'Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness': Film Review | Sundance 2020

A young woman convicted of murder goes on Iranian TV to try to win a pardon in Massoud Bakhshi’s melodrama, which won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance's World Cinema Dramatic category.

The way religious law penetrates every aspect of Iranian life, from a murder case to how a TV show is run, is probably the most striking aspect of Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness. The perverse logic of temporary marriage, inheritance laws favoring boys and homicide laws stacked against wives, not to mention the practice of paying one’s way out of a hanging with “blood money” to the victim’s relatives, become casual plot elements in this well-shot, cleverly scripted melodrama. Filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi (A Respectable Family), who wrote and directed, took home the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

At the same time, one can imagine another audience taking at face value the harrowing story of Maryam (Sadaf Asgari), who has been sentenced to death for murdering her husband despite an avalanche of mitigating circumstances. But the fact the story is set on a live television show called Joy of Forgiveness, where condemned criminals on death row beg for mercy from their victims' relatives, adds a surreal element that pretty much precludes any emotional response by the audience to poor Maryam’s plight.

The film begins with a breathtaking night view of the soaring Milad Tower in Tehran, whose cornerstone was laid by the Shah but whose construction began after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Arriving at the TV station in handcuffs, young Maryam looks dazed and dull while her mother is foolishly excited. The showrunner, a competent older man (Babak Karimi), assures her they are going to save her life on the program, which is taking place during the night of Yalda, the winter solstice, a cheerful holiday in Iran. So the expectation is that Maryam is going to persuade her dead husband’s daughter Mona (Behnaz Jafari), the heiress to his ad agency, to grant her forgiveness.

It is soon apparent that Maryam’s nervousness and lack of self-control could threaten this happy ending. She has already served 15 months in prison and seems emotionally shattered, while her silly mom bothers everyone on the set and jeopardizes her pardon.

As the story of the “murder” comes out, one outrageous fact follows another. To begin with, the wealthy husband Nasser Zia was 65 and married when he decided to importune innocent young Maryam, his driver’s daughter. Convincing her he loved her, he got her to agree to the infamous practice of "temporary marriage," which avoids sin along with permanent commitment. But Maryam disregarded Nasser’s condition for marriage that there be no children, and when she got pregnant they began fighting. According to a documentary reconstruction of the crime, Maryam gave Nasser a push that made him fall down a one-step rise in the living room, hit his head and die. For this, a court sentenced her to death by hanging.

The prosecutor, who is also on the show, would be happy to commute this sentence to three to six years in prison, and if she wins the sympathy of enough viewers who vote in her favor, the blood money will be paid by the show’s sponsors. Cue the commercial break.

Only halfway through does Mona Zia turn up at the station, late, dressed head to foot in glamorous black like an Iranian Maleficent. Behnaz, who played the striking actress in Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces, gives the character a brooding villainy that is confirmed when it turns out she is planning to use the blood money to go abroad. But her expected forgiveness is put into question by a last-minute plot twist that only a melodrama could absorb without cracking.

There is really much to enjoy in this paradoxical but grippingly paced film. Young Asgari is beautifully cast in the main role, which demands many scenes played in tears and hysterics. Karimi leads the TV crew in taking the whole absurd situation seriously.

Julian Atanassov, the cinematographer, opts for elegant opulence in muted colors as the camera nervously follows characters around the studio and backstage offices. Jacques Comets’ editing is precise and always fluid. Music is limited to a refined selection of traditional Persian excerpts.

Production companies: JBA, Amour Fou Luxembourg, Niko Film, Close Up Films, Schortcut Films, Tita B Productions, Ali Moussafa Productions
Cast: Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Babak Karimi, Faghiheh Soltani, Arman Darvish, Fourgh Ghajabagli, Fereshteh Hosseini.
Director-screenwriter: Massoud Bakhshi
Producers: Jacques Bidou, Marianne Dumoulin
Co-producers: Joelle Bertossa, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu, Nicole Gerhards, Bady Minck, Ali Mosaffa, Fred Premel, Georges Schoucair, Flavia Zanon
Director of photography: Julian Atanassov
Production designer: Leila Naghdi Pari
Costume designer: Rana Amini
Editor: Jacques Comets
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema)
World sales: Pyramide International

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'Acasă, My Home': Film Review | Sundance 2020

A Bucharest family is forced to give up its off-the-grid way of life in a debut film that received the Sundance fest's World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematography.

Lyrical and provocative, Acasă, My Home brings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life. And it does so with laudable concision.

