La Práctica by Martín Rejtman
The 61st annual edition of the New York Film Festival (NYFF) starts today, Friday, September 29, screening different films by Latin American and U.S. Latinx filmmakers, including five South American films in the main slate: Eureka by Lisandro Alonso, The Delinquents / Los delincuentes by Rodrigo Moreno, The Practice / La práctica by Martín Rejtman, Pictures of Ghosts / Retratos Fantasmas by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and The Settlers / Los colonos by Felipe Gálvez.
The protean Argentinean director Alonso returns to NYFF, after La Libertad and Jauja, and continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence. In the first, Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni guest-star in a black-and-white neo-Western pastiche following a taciturn gunslinger seeking revenge in a lawless frontier town.
In the second section, in a different kind of law-and-order narrative, set during the present day in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we accompany a Native American cop (Alaina Clifford) on her nighttime patrols, revealing a community troubled by addiction and poverty, but also, because of the cop’s good-hearted basketball coach niece (Sadie Lapointe), touched by transcendence. Finally, the film travels to the magnificent Brazilian rainforest of the 1970s, where Indigenous workers pan for gold while articulating their dream lives. Cleverly transitioning between segments without hand-holding the viewer, Alonso has created an improbably unified aesthetic experience that leaves it up to us to make the connections among its transient worlds.
A heist picture unlike any other, Moreno’s The Delinquents / Los delincuentes upends genre expectations with a gentle yet deftly constructed existentialist fable. Timid bank clerk Morán (Daniel Elías), fed up with his dead-end middle-management job, decides one day to simply walk into the vault, pack a bag with enough cash to cover his salary until retirement age, and saunter out. Knowing he has been inevitably caught on security camera, Morán plans on turning himself in, but not before passing the stash along to his coworker Román (Esteban Bigliardi), now an accomplice who agrees to hold onto the money until Morán gets out of prison. From this gripping premise, Argentine writer-director Moreno spins an endlessly surprising tale that moves into increasingly idyllic territory, adding layer upon layer to the twinned stories of these two men’s lives, and inquiring what it means to be free in a world of monetary satisfaction.
The life of a true cinephile is one constantly haunted by the dead, as the history of the movies is a corridor of ghosts. Brazilian filmmaker and unrepentant cinema obsessive Mendonça Filho’s new documentary Pictures of Ghosts / Retratos Fantasmas serves as a poignant testament to the liminal state of movie love, telling, in three chapters, the story of his cinematic world—namely the city of Recife, where his youthful film education took place. At theaters like the Veneza and the São Luiz, Mendonça discovered a popular art form that would change his life; today, with the landscape of the city altering drastically, he surveys its empty rooms now pregnant with memories. This moving and playful film, as much about the architectural and social structures of a city as about the movies that inspire and haunt us, honors the personal spaces that are also the communal lifeblood of our urban centers.
Leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, Rejtman returns with his first film in nearly a decade (following Two Shots Fired), a shrewd deadpan comedy that provides further evidence that few directors are as adept at dramatizing the absurdity of the mundane. Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), an Argentine yoga instructor living in Chile, has recently separated from his wife, which leaves him essentially without an apartment and complicates keeping his business afloat. Adding injury to insult, he’s dealing with a torn meniscus, a meddling mother, a new client who might be a thief and another who gets amnesia during a session. A flirtation with a former student, Laura (Camila Hirane), brings promise for the future. Directed and acted with wry precision, the entrancing The Practice is a sardonic yet loving immersion into a world in which wellness retreats and physical and spiritual self-improvement naturally exist side-by-side with romantic and professional neuroses.
A tale of brutal colonialist violence set against the sweeping, mountainous backdrop of Chile at the turn of the 20th century, Felipe Gálvez’s handsomely mounted, emotionally wrenching adventure The Settlers / Los colonos plays off conventions of the American Western while becoming its own haunting work of cinematic historical exploration. The film follows the journey of three men—an officer of the British army, a mercenary from the American Southwest, and a Chilean mixed-race marksman and tracker to guide the two outsiders—hired by a tyrannical landowner to scout the boundaries of his vast property and execute a new trade route. The true nature of their dispatch, however, comes into focus: to rid the area of its indigenous tribes. With its evocative period setting and arresting landscapes, The Settlers is a vivid, immersive experience, featuring an indelible final passage that reminds us the past is always present.
The Spotlight section of the festival will host the New York premiere of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project by Afro-Latina director Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition, this beguiling documentary portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80, exploring her Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook and her poignant relationship with her family with audacity and eloquence.
The Currents program of the New York Film Festival will host the local premiere of The Human Surge 3 by Argentine director Eduardo Williams. Armed with a 360-degree camera, Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film The Human Surge and constructs something even more immense, fearless, and breathtakingly beautiful, shooting in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru and achieving an unprecedented fluidity between spaces and feelings.
Additionally, three Latin American short films will also be screened in the Current section: Mercurial Currents by Carolina Fusilier from Argentina, The Moon Will Contain Us / Sólo la Luna comprenderá by Kim Torres from Costa Rica, and The Rays of a Storm by Julio Hernández Cordón from Mexico.
In Mercurial Currents—screening in its world premiere—a ghostly bubble haunts the empty trading floor and conference rooms of La Bolsa, the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange building, as filmmaker Fusilier tries to locate a missing photograph of her father when he worked there during Argentina’s 1990s financial crisis. This search melds autobiography and science fiction, as arcane computational mechanisms—humming, flashing, bleeping—track the liquid undulations of trade.
In the small coastal town of Manzanillo, Costa Rica, filmmaker Torres enlists the local teens and adolescents to share their stories, lies, and fantasies on the cusp of a cataclysmic event. Playing amid ruins and wreckages, and voicing their boredom at the lack of change, Manzanillo’s children engage in a collective fabulation, finding strategies for building a new world from the old.
In ceremonial costume, a group of chilangos negotiate with motorcyclists from a rival neighborhood, planning a reenactment of Victory Night, when Hernán Cortés and his army were driven out of Tenochtitlan. With jittery-smooth video and sparing use of an accredited historian, Hernández Cordón explores the significance of the 500-year-old Tree of La Noche Triste, climbing the fence with his subject-collaborators to survey its charred remains.
The 61st edition of the New York Film Festival will take place taking place September 29—October 15, 2023 at Lincoln Center.
