Gabriel Martins’s Marte Um (Mars One) opens with a slim teenager, Deivinho (Cícero Lucas), gazing up at the stars he longs to reach. He is seemingly unaffected by the fireworks going off over the city center of Belo Horizonte or by the few shouts accompanying this celebration, exclaiming the election of Brazil’s current authoritarian president, Jair Bolsonaro. These traces of ambient context tell us that its 2016 and that the country is about to descend into a dark and still unfinished period of political and social unraveling—of rampant corruption; a devastating and deadly nonresponse to the coronavirus; an alarming, state-backed increase of rain forest destruction; and an existential threat to a relatively young democracy that’s been faltering in the wake of major economic and political crises over the past decade. It’s against this future backdrop of a Brazil in deep and deepening turmoil, of what we know is coming, that director Martins casts his often pleasing shadow play of hope and resilience.

As we come to discover, Deivinho’s real vision in that opening scene is not just of the stars, but of his own longed-for future as an astronaut bound for Mars, a participant in the project for which the film is named, the establishment of a permanent human colony on the red planet. It’s a seemingly impossible goal for a kid from the tenuous suburbs of the city. But is it any less realistic than Deivinho’s soccer-mad father Wellington’s (Carlos Francisco) own desire for his son to become a professional footballer?

Everyone in their family, it seems, has a desire that feels at least somewhat out of reach. Deivinho’s older sister Eunice (Camilla Damião), a college student beginning to embrace her sexuality, not only wants to strike out on her own, renting an apartment with her new girlfriend, but also for her self-determination to be accepted by her conventional family. Her mother Tércia (Rejane Faria), a housecleaner, seems mostly to want to sustain the tenuous balance of their home, with Wellington peacefully continuing his journey of sobriety (he’s four years in, thanks to AA) and her children perpetuating a traditional social order, remaining obedient and practical, while pursuing even better lives through education. If the family has achieved a position (during the previous progressive yet turbulent Lula and Rousseff administrations) from which they can imagine continued improvement in their quality of life, it doesn’t take much to reveal their dependence on the whims of the wealthy for their semblance of middle-class stability. When Tércia’s employers go on vacation, she temporarily loses a portion of her necessary income, and Wellington, a maintenance man at an upscale condo, depends on his attentiveness and good humor to build trust with the residents. His character is the only job security he has, and this is all-too-easily jeopardized by a co-worker who’s more willing than Wellington to see and resent the imbalance of social and political power their employers’ wealth represents.

The performances of Marte Um‘s cast are consistently remarkable through all the film’s extremes of passion, joy, despondency and despair. There’s a lovely and authentic feeling of connection between the family members that we understand will eventually prevail over their disagreements and challenges. Failure will find forgiveness and disruption will be accommodated into a new, more expansive status quo. To this extent, the somewhat slow-paced Marte Um can feel rather like an afterschool special that will inevitably end on a note of unity and mutual understanding. And yet, considered in its lightly-sketched narrative moment (no character in the film even mentions the election), at a point when the resilience of the family will be necessary to withstand the imminent Bolsanaro threat, we can appreciate Martins’ mild melodrama as a message of hope for families like Deivinhos, or perhaps as a prayer that the bonds of love and beneficence like those performed on the screen will sustain them and ultimately carry them through to whatever comes next.

Hey, did you hear? Your alma mater’s founders sold slaves to keep the doors open. It was built by slaves. It was named for a slave trader. Its law school was paid for with profits from the slave trade. These histories, all true, are the basis for the high-pitched horror of Mariama Diallo’s Master. Set at a fictional exclusive northeastern college, a rival at one time to Harvard, the film tracks the intertwining stories of three Black protagonists: Jasmine (Zoe Renee), a freshman from Tacoma, Wash.; Gail (Regina Hall), an established faculty member and Master of the students in Jasmine’s haunted hall; and Liv (Amber Gray), an English professor up for tenure who nevertheless is not afraid to call out the historical and present racism of the institution.

