Pawel Lozinski’s The Balcony Movie
European documentaries are in the frame at MOMI’s upcoming First Look festival, running March 16-20. The Festival “introduces New York audiences to formally inventive works that seek to redefine the art form while engaging in a wide range of subjects and styles,” say event organisers (see fest trailer).
Of the 40 works premiering in New York, ten are documentaries, including the Closing Night presentation of Polish Pawel Lozinski’s The Balcony Movie, which picked up the Grand Prix at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival’s Critics Week. The film was shot entirely from the balcony of Lozinski’s Warsaw apartment, which proves to be a uniquely advantageous perch for encountering the struggles and moods of the times. Lozinski was previously selected for First Look in 2018 with You Have No Idea How Much I Love You.
In the Showcase Screening section are the two latest works by Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa. IDFA winner Mr. Landsbergis (Lithuania/Netherlands/Ukraine. 2021, 246 mins) exhaustively details the Lithuanian fight for nationhood during the crucial years of 1989–1991, threaded together by interviews with the first Head of the Lithuanian Parliament, the now 89-year-old Vytautas Landsbergis.
The archive-based Babi Yar. Context (Netherlands/Ukraine. 2021, 121 mins), a Jury prize winner both at Cannes and IDFA, comprises a meticulous recounting of the events at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where, in 1941, one of the largest mass executions in history took place, and where citizens who turned on their Jewish neighbours under one occupation sought to erase their actions under the next.
In Science On Screen is the North American premiere of Constant by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner (Germany/United Kingdom) in which the artist duo uses a combination of 3-D animation, documentary footage, live action, and diagrams to relate the history of the search for a universal standard of measurement to the production and control of knowledge and power.
Also in Science On Screen is Bunker by Jenny Perlin (United States. 2021, 92 mins), a verité look at the lives of American men of all classes who self-isolate in preparation for disaster, as well as those businesses that capitalize on fear, all set in abandoned missile silos and custom-made gilded bunkers.
Other European films enjoying their North American premieres at First Look are Guido Hendrikx’s A Man and a Camera (Netherlands. 2021, 64 mins) in which the director knocks on strangers’ doors and then films them without saying a word. But the results are myriad and complicated. “By playing the provocateur, or even, depending on your comfort level, the villain, the director fashions a subtly powerful and frequently hilarious mosaic of community and tolerance,” writes the festival.
Saeed Taji Farouky’s A Thousand Fires (France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Palestine, Myanmar, 2021, 90 min) follows the tireless Thein Shwe and his family as they eke out a life drilling for oil in the fields of Magway, Myanmar. “Tracing ineluctable cycles of life and death on multiple levels—natural, social, spiritual, and economic—A Thousand Fires accomplishes a rare feat, successfully balancing the universal and the particular without compromising the dignity of those with whom it was made,” the festival writes.
Other selections include Day After by Kamar Ahmad Simon (Bangladesh/France/Norway, 2021, 115 mins), in which a still-operating century-old paddle steamer proves to be a metaphor for contemporary Bangladesh, complete with a literal upstairs/downstairs class divide.
Faritra by Tovoniaina Rasoanaivo, Luck Razanajaona (Madagascar, 2021, 78 mins) is a candid observational documentary taking place almost entirely inside a juvenile prison in Madagascar, where young boys rough-house, barter, gamble, and recount
the conditions and incidents that led to their incarceration.
What We Leave Behind (Iliana Sosa, United States. 2021, 71 mins) is Spanish-language with English subtitles and comprises a loving portrait of the director’s 89-year-old grandfather Julián, from his final, long, solo bus ride to visit his daughters in El Paso, Texas, to his efforts to build a second house for his blind son on his property in Mexico.
“Now in its 11th year, First Look has evolved into an event reflective of both the current state of the cinematic arts and MoMI’s curatorial character and curiosity,” says the organisation’s Eric Hynes, Curator of Film.
“We’re attracted to a wide spectrum of work, from a diversity of makers, and are ever in search of new ways of seeing and expressing. The films and projects in the festival are indeed new to New York, but First Look also signifies an open, activated way of approaching the moving image. Crucial to this is our showcasing both finished and unfinished work—the latter via our daytime Working on It sessions—offering artists and audiences an enticing space in which to encounter one another.”