The first feature-length film by investigative journalist Radu Ciorniciuc — who also serves as a producer, co-writer and one of two DPs — was shot over nearly four years, a period that would prove transformative for the unconventional family at its center. Edited with eloquent precision by Andrei Gorgan, the powerful vérité footage reflects an extraordinary level of trust between the filmmakers and the Enaches, who are forced off their bucolic patch of land in the name of their children's welfare and, more urgently, in the name of an eco-conscious form of gentrification.

Timeless and of-the-moment, vividly specific and universally resonant, this portrait of poverty, displacement and social engineering is sure to strike a chord with fest programmers and international art house audiences.

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As the film opens, Gică Enache and Niculina Nedelcu have made their home for 18 years on a stretch of abandoned wilderness that's technically within Romania's capital but worlds removed from its urban congestion. They share an unrushed life with their nine children, the kids swimming and fishing in placid Lake Vacaresti, the younger boys roughhousing on the shore like a pack of puppies. These establishing scenes are punctuated by the implausible sight of high-rises in the near distance, and the pre-title sequence ends with what may be the most expressive use of a drone shot in recent memory: Lifting from ground level to a bird's-eye view, the camera reveals how close this verdant arcadia is to the city proper. 

Gică, a laid-back patriarch with an old-school authoritarian streak, is a former chemistry lab assistant who rejected "wicked civilization" and opted for a life close to the land. But the Enaches' story isn't one of upper-middle-class professionals cashing it all in for a home in the heart of the country; they're squatters, living in a tar-paper shack. Their off-the-grid existence is hand-to-mouth.

It's also idyllic. But Social Services and the police are circling — whether out of concern or rule-bound paternalism depends on who's confronting the Enaches. Acasă follows the escalating targeting of the family for eviction, monitoring and assimilation. The plans are fast-tracked in 2014, when, after decades of failed government and private-sector plans for the wetlands of the so-called Bucharest Delta, the area that the Enaches call home receives the official stamp of approval as a nature preserve. Enter the heavy machinery.

And enter the prime minister and other government officials, not to mention Prince Charles, who indulges in a bit of ceremonial shovel work and photo ops for a project that's hailed as the largest urban nature park in the EU. At press conferences and other promotional events, Gică hovers watchfully. Bureaucrats in sunglasses and activists in state-of-the-art bicycle helmets listen to him, admonish him, shine him on. They acknowledge his role as a caretaker of the land, but the die is cast. In one of the most heartbreaking sentences uttered in the film, Gică faces one of them and declares, "I have nine children, I'm not a nobody."

This narrative, however challenging, is rich with humor and moments of delight, keenly observed in the patient camerawork of Mircea Topoleanu and the helmer. There's an Olympian exchange of insults between Niculina and a post-relocation city neighbor, the sweetness of an Enache boy's first haircut, and the self-conscious sense of absurdity for four of the brothers when they're wedged into their first classroom desks.

The kids learn to read and write and do math, and they learn the rules of the game, at the same time as their father is forced to play by rules he's long since scorned. He's wise, he's hurt, he cries and threatens childishly. He wants to go back to his Eden on the lake. So does second-oldest son Rică, who, in a tearful confession to firstborn Vali — one of several wrenching, incisive scenes late in the doc — likens the city to a prison. One of his younger siblings, clearly moved by Rică's emotion, concurs: "Even the food tasted better there."

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But Ciorniciuc and co-writer Lina Vdovîi have structured something far more complex than an ode to paradise lost. The Enaches' poverty clearly has had a detrimental impact on the parents' health. The family's connection to the natural world, which includes Vali's knack for catching birds barehanded, likely would not win PETA's blessing. A pig's slaughter occurs offscreen, but the kids' lunging attempts to catch it, and its squealing attempts to escape, make for distressing viewing. Then again, pre-butchered grocery store meat offers nothing morally superior to this ultimately bloody scuffle.

Building toward the poetic image of ambivalence that closes this potent film, director Ciorniciuc moves through a series of remarkable exchanges. In their personal detail and their universal push-pull, these conversations have a literary poignancy: parents arguing about child rearing; a son, on the verge of adulthood, rejecting his father's authority. That son, Vali, embodies a specific generational shift in this saga, one that zeroes in on its conflicts: In the Bucharest Delta, where he once lived and played and eked out a living with his family, he's working construction on the new nature park and its Urban Biodiversity Trail.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
Production companies: Manifest Film, HBO Europe, Corso Film, Kinocompany
Director: Radu Ciorniciuc
Screenwriters: Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc
Producers: Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan, Radu Ciorniciuc
Executive producer: Hanka Kastelicova
Directors of photography: Mircea Topoleanu, Radu Ciorniciuc
Editor: Andrei Gorgan
Composers: Yari, Codrin George Lazăr, Gaute
Sales: Autlook Film Sales

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'Come to Daddy': Film Review

Elijah Wood stars in Ant Timpson's darkly comic thriller about a father-son reunion that goes very, very wrong.

