Dispatches from DFF48, Part 1
I attended the 48th Denver Film Festival, and here's what I saw.
In late October / early November, Denver Film hosted the 48th Denver Film Festival. It’s a modest festival compared to some of the film world’s heaviest hitters, but that’s part of its charms. The fest is ten days of rampant cinephilia; here’s what I ended up seeing.
Opening Night
I take in Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery. I love a good whodunit and the Knives Out trilogy has yet to disappoint.
Wake Up Dead Man is the marquee film of the festival’s opening night. Although other screenings happened that day, WUDM was the main event of the evening, which happened to be Halloween. In the lush halls of Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House, costumes dot the landscape. I see multiple guys dressed in bathrobes and wraparound shades, mimicking Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another. I see someone dressed as a Sim, the same costume worn by characters in this year’s excellent Twinless (which played at Denver’s CinemaQ earlier in the year). And plenty more costumes I don’t recognize or can’t remember.
Day 2
At 4pm I catch Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and am blown away. It’s early, but I could easily see it being my top film of the festival. Nirvanna is a delightful Canadian indie comedy built around a parody of Back to the Future without being annoying about it. Absurdist irreverent time travel comedy? Sign me up. (And I’m seeing this on the day Vinegar Syndrome announces a new release of a personal favorite time travel movie, Timecrimes. And there’s a guy with a VinSyn shirt in Nirvanna. Coincidence? Yes.)
I’m writing from a convenient ledge as I wait in line for The Plague. I don’t know much about this film except that it bridges the time between Nirvanna and Zodiac Killer Project. I’m glad to be hanging at the Sie, an amazing theater and home to Denver Film and most of the films in the festival.
For The Plague, simplicity is best. This story of 12- and 12-year-olds in a water polo camp is nothing if not simple… at least on its face. What ensues is a nuanced psychological portrait of adolescence in turmoil. My frontrunner for Best Cinematography and Best Score, as far as my experience of DFF48 is concerned.
Now I wait for my third and final movie of the day. Zodiac Killer Project promises to be unique if nothing else.
I think after seeing Zodiac Killer Project I can only wish it was the film I had hoped it would be. While it’s not a bad film per se, I find the film grating and what might seem like self-examination actually feels like a filmmaker trying to have his cake and eat it too.
Day 3
I take a break for day three. No movies.
Day 4
I spend the morning of day four planning my next couple of days. I add an extra film, A Poet, to my docket for the day before eventually I go to Cover-Up at the end of the day. Where day five is concerned, I make sure to grab a ticket to The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo. My only ticket to day five so far, but there’s room for expansion. Day six is going to be busy with Franz, a new film by Agnieszka Holland, followed by Natchez and Nouvelle Vague. I may even hit the standby line for Coexistence, My Ass! in the morning, making it a full four-film day.
My first of the day is A Poet, a Colombian film about a washed-up poet who makes some bad decisions with good intentions. It’s a beautifully rendered film, lots of lingering on the characters’ faces in which weird mix of the mundane and the elaborate. As someone who has unironically called herself a poet, I identify with a lot of the existential malaise of Oscar Restrepo, just maybe not so much with his series of catastrophic choices.
My last film of day four is Cover-Up, which is undoubtedly one of the most vital films of the festival in terms of understanding the state of the world, the U.S., and journalism today. The film is structured around interviews with a remarkably tentative and hostile Seymour Hersh. I think that co-director Laura Poitras’ earlier film Citizenfour is a key film of the 21st century, of modernity in general; I might similarly call Cover-Up a key film of Trumpian post-modernity.
Day 5
I write the previous section after seeing Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, a good-but-not-necessarily-great Italian drama with some really good soundtrack choices and some amazing moments (including one that may go down as my favorite scene of the festival), but ultimately I find the film overly long and a bit bloated. Some cuts would be welcome.
I’m about to go into Two Prosecutors, a film I’ve been excited to see since I heard about it earlier this year after it showed at Cannes.
And wow, Two Prosecutors does not disappoint. It’s a hell of a brutalist film: stark, minimalist, deftly crafted labyrinth of human suffering. I can’t call it beautiful; like The Plague, the film is horrific.
I’m waiting now to see The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, and someone behind me is talking about it and I want them to stop because I’m about to go into it. I frustratedly step away rather than ask them to stop, but I find another table.
Mysterious Gaze turns out to be very good, with some caveats. As a scholar of transgender cinema naturally I had to see the film, which concerns an enclave of trans sex workers in a small Chilean mining town in 1982. As AIDS ravages the community, disease and prejudice threaten to tear the town apart. It’s a moving film with some intriguing magical realism and a sharp sense of character. I hope to see more from this first-time feature filmmaker, Diego Céspedes. The caveat is that the film follows a lot of transgender tropes, so much so that I feel I almost predict the film beat-by-beat.
Day 6
I’ve got four tickets to screenings today. It promises to be my longest day yet. I get to the Sie FilmCenter early. They’re not even lining up for Coexistence, My Ass! yet. I get a soft pretzel, which is more delicious than usual, probably because it’s fresher than it would be later in the day. The long day begins to unfurl.
I get out of Coexistence to find a line for my next film, Franz, already formed. I can at least get a few notes down. Coexistence was funny, beautiful, heartrending, and radicalizing, if you weren’t already a vocal critic of the genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people. It’s the kind of that can hopefully jolt people into awareness and action; I like to believe film can have that power. I myself feel like I’ve underused my platform, small as it is, to speak out.
Franz is exquisite. So much so that I decide to call it a day. I skip Natchez and Nouvelle Vague. I love Franz though, particularly the choice to stitch in scenes set in the modern-day Franz Kafka museum. I’d argue that Franz is a bit more straightforward than it appears at first glance, but I like this touch and do appreciate the not-totally-linear way of cutting up Kafka’s life story.
Day 7, 8, 9, 10
I don’t see anything else. Franz turns out to be my final film.
To be continued.