In the excellent Slovenian drama I Am Frank, the title character returns to Slovenia after years abroad. Frank has some baggage, so hardly anyone is happy to see him back, including his own mother. Frank’s brother Brane greets him warmly, but warily.
Frank is one of those opinionated, contentious and perpetually dissatisfied people who think nobody can get along with because of their unbending principles; but it’s really because he’s too self absorbed to understand any one else’s point of view. A Marxist true believer, he’s let Slovenia after the dissolution of Communist Yugoslavia, but has now left Israel in outrage after his kibbutz was privatized. Frank leaves no emotional scab unpicked and has never left well enough alone.
Frank and Barnes father has died leaving an unexpected fortune. Brane, a successful if shady entrepreneur, starts thinking about how to invest the inheritance and get richer. Frank is consumed by the fact that the windfall must have been built illegitimately. What Frank uncovers leads us into a paranoid thriller and tumult between the brothers and Brane’s dangerous business associates.
Writer-director Mitod Pevec has created a marvelous charcter in the charismtic misfit Frank, well played by Janez Skof. Valtar Gragan is equally good in the less showy part of Brane, the guy with his own business and family challenges, trying to hold it all together despite his volatile brother.
Cinequest hosts the US premiere of I Am Frank. which is one of the world cinema highlights of the festival.
Michael Olavson in FOX HUNT DRIVE, premiering at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
In the thriller Fox Hunt Drive, Alison (Lizzie Zerebko) is an architect whose career has been stymied by an unfair blackballing; she works as a rideshare driver at night to make the rent and subsidize her futile daytime job search. She picks up a ride (Michael Olavson) who may be a serial killer, and we’re all off on one wild ride.
The rider is anything but the wild-eyed Charlie Manson type. He is polite, professional and contained, and he doesn’t show any sign of compulsivity. But Alison finds some disturbing evidence in his bag…
So, here we have a woman alone, driving around deserted streets at night with a killer in the back seat, and the audience is screaming “Get away! Get away!” But she doesn’t.
This sets up a massive plot twist. Setting up this turn of events so that it’s credible as well as gobsmacking requires some ingenuity, so kudos to screenwriters Adam Armstrong and Marcus Devivo and director Drew Walkup.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of Fox Hunt Drive.
In the offbeat dramedy Closet, Jin is reeling from a breakup and gets a very unusual job. The job is with a non-sexual escort service where clients pay him to cuddle with them as they try to get to sleep. It’s one of those quirky only-in-Japan things, like capsule hotels and golf in highrise buildings.
The cuddle is often preceded by a massage and/or a listening session. Cuddling is so intimate that the audience often expects sex to break out, but it doesn’t.
The service appeals to insomniacs because they can drift off to sleep with the comfort of another warm human body. Closet moves through vignettes on a varied set of customers – all differently motivated. One is a lively spirited 18-year-old student (Aino Kuribayashi).
Given his recent medical and relationship traumas and the weirdness of his new job, Jin (Yosuke Minokawa) often looks bewildered.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of Closet. Closet, with its novel premise, is a worthwhile choice.
Haaz Sleiman and Michael Cassidy in BREAKING FAST. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
In Breaking Fast, successful physician Dr. Mo (Haaz Sleiman) is a practicing Muslim who is out to his family, friends and work colleagues; although he lives in West Hollywood, he’s not part of the gay club scene. He has a longtime boyfriend Hassan (Patrick Sabongui), and Mo’s most flamboyant behavior is scoring the best desserts from the local Middle Eastern bakery for family gatherings.
Hassan’s family is not so tolerant, and Hassan – buried deep in the closet – believes that he must enter a sham heterosexual marriage, which Mo cannot stomach, and they split. Then, Mo meets meets Kal (Michael Cassidy), sparks fly, and the audience recognizes that Kal is perfect for Mo. But Kal is neither Arab nor Muslim, and Mo is still obsessed with losing Hassan. A romantic dramedy ensues.
The term “Gay-rab” pops up. And there is a stereotypical Gay Best Friend, Sam (Amin El Gamal), who is so gay that his party features a gospel choir singing Happy Birthday.
Sleiman is an adorable lead, and the flawless main characters must navigate a straightforward conflict.
This is a first feature by writer-director Mike Mosallam. He delivers solid entertainment here, elevated with insights into the quandaries faced by LGBTQ Muslim-Americans. Authentic-seeming cultural glimpses in the lives of Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans and LGBTQ LA are a bonus.
There’s even an effective cameo by Veronica Cartwright. BTW it’s good to see these Arab-American actors getting chance to play something other than terrorists on episodic TV.
Although the most striking aspect of Breaking Fast is its breaking ground on the topic of LGBTQ Muslims, we should note that it’s a romantic comedy about someone on his forties, which isn’t all that that common, either.
So, this is just another gay Muslim romantic comedy…I predict that Breaking Fast will become the Feel Good hit of the 2020 Cinequest. And I wouldn’t bet against Breaking Fast getting a shot at theatrical distribution. Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Breaking Fast.
