Sundance '22: The Exiles--at the Epoch Times

The stories of Tiananmen Square Massacre survivors needed to be told. Years after Christine Choy filmed student leaders like Wu'er Kaixi regrouping in America, her footage finally sees the light of day in Violet Columbus & Ben Klein's documentary, The Exiles, which premiered at this year's Sundance. You can find my review exclusively at The Epoch Times here.

Sundance ’22: Navalny

Anna Politkovskaya. Boris Nemtsov. Alexander Litvinenko. Alexei Navalny was supposed to join their names on the list of Putin critics who met conveniently early deaths. However, he survived to expose his would-be assassins. In a fitting irony, the Kremlin officially declared him a “terrorist” yesterday, mere hours before Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny, an up-close chronicle of his recovery and return to Russia, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Nobody was really surprised when Navalny was arrested returning to his Russian homeland in early 2021, least of Navalny. As viewers can see in the film’s early scenes, Navalny was a master of social media, who built a large and enthusiastic following throughout Russia, especially with younger generations (you can see them in Alexandra Dalsbaek’s doc, We Are Russia). Odds are he could easily unseat Putin in a legitimately fair election, but that is not how the president-for-life plays the game.

Navalny always knew he was a threat, but he assumed his prominence would protect him. He was wrong, as he readily admits to Roher. In August of the super-fun year of 2020, agents of the FSB (what the KGB is now called) poisoned him with the nerve agent Novichok (dubbed “LP9” by the Russians). We really do know that because of an investigation conducted by Bellingcat journalist Christo Grozev and Maria Pevchikh of Anti-Corruption Foundation (founded by Navalny). Viewers hear from them a lot in the documentary and what they have to say is fascinating. Yet, Navalny himself was able to secure independent verification in a spectacularly dramatic fashion.

Those who have followed Navalny’s case might already know he cold-called one of his attempted-assassins, who basically confirmed everything over the phone. It is an absolutely electric, jaw-dropping scene that has to be seen to be believed. Some of that footage (that was shot by Roher and Niki Waltl, one of three cinematographers on the project) is already in the public sphere, but the full context makes it even more gripping.

Of course, it was uncertain whether Navalny would even live that long. The sequences covering his poisoning are also quite intense and profoundly troubling. It is easy to see how scared the Navalny family was, as they fought the suspiciously obstructionist Novosibirsk hospital for access to Navalny. There is plenty there too that demands to be seen by the world at large. However, Roher does his best to keep the Navalnys’ privates lives private, but it is hard to maintain a hard-and-fast firewall for a subject that was poisoned by Novichok and returns to Russia to face likely (and unjust) incarceration.

Sundance ’22: Leonor Will Never Die

In the 1970s, Roger Corman started shooting films in the Philippines, because they already had an established exploitation movie industry that worked fast, cheap, and without excessively cumbersome safety regulations. Back in the day, Leonor Reyes wrote the scripts. She has been retired for years, but serious trashy movie fans still remember her. Of course, that won’t pay the bills, so she tries to pull out her typewriter again. Unfortunately, a freak accident submerges her in the world of her prospective script in Martika Ramirez Escobar’s Leonor Will Never Die, which premiered at this year’s Sundance.

Sadly, Reyes’ golden-boy son Ronwaldo died, but he still quietly haunts (or watches over) the family, while she is stuck living with the other one, Rudie. She and her husband Valentin split-up, but he remains a constant presence in the neighborhood. With their power on the verge of disconnection, Leonor dusts off an old unfinished screenplay, but she still struggles to finish it. Then she gets bonked on the noggin, in a suitably unlikely manner, and proceeds down the rabbit hole into her screenplay.

Suddenly, she befriends and mothers Ronwaldo, the vengeful hero of her film, transparently (but not identically) based on her late namesake son, as well as Majestika, his new stripper girlfriend, whom he saved from the corrupt mayor. Meanwhile, Rudie desperately tries to talk her out of her coma, as the other Ronwaldo looks on and occasionally offers some advice.

Leonor might sound like the Filipino exploitation equivalent of light and frothy fantasies like Ana Maria in Novela Land and Delirious with John Candy, but it is considerably darker and more meta. The cool thing about Escobar’s film is that it is true to sweaty, testosterone-driven genre it portrays. That means Reyes very definitely finds herself surrounded by violence and sleaze, which might limit the film’s appeal.

However, Escobar consistently finds ways to surprise the viewer in the third act, breaking down barriers between realities and self-referring like all get-out. There is also some brilliant work from cinematographer Carlos Mauricio and production designer Eero Francisco recreating the look, texture, and ambiance of vintage 1970s Filipino grindhouse.

Sundance ’22: After Yang

Yang is a way more advanced AI than Alexa. When you ask him to turn off a light, he does it. In fact, he is truly a part of Jake and Kyra’s family, so when he goes on the fritz, it is very distressing for them—and especially so for their young adopted daughter Mika. They will have to prepare her to experience grief for the first time, while learning there was more to their “techno-sapien” “son” than they realized in Kogonada’s After Yang, which premiered (online) as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

When Kyra and Jake adopted Mika from China, so they also purchased Yang, a life-like AI-cyborg to serve as her big brother and help keep her connected to her Chinese culture. However, they bought him certified-refurbished from a licensed re-seller that apparently is no longer in business. Unfortunately, that means when he breaks down, he most likely can’t be repaired.

Suddenly, the two parents realize how much they had delegated their parenting responsibilities to Yang. They also must come to terms with their own sense of loss. However, the discovery of a cache of Yang’s saved memories leads Jake to the discovery of Yang’s secret relationship with a clone and his previous lives with other families, before they acquired him.

After Yang is a sensitive, character-driven science fiction story, in the tradition of films like Marjorie Prime that happily does not involve terminally ill people cloning themselves (as in Swan Song and half a dozen films before it). Kogonada’s adaptation of an Alexander Weinstein short story still has clones and it very definitely challenges viewers to reconsider what it means to be human. This near future world features humanity living and working together with its sentient creations in reasonable harmony, but the way people relate to AIs and clones is clearly still developing.

Kogonada de-emphasizes the flashy futuristic trappings, focusing instead on big ideas and big emotions (although self-driving cars are already a staple of the world). Indeed, the way he and actor Justin H. Min tease out intriguing new dimensions to Yang’s character is one of the most successful aspects of the film.