- Sheer Force of Ambition: David Kittredge on “Exorcist II” and “Boorman and the Devil” (August 25, 2026)
From practically the moment that it first hit theaters in June of 1977, “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” John Boorman’s follow-up to William Friedkin’s enormously successful 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-seller, has been written off as one of the biggest and most baffling disasters in Hollywood history.
In many ways, the virulence it received from critics and audiences alike was not entirely off the mark. Instead of giving viewers the kind of straightforward continuation of the first film that they might have logically expected, Boorman—who had spurned the chance to direct the original because he felt that it was only about torturing a child—presented them with an audacious narrative that presents its supernatural premise of a girl possessed by a demonic presence as an ambitious, highly metaphysical and visually startling take, more fever dream than nightmare.
Alas, moviegoers back then were clearly not in the mood for such a super-trippy take, and after an understandably huge opening weekend, what was once expected to be a blockbuster instead disappeared from theaters. To this day, many still regard it as not just one of the worst horror films or worst sequels ever made, but one of the worst films of any kind to ever hit the screen.
But what if “Exorcist II” wasn’t just a bizarre sequel to one of the most successful films ever made? What if it was, in fact, an example of an enormously gifted filmmaker who was given the chance to make a borderline experimental commentary/critique on a work that bothered him on some basic level, given every possible resource by studio executives who didn’t bat an eye at the weirdness? What if what Boorman’s film was closer to the likes of Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York,” Steven Spielberg’s “1941” and Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”—lavishly-funded projects from gifted auteurs that helped hasten the end of the New Hollywood era of the 1970s but which have been reappraised decades later? What if “Exorcist II: The Heretic” was actually great?
Director David Kittridge.
That is the premise behind “Boorman and the Devil,” a fascinating new documentary from David Kittredge that takes a look at the entire startling history of “Exorcist II” from its ambitious beginnings to its tumultuous production to its disastrous reception, including a preview screening in which the audience not only revolted against the film but drove the studio executives in attendance out of the theater. He does so through vivid recollections from many who worked on it, from Boorman and co-stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher (who passed away in 2022) to several crew members.
In addition, there is also commentary from a number of critics and observers, including filmmakers Joe Dante, Karyn Kusama and Mike Flanagan, who make the case that while the film might have failed as a sequel to “The Exorcist,” it displayed such a unique cinematic vision that it deserves reconsideration. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, of course, but as someone who has always felt “Exorcist II: The Heretic” is one of the boldest works from a filmmaker not known for playing it safe, Kittredge has more than made the case for it.
Having toured the world on the festival circuit, where it often screened alongside the film at its center, “Boorman and the Devil” is finally opening commercially. Recently, Kittredge sat down with RogerEbert.com to talk about his film, the genius of John Boorman, and why crazy cinematic swings like “Exorcist II: The Heretic” matter.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I can be briefly glimpsed in the film, albeit blurred, and I am thanked in the end credits. In addition, contributor Simon Abrams also appears as one of several critics offering on-screen commentary.
When did you first see “Exorcist II: The Heretic” and what knowledge did you have about the film’s history and reception when you did watch it?
The first time I saw “Exorcist II: The Heretic” was on Betamax—the big clamshell from Warner Brothers—and it was the European cut, the shorter one, not the original U.S. theatrical release. That one didn’t have a lot of the stuff that the film is most infamous for—there is no tap dancing, and in that cut, Richard Burton doesn’t live. I hadn’t seen a John Boorman film, but I knew he was a noted filmmaker. I knew that it was infamous.
I knew that it was indicated in “The Golden Turkey Awards,” that Medved book, as the second-worst movie ever made, which is absolutely fucking ludicrous, but whatever. I watched it, and I was intrigued by it and fascinated by it, but I didn’t really love it, mostly because it didn’t feel like a sequel to “The Exorcist”—I didn’t know what it was. It was kind of a weird, trippy hard left turn into surrealist filmmaking in a way.
It wasn’t until the mid-’90s, after I was out of college and living in New York, when Warner Home Video came out with the full cut on VHS, the original theatrical version that hadn’t been available since its opening weekend. That version really resonated with me because, even with its issues, I found it a fascinating and ambitious swing of a movie, and I became obsessed with it. I tried to figure out how they did this and what they were trying to do. The more I learned about the film, the more intriguing it felt and the more inspired I got.
In 2017, my friend Jeffrey Schwartz, a documentary filmmaker who actually has this great film out now about “Cruising” called “Mineshaft,” had been on me for a number of years to do a documentary on “Exorcist II” because he knew that I was so fascinated by it and by the stories behind it. I didn’t want to do it because documentaries are a lot of work, but he basically told me, “If you don’t do this and soon, this story is never going to be told.”
I knew he was right, and I didn’t want to live in a world where this story wasn’t told because I just find it so fascinating in any number of ways. Not just the movie itself but how it was made, and not just how it was made but the fact that it was made—the fact that Warner Brothers put their biggest budget ever behind this movie, this huge departure from the highest-grossing film in their history and the third-highest-grossing film of all time.