In the thriller Before the Fire, this year’s Must See at Cinequest, the only escape from an apocalyptic flu pandemic is a woman’s long-estranged rural hometown – but the scary family who traumatized her childhood is there, too. Written by its female star Jenna Lyng Adams, and the first feature by its female director Charlie Buhler, this indie thriller rocks.
Ava Boone (Adams) is a Hollywood actress who has found some success “pretending to be a vampire”, as she puts it, on a television series. As a killer flu sweeps America’s cities, her photojournalist husband (Jackson Davis) seeks to save her by tricking her into refuge with his family in their sparsely populated childhood hometown.
The problem is that growing up in a family ruled by her abusive father was deeply traumatizing. And it’s only a matter of time until her family finds out that she’s back.
As star and screenwriter Adams has said, “but what if the last place you wanted to go was the only place you could go?”
Veteran Charles Hubbell is excellent as the monstrous dad. The part is written to acknowledge that domestic abuse is about power and control – and not just physical abuse. This guy emanates physical brutality, but he is also a master manipulator.
To make things worse, the dad leads a militia of Deliverance-style yahoos, whose strategy to suppress the flu is to murder outsiders.
Ava was once – and is definitely no longer – a farm girl. For necessity’s sake, she begins repairing fences and doing the other hard, dirty and unglamorous work of the family farm run by her husband’s brother (Ryan Vigilant) and his mother (M.J. Karmi). Along the way, she physically hardens up and develops some skills with firearms.
Unsurprisingly (since she wrote it), the role of Ava is a showcase for Jenna Lyng Adams (The Kominsky Files). When Ava first sees her father again, she’s terrified to her core, which tells us all we need from the back story. Adams’ performance is compelling and credible as Ava has to devise and execute her own survival plan. Adams is on-screen in almost every scene and carries the picture.
“Audiences are thirsty for unconventional, layered, and imperfect women on-screen,” said Adams. “I wanted our protagonist to find her strength by facing the darkest parts of her life in the darkest hours of the world. She reinvents herself over and over again to survive.”
“We fought to make this movie, because we felt that there was a very specific expectation about the types of stories women were able to tell,” says director Charlie Buhler. “Male directors shift between genres much more fluidly, and I think you can feel it in the types of stories that make it to the screen. But Jenna and I both love action, we both love sci-fi, so we wanted to make a female protagonist that we women could really rally behind.”
Indeed, women filmmakers shouldn’t be left to the high-falutin’ Message Pictures while the guys have all the fun with the genre movies.
Before the Fire was filmed on location in South Dakota. Cinematographer Drew Bienemann (visual effects in Beasts of the Southern Wild) makes the barren wintry landscape work to illustrate the Ava’s isolation and vulnerability.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of Before the Fire, which is the best American narrative feature in the fest.
In the Mexican sexual psychodrama Ana’s Desire, Ana (Laura Agorreca) is a conscientious working single mom. She is unsettled by the sudden appearance of her shady younger brother Juan (David Calderón León), who has been out of contact for years. With his motorcycle and his subversion of Ana’s bedtime and dietary routines, Juan becomes that Way Cool, fascinating uncle to Ana’s son Mateo (Ian Garcia Monterrubio).
It turns out that Ana and Juan had a tough childhood, having been raised by a less-than-ideal widowed father. They became very close then, and Ana’s visit back to their hometown rekindles old memories and deep-rooted feelings.
What is going on here between Ana and Juan? Writer-director Emilio Santoyo lets the audience connect the dots in a slow burn compressed into only 80 minutes. The ending pays off.
Maja Stojan in 3 DAY WEEKEND. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
The inventively constructed thriller 3 Day Weekend is a storytelling triumph for writer-director Wyatt McDill and a taut 80 minutes of gripping entertainment.
3 Day Weekend begins with a lovelorn Millennial doofus, Ben, on a solo camping trip. Despite a noticeable lack of outdoor skills, Ben pitches his tent in the woods near a remote lake; but other people arrive, and everything that Ben witnesses tells him that he has blundered into a kidnapping in progress, and, possibly, a murder. But all is not as it seems…
We follow what Ben sees for 29 minutes, and then the point of view shifts to that of a second character. The added vantage point provides the audience with more puzzle pieces, and we start understanding that the story is going in another direction. Then a third character, and, finally a fourth, add layers to complete the story.
McDill even takes us from one crime subgenre to another – is this a peril-and-rescue film, a heist movie, a tragic neo-noir or a perfect crime flick?
And McDill tells his story with hardly any dialogue – and essentially none in the first half of the movie, unless you count grunts. The actors – Maya Stojan, Morgan Krantz, Nathan Phillips and Scott MacDonald – ably tell the story without many lines.
This isn’t exactly like Rashomon, where each character’s perspective shapes the facts differently. In 3 Day Weekend, the facts are all the same; it’s just that some characters come to the story knowing things that others don’t, and some characters experience events that others miss.
