The film opens with the desperate, whispered prayers of a circle of women, three generations of the family of General Monteverde, a fictionalized version of the dictator who oversaw Guatemala’s brutal civil war in the 1980s, now, in the film’s present, on trial for genocide. The prayers, particularly as articulated by the general’s wife, have the quality here of a spell, the circle a witches’ coven, evoking as well as opposing the indigenous supernatural terror that haunts the family and the country in the form of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, a figure of folklore reaching back to pre-Colombian times. Frequently portrayed as a ghostly, vengeful mother who drowns lost children as she drowned her own and herself to spite her philandering husband, here La Llorona is recast as the vengeful spirit of Mayan Indians slaughtered indiscriminately by the general’s forces as part of a policy that presumed every Indian was a communist rebel. 

At first, General Monteverde seems as confident in his eventual vindication by the courts as he is in the rightness of his earlier actions, for the good of the nation and its identity, as he puts it. But despite the persistent authoritarian controls on government institutions, including the courts, in this fictionalized Guatemala there is enough popular outrage about the general’s war crimes, enough protest in the streets, to finally confine him and his family to their palatial home, attended by only two servants. Both are Mayan, one a trusted, long-time ally, the other a new girl whose bad intent becomes clear within days of her arrival from the countryside.

La Llorona is a relatively predictable, though evocative, and ultimately important revenge tale. It’s a sad fantasy in the sense that even after the end of Guatemala’s civil war and transition to peace, after the excruciating process of fact finding in the 1990s, many of the crimes committed against the Maya and other suspected enemies of the state, in the name of national security, have remained unpunished. These include those of General Monteverde’s real counterpart, General Efrain Ríos Montt, whose initial 2013 sentence of 80 years for his genocidal campaign was vacated, too. He died in 2018, before his second trial concluded.

Perhaps we should understand Ríos Montt’s death as the catalyst for the effective popular and supernatural uprising portrayed in the film, but some clearer motivation within its fictional world, and a reason to believe such a revolt could succeed, would have been more effective. And while we’re imagining the achievement of a more just Guatemala, the film might also have found ways to prosecute and punish the regime’s civilian accomplices, business leaders as well as generals, and even the general’s own family, who know the truth, from which they’ve benefitted, better than they pretend, and whose silence shouldn’t be spared scrutiny.

Nevertheless, as an aspirational fiction, La Llorona contains a number of strong dramatic moments and it serves as a good primer for further, even more probing discussions.

You know the place, how it smells: stale beer, spilled well liquor with cheap mixers. Things are sticky. Decades of cigarette smoke have permeated the stained carpet and couches, the regulars, too. This is precisely what Bill and Turner Ross were after when they created the Roaring 20s, a locals joint way off the Vegas strip, the setting for their nonfiction film Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. From the opening credits to the always perfect juke box, the black and white films (including 1958’s A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic) playing on the tucked away TVs no one’s watching, the entire milieu of Bloody Nose is retro to the point of staleness. It’s cool, it’s been fun, but now it’s time to turn out the lights. Today is the last day in the life of the bar, set to shut its doors for good, the day after today, if the morning ever comes. 

(Hint: it’s 2016. It’s that night. You remember.)

About mid-morning, we find Michael washed up at the bar, awakened with a pick-me-up in a shot glass so that he can get in a quick shave before the rest of the crowd of regulars arrives and the unofficial wake for the 20s, all that it represents, gets underway in earnest. A former actor, we learn, Michael claims to have retired into deliberately chosen failure. He’s the unofficial dean and den mother of the 20s, really a tender person it seems, administering occasional advice and tidying up the place around the edges, expressing not just attachment, but a homeowner’s care. Clearly educated (we see him tucking away a massive volume of Eugene O’Neill early on), and devastatingly sarcastic, Michael maintains a stoic dignity in the face of oblivion, his own as much as that of the bar’s community. No matter how much he or the other patrons reveal of themselves, we come to expect that there will always be deeper depths that we’ll never know—motivations, regrets, evasions, family lives that would torment if there wasn’t a drink in your hand and a friend, a neighbor on the next stool to distract you.