Elijah Wood has been forging an interestingly quirky career path since his starring role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He seems to be emulating Nicolas Cage in his offbeat acting choices, and has even produced two of the actor's recent films, Mandy and Color Out of Space. Now comes the supremely weird, hard-to-categorize Come to Daddy, in which Wood delivers the sort of gonzo starring turn that could easily have been turned in by Cage in his younger years.

The film marks the directorial debut of Ant Timpson, whose creative leanings can be easily discerned by the titles of two of his previous producing efforts, The Greasy Strangler and The ABCs of Death. He also provided the idea for this film scripted by Toby Harvard, based on a real-life experience involving Timpson spending a week alone in a house with the embalmed body of his recently deceased father.

That gives you just a hint of the weirdness of this pic in which Wood plays Norval, a thirtysomething hipster sporting a medieval monk haircut and a cellphone "designed by Lorde." As the story begins, Norval arrives at the impressive coastal home, perched over a rocky shore, of his father Gordon (Stephen McHattie). It seems that Gordon, who abandoned his family decades earlier when Norval was a child, had sent a letter summoning him for a reunion.

Gordon seems confused by the arrival of his son, who seems desperate for an emotional connection. Nonetheless, he invites him to stay at the unique house, which Norval accurately describes as looking like "a UFO from the 1960s."

Unfortunately for Norval, what ensues turns out not to be the father-son reunion he was hoping for. The frequently inebriated Gordon proves belligerent, needling and belittling Norval and engaging in macho one-upmanship. Norval, who says he's a big shot in the music industry, makes a big deal of his friendships with various stars, including Elton John, whose real name, he informs Gordon, is Reginald Dwight. His father isn't impressed. "Reginald and I, we go way back," responds Gordon, claiming that he worked as John's chauffeur for 10 years. He even suggests calling the pop star on the phone so the three of them can have a chat.

Things only deteriorate from there, to the point where Gordon attempts to kill his son with a meat cleaver (the proper term for what he's doing is "filicide," he helpfully informs Norvel) only to drop dead from a heart attack in the process.

If you think that's too much of a spoiler, rest assured that there are plenty more plot twists to come. Indeed, Come to Daddy starts out as one kind of film, a darkly comic psychological thriller, before becoming something completely different and far more bizarre. By the time the ultra-violent and twisted proceedings reach their conclusion, we've been introduced to several more characters, including a sympathetic coroner (Madeline Sami, delivering a slyly comic deadpan turn) and a pair of warring criminals (Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley).

Unfortunately, the movie is far more effective in its first half than its second, which degenerates into cheap shocks, absurd plot contrivances and vulgarism for its own sake (including an excrement-covered pen). It's a shame, because the opening section proves deliciously unsettling, thanks to the screenplay that keeps you off-balance and the terrific performances. McHattie tears into his villainous role with the sort of gusto earned by decades of being a hard-working character actor (most moviegoers will recognize his weathered face and voice, if not his name), and Wood brings delicate shadings, both comic and dramatic, to his compelling turn as the emotionally confused man-child. Their scenes together sizzle with an electricity that becomes sadly fizzled out the more outlandish the film gets.   

Production companies: Firefly Films, Blinder Films, Nowhere, Scythia Films
Distributor: Saban Films
Cast: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley, Madeleine Sami, Simon Chin
Director: Ant Timpson
Screenwriter: Toby Harvard
Producers: Mette-Marie Kongsved, Laura Tunstall, Daniel Bekerman, Katie Holly, Emma Slade, Toby Harvard
Executive producers: Tim Headington, Lia Buman, Ant Timpson, Hussain Amarshi, Michelle Craig
Director of photography: Daniel Katz
Production designer: Zosia Mackenzie
Editor: Dan Kircher
Composer: Karl Steven
Costume designer: Angela Ganderton
Casting: Emma Gunnery, Tiffany Mak

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'A Thousand Cuts': Film Review | Sundance 2020

Ramona S. Diaz follows the rise of strongman Rodrigo Duterte and the journalists who brave his intimidation.

An immersive political documentary that might be useful as a glass half-full/half-empty personality test, Ramona S. Diaz's A Thousand Cuts presents this challenge: Having spent two hours watching a democracy wither under a thuggish, law-ignoring president, does a viewer walk out growling, "Well, we're all screwed," or is she uplifted by the example of Maria Ressa, a journalist who cheerfully does her damned job no matter how her government harasses her? Well, it's of course possible to hold both feelings simultaneously. But psychological tool or not, the film is an essential character-driven document of a moment in the history of a country facing some challenges that are disturbingly familiar and others, thank goodness, that Americans will find very foreign.

