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 interest- ing 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.