Karim Aïnouz’s Mariner of the Mountains
Doc Fortnight, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of international nonfiction films and media, is returning to the museum’s theaters for its 21st edition, bringing with it a wide-ranging survey of the most daring new documentaries and nonfiction films from around the world. Out of thirty-one established and emerging filmmakers, artists, and collectives in this year’s edition, Doc Fortnight 2022 will be bringing New York audiences four feature films from Latin American directors representing Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.
Entering its third decade amid unprecedented sociopolitical realities, the festival nevertheless remains committed to its mission of gathering adventurous and experimental works that highlight thought- provoking perspectives on the most urgent issues of our time.
Screening with the Spanish short film Inner Outer Space by Laida Lertxundi, Argentine director Carolina Fusilier and Filipino director Miko Revereza (both based in Mexico) will premiere their latest documentary collaboration The Still Side / El lado quieto. A sensorial journey through colliding mythologies,The Still Side surveys the afterlife of a pleasure island that is slowly being engulfed by its surrounding nature. A crisp study of life and decay unfolds by way of the Filipino fable of the Siyokoy sea creature, who, carried by strong currents from the Philippines, comes to navigate the spectral remnants of this post-human landscape.
Representing Brazil, emerging Brazilian filmmaker Emiliana Mello will be screening her debut film as writer/director No Kings / Sem Deus Sem Demônio. Arriving in New York for its U.S. premiere, No Kings evocatively portrays the daily rhythm of a remote fishing village in southeastern Brazil that lives according to the rhythms of the sea. This Caiçara community, descended from Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and escaped African slaves, is one of the last of its kind. Mello’s first feature sensitively portrays a unique culture whose sustainable practices and alternative forms of kinship are threatened by deforestation and unbridled government-led development. Cocooned in fluid observations of daily life is the story of Lucimara, a fiery tomboy who leads the village kids in catching crabs—and draws Mello into the film itself. No Kings is a lovingly crafted ode to nature and the resistance of contemporary Indigenous life.
Also representing Brazil, critically-acclaimed director Karim Aïnouz will present his most recent nonfiction feature Mariner of the Mountains / Marinheiro das motanhas which has also been selected to play at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Screening with the Sri Lankan short film Agantukayan / Strangers by Rajee Samarasinghe, Mariner of the Mountains is a personal odyssey that ignited from a trip the director took in 2019 as he boarded a boat in the port of Marseille to visit Algeria, the country where his estranged father was born. Aïnouz’s most intimate film to date retraces parallel histories: a love story that could have been, and the liberation movement to which his father returned before the director was born. While reflecting on the contemporary effects of Algeria’s colonial past (the subject of a companion film, Nardjes A, which was filmed in tandem with this one), Mariner of the Mountains is an elegiac and enthralling auto-fiction that spins into a fever dream where individual and collective meet.
Finally, Argentine director Rafael Palacio Illingworth will be screening his latest nonfiction feature Life Begins, Life Ends / Vida comienza, vida termina in it’s U.S. premiere. The result of a personal tragedy that befell the director while he was midway through a screenplay about gauchos holding out against change in the Argentine pampa, Life Begins, Life Ends follows the director and his family as they relocate to Zurich for his wife’s cancer treatments. Recording life with their young daughters and hanging on to every last moment, the two stories converge in this wholly unexpected mix of autobiography and delirious fiction, in which temporal layers and doppelganger families open up a space to process disorienting grief. Life Begins, Life Ends unfurls as a stream of consciousness that exalts life’s fragility, and its preciousness. Punctuated by the line drawings of Roberto Bolaño and shades of magical realism, Palacio Illingworth’s film is as original a work of art as any that stares down our own mortality.
To find out more about these films, screening dates and times, and the rest of this year’s lineup, visit moma.org.
