically, the perfect time of year to visit Southern California.) The first language is the disdainful speech of the aloof artist, wherein to actually like something is decidedly uncool. The local language is one of unbridled enthusiasm and charming goofiness. We like things here. We really do. I love us for that. 

The Sundancers, however, come with their lists, a hierarchy of A through Z listers. There are clipboards waiting outside of all the private parties, celebrity lounges and concerts. Out there in party land, there are lists upon lists upon lists and rope lines and waiting in the cold to get into someplace only to find that there’s another level of VIP-ness beyond the first gate. There always seems to be another level of even more exclusive and elusive exclusivity beyond—each layered inside the next like a matryoshka doll. I imagine that eventually, you get to one super cool room, containing one super cool VIP. Who could, if there were anyone else there to hear, be heard to exclaim, “I think I won!” 

Welcome back to town, Hollywood. Don’t slip on the ice.

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