Sundance: 'Mars One' is a Brazilian gem!

by Cláudio Alves

Looking over the city she calls home, Tércia lingers and, in turn, the camera lingers on her. It's a beautiful, if humble, image, her silhouette against a celestial painting. The twilight sun makes watercolors out of the skyline, yellow bleeding into blue, gray buildings falling into the cold penumbra. The contemplative frame can contain many meanings, and director Gabriel Martins doesn't force the audience's hand. We're free to surmise what we want from the picture. Speaking from a personal place, I couldn't help but feel a melancholic kinship. Maybe it's projection, but I recognized myself in Tércia, looking at a seemingly peaceful world I thought I knew until it proved me wrong...

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Interview: Aly Muritiba on Brazil's queer Oscar submission "Private Desert"

by Nathaniel R

Sometimes the long lead up to a movie's release can alter a story. In the case of Aly Muritiba's Private Desert, most people who come to it will already be aware of its central premise though the movie treats that as a "reveal". Happily the film works either way. Crossing the border can also change how a movie feels. The initial protagonist, Daniel (Antonio Saboia) is viewed sympathetically but his offscreen history (police brutality) is likely to spark different reactions from country to country, depending on societal views on policing and masculinity.  In the minimalist but never simple story, a lonely cop spontaneously drives several hours to finally meet the woman he's been romancing online. She abruptly ghosts him after an implicit request for reciprocal nudes and we glean, quite a long time before he does, that he's fallen for a queer person. 

We had the pleasure of talking to the director Aly Muritiba about the film, the careful casting of his second lead, and Brazil's contentious history of Oscar selections...

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Interview: "Escape from Mogadishu" director on following "Parasite" towards the Oscars

by Nathaniel R

The "Korean Wave" has exploded in the last decade as more and more international audiences eagerly lap up South Korean music, television, and film. The roots of that cultural tidal wave go back to the 1990s and, in film, particularly the early Aughts when a group of young directors took the country by storm with exciting genre films. Some of them like Park Chan Wook and Bong Joon-Ho have gone on to become international superstars but they weren't alone. Ryoo Seung-wan, one of several others to make waves in the Aughts with hits like Die Bad and The Unjust is, in some ways still rising. He recently had the biggest hit of his career and awards nominations at home with the action drama Veteran and, now, a handful of years later, another huge hit and his first Oscar submission. Escape from Mogadishu is a tense action drama and true story. When the Somali Civil War broke out in the 1990s, the North and South Korean embassies were thrust together, against their natural impulses, in a desperate attempt to survive.

We recently had the chance to sit down with Ryoo Seung Wan in Los Angeles as his film was screening for Academy voters. He was in something like a state of joyful disbelief, laughing as he told me "my parents were actually married at a venue called 'The Academy'!". This interview was conducted through a translator and has been edited and condensed for clarity...

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Review: Mayor Pete

By Abe Friedtanzer

Politics have become so divisive these days that campaigns are often based more on what a candidate is not rather than what they are. It’s refreshing, therefore, to see a politician whose identity is integral to their desire to achieve a certain office. This documentary’s title indicates the informality and folksiness attributed to its protagonist, a man who may actually be one of the most put-together, presentable people in the political world today. That would be Pete Buttigieg, the extremely likeable and publicly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana who made a run for the presidency in 2020…

Being gay is not the only aspect of who Pete is, but it is a big part of it and one that broke new ground when he shared the debate stage with other Democratic presidential candidates...

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Cannes at Home: Day 7

by Cláudio Alves

Last year, while the Cannes Film Festival did not occur, the organizers revealed a list of titles selected. Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch was among them, and, unlike many other films slotted for the 2020 Croisette, it rescheduled all release plans so it could still premiere at the festival. After a one-year delay, it's finally upon us, and the reviews skew positive. Let's hope it's worth the wait. Another main competition title to take its bow today was Kirill Serebrennikov's Petrov's Flu. It's the Russian director's second film to compete for the Palme d'Or and his first release since a controversial conviction for embezzlement. Still banned from leaving Russia, he attended the festival by FaceTime. More on that later. For now, let's look back at these directors' previous successes – a bittersweet comedy on dysfunctional families and a galvanizing political allegory about modern Russia…

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