While the three women are not the only faculty or students of color on campus, they stand out as among the very few. The three remain subject to a painful parade of microaggressions and more overtly racist comments from their predominantly white academic community, who try and fail to navigate our moment of racial reckoning, if not healing. In conversations about Liz’s research-light tenure file, white faculty awkwardly stumble through racially sensitive language that parrots of their relatively recent training in equity and diversity. In more sinister moments, young Jasmine is painfully singled out as the only Black girl in the room, offhandedly nicknamed Beyoncé, Serena and Lizzo. 

Of course, the horror here goes beyond these sickening, condescending social trespasses. There’s a legendary witch to contend with, too, the specter of a member of Ancaster’s founding family, who, if not slaveholders themselves, were at least dedicated to a social order in which Black people knew their place, as meek servants—not students, not outspoken faculty and certainly not masters of any kind. According to the legend, dramatically introduced to Jasmine by a smug, white frat type, the witch annually chooses a victim from among the freshmen to drive to a terrifying suicide. The most recent sacrifice came from the garret room to which Jasmine has been assigned, she’s told, and where, she later learns, another young Black student (the college’s first) was found hanged, an alleged suicide, several decades before. Jasmine’s sense of awkwardness and disorientation on campus becomes deeply entangled with her terror of the witch, who haunts her dreams armed with a noose, as well as with more mundane romantic attractions and her classroom clashes with Liz, who demands a more acute racial consciousness from Jasmine than she seems accustomed to. Meanwhile, Gail, new to the Master’s house, experiences her own hauntings, drawn repeatedly by the sound of a servant’s bell up the residence’s backstairs to the former maid’s room, where a ghostly wind continually reveals to her the festering wound of her institution’s racist past in documents scattered about the room. She looks over them, disgusted, but repeatedly sets them aside, unwilling to investigate further, even as she declares in a speech she’s writing that “there’s work to be done” in achieving equity at the school.

Of course, the real monster in the film is the overwhelming entrenchment of a foundational racism in American life and the broad unwillingness to examine this with any seriousness. And while we might get lost in the endlessly proliferating tendrils of Diallo’s script (which makes many minor characters and situations narratively disposable), while we might be confused by leaps of time and place, the uncertainty about dream and reality, and the almost parodic excess of Master‘s horror tropes, we should also understand that the film’s overload seems to be its point. “It’s everywhere,” Gail informs Jasmine, as they both confront the latest of their struggles to survive in a hostile community, which stretches far beyond the campus and academia. Yes, it’s everywhere, all the time, taking a myriad of forms, and the psychological and social consequences for Diallo’s protagonists are just as inescapable. That we should experience Diallo’s provocative, jagged, and unmanageable representation of this persistent horror seems rather necessary. If we want to think more about how else the film might have been constructed to better exploit its metaphors and clarify its visual and textual logic, we might want to think, first, about where such expectations come from, who established that paradigm, and how it delimits the nevertheless effective, visceral terror and disturbance of Diallo’s work.

While researching the Icelandic landscape for her film The Seer and the Unseen (2019), director Sara Dosa and her team came across spectacular footage from volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, which led to Dara digging further into their work, lives and deaths, and Fire of Love.

Deep in the Krafft rabbit hole, Dosa learned a profound lesson from the couple that she shared with the Sundance audience:

“They taught me that loving the earth also helps us to love each other.”

Fire of Love builds up to the couple’s death, doing what they love, but that is just a small part of the narrative, which instead focuses primarily on their lives and relationship.

The film tells their story through their own photos and video footage from around the world. The majestic, and often frightening, footage is expertly paired with music, animation and narration from indie film star Miranda July, who sounds more low-key and honest than your typical nature-doc “voice of God.”

We learn the several ways the couple may have met, how they first became fascinated by volcanoes (Etna and Stromboli early on) and witness the subtle differences in the ways they approach their work. While Katia prefers taking still photos, focusing on the small details of their science, and writing the books; Maurice shoots video so no aspect is lost, focuses on the grandiose and does most of the public speaking. Maurice also comes off bolder in his research methods, even paddling with a fellow scientist onto an acid lake at one point.

We learn that one won’t work without the other.

Viewers also witness a change in their approach overall, as they turn their attention from the less-dangerous “red” volcanoes to the highly dangerous “grey” volcanoes (think St. Helen’s and Unzen), with a goal of sharing their findings to help save those in the path of destruction.

