1. Horse Money
Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa started making films in the Lisbon outpost of Fontainhas with the fictional Ossos, but over the last 20 years he’s been slowly moving towards the realm of documentary. The main character, Ventura, plays himself. It’s not fly on the wall verite, though. Costa’s a big cinephile, very influenced by Hollywood directors and a lot of B-grade noir such as Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton. There are echoes of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and there’s a really lovely nod to Fritz Lang’s M in the last shot that just makes you think, ‘What have I just seen?’
2. Heaven Knows What
MIFF guests Benny and Joshua Safdie are brothers based in New York; they’ve been making films since they were about 12. This film blew me away and has an interesting backstory. The brothers were in the Diamond District in Manhattan working on another film when they spotted lead actor Arielle Holmes on the subway.
They were so fascinated by her visually they followed her and started talking to her. She was dressed up very stylishly and they were expecting her to be Russian, but she started talking in this thick New Jersey accent. Then they spotted her a couple of weeks later dressed in rags and carrying a huge sack, and they learned she was living on the streets. They asked her to write a memoir, which inspired the film. The result is so full of energy—I can see opera and melodrama there—and it reminds me a lot of the ‘70s work of people like Cassavetes.
3. Stinking Heaven
This looks at a group of ex-addicts who come together in a New Jersey commune in the ‘90s. New York filmmaker Nathan Silva’s style is beyond black. He loves human drama, kind of in that Fassbinder realm. He doesn’t even work with a proper script, so a lot of his actors are thrown into situations and they have to come up with the dialogue and really inhabit their characters.
4. From What Is Before
Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s five and a half hour film (which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival) is so beautiful. There’s something kind of mystical about it. Set in the Philippines in a small village in the early ‘70s just as President Marcos was about to invoke martial law, it looks at corruption among the army and police and has so many characters it’s almost like a soap opera. Diaz is a really interesting filmmaker—there’s no one like him in the world. He’s very talented in painting a huge canvas yet somehow bringing all the characters’ various trajectories together.
5. Ruined Heart
Another Filipino film, this time from Khavn de la Cruz, who’s also a festival guest. He’s a very irreverent, renegade young filmmaker who’s been making small digital films for years that tend to show in festivals like Rotterdam. This is a bit of a breakout for him, but still very low-budget. It’s a completely dialogue-free gangster musical. The music is by Stereo Total and Khavn himself, cinematography is by Australian Christopher Doyle and it stars the great Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu. It’s a lot of fun and completely indescribable.
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