Festival Dispatch
Visits to cinema showcases around the world
Museum of the Moving Image film curators Eric Hynes and Edo Choi continue their chat about Cannes 2023, including comments on Killers of the Flower Moon, May December, Anatomy of a Fall, The Pot au Feu, and more.
For the second year in a row, MoMI’s film curators visited the Cannes Film Festival together. Hynes and Choi pass notes in the hall between screenings, discussing the culture of and around the festival, and, yes, the occasional film.
Our Body, one of the best documentaries I have seen in years, silenced the murmur of any externalities the moment it started, maintaining its quietly firm grip on one’s attention through every startling moment of its nearly three-hour running time.
Little Richard: I Am Everything, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, The Stroll, A Still Small Voice
Featuring reviews of Gush, A Common Sequence, Last Things, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and You Hurt My Feelings
Death and distance play a key role in many films nominated for the Queer Palm this year at Cannes, and many of them forgo a meaningful exploration of their characters’ desires.
This was the first year that the film curators of MoMI visited the Cannes Film Festival together. Eric Hynes and Edo Choi compare notes on the scene, the culture of the festival, the slate, and what it might mean for MoMI.
A pleasing sense of ambient drift marked a number of the landscape-focused True/False features I saw, a welcome respite from the “story” and character-obsessed rigidity that hobbles the American commercial documentary industry.
The most intriguing films I saw were premised upon an often performative return to the near or distant past to resolve pesky questions of home or relationships, which is to say, inevitably, questions of identity and inheritance.
Even in this capacity-reduced iteration, one sensed the anticipation of what felt like largely local crowds returning to the program, perhaps for the first time since 2020, at each sold-out Forum screening.
In the murky waters of documentary ethics, responsible filmmaking is not always a question of authorship, but of perspective. It is not just about who is behind the camera, but who is seen through its lens.
Bemoaning or simply acknowledging the metastasis of the “Sundance film” has an obvious tendency of obscuring the nonfiction and non-English narrative entries that premiere at the festival and aren’t likely to be sought out by viewers, especially virtual ones.
Viewers watching this year’s Sundance films are being asked to interrogate their ways of seeing, coming up against films that examine perspective by more thoroughly investigating the relationship between who’s behind the camera and what we see on screen.
Several films on view continued to reckon, indirectly or otherwise, and to varying degrees of success, with our era of disrupted intimacy and heightened loneliness. Titles include Quickening, The Humans, and The Power of the Dog.