Geoblocking Fall 2020: Toronto, New York, Leipzig

FESTIVAL REPORTS

GEOBLOCKING FALL 2020: TORONTO, NEW YORK, LEIPZIG

B. Ruby Rich

There is something oddly desiccated about a film festi- experiencing a version of that satiation—oversubscribed to val stripped of its “eventness,” no matter the online sub- simultaneous festivals and losing sleep over time zones—yet stitutions. With festivals distilled into one giant firehose free of the exhaustion of actual travel. blast, the media streams puddled onto the home screens Nonetheless, bereft of comrades and coffee-shop hang-

of critics, buyers, audiences, and fans, all trying hard yet outs (though some have been improvised online, minus the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 still wearing the same outfit like a programming version of caffeine), film critics persevered. More to the point, so did “Who wore it best?” The scholar Diane Burgess has writ- the film festivals. ten about the “attention momentum” that drives a film’s I checked out the Toronto International Film Festival “symbolic value” in festival settings.1 I wondered how the (TIFF), my longtime and habitual fall kick-off, as well as new festival iteration, with a footprint both shrunken and the New York Film Festival (NYFF), to which I’ve had ac- dispersed, would be able to fulfill its function of delivering cess only when in New York City, though it was the first either. After years of complaining about red-carpet glitz, festival I ever attended as a junior curator from Chicago. theater lines, and general festival mania, critics might need I also served as a juror for the 2020 DOK Leipzig festival in to ask forgiveness: without them, a screening is a stream- its international section. Toronto and New York overlapped ing is a screen. The rerouting of the “live” event onto the in many cases, but the German documentary selection was very same screen used for Zooming with friends, taking different, with more in common with European fests than meetings, and writing this report have had a destabilizing its North American counterparts. effect, at least on this writer. Navigating the festivals’ screening websites meant that The terms of engagement have changed as the unlock- my viewing was far more random than usual. Sometimes I ing of location has fashioned a strange new world. On the one was geoblocked, banned from entering the portal because hand, the ability to travel the globe has been arrested, strand- my browser tattled on me, revealing my location in Paris, ing critics at home (in homes that aren’t necessarily lovely or outside the North American window. I tried using a VPN Zoom-worthy). Deprived of the film-festival fix that has long proxy with varying success and sometimes had to give up. provided sustenance, melancholia lurks. But audiences, sud- Other times, I missed screening slots owing to a confu- denly invited to far-flung festivals neverbefore within their sion that I’d never have experienced in person. Yet those reach, are downright euphoric to be liberated by online access films that I did see offered a compelling route out of my (especially for specialized festivals). To sum it up: those who COVID-demarcated existence. used to be able to travel can’t any longer, making do with Of the films that spanned both Toronto and New York, virtual versions, while those who never could can suddenly the most celebrated was the Venice-awarded Nomadland take part in long-out-of-reach festivals, if only virtually. Fi- (Chloé Zhao, 2020). Zhao went on to win TIFF’s People’s nally, as FQ contributor Rasha Salti pointed out last fall, in- Choice award and would go on to major nomination buzz dustry veterans who used to pick and choose their markets and a planned February “launch” by Disney’s newly re- with geography as a partial determinant are finding them- named Searchlight Pictures. Based on a nonfiction account selves overbooked by online events that used to be sorted of the itinerant life of those barely surviving economically in by travel budgets and overlapping dates.2 And they, too, are post-recession America, Nomadland came with an interesting back story—as well as a superb “front story” in the shape Film Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 3, pp. 76–82. ISSN: 0015-1386 electronic ISSN: 1533- of Frances McDormand, at center screen, playing Fern.3 8630 © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article As in her earlier work, Zhao filled her cast with content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions nonactors—in this case, “nomads” on the road in their RVs. web page, https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2021.74.3.76 But it was McDormand herself who had fallen in love with Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland: Surviving America in the

