;)
Histories of colonialism were omnipresent at TIFF, even in films that, at first glance, might not seem to be in dialogue with these imperial pasts and legacies. Consider the matter of Spanish occupation in North Africa, how it has influenced tensions in the region long after the purported triumph of decolonial movements and still lives, haunting-like, in the contested partition of the Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania. Sometimes, it's something as simple as the children of colonial rule living in a limbo of their ancestors' making, caught in cultural intersections that feel bound to unravel any day now.
In his feature debut, Nomad Shadow, Eimi Imanishi touches on some of these realities through the story of a Sahrawi woman deported from Spain, while Oliver Laxe's Sirât dances entranced across a minefield on the disputed desert. Finally, Maryam Touzani sings a song of displacement in Calle Málaga, where Carmen Maura – the original Chica Almodóvar! – must abandon the life she's always known in Tangiers after her daughter arrives from Madrid with terrible news. These latter two are their countries' submissions for the 98th Academy Awards, with Sirât representing Spain and Calle Málaga Morocco…
NOMAD SHADOW, Eimi Imanishi
Nomad Shadow starts in a rush, from a club's dance floor to the sobering cold of a Spanish night. Mariam is running desperate before she's tackled to the ground, put in handcuffs, and condemned to exile from the country she's called home for a decade. Alas, her visa has expired. Hard cut to desert dunes where the wind blows waves of floating sand, the faint illusion of an ocean undulating low to the ground. It's almost too beautiful for words, but one has little time to contemplate its majesty. Cut to a claustrophobic police station somewhere in Morocco. There, she's mocked by local authorities and sent away, back to a Western Sahara ravaged by Moroccan occupation and a refugee crisis that's lasted for the best part of fifty years.
Clocking at 77 minutes sans credits, Eimi Imanishi's feature debut has no time to lose as it introduces its Sahrawi lead and sets her on a journey of inverse migration. The main action finds her back in Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra, readjusting to a place that feels like a stranger to her. In one memorable scene, Mariam expresses surprise about the river she remembers flowing free, now reduced to a patch of dry earth. It hasn't rained for three years, but she wouldn't know. More concerningly, the people are distant, recriminating her for leaving yet eager to relitigate the same age-old fights that led to her escape all those years ago. And with each kindness denied, a new blow falls down on Mariam, a new layer grows in her carapace of invisible scars.
One of Nomad Shadow's greatest strengths is its ambivalence, regarding the might of tradition with a skeptical eye while acknowledging its importance when one's cultural identity is under the pressure of occupation. Indeed, Imanishi shows an unwillingness to proselytize about decolonial politics, but lets them exist in the background, unexamined yet informing every action. This is especially relevant for the portrayal of Mariam's family, the women above all others. Scenes of acrimonious exchange may play in suffocation or easy communion, depending on the performance and the degree to which No Shadow extends its characters an olive branch of understanding, of grace.
Nevertheless, Mariam's feelings of displacement are constant. Too influenced by European custom to be seen as truly Sahrawi by the community, yet too foreign for Spanish immigration, she belongs nowhere and often dreams of herself between shores. These symbolic passages are among the film's finest photographic showcases, rendering the sky an amber flame, the water black, except for the reflections that gild the waves in gold leaf. Imanishi may choose restraint in her direction, but she lets DP Frida Marzouk surrender to pictorial ecstasy. At twilight, the Atlantic shores glow soft blue. By day, Laayoune is orange quartz against a lapis lazuli backdrop, while the later hours find camels silhouetted by headlights, their fuzzy outlines over the desert night void. How can you resist falling for the land when she's seen through such a loving gaze?
SIRÂT, Oliver Laxe
In the southern Moroccan desert, European ravers congregate for sleepless dance parties that seem to go on forever, their revelry resulting in trance-like masses of thrumming flesh and atonal electronic beats. The sound moves through the bodies on screen and those who watch from the theater seats. These devices immerse the spectators in a fictitious daze and beckon a strange sort of communion where, rather than being joined in togetherness, each individual sinks into themselves. Two figures stand apart from the solipsistic party-goers, crossing the crowd with questions whose urgency grows with each dismissal. They are Luis and little Esteban, father and son looking for Mar, the daughter and sister they've lost to this subculture of catatonic bacchanalia.
When military personnel arrive to disperse the ravers and warn of a regional conflict, the outsiders follow a couple of fleeing vans, confident that Mar will be at their next stop, somewhere close to Mauritania and across the Western Sahara desert. What ensues is an odyssey of apparent freedom on the margins of an apocalypse that each character believes won't touch them, caught up in the privileges they've enjoyed their whole life, whether domestic or nomadic. But they cannot elude chaos forever, especially when they venture into lands pockmarked by geopolitical strife. A forced detour into the rocky mountains here, the world's largest minefield over there, and the illusion of distance between them and the world collapses.
