Capsules from the Latin American Film Festival

in sunny downtown Silver Spring

Watching

Tótem (2023) – Mexico

Young girls are always learning about mortality in the movies, or so it seems as of late (see: Petite Maman, Summer 1993, etc.). Lila Avilés’ take on the subgenre isn’t strictly confined to the perspective of its youngest star, but it’s a child’s side of the story—and how it fits into the world of the adults around her—that Tótem is most interested in.

7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes) knows that her dad is dying and she is handling it about as well as you would imagine someone that old would. The film opens with Sol making a wish that her dad won’t die and from there her condition rapidly deteriorates to the point of stealing a smartphone to ask Siri when the world will end (in several million years, when the sun expands large enough to consume it).

Sol’s whole extended family and friends are gathering at her grandfather’s house to throw her father a surprise birthday party, which is also in a way a farewell party. The grandfather is a psychologist who communicates with an electrolarynx and sees patients out of his home; the father, a painter, has been boarding upstairs with a likely-cancerous stomach ailment that keeps him mostly housebound but doesn’t totally interfere with his painting. Sol’s aunts and their children run in and out of the house making preparations for the celebration and fretting about the family’s finances, which are insufficient to cover the cost of chemotherapy. The whole movie is shot in that trendy style that uses long lenses and the academy ratio to induce mild claustrophobia.

The adults in the film are coping with Sol’s father’s impending death with varying degrees of acceptance. Of particular note is the faith the whole family places in extramedical remedies. One of the aunts hires a woman to run around the house blindfolded chasing out evil spirits. Later, the immediate family gather around a metronome to practice “quantum therapy,” a slightly more formalized method of sending someone good vibes. I wouldn’t call the movie on the whole groundbreaking—not that it needs to be—but it ends with an emotional revelation. Sol’s father, presented with his birthday cake, declines to make a wish on the candles. Sol is immediately attuned to her dad’s resignation to death, so different from her own hope earlier in the day that a wish could avert the inevitable. Both Avilés and Sentíes movingly capture the moment and its aftershock with grace and gravity.

The Practice (2023) – Argentina/Chile

Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), a yoga instructor, is an Argentinian living in Chile and separating from his partner Vanesa (Manuela Oyarzún), also a yogi. She kept the apartment and sold all the furniture to set up her own makeshift yoga studio; he kept the studio but has to crash at her brother’s place, trying to avoid all the garlic Vanesa’s sister-in-law puts in all the food. Like the protagonist of a Rohmerian moral tale but clad in athleisure, Gustavo narrates The Practice as he hobbles with a torn meniscus from class to couple’s therapy to physical therapy and back again. Along the way he reckons with the fact that ten years of teaching yoga in the same place has shrunk his world dramatically: everywhere he goes he runs into current or former students.

The former students always seem happy to see him again but it isn’t actually clear that Gustavo is a good yoga instructor, at least not anymore. In the opening scene, a German student claims that he’s paying excessive attention to correcting her form relative to the other students; he gingerly tries to explain that her form really is that bad, though we’re not given much evidence to judge one way or the other. (Then an earthquake hits, she passes out, a screen falls on her head, and she wakes up without any memories—the rare first-scene deus ex machina.) Later a troublesomely muscular young guy joins the class and suffers a back injury when Gustavo tries to correct his form. As problems continue to pile up, Gustavo becomes increasingly alienated from the heart of his practice, adding to his uprootedness as both an immigrant and a soon-to-be divorcé.

The Practice isn’t a movie of grand ambitions but neither is it phoned-in. Whether you feel for Gustavo or are rooting against him, it’s a very funny movie and owes its success to its director’s good judgement. Rejtman knows exactly how to cut a sequence to make jokes land, and he’s shot thoughtful coverage that ensures that scenes, which often repeat themselves with slight variations, flow with a pleasant rhythm—good practice for a filmmaker in general, but especially appropriate for a movie about yoga.

The Settlers (2023) – Chile

It isn’t usually a good sign when you find yourself in the middle of a movie mentally rattling off all the older, better movies it reminds you of.¹ Surely it would be more fair to ask okay, so what does this one bring to the table?

The Settlers, a first film by Chilean director Felipe Gálvez, is set in Tierra del Fuego near the start of the 20th century. José Menéndez, the historical businessman who oversaw a sheep empire, has called together an American, a Scotsman, and a mestizo to go on a scouting mission to mark the edges of his territory near the Argentine border. In four or five episodes introduced with bold, red title cards, the film follows the ragtag band across Patagonia as they (read: the white ones) get themselves into trouble and commit a few war crimes. An epilogue set years into the future follows up with the mestizo long after he has left his white employer to live off the sea with a Chilean woman; it’s also in this segment that the film reckons most interestingly with the aftereffects of Spanish colonialism on the native people of Chile.

The Settlers’ contribution to the colonial period piece genre is the specific history it brings to the screen—for the first time, as far as I’m aware—but beyond that it’s a cautionary tale in how not to make this kind of movie. The scenery is frequently and strikingly beautiful, but never shot the same way twice. At times you wonder if the crew is using a different camera setup for every scene, right down to a tracking shot that appears to have been filmed, distractingly, on horseback. The brassy musical choices feel more deliberate and underline the absurdity of white violence to a fault but, intentional or not, the cumulative effect of these images with these sounds is that you are never unaware that you are watching a movie full of men playing an elaborate game of dress-up.

Pictures of Ghosts (2023) – Brazil

Kleber Mendonça Filho appeared at the AFI Silver to introduce his new film and stuck around for a Q&A. His answers were quite critical—of capitalism, of the Bolsonaro regime—which was refreshing, since his movie was more on the gentle side of social critique.

Pictures of Ghosts is a tripartite documentary covering two sides of Filho’s hometown of Recife: the apartment and the neighborhood he grew up in, and the cinemas of Recife’s downtown. The first part of the film is the most formally interesting one. Filho cuts together a quick-moving montage of scenes from his apartment, some of which are home videos and some of which are from his 2012 film Neighboring Sounds, which was shot on location there. It’s a nice little personal essay on what home has meant to him over the years, but it isn’t all that involving for the viewer.

The second and third parts of the film get into the real meat and potatoes, the rise and fall of movie theaters in the city. Filho amasses a lot of archival footage to tell this story, some of which he shot himself. One highlight: an 1990s interview with Alexander the projectionist, an old hand who can recall like it’s yesterday the agonizing summer he had to watch The Godfather every day, several times a day, for weeks on end. Anyone who loves the movies will find something to like in Filho’s history of the people and places that dotted the landscape of his moviegoing youth, but this is clearly more of a pandemic art project than a critical investigation of urban transformations in the vein of Neighboring Sounds or Aquarius. Still, those films are known for having fun with themselves as much as they are for their political commentary, and in that regard Pictures of Ghosts is at home in Filho’s filmography thanks to some well-picked needle drops and the occasional cinematic sleight of hand.

1. For the curious: Zama, Godland, Silence, Jauja, The Northman (!), Aferim! all came to mind. Also the sound design of the opening credits seems to owe a very mild debt to Enter the Void, of all things.