76 SPRING 2021 Twenty-First Century and optioned it. According to press reports, McDormand then saw Zhao’s last film, The Rider (2017), sized up her ability to win performances from “real” people playing their own lives—and her obvious affinity for the American West—and picked her to direct. Nomadland is a heartland tale. I loved these hard-bit women, genuine and unsentimental, and I was moved by the fact that so many of the “actors,” like Swankie and Linda May, were actual people down on their luck, repre- senting the wide swaths of the United States in that very predicament, but here with movie-screen-worthy person- Kim Min-hee (left) as The Woman Who Ran (2020) alities. Frances McDormand, as usual, fills the eyes and the heart with her performance. She’s steadfast in her ability to

for even a day, but that he’s now on a business trip, giving Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 embody the physicality of the unlucky or wronged white her this opportunity to take a trip down memory lane alone. working-class woman. Her Fern is an utterly convincing Told in a deadpan style not unlike that of a Kaurismäki version, pride mixed with hurt, survival laced with disaster. film, but with far more restraint, The Woman Who Ran It’s hard to find fault with any of this: McDormand’s dwells delicately in the spare lives of the women she visits, performance, Bruder’s hard-bitten story, Zhao’s fine- and on whom she repeatedly deploys her art of apprecia- ly directed narrative. And yet a few doubts crept in as I tion as she thanks each one for fruit or tea or meat, offering watched. Fern owes more than a bit to McDormand’s effusive praise. It is a universe entirely of women—until it turn as Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, isn’t. In each case, when a man does appear, he is disruptive. Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017), a film with much too Whether a spurned lover, a rude neighbor, or an unfaithful much race blindness to stomach. Nomadland shows an partner, masculine verbal excess punctures the female uni- all-too-white world of poverty. While it may be true that verse of oblique conversation and polite avoidance. down-on-their-luck nomads inhabit communities every I remain fascinated by the film’s quasi-feminist politics bit as segregated as the residential neighborhoods they left and its sheer nerviness in lodging its momentum within such behind, the whiteness of Fern’s universe felt too pat—espe- restraint. My astonishment at this powerful chamber piece is cially in the waning days of Trumpdom. partly fueled by shame: that I had never seen any of Sang- And then there’s the dramatic story that’s been added soo’s immense filmography before, that I hadn’t recognized to make this a “movie,” and not a documentary: the gears Kim Min-hee from Agassi (The Handmaiden, Park Chan- creak as Fern’s backstory comes into play, her sister shows wook, 2017), that I was unaware of her and Sang-soo’s prior up, a guy on the road becomes a suitor, beckoning her back collaborations in life and on-screen. Now I am catching up, to domestic life. The problem? The chosen narrative shifts with gratitude to the NYFF for the belated introduction. Nomadland from social critique to psychological study, from Pedro Almodóvar, a New York festival favorite over recession to mental illness, and tilts dangerously into “Fern the years, was back with a riveting short-film set piece made Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” territory. Still, it’s the fact of during the early days of COVID lockdown—with Tilda McDormand’s genuine relatability embedded in this previ- Swinton as its sole protagonist. La voix humaine (The Human ously invisible “nomad” universe that undergirds the film’s Voice, 2020) proved to be a perfectly lovely conceit and prob- emotional appeal. ably one of the few films able to turn the pandemic to ad- Then I was knocked off my armchair by a small vantage. In this one-woman show that was a remake of the masterpiece. South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s Jean Cocteau play, Swinton paces through a Technicolor set Domangchin yeoja (The Woman Who Ran, 2020) haunted that is one part Peewee’s Playhouse, one part Mondrian, all me for weeks after its New York festival screening. Hold- pure Almodóvar. A melodrama in one act, it features Swin- ing up a mirror to Nomadland, it features Kim Min-hee as ton as a jilted lover trying to hold it together as she accepts Gam-hee, a composed but mysterious woman who journeys being dumped. It’s amusing to see her in this role of spurned from place to place to visit woman friends from her past. woman, but as always, she makes the role work. Her tele- She has clearly been out of touch. Her explanation for ap- phone has been updated from the original version with sig- pearing now is as simple as it is confounding: she tells them nature white AirPods on which she holds a possibly imagi- that she’s married, has never been away from her husband nary conversation with the unseen cad on the other end of

