Identifying Features by Fernanda Valadez
Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art have announced the lineup for the 49th annual edition of New Directors/New Films, which will feature a record-breaking number of six Latin American titles, including the Chilean documentary The Mole Agent / El agente topo by Maite Alberdi that has been selected as closing night film.
The other Latin American selections are the Colombian film Los conductos by Camilo Restrepo, the Mexican films Identifying Features / Sin señas particulares by Fernanda Valadez, and The Dove and the Wolf / La paloma y el lobo by Carlos Lenin, The Fever / A Fevre by Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin, and the Uruguayan film Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine / Chico ventana también quisiera tener un submarino by Alex Piperno.
A clever, entirely unexpected delight, Alberdi's The Mole Agent weds a spy movie conceit to an observational documentary framework: Sergio is a dapper widower in his early eighties who gets hired by a private detective to go undercover in a nursing home to investigate whether a woman who lives there is being abused and robbed. Initially, Sergio, with his spy glasses and lack of tech savvy, cuts a conspicuous and amusing figure as he reports back to his no-nonsense boss. But like any great detective story, the solution to the mystery isn’t as important as what’s learned along the way, and Sergio forges poignant, sometimes heartbreaking bonds with an array of fascinating elderly women. Director Alberdi’s camera captures interactions with remarkable intimacy and compassion, resulting in a warm, funny work of nonfiction with an emotional power that sneaks up on you.
In Restrepo's fragmented first feature Los conductos, a former criminal and cult member living under cloak of night in the crevices and corners of the Colombian city of Medellín makes his way back into civilization, yet is gripped by a shadowy past. After his memorable shorts Cilaos and La bouche, the director proves his mastery at economical yet expansive storytelling here, taking a complex narrative about the possibility of regeneration within a society all too willing to discard its outcasts and boiling it down to a series of precise shots, sounds, and gestures of off-handed beauty.
The terrors of the past haunt the present in the astonishing debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Lenin, The Dove and the Wolf in which trauma lurks beneath every meticulously composed shot. Factory workers Paloma (Paloma Petra) and Lobo (Armando Hernandez) share a tender, loving relationship, though as their story unfolds it grows ever clearer that something from long ago is obstructing their happiness, and that for their romance to survive they must confront it. Setting the memory of unspeakable violence against hushed tones and deceptively placid imagery, Lenin gradually reveals the source of their pain, constructing an essential drama of the people who become collateral to the rampant gang and cartel violence in contemporary Mexican society.
In her spellbinding first feature, Brazilian director Da-Rin takes a delicate, metaphorical look at the fragile political state of her country from a perspective most moviegoers haven’t seen. Da-Rin centers on the working and home lives of a father and daughter of indigenous Desana descent—middle-aged Justinio (a splendid, quietly expressive Regis Myrupu, who won Best Actor at the Locarno Film Festival) and Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto)—who have moved from their community to the northwestern city of Manaus. There, he works as a security guard in a massive warehouse; she has a position in a hospital and has recently been accepted to study medicine in Brasilia University. Trying to support his family, all the while dreaming of a soul-sustaining return to the Amazonian rainforest, Justinio must contend with encroaching obstacles, including casual racism, reports of a wild animal on the loose, and a mysterious malaria-like illness. Da-Rin keeps the film at once realist and mythic, modern and spiritual, leading to a symbolic, emotional conclusion.
Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Audience and Screenplay Awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Identifying Features follows middle-aged Magdalena (Mercedes Hernandez) who has lost contact with her son after he took off with a friend from their town of Guanajuato to cross the border into the U.S., hopeful to find work. Desperate to find out what happened to him—and to know whether or not he's even alive—she embarks on an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous journey to discover the truth. At the same time, a young man named Miguel (David Illescas) has returned to Mexico after being deported from the U.S., and eventually his path converges with Magdalena's. From this simple but urgent premise, director Valadez has crafted a lyrical, suspenseful slow burn, equally constructed of moments of beauty and horror, and which leads to a startling, shattering conclusion.
Enter a world of the unexpected in the exceptional surrealist debut from Uruguayan poet and filmmaker Piperno in which doors never lead to where they’re supposed to and the world is a lot smaller than it appears. Melding together two inexplicably interconnected stories from wildly different settings, Piperno’s vividly drawn dream movie initially follows a group of rural farmers in a Filipino village who come to believe a shack that has mysteriously appeared in a valley clearing contains evil properties they must exorcise; at the same time, a young janitor working on a bougie cruise ship discovers a portal that opens to somewhere else entirely. Touching upon ideas of global connectivity and economic inequality with a lightly fantastical touch, Piperno has made a delightful fantasia for our moment.
Additionally, New Directors/New Films will also screen the Argentine short films Playback by Agustina Comedí, a fiction-documentary hybrid that is a tenderly crafted love letter to a group of Argentine drag queens and trans women as they lose their community to AIDS against the backdrop of an oppressive regime, and Monster God by Agustina San Martin, a fiction film about an all-seeing power plant looms above a foggy town and seems to anticipate an unknown cataclysm while a punk teen longs to escape.
Featuring 27 feature films and 10 short films from 35 countries with 13 North American Premieres and 4 U.S. Premieres, the 49th edition of New Directors/New Films will take place March 25-April 5 in New York City.
