Good morning 🐣

Sundance Month (I guess that’s what this is quickly turning into) continues here at Cinescape HQ with more treats from this year’s film fest. Since I watched a lot this year, I’ve been splitting them up by themes over the course of a few weeks, interspersed with older Sundance classics. I’m not sure when these movies will be available for mass consumption, but I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

I suppose we’ll dive into the most abstract of the bunch first. The description of “Last Things” in the Sundance program starts with the line, “The human race is old, but rocks are timeless.” Indeed! Clocking in at less than an hour, this …documentary? …poem? …visual essay? …guides us through footage of rocks and crystals from the microscopic on up to the looming giants of mountain ranges while narrators read aloud lines from poetry, classic science fiction, and stream-of-consciousness reflections, some of it in French. If that sounds tedious, it somehow manages to confuse and delight and never outstay its welcome. Filmmaker Deborah Stratman posits that rocks and their elemental compositions have witnessed and created the evolution of our planet, and are ancient entities that will long outlast anything remotely human. But we are not dwarfed by them. We live in concert with them, leaving our own imprints, recording our presence, much like drops of water shaping a stone over thousands of years. As one person in the film points out, “Rocks have a history, but they don’t remember it.”

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Creative Vision (pause for breath), “Animalia” is the visually stunning, gripping story of Itto (played by Oumaïma Barid), a young Berber woman from a poor rural background who has “married up” into a wealthy family in Morocco. She still casually chats with the hired help, much to her mother-in-law’s disapproval. When she’s left home alone, Itto kicks off her shoes and lets her hair down, only to have her relaxation cut short by a mysterious national emergency. Strange weather, creepy dogs, and villagers that trip into the uncanny valley dot the landscape as she desperately makes her way across the country to her husband and the safety of police barricades. It’s a surreal, dreamlike roadtrip that addresses classism, organized religion, and the feelings of helplessness and loneliness during a global crisis. Director Sofia Alaoui previously made the short film “So What If the Goats Die,” which follows a goatherd buying animal feed in town the day aliens visit Earth. “Animalia” presumably takes place during this same event, but leaves it open-ended and vague.

Set in 1880 Chile on a remote island, a 13-year-old Huilliche girl (played by Valentina Véliz Caileo) witnesses her father’s murder at the hands of a German colonist in “Sorcery.” In turn she renounces her Christian upbringing and joins an underground indigenous rebel group that practices witchcraft. Her teacher is Mateo, played by a wonderful Daniel Antivilo, and together they come into conflict with both the Christian Chileans and their own German oppressors, challenging colonialism and socio-racial hierarchy. It’s an ambiguous tightrope between historical realism and magical realism, a fable both grim and hopeful.

Then there’s the just plain kooky “Divinity,” a true midnight flick if there ever was one. It has a fun black-and-white, analog science-fiction aesthetic where eternal youth and toned muscles are the ideal. A futuristic society functions on a miracle drug of mysterious origins that keeps you beautiful and immortal, but two brothers (Moises Arias and Jason Genao) are out for revenge on the man who runs the whole operation (Stephen Dorff). Followers of QAnon will probably think it’s a documentary, but for everyone else it’s a campy, goofy adventure with sex, drugs, and a gory claymation fight scene that filmmaker Eddie Alcazar calls a “meta-scope” blend of live-action and stop-motion. It’s produced surprisingly by Steven Soderbergh. Scott Bakula and Bella Thorne also make an appearance.

Now watch this 👀

You didn’t think I’d leave you high and dry with nothing to watch this week, did you?

Revisiting last year’s Sundance fest, here’s what I wrote about “You Won’t Be Alone”:

As you can probably tell by now, I deliberately sought out Sundance films this year that sounded weird and different. If I recall correctly, there is hardly any dialogue in this dreamlike film that is perhaps even more surreal than “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future.” Set in and around 19th-century Macedonian villages, a young feral woman is raised by a shape-shifting witch and then rejected when she acts too much like your standard teen. Now all alone, she must learn the ways of men by taking on the forms of men, women, children, and animals… but in order to do so, she has to physically consume her victims through a hole in her chest. Imagine Terrence Malick meets “The Thing.” It’s beautiful and haunting.

Until next time! 👋