The 38th annual Virginia Film Festival may turn out to be one of its strongest. Virtually every anticipated movie of the autumn and holiday season, American and international alike, is available to see in downtown Charlottesville from Oct. 22-26, and there are plenty of opportunities for discoveries as well.
On the glamorous side of the aisle, there are events like Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Noah Baumbach’s George Clooney vehicle “Jay Kelly,” and the ecstatically received Shakespeare drama “Hamnet.” Meanwhile, in the edgier district, are buzzy titles like Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” and Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee.”
Miles Caton, the breakout star of “Sinners,” will be in town for a discussion and a live musical performance. Producer James Schamus and filmmaker Whit Stillman, legends of 1990s-era American indie film, will be present for screenings of “The Ice Storm” and “Metropolitan,” respectively. Filmmaker Hikari, of the TV series “Tokyo Vice” and “Beef” and this year’s film “Rental Family,” will also be there. So will TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and RogerEbert.com writers Robert Daniels and Marya E. Gates, among many other documentary participants, critics, producers, directors and actors.
One could go on. There are numerous panels and series, including those dedicated to Korean cinema, Virginian cinema, Middle Eastern and South Asian cinema, and nature and the environment. As I said, the bench this year is deep, and you can reference the Virginia Film Festival’s website for tickets and more information.
As a gesture towards cutting a path through this embarrassment of opportunities, I offer a list of films playing at the festival that I have either seen or wish to see.
Recommendations
“Zodiac Killer Project” (Charlie Shackleton)
This inventive documentary, about the failure of another documentary to materialize, represents a rather ingenious case of a filmmaker getting lemonade from lemons. Shackleton was to make a film about the Zodiac killer until rights for the source material fell through, and so he travels various sites of the murders, narrating for us descriptions of the movie that may have been. This set-up allows for elaborate deconstructions of the insidious manipulations of the true-crime genre that currently sprouts all over streaming culture.
“The Things You Kill” (Alireza Khatami)
This haunting thriller, about daddy issues and role reversals and dead mothers, is among the best films that I’ve seen this year. Alireza Khatami, a rising rock star of political thrillers, cauterizes masculinity without succumbing to a screeching harangue. The filmmaker’s empathy only makes “The Things You Kill” scarier as it plunges murkier and more surreal waters. I’m being vague because I want to discuss it further later. But you should certainly see it.
“It Was Just an Accident” (Jafar Panahi)
The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, an international treasure as well as a former political prisoner, makes his daring autobiographical parables of fascism look so disarmingly casual. His films are funny, heartbreaking and mind-bendingly reflexive, which is to say that in this context the Palme D’Or-winning “It Was Just an Accident” comes off as weirdly straightforward … for a while. This film of a formerly imprisoned man looking for revenge against a former agent of torture and persecution becomes a shaggy and lacerating and even amusing story of the sheer inconvenience of revenge. It’s “Death and the Maiden” shot through with the humanism of Jean Renoir.
“Sirāt” (Oliver Laxe)
A middle-aged man (Sergi López) and his little boy (Bruno Núñez Arjona) join up with a caravan of partiers in search of a rave across the Moroccan desert. The man is looking for his missing adult daughter, a quest that becomes as moot as the rave that never seems to materialize. We think we may be witnessing the fall of society, which the ravers digest by fusing the politics of survival with the annihilating properties of dance and drugs. It’s a mesmerizing movie, a hallucinatory acid western with traces of George Romero, “Max Max,” and “The Wages of Fear.” But Laxe’s vision, especially of the fraught yet tender relationship the man forges with the caravan, is ultimately his own.