Add this to your list. With 200-ish hours of footage edited down to about an hour and a half, we can only imagine the sights left on the cutting room floor.

Fire of Love will show again Jan. 21 at 8 a.m. at Sundance online.

Perhaps you’ve heard this story. How, once upon a time, a beautiful, young woman—a nanny of all things!—met and married a prince in an incredibly lavish ceremony observed by the whole world. And wasn’t it amazing, dreamy, romantic? The spectacle, the procession, the dress, that girl! Just like a fairy tale, they said. We said. And then the not-so-happily-ever-after followed, and we continued to watch, at least sometimes, wondering, maybe, what’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with her?

But oh, there’s a son! And here’s another one! Splendid. And then things got even worse, and then they were splitting up, sort of, separating, not divorcing, because for some reason his family couldn’t allow that, and, really, it was for the boys, and were we still paying attention? Because there’s another woman and another man in the story now—but which came first, and that’s not how these things go, right? I mean, maybe in our lives, people’s lives, but not in this story, not for them (or forget him, he’s always been sort of odd and definitely not charming), not for her. That’s not how we wanted it to be. Or, actually, all this business about affairs and her feeling trapped sort of maybe makes her more interesting, doesn’t it? Which has always been the case, yes, that she, the seeming outsider, was the most approachable of all of them, that ancient, cold, symbolic family she married into. She’s the most compelling, the one we really loved because those eyes, that voice, that style—and also she had problems we could identify with and she cared a lot and she could express that.

And then they were divorced and she was free of him and his controlling family—great!—and then she was dead, killed in a car crash we never saw, while she and some guy were being chased by a buzzing swarm of paparazzi, trying, as they always had, to catch the latest, most intimate glimpse of her face, her most private expression that would tell us everything we wanted to know, about— 

What did we still want to know? What was it we’d wanted from her? What did she mean, after all?

Maybe you lived through this saga, getting up before dawn to watch the coverage of its beginning and its end. Or maybe you only know part of it. Or you’ve immersed yourself in all the pages and hours of analysis, the told-to biographies and secret histories, as well as the searching, speculating dramatizations of The Queen, The Crown and Spencer. So why, at this point, would you bother to sit down and watch one more documentary about her—unless you’re just a glutton? 

Director Ed Perkins is well aware of your saturation and skepticism, but he doesn’t accept the possibility of your total exhaustion. Or rather, he knows you haven’t yet considered the implications of your own interest. The Princess is what he calls an archive film, constructed in the editing room from thousands of hours of video and audio documenting and analyzing the marriage of Charles and Diana, the most basic materials of their narrative. His choices purposefully avoid the mostly familiar, entangling and enhancing the known with video outtakes and the often passionate and sometimes cruel assessments of royal observers, talk show hosts and ordinary citizens from around the world. There are very few moments of surprise in The Princess (Princess Anne’s stunningly bitchy response to a question about her sister-in-law’s new baby is one), but that’s not really the point. The film’s drama lies, rather, in Perkins’s deft aggregation of the frequently absurd, sometimes pathos-laden, but always authentic images and sounds of people watching and caring—the expressions of affirmation in the street celebrations during the wedding; the constructed melancholy in the coverage of Diana contemplating the Taj Mahal solo; the inevitable phalanxes of slavering photographers and videographers; Diana’s increasingly intentional and savvy manipulation of the media through more and less subtle glances, refusals and riddle-like statements; and, finally, the tearful, even rageful crowds slowly converging on Buckingham Palace, seemingly to mourn some greater coming apart.

Though there are a few moments (as in a hunting sequence) where the editing of the film indulges its own myth-reinforcing metaphors and resonances, The Princess mostly avoids pushing its own commentary on its subjects, letting the footage it frames—its assumptions and claims—raise critical questions. And the film draws no grand conclusions about our persistent, reciprocal participation in an intoxicating and frequently destructive celebrity culture. Instead it presents abundant and provocative evidence supporting a single and singular case. Whether or not we have been caught up in the story (as millions of others here testify that they were), the attention The Princess asks us to bring to its montage of images and dialogue and to the personal act of meaning-making we perform on these make it a worthy and uniquely reflective addition to the vast commentary on Diana’s life and death.