And yet, for all we don’t know, can’t know about the patrons (real bar flies playing themselves in this constructed situation), like good conversations, like your own night at the bar, the characters expand unpredictably. Their overlapping interactions provide glimpses of long relationships, boundary-crossing empathy, made possible by the shared surface goal of getting slowly, cheaply blotto together. Their chaotic, overlapping interactions meander through peaks and valleys of emotion, of hilarity and pathos, frivolity and depth, perpetually returning to existential questions of love and impermanence. Which is to say, that, when all of the pressures and expectations of life on the outside are stripped away, this motley group, with its vague mix of races and professions, is able to find some common ground as they speak with passion about community and the soul. This is a vision of American civic life in the 20-teens. Is it America as it is or as it might be? Is it a dream? A hallucination? Is it a democratic heaven—a blind drunk, rhetorical hell? Who’s missing from the picture and why? Is progress possible here? And what does it mean that the Ross Brothers are shutting the place down, making this boozy Brigadoon disappear?

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets presents a unique approach to documentary, more of an essay than straight nonfiction, the playing out of a provocative metaphor that the film wears relatively lightly until a few key visuals in its last quarter. But we’re never not quite aware of the real subject, and perhaps also of the film’s ambition to get us talking about its questions, to find a new joint, because we still need each other, after all, and we’re better together, less lonely. Or at least we might be.

For more Sundance, click here.

First, count with me to 43. 

It’s a simple tribute and protest practiced by the families of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were disappeared after police attacked their bus on the night of Sept 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. 

The official story, the so-called “historic truth” widely publicized by the Mexican government, confirmed the involvement of local police, then claimed that the students were handed over to members of a drug cartel, who then allegedly murdered them and burned the bodies in a mass grave. A subsequent independent investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights came to conclusions that contradicted the official story, suggesting complicity in the attack and disappearances by the federal police, the army, and the government itself. But then that investigation was shut down by President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration. The disappeared students, and three others who were killed in the initial assault, had been on their way to Mexico City for the annual commemoration of another massacre perpetrated by a previous administration, the murders of unknown numbers of protestors at Tlaltelolco in 1968.

Renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s epic documentary Vivos does not delve into every detail of the Ayotzinapa disappearances and its investigation. Rather, it begins by offering several families—mostly poor, indigenous farmers of coffee, sugarcane, and corn—the opportunity to tell stories about their sons’ youth and ambitions. To become a teacher in these communities, to become fluent in Spanish, is a respected goal, an act of upward mobility in an environment that otherwise offers little hope of economic or social improvement. The families remember the missing as hard workers, contributors to the welfare of the household, loving fathers, young men who desired to repay their parents’ struggles on their behalf through their own professional independence and success. 

The school at Ayotzinapa is also known as a particular hotbed of resistance to state power. Training as a rural teacher there, to empower youth in frequently disenfranchised communities, is not just choosing a professional path. It’s an ideological one as well. The self-described peasant families of the missing believe this is one of several reasons they have yet to receive the full story about the 2014 attack and the whereabouts of their sons. Whereabouts because, without physical evidence, many don’t believe the missing are dead. We may see this as false hope, but really its indicative of the complete loss of trust in the government in regions like rural Guerrero and elsewhere in Mexico, where the history of oppression, corruption, extrajudicial killings, and neglect of basic services runs long and deep. 

Strangely, there is a substantial amount of joy in Vivos (Spanish for alive), frequently emanating from the play of parents with young children and the curious behavior of animals. The color and light of the family homes in Guerrero’s valleys are the material of postcards and travel magazines. Everything and everyone is, of course, expertly photographed. But the rich aestheticization of this world doesn’t trouble us as trivializing, for looking in the wrong way. Rather, the everyday beauties artfully framed by the cinematography heighten the tension between the pride and resilience of the communities and the criminality and horror they endure, that are imposed upon them by the state and its terroristic accomplices. Beauty and joy, hope, too, are undeniable elements in these lives, simple on their surface, but complex in their psychological and historical suffering. We must delight in the pleasure Ai gives us, even as we boil in response to the impunity with which a murderous institutional corruption sustains and deepens the students’ families’ anguish. As much as Vivos is the narrative of a horrible crime and its aftermath, it is also, equally, maybe more so, an exquisitely detailed and sympathetic record of a rural culture whose resilience and exemplary resistance is rooted in generosity, civic and familial bonds, and a deep spiritual approach to the currents of life and death.