FILM QUARTERLY 77 the line. It’s the perfect metaphor for the isolation and de- love of apples as a clue to his past. I sympathize; I, too, love spair of the COVID 2020 moment. And Swinton is perfect. apples, but the film needed more ample nutrition. Restraint fights with ambition throughoutThe Disciple It was a relief then to immerse myself in the animal (Chaitanya Tamhane, 2020), which played at both festivals, world reimagined for human spectators by Victor Kossa- though it is TIFF that has long been a reliable source for kovsky in Gunda (2020) at NYFF. What is it about pigs? Indian cinema at its best. An intense and sobering view of First Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995), then Okja (Bong Joon- discipline and faith in Mumbai, it is focused on Sharad (Ad- ho, 2017), now this. Other animal films are usually in-the- itya Modak), an adherent of classical vocal techniques who wild views courtesy of specialized production companies yearns to excel and, not so incidentally, redeem his father’s equipped with drones and telephoto lenses and huge travel failure in the same musical tradition. Alongside his musi- budgets. This is the opposite: a film about animals who are cal training, though, the singer is pulled increasingly into on a farm, not in nature; raised for a particular purpose, the teachings of a mysterious guru. Quietly paced to allow free-range, yes, but not really free to range. It is an utterly the studious Sharad’s inner turmoil to emerge, The Disciple original work of cinema, filmed in platinumesque black- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 plumbs the ambition and doubt, ascetism and sensuality, and-white, in macro close-ups, as the farm animals go about that duel for supremacy in the young man’s heart. Interest- their deceptively bucolic lives. ingly, the film has Alfonso Cuarón as its executive producer. Gunda is a Norwegian sow who is seen giving birth, Tamhane shows a similar dedication to throwing light on nursing, and raising up a litter of squealing piglets, with a otherwise hidden worlds, but in an entirely different style. few cows and a flock of scene-stealing chickens thrown in Mila (Apples, 2020), the directorial debut of Chris- for good measure. Gunda takes its time and asks the same tos Nikou, has a distinctive style that evokes the absurdist of the viewer, who can’t help cringing in uncertain anticipa- world of his Greek compatriot Yorgos Lanthimos (The tion. Kossakovsky is a master of the camera and the frame, Lobster, 2015) and the so-called Greek Weird Wave. Ap- so apart from its implicit vegetarian message, Gunda strikes ples is set in a surreal world where people turn amnesiac me as a film about film, about lenses and film stocks, depth without warning. Striking people out of the blue, removing of field and composition and, above all, point of view. I felt their memories, leaving few clues to their identity, amnesia as if I were watching a long-lost silent film that had been has in this case left the protagonist with only an enduring postdubbed and resurrected for a modern audience.

The Norwegian sow Gunda in Victor Kossakovsky’s eponymous film.