“Kontinental ‘25” (Radu Jude)
Eszter Tompa stars as a bailiff in Romania who is haunted by the suicide of a homeless man whom she was on the verge of evicting from a building that’s to be razed in the name of corporate greed. Writer-director Radu Jude, one of the most electrifyingly confrontational filmmakers working today, continually emphasizes conflicts between nature and infrastructure, homing in on issues of class and money that scare politicians and filmmakers alike. Jude’s sickest joke is his refusal to allow the bailiff to move on from her guilt; her anguish is poignant, then hypocritical, then so mind-numbingly repetitive that even her priest is telling her to move on. “Kontinental ‘25” is a tougher sit than prior Jude films, but its commitment to the bit is astonishing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you’re a fan of Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, you won’t want to miss the 57-minute documentary “Shenandoah” directed by Elizabeth Crowl and (the late) Jeff Boedeker, which is playing on Sunday, Oct. 26 at 11:30 a.m. at the Culbreth Theatre. It’s a thought-provoking and personal documentary with gorgeous cinematography by two renowned National Geographic filmmakers. The filmmakers were allowed exclusive access to anywhere in the park in 2019, so you’ll witness everything from scuba diving in mountain caves looking for the American eel to climbing cliff faces to watch a peregrine falcon’s first flight. The film is dedicated to Boedeker, who passed away unexpectedly during production. There will be an introduction by co-executive producer Anna Boedeker (Orange Frame Productions) as well as a discussion with director Elizabeth Crowl, Evan Childress (Division Chief of Natural and Cultural Resources, Shenandoah National Park), Claire Comer (Interpretive Specialist, Shenandoah National Park), and Robert Cox (UVA), moderated by co-executive producer Steve Humble of VPM, which owns Style Weekly.
Films I’m impatient to see:
“No Other Choice” (Park Chan-wook)
Park Chan-wook, a stylist of a level of sophistication that’s nearly unrivaled by active filmmakers, tackles Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel “The Ax,” which pivots on a man’s systematic murdering of the rivals for a potential life-preserving job. It’s the desperation wrought by capitalism given a pitilessly human face. Westlake’s novel is unforgettable, can Park do it justice? I’m impatient to see how the story adapts to a South Korean setting, and to Park’s bravura aesthetic.
“Dust Bunny” (Bryan Fuller)
The creator of the TV series “Hannibal” reunites with Mads Mikkelsen for a horror movie about a girl convinced that a monster has eaten her foster parents. Anyone who has seen “Hannibal” knows it is the best American giallo since the glory days of Brian De Palma, which is to say that a horror movie with Fuller and Mikkelsen had me at hello.
“Bird in Hand” (Melody C. Roscher)
Per the VFF synopsis, a biracial bride-to-be shows up unannounced at her hippie mother’s rural home, looking for help planning the ceremony. Roscher is a filmmaker based in Richmond, and the film was shot in Virginia, with star Alisha Wainwright supported by veterans like Christine Lahti and James Le Gros. I know little about this project, but hometown pride and a promising collection of talent beckons. Roscher and producer Saba Zarehi will be speaking at the festival in an event moderated by RogerEbert.com critic Marya E. Gates.
“The Secret Agent” (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Kleber Mendonça Filho has established himself as a perceptive chronicler of Brazil’s oppressive past across many genres, rhyming a society’s atrocities with the intimate personal regrets that come to haunt us in middle age. “The Secret Agent” seems to continue this tradition, following an academic on the run (Wagner Moura) who’s looking to reunite with his son in a dangerous setting. Word on the film is extraordinary, including its wins for Best Actor and Director at the Cannes Film Festival. The film’s director of photography, Evgenia Alexandrova, will be speaking at the festival in an event moderated by RogerEbert.com critic Robert Daniels.
“Mirrors No. 3” (Christian Petzold)
The fourth collaboration between German filmmaker Christian Petzold and actress Paula Beer sounds like a Hitchcockian gothic in which a woman integrates uneasily with another’s family in the wake of a car accident. It also sounds a little like Petzold’s “Phoenix,” which spun post-war German rootlessness into a mystery of adaptation and survival–think “Vertigo” with a vein of qualified optimism. Obviously one doesn’t know what to make of “Mirrors No. 3” until one has seen it, but I’ll say this: Petzold is a master of movies that sound familiar but turn out to be mysterious and unforgettable.
The Virginia Film Festival runs from Oct. 22 through Oct. 26 at various locations in Charlottesville. Tickets and information can be found at the festival website.
