The high point of my Saturday at the festival was interviewing Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar, the directors of the Competition Documentary entry, A Fly on the Wall, which is about a friend of theirs, Chika Kapadia, who, after being diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer and given less than two months to live, decided to undergo assisted suicide in Switzerland and invited the filmmakers to record his last days, including his death. The movie has a certain rough appeal in that the two directors, who had never made a documentary before, knew they couldn’t plan what would happen, though they tried their best to at least be prepared for anything. The difficulties started from the get-go. Bose has dual citizenship, India and US, while Maniyar has only Indian citizenship, and Switzerland requires Indian nationals to apply for a visa, which took time that Kapadia didn’t have, so while Bose stayed with Kapadia for the rest of his days and is the co-center of the film, Maniyar stayed behind in India and directed remotely, sifting through the recordings Bose made on her iPhone. Several times during this recording, Kapadia almost called it off for one reason or another—family objections, his own doubts as to the ethics of the project (he took seriously one commenter on his blog accusing him of being “elitist and judgmental”). But while he and Bose talk at great length about the right to end one’s own life, a view that offends many people, the overall documentary is less an issue film than one about an extraordinary individual who, in line with his outlook on life, was very determined in his choice of how and when to die. Kapadia was trained as an electrical engineer, which made him semi-wealthy, and then threw it all away to become a standup comedian, and later, being a dedicated diver, abandoned that line of work to move to Bali and become a professional scuba diver. While such a person’s dedication and ambition is certainly admirable, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that such a person can also be arrogant, and much of the drama in the film is derived from his attitude and how it clashed with Bose, who was trying at once to satisfy his wishes and make a film that had meaning, because it wasn’t as if she’d have any chances of doing retakes. After I return from Busan, I will transcribe the interview and post it on this blog. It was a remarkable conversation.

The other films I saw yesterday were less impressive, but I don’t know if that was a matter of contrast. Certainly, I was disappointed with Jia Zhang-ke’s newest film, Caught by the Tides, which I had been looking forward to probably the most. Made during the pandemic, the movie is a clever collage of used and unused footage from previous features, as well as new footage that could be shot under rather strict circumstances. The result is a film that attempts to review the last 20-odd years of Chinese economic development through Jia’s jaundiced eye and structure it as a kind of romantic tragedy. Zhao Tao plays a dancer-entertainer in Datong in 2001, the same character she played in Unknown Pleasures, whose boyfriend, a ne’er-do-well played by Li Zhubin, decides to leave town and try to take advantage of the coming economic boom. Eventually, Zhao goes looking for him, taking her to various places that Jia covered in his intervening body of work. The film’s structure is necessarily loose and free-form, moving from documentary realism to semi-staged dramatic tableaux and slightly stylized musical numbers (the music, I will have to say, is impressively used). And while Jia succeeded in what he set out to do, the film didn’t move me, probably because the connecting plot never felt organic enough to pull me in. In the end, when Li just returns to Datong because he’s tired and disabled by a stroke, it feels anticlimactic. 

MA-Cry of Silence wasn’t as well-made, but it was definitely more provocative, if only because it takes place in Myanmar, a place I imagine makes it very difficult for people to make movies, especially this one, which is based on a true story from 2012 when a group of young female textile workers staged a strike to demand unpaid wages. The director, The Maw Naing, doesn’t necessarily try for realism, though the set design is impressively oppressive. These girls are exploited to within an inch of their lives, not just at work but in the private dormitory they share. All are from outside of Yangon and are essentially migrant workers, since they are sending money back to their families, whose villages have been economically devastated by the junta. The movie doesn’t skirt revolutionary rhetoric—a disillusioned former student activist quietly radicalizes one of the workers—and while Maw Naing’s decision to mask the faces of the male overseers is a bit gimmicky, the violence is powerful and the desperation palpable. Whether it will find a wide audience is the question. For some reason, I doubt it.

It took me a while to warm to the Korean indie, Tango at Dawn, which, for the first 45 minutes or so, put up an impenetrably morose front. Centered on three young women working together at a tech factory, the movie didn’t show its hand until it was half over, and then I suddenly got it. Our protagonist, Ji-won, has been swindled by her best friend and is skittish about making any new ones, while the impulsively sunny Ju-hui got on my nerves with her trite love of the tango. The third wheel, Han-byeol, was the kicker: a schemer who believes that she has the ability to turn anyone else’s weaknesses to her advantage; in other words a person with unlimited potential for evil. What eventually worked for me was how the plot suddenly came to life when Ji-won realized what Han-byeol was capable of, and then all hell broke loose in a very stimulating way. Quite original, I’d say.

Also original, but perhaps too cultural circumspect to be widely appealing, the Indonesia film, Tale of the Land, confused me at first. Mostly set on a floating house in the middle of a vast lake, the movie piqued my prejudices about current affairs, and I thought it would be about the effects of global warming. And while it did occasionally address issues that Indonesia is facing, such as land grabs and devastation, and political discrimination, it was mainly about tradition and the pull of superstition. A young woman lives with her grandfather in the house, and he forbids her to step foot on land, saying that all the bad things in the world are associated with being on land. It’s a moot demand, because when she does step on land she becomes ill and faints, and had to be brought back to life with the sacrifice of a chicken. The story moves through some hackneyed ideas, including two eligible men vying for the woman’s hand, and how exactly the girl’s parents died and at whose hands (some landowner, apparently), and it arrives at a place that, cinematically, was quite affecting, but I found its overall attitude difficult to gauge, esoteric even.