Independent Cinema: Movies that Make Us Think
Clockwise: Stills from “Aftersun,” “Faces Places,” “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” “The Quiet Girl”
The Academy Awards are upon us. “And the winner is . . .”
For as long as I can remember, I have watched the Oscars, even though some years I’ve seen only one or two of the nominees. In 1966, I joined 50 of my freshmen dormitory classmates to watch host Bob Hope crown “The Sound of Music” with five wins.
Fifty-five years later, I watched the stripped-down “Pandemic Oscars” (2021) by myself. There was no host, and “Nomadland” won three statues while “Judas and the Black Messiah” won two. I had seen neither.
While I’ve watched many of this year’s Oscar nominations — a testament to the convenience of streaming and the press for diversions in these troubled times — I don’t have a horse in this year’s race. There’s lots to applaud, though I’m down on the trend to longer and longer movies (what happened to editors?).
Until I moved to Ashland, my relationship with independent cinema — movies produced outside the major film studio system as well as produced and distributed largely by independent entertainment companies — was limited to the blockbusters that emerged from this creative brew: films like “Lost in Translation,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Moonlight,” or this year’s Oscar contender “Past Lives.”
That changed my first spring in Ashland, when I feasted on nine documentary, feature and short films (out of one hundred) at the 18th Ashland Independent Film Festival, which brought over 7,000 film lovers to the city’s downtown for a week. The Washington Post called it “a dream you’ll never want to leave.”
Along with dimming the Oscars, the Pandemic also darkened regional and local “indie film” festivals like Ashland’s. The loss, especially here in a small town with large cultural ambitions, was palpable.
For the past two years, however, a trio of Ashland cinephiles has curated and shared a remarkable collection of independent narratives and documentaries in a class they teach at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Southern Oregon University.
Lorraine Vail, the engineer for this effort, aided by the Ashland Independent Film Festival’s charismatic former director, Richard Herskowitz, has spent almost a decade teaching independent cinema at OLLI.
She reminds us that independent filmmakers are known for their unique and inspiring stories: “Their films explore complex themes, provide a more intimate look at human experiences, and offer a deeper and more immersive journey than the more conventional ‘This happened and then that happened’ movie.”
From big screen to small
This past August, over the course of two days, I watched “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” at the Regal IMAX theater in Denver. Along with my daughter-in-law, I wore pink to the second.
The past two weeks, I’ve watched the eight movies on Lorraine Vail’s January OLLI film list. I began with the spare and tender film “The Quiet Girl,” set in rural Ireland in 1981, and ended with the comparatively raucous “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” about renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin’s personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis.
It’s been a heady mix.
In case you would like to sample a few of these remarkable films, here are my favorites.
Where can you see these films? All of them can be viewed, free, on Kanopy, the on-demand streaming video platform for public and academic libraries that offers films, TV shows, educational videos and documentaries. All that’s required to sign up is a library card; I’m signed up through the Ashland Public Library. While free for users, content owners and creators are paid on a pay-per-view model by the institution.
(Note: I’ve lifted and edited text from several sources — e.g.,RogerEbert.com — to create these summaries.)
Aftersun (2022)
“In one of the most assured and spellbinding feature debuts in years, Scottish director Charlotte Wells has fashioned a textured memory piece inspired by her relationship with her dad, taking place over the course of a brooding weekend at a coastal resort in Turkey. The charismatic Paul Mescal and naturalistic newcomer Francesca Corio fully inhabit Calum and 11-year-old Sophie, a divorced father and his daughter often mistaken for brother and sister, who share a close and loving bond that creates an entire world unto itself. Wells employs an unusual and gorgeous aesthetic that brings us into the interior space of this parent and child, even as she judiciously withholds details, an approach that finally grants the film a singular emotional wallop. Aftersun reimagines the coming-of-age narrative as a poignant, ultimately ungraspable chimera, informed by the present as much as the past.” – Film at Lincoln Center
[An] astonishing and devastating debut feature.” – A.O. Scott, The New Work Times
A work of masterful and almost unbearable melancholy.” – Allison Willmore, Vulture
A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid.” – David Erhlich, Indie Wire
Faces Places (2017)
Agnes Varda knows the value of a camera. The 89-year-old director was a pioneer of French New Wave filmmaking and has strived to find inventive forms of storytelling throughout her career. In her new documentary “Faces Places,” Varda teams up with the enigmatic photographer and visual artist JR to follow and participate in his “Inside Out” project, in which he takes portraits of regular people and pastes the pictures, in gigantic-poster format, onto walls and buildings.