78 SPRING 2021 The jungle, though, is a very different place. In Yu- The biggest splash belonged to Steve McQueen’s “Small lene Olaizola’s Selva trágica (Tragic Jungle, 2020), a Mexi- Axe” (2020) anthology of five films, produced and shown by can film in English, Creole, Maya, and Spanish, set in the the BBC and Amazon Prime. The New York Film Festival 1920s, the jungle lies in the outer reaches of a settler society invited an unprecedented three of those films:Mangrove, bent on domination. The film opens as two Black women Lovers Rock (shown on opening night), and Red, White and flee the white landowner who wants to claim one of them Blue. Interesting time for multiples, these days, as stream- as a wife. Lines of battle in this universe are uncertain, ing influences filmic duration. McQueen has so established rubber tappers fight with sugar cultivators, property is de- himself as a dramatic director that it’s surprising to think fined by gender as much as land, and alliances are wholly back to his earlier, formally inventive installations (which provisional. Romance is nowhere to be found. Every re- I was able to see on view at the Tate Modern, just before lationship is transactional. Olaizola creates a universe of the pandemic hit). He’s become a smooth operator, an art- spirits accessed via native wisdom, but the redemption they ist who changes genres with ease, the kind of director who offer may not be found on earth. would have been right at home in the old studio system. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 A newly arrived festival genre is always cause for inter- The “Small Axe” films made me feel as though an ar- est. Here, it was the arrival of the lesbian bodice ripper—a chive had been pried open and the films that could have bizarre turn of events, to me at least. Who would have been made back then—and should have been, but were not, guessed that this is where the lesbian movie would land: in given the entrenched racism of the BBC—had suddenly the past, with costumes and sets to die for, and increasingly been sprung free. Set in London’s Caribbean communities of famous actresses in the lead roles. that era, the films bring a bracing thrill via the period music Accorded a gala slot in Toronto, Ammonite (Francis and locations and wardrobe, delivering immense pleasures Lee, 2020) may mark an apotheosis of the trend, as Kate that set up the viewer for the gut punch of outrage at the Winslet (as a fossil hunter) and Saoirse Ronan (as an era’s abrasive, deadly injustice. You know it must be coming, unhappy wife) discover passion in each other’s arms on yet still are caught up short by the outright savagery that, the nineteenth-century Dorset coast. Filmmaker Francis decades later, drove the Brexit forces forward. The center- Lee has come by his credentials honestly: he’s gay and piece of Mangrove is a courtroom scene in which defendants working-class and brings an understanding of the rough invoke political rhetoric to argue that racist policing was world where Ammonite is set. My failure to enact any to blame for the Notting Hill “riot.” See Film Quarterly 74, suspension of disbelief, however, doomed me as a spec- no. 4 (Summer 2021) for essays on “Small Axe.” tator for this elaborate love affair. Of course, Kate and Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020) imagines the Saoirse are lovely, but not remotely believable, together night of February 25, 1964, when the boxer Cassius Clay (Eli on-screen. Goree), about to be rechristened as Muhammed Ali, defeat- Then my luck turned. An absolutely striking set of ed Sonny Liston to become world champion. Accompanied films by Black filmmakers made undeniable a fact that has by Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), he spends the night been glaringly obvious already: the year 2020 was a daunt- rather unwillingly holed up with NFL star Jim Brown ing and terrifying, enraging and mournful time for the (Aldis Hodge) and the Motown singer, songwriter, and world, and the United States in particular, yet it was also an producer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). The three expect era of extraordinary black cinema. to party, but Malcolm X has something less festive in mind: In recent years, there have often been one-off moments: their responsibility to the civil rights movement. Equipped slavery with Steve McQueen, romance with Barry Jenkins, with a script by Kemp Powers from his eponymous play, horror with Jordan Peele, everything else with Ava Duver- Regina King does a terrific job probing thenature of black nay. But the festivals last fall blew all that up: now there’s a masculinity and the power of political action while illumi- landslide of talent and a shared focus on history and its social nating, through savvy casting and great performances, how actors. Regina King, Ephraim Asili, and Steve McQueen these four historical figures struggled (on-screen and off) were variously present on screens at Toronto and New York with their own choices in the face of social upheaval and festivals. They presented radically different but wonderful- state violence. ly complimentary versions of how to envision a past that is The Inheritance (Ephraim Asili, 2020), shown at both both overdue for presentation and in need of reformulation, TIFF and NYFF, brings the politics of race forward in time a past that deserves to be revived not only through scenes of and shifts the terrain to West Philadelphia. A young man in- oppression but with those of celebration, too. herits a house and, inspired by his girlfriend, opens a collective

FILM QUARTERLY 79 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021

The courtroom scene in Mangrove, from Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series.