For more Sundance, click here.

Magdalena’s son Jesús emerges from the rural Guanajuato cornfield, as if from a dream, to inform his mother, without drama, that he’s leaving, heading north with his friend Rigo, to find work in Arizona. The friends’ departure across a wide, grassy valley, a seemingly idyllic, if impoverished, world, is an image that haunts the remainder of Fernanda Valadez’s affecting and lyrically photographed Identifying Features (Sin Señas Particulares). The suggestion is that home is an underappreciated paradise and only the Devil awaits in the underworld through which one must pass on the way to that other, so-called better life across the border. Once Jesús and Rigo go missing, Magadalena, without much to go on, sets out on her own journey to locate her son, or his remains, if nothing else. Her first stop at the border is a miserable makeshift morgue, where she begins to follow a series of leads, notably provided by sympathetic women. Magdalena’s path periodically intersects with the lives of other seekers as she winds further and further into Mexico’s borderlands, both stunningly beautiful and tragically depopulated, emptied by the reciprocal pressures of poverty and human trafficking, where there is no uncertainty that the missing are, in some way, also dead.

The eerie and dangerous world of this film, with its disembodied voices punctuating the silence, its characters wandering ghost-like, offering both solace and mystery, owes something to Juan Rulfo’s masterful short novel Pedro Páramo, as well as to the more contemporary allegorical border world of Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Atmosphere is as substantively developed through the excellent sound design as it is through Claudia Becerril Bules’s wonderfully disorienting and apocalyptic visuals. Through much of the film, Bules employs a persistent technique of near-field focus as we follow the actors, giving the sense, on the one hand, of characters moving into an uncertain future. On the other hand, we might read the blurring of what lies directly ahead as a perpetually impenetrable and indecipherable surface, a conceptual wall that the character (and, by association, the trailing viewer) will never see the other side of. It’s a unique and effective manifestation of border ambitions, of desire, insecurity, and psychic as well as physical and legal obstacles faced by migrants and refugees coming north.

Identifying Features is not a perfect film. It feels more than a touch too constructed, a little too neatly designed to take us to its narrative conclusion. But, to its advantage, its ethical and political implications are a good deal murkier. If, as one witness says about a victim killed during a bus hijacking, “El Diablo got him,” a viewer might wonder just who that metaphor represents in this quiet, devastated landscape. El Diablo is more than the individual he appears to be, of course. He’s a cartel, yes, but a wider one, than we may suspect. Who is it that facilitates the human trafficking under scrutiny here? Who creates its conditions? How responsible for this lawless wasteland are those who bleed rural communities economically, who provide the transport, who corruptly divert the transport, who raid the transport for new mules and assassins, who create a market for trafficking by criminalizing and fortifying the border, who disrupt with walls and wire what we’re shown was once a coherent ecosystem, all to the devastation of those who ambitiously want “to find their own road?” Identifying Features doesn’t attempt to address the full expanse of this cartel, but all its signs are there, allowing us to contemplate the evil entity long after the film’s sanguine sunsets fade to black.

For more Sundance, click here.

Majnuni, Iranian-American director Kouros Alaghband’s first feature, takes on a storytelling style where, perhaps, it’s all up to you in the end.

With long, fluid takes studying the characters and their movement throughout Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, buildings and streets, the film centers on Adnan, a gruff billy-goat-looking creeper who helps a drunk American embassy worker make it home to his local family, only to later stalk the family members, including a weird scene where he chases their train, and begin entwining himself in their lives, while also seeking out his true love, Nela. From watching the family on a TV set to confronting Nela on the street to an awkward cab ride with Nela, you’re with Adnan the entire film. But is he really seeing private moments in the family’s lives? And is Nela really his lost love?

The title, Majnuni, translates to a longing that makes a lover go insane in Persian and Arabic. Certainly that’s the case for Adnan, as it’s often difficult to tell the difference between his fantasy (aside from grandiose musical numbers) and reality.