“It’s like a game,” Varda says early on in the documentary, as she helps JR take pictures of French villagers, whose individual portraits are glued in a row to create the illusion of them all holding one long baguette. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire,” Varda explains. “To meet new faces, and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes in my memory.”
Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making films. That alone should be cause for dancing in the streets. But wait, there’s more: Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.” – Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com
Varda died in 2019 at age 91.
Petite Maman (2021)
Céline Sciamma’s “Petite Maman” transcends time and space to weave a delicate fable about grief, family, and connection across generations.
In the wake of her grandmother’s death, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) accompanies her distraught mother (Nina Meurisse) to her childhood home. There, Nelly’s encounter with another young girl (Gabrielle Sanz), seemingly her twin, brings mother and daughter together in a way neither could have ever imagined. Evoking childhood’s perpetual state of wonder through luminous, richly textured images, Petite Maman takes viewers on a journey inward for a quietly miraculous tale of emotional time travel.
At barely 72 minutes, [“Petite Maman”] breezes by before we realize how deeply it has implanted itself. There are heavy topics present here, the death of a parent, childhood illness, grief, and the guilt one feels when unfinished business exists with the deceased. But they exist within an aura of the fantastic that elevates them from a level of unbearable pain to a more comforting area of bittersweetness.” – Odie Henderson, RogerEbert.com
The Quiet Girl (2022)
The nameless narrator of Claire Keegan’s award-winning 2015 short story Foster, upon which “The Quiet Girl” (Colm Bairéad) is based, is a nine-year-old girl, living in rural Ireland in 1981. She is sent to spend the summer with relatives she’s never met while her mother has yet another baby in a family with already too many mouths to feed. One might expect a story about a child thrown to the wolves, but it doesn’t turn out that way.
“The Quiet Girl” sparely and tenderly unfurls how the childless couple (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett) shows Cáit (she has a name in the film) the first kindness and care she has ever experienced. “I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before,” Cait (Catherine Clinch) says midway through the film.
Like Keegan’s Foster, the film is masterfully rooted in details absorbed by the observant child, piecing together a tapestry of things overheard or glanced.
It is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award (Best International Feature).
Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2022)
Bianca Stigter’s documentary “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” is a great film about filmmaking and a quietly devastating memorial for lives long gone. The title tells you what it is: Stigter takes a three-minute reel of faded 16mm color home movie footage taken in 1938 in the Jewish quarter of Nasielsk, Poland and scrutinizes it — not just to identify the people pictured in it, but to explore the town, the neighborhood, the community, and the little details of daily life that often get neglected.
There are no on-camera interviews, only the voices of people who were there, or who know people who were there, or who know things about the Jewish experience in Poland in the thirties. The footage is slowed down, freeze-framed, zoomed in on, slowly run backwards and forwards.
By the end of the war, there were only one hundred Jews left in the neighborhood, the rest having been relocated and murdered en masse by Nazis and their enablers.
“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” gives life, briefly, to a community on the cusp of obliteration.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” covers themes of love and betrayal while sending the narrative in unexpected directions. A young woman’s friend falls in love with her ex, a bitter student asks his lover to trap his professor, two old friends meet again after 20 years — Hamaguchi’s film anthology traces the trajectories of three Japanese women between their choices and regrets. (Each story ends with a short credits sequence to ensure we don’t waste any time trying to tie characters together.)
All three have twists. The first of the three, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” opens with an engrossing taxi ride shared by best friends Meiko (Furukawa Kotone) and Tsugumi (Hyunri). As the ride unfolds, seemingly forever, Tsugumi gushes to her girlfriend about the man she’d gone on a date with the night before. As the giddy details spill, Meiko feels an uncomfortable sense of familiarity—is it possible Tsugumi is talking about her ex-boyfriend, Kazuaki (Nakajima Ayumu)? Meiko pays a visit to him and discovers that he is indeed the man who charmed her best friend.
Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.” – Film critic Manohla Dargis of The New York Times.
If I were to pick just one of these films to fill a cold winter’s night, it would be Agnes Varda’s “Faces Places.” The film reflects what makes Varda so special.
“I am curious. Period.” Varda said in a 2018 interview in Interview Magazine. “I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting.”
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