New Directors / New Films was presented from April 3 to April 14, 2024, at Film at Lincoln Center (FLC )and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Over more than a half century ND / NF introduced new filmmakers with striking innovative productions reflecting the future of cinema. This year the program included 25 features and 10 short films with 18 North American and US premiers and 16 first time New York screenings. As La Frances Hui, Curator of the MoMA film department and co-chair of the 2024 ND/NF edition observed “This year’s lineup is a splendid exhibition of adventure, courage, and ambition… that celebrates joy and love while also reflecting on pain, conflict, and our shared humanity”. Funding for ND/ NF by Film at Lincoln Center was provided by national and NY State institutions. Film at MoMA grants were provided by CHANEL with additional support from Debra and Leon D. Black, the Triad Foundation, Jo Carol and Ronald S. Lauder, Karen and Gary Winnick as well as other sources.
With his third feature LA PARRA (THE RIM),
Spain 2023, Alberto Gracia provides this year’s festival an unusual, compelling,
and outstanding film which I would rank among the best selected in 2024. His film is difficult to classify in standard
innovative genre categories, but it is a witty, original, and surreal
presentation with hallucinatory overtones of the survival of a young man,
Damian, in a boarding house after the death of his father. It recounts his escapist
ventures in the coastal Galician city of Ferrol, Alberto Garcia’s old home
town. Damian has been absent from Ferrol for two decades and returns there when
his father dies, though he had been estranged from him.
LA PARRA was written and directed by Garcia
but has no traditional linear story, which may be puzzling to some viewers. Gracia
opens the film with images of a group of blind people who are guided on an
excursion by Cosme, played by Gracia. At the end of the sequence, Cosme seems
to kill himself by jumping from the top of a mountain. The feature ends with a
large ship destroying the only bridge connecting Ferrol to the outside world, a
scene watched by many people from Ferrol. The city and its population are therefore
isolated and inhibited from returning to former fame and prosperity.
Damian lives in the boarding house and is
misidentified as Cosme who used to stay there, a designation he first rejects
but slowly gets used to. As Garcia points out in an interview, in today’s
society, some people find their own selves only by assuming a different identity
and Cosme fits Damian. Damian is impoverished and unemployed. He survives with
some support from the boarding house residents. He takes Cosme’s possessions,
including his car, but gets along well with the other people living there. They are an odd collection of absurd individuals
with none conforming to the stereotypes of normality. Unemployed like Damien, they
steal from residents to sell them their thefts, but are not antagonistic.
Damien’s or Cosme’s car is picked up and he recuperates it. When he tries to
leave Ferrol, the city has closed all exits and he is forced to join a population
as underemployed as he is and the boarding house tenants are. With great finesse, Garcia selected original
characters and the antics they engage in. He hired only two professional actors. Ferrol
has an aged population and the city, birthplace of the dictator Franciso Franco
and once a prominent navy base, seems to further descend into obscurity. Alberto
Gracia presents its people with compassion, and not as a group in despair,
though the film Rim has some strong comedy elements. Gracia’s feature offers a
sympathetic yet surreal image of a declining city.
MALU is an outstanding psycho-social 2024
Brazilian debut feature by Pedro Freire who directed and wrote the script. He superbly depicts the fractured and dysfunctional
interactions of his family in realistic terms. Here reality is the story. The
center of Freire’s film is the life of his mother, an imposing character, Malu Rocha,
an unemployed former actress stunningly portrayed by Yara de Novaes. Malu lives
with her own very religious catholic mother Lili in a rundown house which Malu
refuses to have fixed unless her distant husband pays for it. It is situated in
one of Rio de Janeiro’s favellas. A black queer companion, Tibera lives there
too and supplies Malu with drugs and maintains the status of an aspiring poet. Malu is joined by her daughter Joana who just
returned from living in France and wants to become an artist. Freire offers an
amazing realistic presentation of the lives of these three generations of women
as shaped by past experiences, phantasies, and present illusions. Apart from
Tibera, there are no significant male characters but male shadows from the past
leak into the plot. Grandmother Lili shares that her father had ditched her
because he had sex with her sister. Malu’s invisible husband, father of Joana,
becomes a point of contention since he owns part of their home. Malu’s
passionate emotional actions and outbursts drive the story. She explains each
day her desire to build a theatre for slum kids on the plot of her home.
Malu’s behavior is erratic and accompanied by
battling with whoever surrounds her, a life characterized by chaos and tensions
which does not disturb her. Conservative mother Lili believes that Malu’s unrestrained
and unstable life style, drug use, sex and antagonisms reflect psychological problems
and possibly a mental disorder. For her,
this may account for Malu presenting her life as a perpetual show. Lili decides
to move out of the house into a shed. Her granddaughter Joana comes to the same
conclusion after numerous encounters and fights with Malu. Her mother needs professional
therapeutic help, which Julia will arrange or otherwise she leaves. Malu refuses and Julia disappears to return
when Malu calls claiming an emergency and admits when they meet that she is losing
her mind. Julia brings Malu to her
apartment in Sao Paulo and learns during their car trip that Malu has been diagnosed
with Mad Cows Disease.
La Parra,and Malu are superb, ingenious films
with unique approaches and interpretations, meeting the promise of the 2024 New
Directors / New Films festival.
Claus Mueller, filmexchange@gmail.com
New York, 1 347 210 6759 1 212 759 1351
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