Ressa is a Manila-born journalist who spent much of her youth in the U.S. before returning there, serving as CNN's Manila bureau chief. As she describes it, as a young adult she felt driven to choose which country would be hers; unlike her sister, who chose the States, Ressa cast her lot with the Philippines, believing in the 1986 People Power Revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy to the country.

Nearly a decade ago, she co-founded the online news site Rappler, hiring a staff full of twentyish digital natives; it would appear that, as the youngsters helped their bosses understand the new-media universe, the veteran reporters bolstered the newbies' commitment to seeking and exposing the truth.

Though set largely amid campaigning for the country's 2019 midterm elections, in which Duterte worked to stuff the government with the most fervent supporters of his brutal drug war — even candidates like racy pop dancer/singer Mocha Uson, who had no governmental experience before embracing Duterte and spreading his misinformation to a legion of online followers — the doc also offers telling footage shot around the Duterte's own election. We see an interview between him and Ressa, in which the latter is unfailingly polite while he says shocking things about his hunt for those he claims are drug dealers. "I'm not building a case beyond reasonable doubt," he explains, but instead relying on his gut, which is perfect: "Would you believe it? I'm at 0.0 margin of error!"

Sound like anyone you know? A Thousand Cuts sprinkles its running time with clips of speeches in which Duterte looks almost exactly like a Southeast Asian remake of Donald Trump, albeit one with more convincing hair and virility. He boasts about his penis; he dreams up vast conspiracies against him and stocks his government with relatives. He spreads obvious lies and calls the press the enemy of the people.

Duterte singles out Rappler and Ressa specifically, and we watch as his government arrests her several times, filing trumped-up cases alleging libel and other crimes. If there's something inspirationally un-dramatic about her response to this persecution, the film has other characters whose bravery takes a more visible toll. We spend time with young Rappler reporters including Pia Ranada, for example, who must petition the Supreme Court when Duterte bans her from covering official events.

Diaz gets surprising access on the other side as well, hitting the Senate campaign trail with Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa, the police chief and Corrections Bureau director who is proud to say, and repeat, how happy he'd be to kill for Duterte. We spend more time observing his personality than digging into those murders: Though interviewees make frequent reference to the government's extrajudicial killings, in which thousands have been slain on the street for suspected drug activity, the doc assumes a basic familiarity with the horrors of the drug war.

That rampant bloodshed, which many observe has become a de facto war on the poor, is the most obvious way in which the Philippines' rapid descent outstrips our own. But Ressa cautions those who'd be sanguine about the rule of law's survival in America. Claiming that, for instance, Cambridge Analytica beta-tested its data theft and manipulation in her country before teaming with right-wingers in ours, she argues that what happens in this Asian archipelago is more predictive of American history than you might like to think.

Production company: CineDiaz
Director-screenwriter: Ramona S. Diaz
Producers: Ramona S. Diaz, Leah Marino, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Carolyn Hepburn
Directors of photography: Gabriel Goodenough, Jeffrey Johnson
Editor: Leah Marino
Composer: Sam Lipman
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)

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'Cane River': Film Review

Rediscovered and restored, Horace B. Jenkins' long-lost debut feature, a 1982 romantic drama centering on black characters in Louisiana and made independently, with a black crew, is receiving its first commercial release.

For nearly everyone involved in Cane River, on both sides of the camera, the indie feature turned out to be one of their few movie credits. That's particularly true, and sadly so, for writer-director Horace B. Jenkins, who died of a heart attack at age 41, two months before the film's scheduled theatrical bow. Thanks to preservation org IndieCollect, the Academy Film Archive and distributor Oscilloscope, his Louisiana-set romance, a modest charmer steeped in local color as well as matters of racial identity, receives its long-overdue spotlight, remastered and in all its flawed and exuberant first-feature glory.

The performances, most of them by non-pros, are uneven, and there's a sweet, self-conscious awkwardness to many of the movie's exchanges. But Jenkins (who served as script consultant on 1973's Shaft in Africa — his only other credit, according to IMDb) has suffused this love story with deep affection for his characters and the rural landscape. The prevailing mood is one of innocence (with a healthy dose of sexuality) as two young people, engagingly played by Richard Romain and Tommye Myrick, find their budding relationship complicated by the collective trauma of slavery and an inherited caste system among black Americans in the South.