that seeks to revive the energies of the Black Arts Movement lockdown in Wuhan that began on January 23, continued for by studying the history of black intellectual and political life more than two months, paused to honor the dead on April as imparted by the trunkful of books left behind by his grand- 4, and finally ended on April 8. The film is full of births and mother. Asili mixes documentary, improvisation, drama, and deaths, grief and jubilation, and the intolerable stress level archival footage into a “speculative re-enactment” to inspire a of frontline workers, doctors, and nurses, who fought con- new generation of activists. The poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s tinuously, covered in PPE, to save lives. The brutality of the La Chinoise (1967) hanging on a wall tips his hand: world illness, the race against time, and the moments of tenderness revolution, youth, style, history. Real people intervene in the (one nurse blows up a rubber glove and draws a face and action, both live and in clips, as Shirley Chisholm runs for greeting on it) are such a powerful rejoinder to the brutal sav- president, Sonia Sanchez reads her poems, Ursula Rucker agery of a president whose twisted mockery—the “Chinese gives a spoken-word performance, and a surviving member virus”—belied how heroically the Chinese public fought to of the MOVE massacre teaches the group’s philosophy. rescue fellow citizens from unimaginable deaths. 76 Days is a There’s a raw exuberance to The Inheritance that sets it war documentary shot in the trenches of a hospital. apart from the more polished reconstructions of the festi- I started as a juror for the DOK Leipzig festival’s inter- vals’ other films. As it bobs and weaves, looking for its foot- national prizes just after the New York and Toronto festi- ing, it seems to invite the audience to come along for the vals had wrapped. I thought I’d get to see Leipzig when I ride, to debate the aesthetics of the movement and argue the first accepted, but, condemned like everyone to online view- fine points of political action as the film’s conflicted person- ing, I nonetheless reveled in the shared conversation and al relations take their toll. Truly, it gave this viewer some documentary debates with the wonderful jury members moments of posttraumatic stress from the old days of par- selected by the festival’s new director, Christoph Terhechte allel debates and ideological divides, but its optimism and (formerly at Berlin’s Forum). energy proved infectious. The jury awarded the Golden Dove prize for best film With so many visions on offer, it was cruel how quickly to Dieudo Hamadi for his extraordinary En route pour le the arrival of the COVID pandemic rendered them all but milliard (Downstream to Kinshasa, 2020), a documentary impossible. Then I saw 76 Days (Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and that was also at TIFF. Born in Kisangani in the Democratic “Anonymous,” 2020), a direct, up-close documenting of the Republic of the Congo and still in his thirties, Hamadi is an

80 SPRING 2021 astonishingly powerful filmmaker. He shoots and edits the world-class filmmaking skills honor the gravity of his sub- films on his own and embeds his camera in communities jects’ situations. where he is clearly trusted. The jury pivoted for a Silver Dove award, for the best In Downstream, Hamadi follows a campaign by muti- first feature, into an entirely different mode.Las poetas vis- lated and disabled survivors to receive promised reparations itan a Juana Bignozzi (The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi, 2019), for war crimes inflicted upon them in the Six-Day War of by Laura Citarella and Mercedes Halfon, documents the 2000, when battles between Ugandan and Rwandan forces life of a celebrated Argentine poet through the efforts of a on DR Congo land resulted in massive deaths and injuries. group of young women writers and filmmakers who are For the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, a group de- creating a film about compiling an archive of her life. The cides to journey to the capital to demand the payments they’d reflexive result is a study in recuperation and cooperation, been promised. (It is eventually revealed that the DR Congo optimism and despair, as these women with cameras and government kept the millions paid for war damages for keyboards work to fulfill their vision. itself.) Pleading their case, these survivors in dire need of When the poet Bignozzi died in 2015, her will left her Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 prosthetics, medical care, and financial assistance journey by possessions and papers to Mercedes Halfon, a young jour- foot, van, and boat to confront their elected government. nalist and poet who had written about her and whom she’d This is an astonishingly intimate view of the fight for befriended. Halfon was stunned, though, to find herself heir justice. A terrifying storm on the Congo River interrupts to a disorganized and uncatalogued archive that required her the trip at one point, leading viewers to wonder if this will to reach out for help. From that call, there emerged a pro- be the end—of the film, or its individuals, even Hamadi cess—collective, of course—and a film. Documenting both himself. Truly a testimony, Downstream is a shocking in- Bignozzi’s life and their own discovery of her through letters, sider view of cruelty and indifference, alongside a rare view photographs, and the dusty artifacts left behind, Citarella and of humanity’s spirit of resilience under duress. But it isn’t Halfon crafted a charming, rough-around-the-edges account only an observation of suffering, as interstitial dramatic of their relationship to her across time and generation. sequences with the same individuals reveal their past lives The jury could award only two prizes, but I found and the subjectivities that sustain them. Hamadi shows a number of other films so interesting as to suggest a himself to be a consummately ethical compatriot whose new movement afoot in Eastern Europe, an approach to

Disabled survivors protest for promised reparations in Downstream to Kinshasa (2020).