There’s plenty of humor slyly embedded in this tale, chiefly in the foibles of the male characters. Plus there are two tattoos that the audience will not be expecting.
McDill also cleverly uses the time-stamped notifications and texts from smart phones to set and reset the timeline of the story threads.
This is an ingenuously-constructed story. Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 3 Day Weekend.
Pauline Kael in WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is the remarkably thorough and insightful biodoc of the iconic film critic Pauline Kael and her drive for relevance.
Documentarian Rob Garver has sourced What She Said is well-sourced with the memories of Kael’s colleagues, rivals and intimates. Garver’s portrait of Kael helps us understand her refusal to conform to social norms as she basically invented the role of a female film critic and what today we might call a national influencer on cinema.
Of course, one of Kael’s defining characteristics was her all-consuming love of movies, a trait shared by many in this film’s target audience. Fittingly, Garver keeps things lively by illustrating Kael’s story with clips from the movies she loved and hated. Garver’s artistry in composing this mosaic of evocative movie moments sets What She Said apart from the standard talking head biodocs.
Kael was astonishingly confident in her taste (which was not as snooty as many film writers). For the record, I think Kael was right to love Mean Streets, Band of Outsiders, Bonnie and Clyde, and, of course, The Godfather. It meant something to American film culture that she championed those films. She was, however, wrong to love Last Tango in Paris. She was also right to hate Limelight, Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Sound of Music. But Kael was just being a contrarian and off-base to hate Lawrence of Arabia and Shoah.
Kael was by necessity an intrepid self-promoter and filled with shameless contradictions. She famously dismissed the auteur theory but sponsored the bodies of work of auteurs Scorsese, Peckinpah, Coppola and Altman. She loved – even lived – to discover and support new talent.
Most of the people we like and admire possess at least some bit of selflessness and empathy. Kael’s daughter Gina James says that Kael turned her lack of self awareness into triumph,. This observation, of course, cuts both ways.
I saw What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael at the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It’s now playing in theaters in San Francisco and Berkeley.
John Sayles’ City of Hope, almost thirty
years old, is still searingly relevant on race in America and is still one of
the most incisive films on American politics.
Life is complicated, so is America and so are politics. Most political films are NOT complicated, but
Sayles respects the audience enough to give us a realistic story in a realistic
community setting.
City of Hope
features over twenty characters braided together in interlocking story threads. It’s set in an Eastern US City very much like
Newark, New Jersey. An Italian-American
business and political establishment is still clinging to the levers of power,
as an emerging black and brown majority pushes for inclusion. There is racial tension and everyday
political corruption – and people must get on with their lives.
Tony Lobianco and Vincent Spano in CITY OF HOPE
A self-made contractor (Tony Lo Bianco) is trying to
finish a big project but the driving forces of race and politics intervene,
just as his troubled and immature son (Vincent Spano) is flaming out. An African-American professor-turned elected
official (Joe Morton) is trying to keep his integrity, maintain credibility
with the black community and be effective – which is hard to do at the same
time. And that really just kicks things
off.
City of Hope has an extraordinary cast that includes many stars early in their careers: Angela Bassett, Chris Cooper, Gina Gershon, Frankie Faison, Miriam Colon. Kevin Tighe is absolutely brilliant as a police union official whose every personal interaction is designed to increase his political leverage (this is a guy that I’ve met many times on my day job). Tom Wright is compelling as Malik, a distrustful activist. The great David Strathairn, who has appeared in six of Sayles’ films, is unforgettable as Asteroid, a schizophrenic street dweller.
Sayles and Sayles’ life partner Maggi Renzi, who has
produced all his films, carved out juicy – and the least sympathetic roles – for
themselves. In a hilarious turn, Renzi plays a Greek Chorus in the form of an
Italian homemaker (They don’t LISTEN!).
Sayles himself plays Carl, a treacherous and reptilian scumbag of a
local crime lord.
City of Hope was released in 1991, right on the heels of 1989’s Do the Right Thing – both remain as insightful on America’s race issues as they were thirty years ago. City of Hope is said to have influenced The Wire. City of Hope may be streamed from iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Here’s a heartfelt and funny cinematic dive into the
Bay Area’s Filipino community – and it’s a movie musical! Colma: The Musical is a coming
of age story following three Filipino-American kids graduating from high
school.
The characters burst into 13 original songs written by
director H.P. Mendoza – and they’re great songs. As one of the kids, the charismatic L.A.
Renigen absolutely soars.
The film was shot on location in Colma, California, the town more known in the Bay Area as the home of San Francisco’s cemeteries. But almost 2,000 living, breathing folks reside there, and they have their stories, too.
H.P. Mendoza is a Bay Area treasure, having written and directed the genre-bending art film I Am a Ghost and the dark indie comedy on domestic violence Bitter Melon.
Colma: The Musical is refreshing on many levels – and it’s a hoot. I recommend the delightful Colma: The Musical for anyone, especially Bay Area residents; you can stream it from Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
