The 46th Denver Film Festival runs from November 3 through November 12, with more than 100 features and 75 shorts in the mix. KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz discusses three standouts.
Assaults on innocence
Totem, by Mexican filmmaker Lila Avilés, opens on 7-year-old Sol singing and giggling with her mother while they sit on toilets in a public bathroom. She’s a happy kid, and they drive home in a car filled with balloons. They hold their breath through a tunnel, and when the mother asks Sol if she’d made a wish, Sol – now looking serious – says she hopes Daddy will not die.
The balloons are for a surprise party for her father, who can barely get out of bed. He is dying, and Totem combines the unhindered happiness of this beloved child in a comfortable home with those things that undermine happiness as all people grow out of childhood – sickness and death, lack of money, infidelity.
But Sol is only seven. It’s too soon. Children deserve to hold their uncompromised happiness for longer, but Totem recognizes that these assaults on innocence always happen too soon.
Totem is not a grim movie, though. It’s filled with humor. For instance, a nutty woman comes to heal the house of its bad spirits.
“But don’t worry,” she says, “I can get rid of them.”
The grandfather then wonders caustically how walking through the house with a piece of burning bread is going to make life good again. Totem thus has a rich sense of how sorrow and joy come together.
The elusive past
Back in 2012, Spanish filmmaker Oskar Alegria went looking for the meaning of Emak Bakia, the title of a 1926 short film by the surrealist/dadaist artist Man Ray. The movie took off on a fascinating journey, and with his latest work, Zinzindurrunkarratz, Alegria again takes off on an unexpected trip.
He starts with an image of his father standing in a town. There’s no sound. Subtitles describe that Alegria is using his father’s 41-year-old Super-8 film camera, but cannot record sound because the Super-8 film now available can’t do that. Another title says that journeys into the past are never easy. And then, after images of his family in 1981, the film asks silently, “How can we recover the voice of the past with a camera that has become mute?”
Oskar Alegria has a unique vision. With the Super-8 camera, he follows the path his sheepherder grandfather took when he moved his flock to the mountains for the summer. Alegria says he will glue together the pictures he takes with the sounds he records separately along the way. So when people talk about his grandfather on camera, we don’t hear their voices. In the moments between these images, the screen goes dark, and the film adds other sounds.
Zinzindurrunkarratz is a picture of deep yearning – the desire to recall the past. It's frustrated by being partial, because the past is elusive and, in this film, is glimpsed only in fascinating and thrilling fragments.
Irresistible
Nikki Giovanni is a young, fast-talking, often-angry poet from another thrilling film in the Denver Film Festival called Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. In later moments, Giovanni, now 80 and more circumspect, still presents a formidable challenge. She’s brilliant, thoughtful, wild — and with piercing intelligence and wit.
The filming matches her dynamic person. It sets her furious speaking voice and certainty when she was young against James Baldwin’s older, more experienced and measured conversation. It blends in images of ocean surf and the Milky Way that feel infinite.
But as an older woman, Giovanni is a marvel. She mesmerizes women, especially the young — white and black — who look transfixed by her speeches. She’s irresistible.