A master of sensorial cinema, Laxe depicts the caravan's Clouzot-flavored misadventure as a series of formalistic gut punches, honing in on the transporting properties of sound design, destabilizing cuts, and sun-burnt cinematography to bring the spectator into the fold of Luis' agony. In this regard, Sirât is a masterpiece of visceral cinema, communicated almost solely through audiovisual measures, where the narrative swerves are practically subordinate to the matter of sight and sound, and synesthetic surrender. But this shot of pure undiluted adrenaline comes with a chaser many reviewers are ignoring, too drunk on the spectacle to ponder the barbed dynamics Laxe puts into place by conjugating these particular people with this particular land.
One must understand that, from the early experimental shorts to Sirât's relative commercial appeal, Laxe's filmography can be understood as landscape cinema at its most fundamental level. His projects are defined by their vistas, be it Mimosas' North African poem dictated by folding time and Islamic tradition or Fire Will Come's dive into the forest fires of Galicia. Crucially, both features approached character as an extension of the spaces depicted. Sirât differs, positing its main cast in opposition to their setting. So, listen closely and you'll hear a counter-narrative expressed by the desert, its histories ultimately more important than the dramas of those who don't belong there. Indeed, the desert swallows them up and denies them an ending.
Apolitical, this is not, though it won't function as an educational tool, nor will it serve as an aid for promoting awareness. Instead, it remains a passive reflection of our rotten world, skirting moralism and nihilistic hopelessness but ultimately setting prescriptive attitudes aside. Such non-commitment to its ideas will frustrate those who clamor for a more didactic form, while the barebones character work is bound to dissatisfy narrative-minded audiences. Finding myself outside both groups, I am a fan of what Sirât achieves, limitations included. After all, I can't quite dismiss a movie that made my heart skip a beat in absolute shock. And it did it twice!! Step aside landscape cinema, it's time for "el filme de infarto."
CALLE MÁLAGA, Maryam Touzani
Similarly to how her camera captured the textures of traditional sewing in The Blue Caftan, Maryam Touzani's latest obsesses over the material qualities of Moroccan domesticity. Though, this time, she sidesteps North African traditionalism to touch on the diasporic specificity of the Spanish quarter in Tangiers, where her protagonist has built her life. We first find María Ángeles in her Calle Málaga apartment, a fiercely independent septuagenarian going about the day and preparing for her daughter's arrival. Clara is coming from Spain for a rare visit, and the widowed matriarch is all too happy to delight her with the flavors of a lost childhood spent between street vendors and neighbors who still recognize the girl, now grown into a gloomy woman.
Indeed, the tension between the two is obvious, chilling the air of warm well-appointed rooms whose every surface tells the story of a lifetime shared with a husband whose last will and testament has come to haunt María. It turns out that the house is in Clara's name, who, in the aftermath of a ruinous divorce, needs to build a new life for herself. Such freedom doesn't come cheap, so she's here to sell the place and inform her mother that it's time to move out and leave all she's ever known behind. Initially, Clara offers María a room with her in Madrid, but they both settle on an old folks' home in another part of Tangiers. Well, the younger woman thinks it's settled, while María has a plan cooking in the shadow of her resigned façade.
While Clara's away and before the apartment gets sold, she returns to Calle Málaga and buys her furniture back, piece by piece. Helped by old and new acquaintances, a nun's silent approval and the patronage of footbal fans, the widow sustains a temporary independence. She even strikes a friendship with the grizzled antiquarian who first regards her with suspicion that inevitably melts into affection, then sizzles into passion. It'd be a heartwarming tale, if not for the tinge of loss permeating every minute we spend in María's presence, her cheery disposition a striking reminder of what's being ripped from her by a daughter straight out of some Sirkian melodrama. Touzani's directorial gentleness only adds to the ache, proving that, in cinema, a soft caress can often hurt more than a slap to the face.
Through it all, Calle Málaga works a materialist milieu that treasures the meaning contained in every object and space, every corner as lovingly shot as it was designed. Pardon the critical cliché, but the house really is a character, revealed in different stages of fragmentation across a narrative whose tragedy is as incontrovertible as the humor that Touzani insists on finding within. Even the titular street is a character of sorts, bursting with life, echoes of a community born out of colonial rule, developed into an idiosyncratic aberration that's impossible not to love when thus perceived. At the center of it all, Carmen Maura is even better than the material she's given, delivering a bit of disarming naturalism that's bolder than you might think. Her chemistry with Ahmed Boulane is especially lovely, and it's not every day one gets to appreciate such a frank, tender, ever-dignified portrayal of sex and desire in old age.
At TIFF 50, Nomad Shadow played in the Centrepiece section, while Sirât and Calle Málaga were included among the Special Presentations. The latter pair arrived in Canada with the Cannes Jury Prize and a Venice Audience Award, respectively, and are now vying for Oscar gold.