Don’t go in looking for a totally coherent story, or beautiful singing from Ado; you won’t find either. But if you want a director’s stunning work of art to examine, and to attempt to answer what is and what is not subjective reality, this could be for you.

Shown in Croatian with English subtitles

Upcoming screening:

Tuesday, Jan. 28, 11:15 a.m., Treasure Mountain Inn, Park City

Read more of our Slamdance and Sundance coverage.

Early in Benjamin Rees’ new documentary, The Painter and the Thief, artist Barbora Kysilkova approaches Karl-Bertil Nordland in a courtroom. She knows it’s unusual, perhaps inappropriate, but she has to ask. Nordland, an addict who’s already served several stints in jail, was easily apprehended by Oslo police thanks to surveillance video recording him and an accomplice walking off in broad daylight with two of what we’re told are Kysilkova’s most important paintings, which had been displayed in a gallery window. The works themselves have not been recovered. This is one mystery at the center of the film. Nordland claims to have been so high on amphetamines at the time that he doesn’t remember what he did with the canvases. 

But another mystery overtakes this one, almost making us forget about the first. This is the mystery of Kysilkova’s fascination with her trespasser, and his with her, encapsulated in his explanation of the theft. “They were so beautiful,” he says. For her part, before the trial, Barbora has been examining Bertil’s Facebook page with her boyfriend Øyvind, studying Bertil’s shirtless workout selfies, his numerous tattoos, trying to get a read on him. She shows some anxiety about the lost work, but something about Bertil’s presence in the photos, inspires the artist’s interest and amusement. What she wants to know when they finally speak is if she can draw him. This is her punishment, in a sense, whatever the state decides to do, though it’s a sentence charmingly offered as a request, more like a gift. 

What Barbora offers, and Bertil comes to embrace, is more than forgiveness. She doesn’t absolve him, in fact, but rather engages with him quite deeply, the two sharing themselves and supporting each other in ways that are hard to fathom, even as we come to understand the self-destructive tendencies they have in common. Despite this darkness, there is real pleasure in their exchanges, a necessary joy. Unsurprisingly, Øystein becomes increasingly suspicious of the connection. Not jealous, it seems, as the relationship developing between Barbora and Bertil is not sexual. It seems more holy, a risky love of recognition that goes beyond simply seeing oneself in another. Maybe we lack a word for this kind of love, a feeling of care for an essential companion that transcends the erotic. The power of this care can be as dangerous as it is liberating, and it sheds new light on the nature of Barbora’s passion as a painter, her work shot through with the distant, allegorical light of Medieval martyrs.

Ree and co-cinematographer Kristoffer Kumar’s verité camerawork is remarkable not so much for its technical expertise. Though the light their work captures is often revelatory, generally the camera feels like a functional device, an afterthought in its seemingly artless witnessing. What makes the cinematography special is the potent intimacy it (and its operators) develop with the subjects, immersing us in moments of love and conflict so presently that we almost feel embarrassed to be caught, physically, in the middle. Our awareness of our presence in these scenes feels akin to the dramatic proximity that’s clearly constructed in fiction films. It verges on feeling false. And then we’re enraptured by Rees’ protagonists’ passion and emotional intelligence, their lack of concern about what we hear or think. 

This is never more powerful than when Barbora reveals to Bertil her first portrait of him. It’s unclear if the painting is based on a photograph, as are many of Barbora’s works, or imagined by her from her sketches. Regardless, Bertil is ennobled on the canvas: sharp, pale, in distress, himself and more than this. The real, abject Bertil, sitting on Barbora’s couch, still little more than an addict at this point in the film (in his and our eyes), responds to the painting, at first, with a comic shock. Does he hate it? Does he hate her? Some kind of violence is close by. But his astonishment evolves into a deeply moving display of terror that freezes Bertil in place, eliciting shudders, tears, and a pathetic, animal whine. It is a remarkable encounter with the uncanny, between Bertil and his double, with an empathetic and loving perception rather than a projection or detached idealization, the work of art doing painful transformational work at an individual level. Documenting the difficult, two-way nature of transformative care is a gift that Ree gives us, The Painter and the Thief as instructive as it is a compelling tale.