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Romain plays Peter Metoyer, whose last name turns out to be a blessing and a curse in northern Louisiana's Natchitoches Parish. The lanky college football star, a draft pick of the New York Jets, has turned his back on the pros and returned to his hometown to write poetry and work on his family's farm. Touring Melrose Plantation — and, notably, after he breaks away from the white guide and wanders on his own — he meets and quickly falls for another tour guide, Maria Mathis (Myrick), who's as eager to leave the sticks for college in New Orleans as Peter is happy to be back in the country.

What he doesn't at first tell Maria is that he's a direct descendant of the couple who built and owned the plantation, the formerly enslaved Marie Therese Coincoin and her French husband. That makes him not just a scion of a property-owning family, but also, in the local culture, a black Creole, or, in the disparaging lingo of some, a "half-breed." Maria gets a cacophonous earful of that lingo from her brother (Ilunga Adell) and overprotective mother (Carol Sutton — who, alone among the principal players, went on to have a long acting career, still going strong).

Working-class Maria confronts Peter, a member of the gentry whether he likes it or not, with her newly gleaned information — specifically, that his family owned slaves and collaborated with the Confederate Army. In the argument that ensues and winds through the rest of the story, Jenkins' screenplay directly references the 1977 book The Forgotten People, a study of "Cane River's Creoles of Color" whose historical revelations would still be reverberating, a few years after their publication, for the characters in the film. In a poignant and eye-opening retort, Peter insists that he's proud of his African heritage, explaining to Maria that when he was growing up, the sight of a black person on TV was always a thrill — an event — for him and his family.

But something in Peter is awakened by Maria's grievances and Gary B. Mills' book. "You've got to know where you've been to know where you're going," he tells his sister (Barbara Tasker), who's not interested, and his widowed father (Lloyd La Cour), who has more pressing matters on his mind: The family is losing its land to a rigged court system. Jenkins addresses the precariousness of black Americans' land ownership (an ongoing problem) head-on, casting New Orleans civil rights attorney Lolis E. Elie as himself; he's the lawyer Peter consults about reclaiming family property that was stolen under cover of law.

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Jenkins' characters grapple with the fallout of history, but they're fully rooted in their contemporary world. The dialogue includes shout-outs to Gil Scott-Heron and Earth, Wind & Fire, and several sequences are music-driven set pieces, with Leroy Glover's songs, and their very literal scene-specific lyrics, subbing for conversation and playing a key role. Arranged and sung by Phillip Manuel, with additional vocals by Anita Pichon, the songs have a smooth R&B-pop sensibility, with an undertow of country nostalgia, that's fully in sync with the narrative.

But music of a different sort, more spontaneous than produced, invigorates a late sequence. The central duo take each other to Sunday services — first his Catholic church, then her Baptist one, where worship is capped by a knockout gospel number featuring soloist Renee Courtney. This is a performance that would have been lost to the ages if not for Jenkins and cinematographer Gideon Manasseh.

The documentary aspect of Cane River is powerful, offering fascinating glimpses of the title burg's horse farms as well as its antebellum plantation and the faces of revelers at a neighborhood bar. Farther afield, a road trip to New Orleans for Maria and Peter provides additional regional detail while deepening the romantic relationship. Though the star-crossed lovers must verbalize much of Jenkins' ideas and commentary, they do so with a vulnerability that makes them more than mere mouthpieces. And however static some of the scenes may feel, the writer-director gives all his characters engagingly human inconsistencies (Maria's highly opinionated brother, for one, is a hatchery employee and fitness fanatic who also likes to get drunk).

Like many a pair before them, Maria and Peter are discovering each other at the same time as they're discovering themselves, asserting their independence and turning away from family expectations. When, in the opening scene, Peter purchases his one-way ticket home from his presumed career in the NFL, the ticket seller says, "I don't believe I've heard of Cane River." Until now, most of us could say the same thing. But, luckily, a place that holds the distinction of being one of the nation's first free communities of color will now be known to many more people, as will the film that bears its name. Jenkins' one and only feature weaves living history, charged and messy, into a homespun, hopeful tale. It's impossible not to wonder about — and wish for — what he might have done next.

Production companies: A, H.B.J. Productions/The HBJ Legacy Foundation production in association with Indie Collect
Distributor: Oscilloscope Laboratories
Cast: Richard Romain, Tommye Myrick, Ilunga Adel, Lloyd La Cour, Barbara Tasker, Carol Sutton
Director-screenwriter-producer: Horace B. Jenkins
Executive producers: Doris Rhodes, Duplain Rhodes Jr.
Director of photography: Gideon Manasseh
Art director: Joseph Moran
Editor: Debi Moore
Music: Leroy Glover, Phillip Manuel

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