FILM QUARTERLY 81 documentary that might be dubbed “microrealism.” Obser- vational documentaries in the classic tradition, unmediated and careful, microscopic in detail and longitudinal in duration, they deployed an attention to detail with such empathy as to draw deep feelings to the surface. Daria Slyusarenko’s Dzhoy (Joy, 2020) peers at the life of a Russian traveling circus as it moves from town to town. While the camera closely examines the performers’ daily lives of quarrels, passions, and pettiness, a new clown joins up and disturbs the troupe’s uneasy equilibrium. Slyusaren- ko’s attention is even-handed—until the new clown, Yara, The daily lives of performers in a Russian traveling circus recognizes the camera’s potential and begins to direct her provides the drama in Joy (2020) performances to its lens. Naturally, in grand cinematic tra- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/74/3/76/465016/fq.2021.74.3.76.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 dition, the newcomer’s arrival is a prelude to various disas- reminder that sweeping statements (migrant workers, ters, all depicted with microrealist precision, that provide out-migration, labor shortages) have specific applications: the film with drama and catharsis, culminating in a lynx’s particular individuals and the consequences of “choice.” escape and a couple’s break-up. She has declared her intention to make a companion film In the Lithuanian family filmRomano vaikyste˙ (Roman’s about her maternal grandparents next. Childhood, 2020), by Linas Mikuta, young Roman lives with At press time, new announcements began to pour in, his near-penniless mother and father in the abandoned detailing new and impending changes to the 2021 festival building where they’ve squatted. Mikuta quickly makes it schedule. There were so many that Screen Daily posted a clear that this situation is no call for intervention; rather, chart to track the number of online, hybrid, and postponed the boy’s daily happiness puts the kibosh on any class-based festivals, with dates moving later and later in the year, some reflex of pity. He skips out with a pal, explores the region, perhaps chasing weather warm enough to allow outdoor runs free, and returns to his doting parents. A deceptively screenings, while others tried to guess the date by which simple film with a blaringly simple message—love is love— vaccines might change the rules again. Consider this essay, it enacts a microrealist code of observation, keeping prob- then, a report from an evolving front. lems out of the frame and judgments out of bounds. Finally, after so many films in which cameras probed Notes the lives of other people, a film came along that despite its title was an exercise in autobiography. In Leur Algérie (Their 1. Diane Burgess, “Capturing Film Festival Buzz: The Method- Algeria, 2020), Lina Soualem is provoked to investigate ological Dilemma of Measuring Symbolic Value,” NECSUS, her family history when Aïcha and Mabrouk, her pater- December 2020, https://necsus-ejms.org/capturing-film-fes- nal grandmother and grandfather, decide to separate after tival-buzz-the-methodological-dilemma-of-measuring-sym- sixty-two years of marriage. They had come from Algeria bolic-value/. Note especially her assertion that “[a]lthough the together to make a new life in Thiers, France, then a facto- mantra of the digital era is that ‘content is king,’ it is attention ry town fueled by the labor of new Algerian immigrants. momentum that drives the value chain in a multi-screened The filmmaker deciphers their history and, in the process, universe.” See also Marijke de Valck and Antoine Damiens, questions her actor father about his own decisions. She even “Film Festivals and the First Wave of COVID-19: Challeng- ends up traveling to Algeria in pursuit of the full story. Per- es, Opportunities, and Reflections on Festivals’ Relations to haps it’s a common narrative in France, this story of hopeful crises,” NECSUS, December 2020, https://necsus-ejms.org/ migration that encountered the reality of French anti-im- film-festivals-and-the-first-wave-of-covid-19-challenges- migrant racism, but that does nothing to dent its impact. opportunities-and-reflections-on-festivals-relations-to-crises/. When the history of this couple’s life is laid bare, 2. Rasha Salti, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: Film the gendered toll of migration becomes clear. Soualem’s Festivals, Pandemic, Aftermath,” Film Quarterly 74, no. 1 high-spirited grandmother Aïcha acts as if she’s on the (Fall 2020): 88–96. cusp of a new chapter of enjoyment in her final years, 3. Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty- while Mabrouk grows more morose. Soualem’s film is a First Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2017).

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