NYFF 63: "Dry Leaf" is the dawn of the low-res epic poem

by Cláudio Alves

Alexandre Koberidze shot the most beautiful film of the year on a 2008 Sony Ericsson. That may sound like a hopelessly provocative hot take, the sort of dishonest hyperbole one flourishes in hopes of garnering attention, gasps of shock, mayhap the reputation of an iconoclast walking to the beat of their own drum. And yet, I come to you with utmost sincerity to say that Dry Leaf is beautiful indeed, the sort of film whose splendor makes me reconsider how I approach the art form itself and my own pre-conceived notions of what constitutes a valuable cinematic image. At a time when 4K restorations are all the rage, and large formats are back in style to the point of fetishistic fervor, the Georgian director best known for What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? has gone in the opposite direction and created a three-hour 240p masterpiece…

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NYFF '24: All hail "Pepe," the audacious!

by Cláudio Alves

How does one even start to describe Pepe? Or make sense of it? Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias's latest feature is many things – the biography of the first and last hippo to be killed in the Americas, an oblique look at Pablo Escobar's legacy and impact, an experimental travelogue, a political reckoning with the scars of colonialism in Colombia, a non-fiction and narrative hybrid, an ethnography, a poem, a thesis on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It's everything, everywhere, all at once, an audacious piece of cinema that doesn't lack ideas or ambition, so multifaceted as to leave one dizzy. Somehow, it all works. I'd go as far as saying Pepe is one of the year's best and most essential films…

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NYFF '24: "Lázaro at Night" asks what you really want

by Cláudio Alves

Treading the line between documentary and fiction filmmaking, Nicolás Pereda continues his collaboration with the Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol theater collective in his latest film. Lázaro at Night can, at times, feel like an acting exercise spinning out of control yet perpetually low-key, a sort of screwball comedy on a morphine drip. It's the story of three friends in their forties, living in Mexico City, where they pursue work as actors and fall into a peculiar love triangle. In this, Lázaro G. Rodríguez, Luisa Pardo, and Francisco Barreiro are basically playing themselves. Or, at the very least, a fictionalized version of their identities, twisted for the pleasure of Pereda and a film that confounds aplenty but is also captivating in its own odd way…

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Queer Lisboa '23: Sweden's "Opponent" and other festival highlights

by Cláudio Alves

Soon after completing my Toronto Film Festival Coverage, it was time to dive into another fest experience. This turn, it was closer to home, Queer Lisboa being the oldest running film festival in the Portuguese capital, now on its 27th edition. This year, it offered a program rich in stories of marginalized identities and desires, with a particular emphasis on art intent on decolonizing our collective thought and promoting a more progressive view on the labor and lives of sex workers. There was even something for the awards nuts among us – Sweden's official Oscar submission for the 96th Academy Awards, Opponent.

To mark the occasion, let's dive into a selection of titles, starting with that Scandinavian drama, winner of a Jury Special Mention and the Audience Award…

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TIFF ’23: “The Human Surge 3” is cinema’s dream of itself

by Cláudio Alves

I don’t even know where we are and you keep asking where we’re going.

Where is cinema going? Does it know where or what’s ahead? Is it like us - lost in the dark, blindly navigating a road somewhere, maybe nowhere? Perhaps it’s just like us in other ways, too. Can it dream? It must. When it leaves the waking life to visit Morpheus’ realm, it may consider yesterday, today, and tomorrow, others and itself, the possible made impossible, and the other way around, too. Paths appear and disappear as the mind wanders, a string of consciousness twisting itself mad. I’m not sure if writer/director Eduardo Williams’ films know where they’re going, but they’re undoubtedly mad. They dream the future and themselves, infinite possibility.

So it was with 2016’s debut, Human Surge (2016), and so it is with its follow-up, The Human Surge 3, one of the most exciting films at this year’s TIFF…

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