I love all of the Sundance programs, but NONE can compare to the NEXT program. The festival not only focuses on first-rate exhilarating filmmakers but also permits incredibly risky filmmaking that other festivals would not allow. This dispatch is a compilation of two films that have bold independence with joy and observe broken characters trying to reassemble their lives and their relationships with the world around them.
In South Dakota’s wind-swept plains, close to the cracked beauty of the Badlands, Kate Beecroft’s directorial debut “East of Wall” a semi-biographical docu-fiction drama is profoundly moving, capturing an unyielding, multilayered tale. Partly inspired by the mother-daughter duo Porshia and Tabatha Zimiga, the film features its own cast. They are traders of horses using TikTok for business promotion. Tabatha, recognizable with a sharp sidecut and fierce gaze, is a horse whisperer. Besides that, her daughter Porshia is also a champion equestrian.
Along with other problems, Taabtha and Porshia are still struggling with the death of her husband John in East of Wall. Tabatha’s horses do not sell well at auctions nowadays which is a problem as she has a large number of dependants. Besides Porshia and her three-year-old son, Tabatha rescues adolescents whose parents are imprisoned, suffering from substance abuse, or dead. It is indeed true that the rural region has high rates of suicide coupled with low income. These teenagers are taught to ride and perform with the horses to increase their auction value.
With the unfiltered help of her mother, Tracey, and her boyfriend, Clay, Tabatha is managing to stay afloat, if only just.
When Roy a Lively Texan Rancher (Scoot McNairy) arrives with plans to purchase Tabatha’s three-thousand-acre farm, the ranch echoes his characteristics and emotional baggage. He hopes to turn it into a paradise by offering her a job. However, Tabatha, who has spent a lifetime fighting nature on these brutal plains, isn’t blown away by the offer.
In this story that will sure to invite direct and indirect comparisons to “Nomadland,” Beecroft and DP Austin Shelton animate the poetic American West landscape, bursting with warmth captured by the breathtaking horse riding sequence where Porshia evokes admiration for boundless wonder. Alongside that, Beecroft also depicts the area’s hardscrabble economics: the ripped-apart trailers, the abundance of abandoned cars, and women’s violence mark some of the film’s harsh realities. While her scripting is lacking, this ensemble is massive so it is difficult to keep track of each character’s individual story. As with Roy, who as a character is left dangling too often, distracts us from the frayed mother-daughter relationship. Since he’s quiet for such long stretches, I was left wondering if I had missed part of the film.
Porshia, the new talent, delivers a stunning performance that needs little shaping, as her heart-wrenching interior performance echoes sorrow that leads straight to the core. So, thanks to Beecroft, the film maintains emotional grit.
When “East of Wall” is working, it is a dramatic tale of unimaginable toughness that advances with relentless force.
Modern features abound in “Obex” despite it being set in 1987. A black-and-white quarantine-coded film that mixes dreams with videogame logic, Albert Birney’s picture is a scathing critique of screen life, a Dungeons and Dragons adventure, an homage to horror classics.
Conor is portrayed by Birney, a reclusive bachelor who lives in complete solitude aside from his dog Sandy and is served food through a window by a woman named Mary (Callie Hernandez) whom he never allows inside. Conor’s travels beyond the confines of the house are limited to the backyard where he had previously dumped trash and played with Sandy. During his “indoors” phase, he spends his time drawing digital portraits on an ancient Mac computer, recording television spots and commercials, including “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and doing morose karaoke covers of “Cars,” a song by Gary Numan, in bed.
Everything changes for Conor after he comes across an advertisement in PC Mag for a new computer game titled “Obex.” This game allows players to scan themselves into a virtual world for a chance to battle the demon king Ixaroth. As expected, the game kidnaps Sandy, which forces Conor to explore its fairy-laden virtual realms where knights in armor, humanoid cicada soldiers, and a man with a head made of Victor RCA TV (Frank Mosely) reside.
“Strawberry Mansion” was a production by Birney, and “Obex” is strikingly similar, featuring themes of profound emotional isolation. The sound design is rich with textures, from the buzzing of cicadas to the light-demon TV seething with static. Shrieking with static, the TV is as tactile as the sound design, including the synth-imbued score. Their practical effects give the film a handcrafted quality that creates an unsettling tension with the effete technology cluttering Conor’s house. Although Birney’s film is an unrelentingly gentle nightmare about a man’s desperate search for his dog, it is far from pithy. It is profound and remarkably imaginative.
The film “Obex” is deeply informative without ever revealing itself, leaving an extensive impression long after viewing that resurfaces at unexpected moments, such as when you hear cicadas chirp or when standing before a blank TV, even waiting idle in a grocery store queue.
It has a certain effect that is often reminiscent of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” in that it “shakes me, makes me lighter.”
Kahlil Joseph BLKNWS Terms And Conditions.
Joseph’s dense and unshakeable feature debut “BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions” has taken a long journey. The pandemic, as well as a multitude of other factors, including Participant Media pulling the film from Sundance right before the festival began (after claiming without his knowledge Joseph had made a secret edit that he was not told about), slowed down processes. Joseph’s debut seemed suspended until Shani’s Rich Spirit Studios picked it up. It has now returned to the festival list and there is hope that the wait was worth it after all.
More complex than a mere expansion of Joseph’s thirty-minute video art installation “BLKNWS”, The latter is a frantic, adrenaline-pumping concocted piece that synthesizes archival and found footage, intertwining references to film, music, scholarly notation, internet chatter, memes, and chatter in such a way that muddles the present and the past into a nonlinear video essay that pushes the boundaries of what film can be. This is literally the kind of work that is seamlessly integrated into the cascading thoughts of Fred Moten or Saidiya Hartman and poet Wole Soyinka, alongside sonic collages of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis and Land Art critique without batting an eye.
The film derives elements from W. E. B. Du Bois’ Africana Encyclopedia, a work that remained unfinished while he was alive, requiring Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah to eventually complete it. In particular, Joseph draws inspiration from the reference text to navigate through his existence, examine the aftermath of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism’s decay in Africa, and envision an Afrofuturist pilgrimage to Ghana. Tellingly, as he leaps around topics, he notes page numbers. For instance, Willie Mays is supposedly on page 112 but Houston somehow makes it to 771.
Through Garvey’s ideas and Du Bois’ work, the history of Ghana in conjunction with Pan-Africanism is explored.
In particular, Joseph is interested in Black archives, the missing materials from them, and their delicate nature. As a means to account for the lacunae of history, Joseph performs what can be described as a critical fabulation by his breezy temporality, pulsating bass, and collage of disparate sounds, which includes a bombardment of multi-layered interviews and beat-driven music. His sound is unruly. It strikes one as profoundly immersive and captivating. It reveals wild delirium intertwined with brass that makes one feel as though they are experiencing a moving archive unique to Joseph’s legendary editing style.
Approaching something as extensive as “BLKNWS Terms and Conditions” must be overwhelming for Joseph since he is so well-studied. But one has to love the film’s capacity to powerfully summon the past and the future in its recalls.
To watch more movies visit Fmovies
Also Watch for more movies like:
