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Akimi Ota, a doctoral candidate at Manchester University in ethnology, made this intimate film when he lived in the Ecuadorean rain forest with the Shuar, a group of native people with their own unique language whose indigenous territory covers a large land mass that extends over most of the Amazon countries. Ota lived in one village and recorded the footage himself, since he had no crew. The result is highly professional to the point where it not only transcends its ostensible purpose of documenting the daily lives of its subjects, but realizes a cinematic narrative structure and aesthetic that conveys its own sensibility apart from that of its subject. Strictly speaking, I’m not sure if that’s what ethnologists are supposed to do, but it also may explain why the movie has been shown at several international film festivals and is receiving a theatrical release in Japan. 

In any case, Ota tried to stay out of the picture as much as possible, and though you hear his voice once or twice, there is no narration. The main subject is the Tsamarain family, whose patriarch, Sebastian, takes up most of the screen time, acting as a guide to the forest and a kind of professorial lecturer on Shuar culture. Though much of what he says will probably go over the viewer’s head, Sebastian is often a riveting presence: funny, articulate if not always coherent, and genuinely photogenic. The reason he seems out of reach most of the time is that he is a shaman, and while Ota, owing to his long-term contact with the village, seems to understand the spiritual world Sebastian expounds upon, I, for one, became fidgety with all the metaphors and vague descriptions that came with the lectures. The main focus is his use of two psychotropic plants that have a wide range of purposes in the village, though it’s not clear from the exposition if anyone on screen has partaken of the drug during filming. There’s also a lot of imbibing of something called “chicha,” a fermented drink that seems to accompany almost every activity, including those partaken for survival, such as building huts and searching for food. In fact, halfway through, I came to the conclusion that much of footage depicts people who are constantly stoned, which is a pointless observation, of course, since if they are always stoned then that is their “normal” state of being, which means I may never really be able to appreciate the mindset that seems essential to understanding Sebastian’s discursions about the universe. 

Still, it isn’t all exotic ephemera. The family buys clothing from the outside world and there’s even a TV. At one point Sebastian’s wife (at least, I think she’s his wife) talks about running for office, so it’s not as if the people being observed are completely off the grid, so to speak, and in that regard, I wish Ota has pointed his camera farther afield to capture how the Shuar fit into the larger scheme of Amazon society, but that’s perhaps asking too much of an anthropologist. Nevertheless, I wonder what his doctoral advisor thought of the movie. 

In Shuar. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Kanarta home page in English

photo (c) Akimi Ota

In the past decade-plus, a handful of Romanian directors (Christian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, etc.) have created a body of dramatic work that is perhaps unmatched in its ability to come to grips with the way official actions (i.e., bureaucratic behavior) undermine the institutions that are supposed to support a workable society. From abortion to educational opportunity, the topics these films tackle have a universal relevance even if the particular horrors exposed are specific to Romania. Collective, a documentary by Alexander Nanau, provides insight into the kind of obstacles truth-seekers are up against in Romania because it addresses a real-life tragedy by following the players whose aim is to expose the corruption that not only led to that tragedy, but exacerbated it afterwards. 

At the center of the story is a fire that broke out at the titular Bucharest nightclub in 2015 at a heavy metal concert that killed 27 on the spot and injured 180. The club had no fire exits, and while such a lapse in public safety protocols is enough to warrant its own hardline investigation, the movie’s real target becomes something larger and more insidious. In hospital, many of the survivors ended up dying anyway, but not because of the burns they suffered in the fire. They died of bacterial infections they contracted while in intensive care. The government as represented by the health ministry puts up what looks like the usual PR stonewall to hide the fact that the company that imported the disinfectants diluted them to one-tenth their normal strength in order to increase profits, and a small group of journalists (mostly working for a sports tabloid), activists, and victims advocates refuse to allow the coverup to proceed without pushback. Nanau covers it all in real time, keeping his cameras in the thick of the fight rather than summing up the story through retrospective interviews with principal players, the way most documentaries would handle it. Consequently, the movie is not only relentlessly compelling as drama, it’s edifying in the way it treats each element of the tale as its own unique factoid. When a health official uses language to obfuscate some deeper truth, we see the statement given and then the immediate reaction from a journalist who tells the camera that it’s all bullshit. As the authorities try to play down the ensuing disinfectant scandal, we see the key reporters doggedly keeping it in the public sphere even while the mainstream media, especially TV, paint their journalism as mere scaremongering to sell more papers. 

Though Nanau also reserves sufficient time to spotlight the victims and their suffering, the gist of the movie is its slow, methodical revelation of the rot that permeates the entire health infrastructure. And while the viewer may find it heartening that the reporting on display brings down much of this infrastructure (one official commits suicide), thus paving the way for a new health minister who was once a victims’ advocate himself, the idea of “resistance” is so prevalent on every side that it’s easy to wonder what kind of effect the new man will have on a system in which doctors cannot be expected to get ahead in their profession without taking bribes to make sure the “old ways” stay the way they are. Nanau is blessed with almost unbelievable access, not only to the people fighting the system but to those defending it, and yet his movie doesn’t feel like a happy accident of being in the right place at the right time. It’s a fully engaged work of truth-telling, deliberate and fiercely intelligent. 

In Romanian. Opening Oct. 2 in Tokyo at Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Collective home page in Japanese.

photo (c) Alexander Nanau Production, HBO Europe, Samsa Film 2019

There seems to be a certain type of indie film that only premieres at the Sundance Film Festival. Ostensibly black comedies with quirky, often disagreeable protagonists, they usually take place in the US heartland, but what makes these movies distinctive is that they vanish immediately afterwards. And one more thing: they always seem to find a Japanese distributor. 

Adam Rehmeier’s Dinner in America is set in Lincoln, Nebraska, sometime in the 90s. It’s likely semi-autobiographical since the protagonist is the leader of a local punk rock band and Rehmeier had a hand in writing the songs performed. Simon (Kyle Gallner) isn’t just a punk rocker. He’s an anarcho-nihilist who is unabashed in his hatred for everything conventional, a sensibility that comes to a head during the titular family ritual, of which there are three extended examples in the film. Two of the three end up in very violent free-for-alls sparked by Simon’s provocative mouth. The third results in his receiving an invitation to stay the night. Unbeknownst to his hosts, he needs a place to hide from the police, who want him for arson and assault. While on the lam, he comes across Patty (Emily Skeggs), a college dropout and social misfit who has just been fired from her job in a pet store, and gets himself invited to dinner at her house with her clueless parents and hormonally confrontational teenage brother. Acting saintly, he fools the folks and then later, in Patty’s room, realizes she idolizes the masked punk singer John Q. Public, who happens to be Simon. He doesn’t reveal his identity, but is intrigued because Patty has been sending John Q. love letters with dirty pictures and song lyrics he finds compelling despite himself.

Whatever else Rehmeier intended his movie to be it’s basically a romantic comedy: two totally mismatched personalies meet cute and then find ways around their differences to fall in love. In that regard, Gallner and Skeggs make a nice couple but the humor relies too much on the viewer’s capacity to be shocked by Simon’s misanthropy and Patty’s gullibility. There’s also an unfortunate tendency to use the 90s setting as an excuse to forego any attempt at PC responsibility. Homosexuals and people with developmental disabilities get a lot of grief (Patty is repeatedly called the “r” word by her peers), and while the characters who wield these slurs are clearly assholes, after a while the device feels forced. More to the point, the requisite fulfillment of gross revenge fantasies provides no satisfaction. The difference between scrappy and crappy is only one letter. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Dinner in America home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Dinner in America LLC

Living in Japan, where the treatment of politics and history by popular culture is a fraught undertaking, I find South Korean cinema’s willingness to confront the less edifying aspects of its recent past and current social mores almost astounding. Mainstream Korean filmmakers are so fearless in their desire to question authority that many times they go around the bend and make movies that almost seem to ridicule this tendency. Lee Hwan-kyung’s Best Friend (in some territories the English title is Next Door Neighbor) takes place in the mid-1980s when the government had declared martial law and regularly rounded up student demonstrators and political opposition leaders for torture and imprisonment. His dual protagonists occupy either side of this divide. Lee Eui-shik (Oh Dal-su) is the leader of a pro-democracy party who has spent the last several years in exile abroad. He returns home to South Korea to contemplate running in the upcoming presidential election, but is met at the airport by a group of thugs who cart him off to the headquarters of the intelligence services. Meanwhile, Yoo Dae-gwon (Jung Woo) is a fitfully employed ne’er-do-well who, while doing grunt work for the intelligence services, stumbles on a left-wing cell that gets him noticed by the slimy chief, who puts him in charge of eavesdropping on Lee while he’s under house arrest. Yoo moves into the house next door with two other spies to try to find evidence that ties Lee to North Korea so as to give them an excuse to put him in prison for life.

Despite the relatively serious purport of this plotline, the first half of Best Friend is a comedy, and a slapstick one at that. Yoo and his colleagues are supposed to lay low so as not to tip Lee and his family off that their house is bugged, and this dynamic leads to lots of awkward interactions that occasionally spill over into Three Stooges territory. The dramatic arc that is requisite for any mainstream Korean film follows Yoo’s changing sensibility, which goes from that of a simple man just trying to make enough money to feed his family to someone who grows as much of a conscience as necessary to understand that what he is doing is morally indefensible. Of course, this enlightenment is brought about by his inevitable relationship with Lee, whose own sensibility, based on fairness and trust in the human spirit, never changes at all. 

Best Friend doesn’t break any new ground and its reliance on the kind of melodramatic devices that are almost mandatory in Korean cinema these days effectively dampens the political message. Korea is a Manichean society, according to the film, with the authorities as represented by the intelligence services incontrovertibly evil in their methods and intentions, while the liberal party that Lee heads, and in which most Koreans we’re led to believe have faith, is inherently virtuous. Nevertheless, the violence that pushes the plot to its inevitable conclusion in the second half is quite shocking. This 180-degree shift in tone is not surprising, but director Lee seems to be working under the assumption that he has to increase the volitility factor exponentially in order to distinguish his work from past anti-authoritarian dramas, so much so that the ending ends up being ahistorical, meaning it’s beyond revisionism. It’s pure fantasy. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

Best Friend home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 LittleBig Pictures

Scathingly literal in the way it depicts the organizational failure of well-intentioned multi-national peace efforts, Jasmila Zbanic’s slightly fictionalized take on the disastrous UN intervention in the mid-90s Bosnian conflict evinces that nauseous feeling of inevitable doom you get with certain horror movies, but without the attendant jolts and gross-outs. It’s a potboiler in that the heat is applied so gradually and steadily that by the time the pot is actually boiling you sit there in numb acceptance that this was going to happen all along. Zbanic’s means to this end is the title character played by Jasna Djuricic, an interpreter charged with being the linguistic medium between the Dutch UN forces trying to keep the fraught situation in Srbenica from turning deadly and the Serbian soldiers whose intentions they don’t dare second guess. At this point in 1995, Serbs had started murdering Bosnian civilians indiscriminately, acting out their age-old hatred of Muslims. The Bosnian residents of Srbenica, knowing the Serbs were on their way, flee to the safety of the makeshift UN base camp in the belief the international community will save them.

With no food or resources to take care of the townspeople who made it into the compound, and several hundred unable to gain entrance due to space limitations, the UN is forced to confront the arriving Serbian army, who insist they will not harm the Bosnians and that the UN should allow them to return to their homes. As the go-between in these negotiations, Aida understands where each side is coming from—the UN commander is restricted by his own agenda, which did not take into account all these refugees; while the Serbian leader is talking out of this side of his mouth—but as a professional can only translate what each one says, though she wants to tell the UN commander not to trust the Serbs.

Aida’s situation is complicated by the fact that her own family is on the other side of the fence, unable to get in, and when not helping with desperate conversations between the two sides that accomplish nothing, she is running around trying to gain favors from her UN supervisors to allow her husband and sons into the compound. The horror, as it stands, is purely bureaucratic in nature; which doesn’t make it any less horrifying. Aida’s mounting panic is checked by her understanding that only coolness appeals to officialdom when it is confronted by chaos. Meanwhile, Zbanic interrupts this frantic through-story with occasional snatches of stories from the crowd both within and without the compound, thus further intensifying the sense of hopelessness. Of course, anyone who knows the history of Srbenica will know what is going to take place, but even if you do, it doesn’t prepare you for it. 

If anything, the almost dry storytelling tone sometimes defeats the dramatic effectiveness of the movie itself. The acting is uneven, and the script is laid out so matter-of-factly that certain plot points are glossed over. Though the UN is boxed in by its ineffective chain of command, which is unresponsive because top brass are on vacation that weekend (!), it’s not convincingly explained why they give up on the Bosnians so easily even though they must know what will happen to them when released into the Serbs’ care. But maybe it’s that point which is the most horrifying of all.

In Serbo-Croation, Bosnian, English, Dutch and Serbian. Opens Sept. 17 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Quo Vadis, Aida? home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Deblokada/coop99 filmproduktion/Digital Cube/N279/Razor Film/ExtremeEmotions/Indie Prod/Tordenfilm/TRT/ZDF arte