Even in its earliest phases, the film was going in a completely different direction from its predecessor—the fact that they were willing to take that chance and spend a lot of money on it is really amazing. At the end of the film, you have a roll call of wildly ambitious and expensive auteur-driven New Hollywood films from that era—things like “At Long Last Love,” “New York, New York,” “1941” and “Heaven’s Gate”—and “Exorcist II” fits in perfectly amongst them.
The sheer force of ambition behind those movies and the fact that the studios kind of met those auteurs where they were and gave them the financing to do it, like Scorsese with “New York, New York” or Spielberg with “1941” or William Friedkin with “Sorcerer.” My argument, if there is an argument in this film, is that we need to give brilliant directors the latitude to potentially make a disaster if we want anything good. You hope it isn’t a disaster, but I think that if you don’t have something like “Exorcist II: The Heretic” in your work, you are kind of doing it wrong. To me, it means you aren’t risking enough. If you don’t fail at least once in your career, you’re playing it a little too safe.
In the film, you reach out to a wide variety of people involved with the project, ranging from well-known names like Boorman and co-stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher to a number of below-the-line crew members. How did you go about rounding these people up and convincing them to take part in discussing a subject that might have still been touchy for them?
Boorman was the first interview we did, so once people heard he was part of it and an enthusiastic supporter of the film, nobody really questioned it after that. The first interviews were with Boorman, then Rospo Pallenberg, then Linda and Louise, and once we had those guys, it was all kind of gravy. Certainly none of the crew said no, especially once they heard about the people we had already interviewed. I think there was one camera operator that just said “I don’t remember anything,” but other than that, it was kind of a love fest. This was a movie that was made fifty years ago, and they recalled it like it was yesterday.
This was such a profoundly formative production for all these people, some of whom have gone on to have insane credits. You look at Victor Tsu’s credits or Ron Vargas’s credits—they have been on everything—and for them to remember this particular movie that has this horrible reputation so well is because they put their heart and soul into it. Boorman inspired everybody to bring their A-est of A games, and they did, which is why I think it was so painful for everybody, even down through the crew, how the movie was received.
These people care about their work. They aren’t just collecting a paycheck. It is much easier to work in many other industries than in the entertainment industry. These people love movies, and they thought they were making a great movie.
Maybe the most surprising moment in the film occurs during the segment discussing the infamous preview screening, when the audience not only turned on the movie itself but chased the studio executives in attendance out of the theater. You use footage of William Friedkin recounting what happened during an appearance at the Chicago Film Critics Festival, and when he told it, I assumed he was exaggerating significantly. However, you then interweave that recounting with an interview with someone who attended that same screening, and their two accounts do indeed line up.
One part of that story has been disputed, but only one. That was the claim that the executives were chased down the street at the very end. That has been contested, but other than that, everything else that he said has been supported by other people that we talked to. Someone stood up and said, “The people who made this piece of shit are in this theater!” pointed to where they were sitting in the back, and other people chased them as they left to yell at them, but it wasn’t a mob. I didn’t know any of this when we were making the film, but it was a great story, so we animated a mob chasing the Warner Bros. executives. Apparently that may not have happened or may not have happened quite like that—they may have been chased by a couple of people. I don’t know, but that is the extent to which I don’t know.
Are there stories about the making of the film that you simply were not able to find a place for in yours, and will we be seeing them as a bonus feature when it comes out on Blu-ray?
It is funny you mention that, because I just delivered the bonus features for the Blu-ray that is going to happen. This will be months from now—I don’t want people to wait for the Blu-ray and not see it in theaters—and there are about two hours of stuff.
There are a couple of stories in there that I find very entertaining, but we just couldn’t use them in the film. There was one about Richard Burton breaking into a bar with a fire axe—that was fun, but we had so many Richard Burton stories, and I have already seen in reviews that there is a perception that I beat up on Richard Burton. We had so many stories about Burton that we were astonishingly nice, given some of the things that happened on that set, and I would push back at anyone who thinks we were Burton-bashing.
Directors John Boorman (l) and David Kittredge (r).
Do you think that if “Exorcist II” had come out at a different time that it might have had a better chance of being accepted by audiences, or was it always going to be more or less doomed on the basis that it did not give audiences what they would have not unreasonably expected from something called “Exorcist II”?
I don’t know. I’m often asked whether the title was an issue or whether it was all about audience expectations, and I think it was a perfect storm of a lot of things. If I were a Warner Brothers executive and had been given that film, I honestly would have done what they did. The film would have been hated less if you’d called it “The Heretic” and kind of intimated that it was a follow-up to “The Exorcist,” but not really hung your hat on it. I don’t think it would have opened well, and it still would have failed at the box office because it is a flawed film. I do love this film and certainly spent enough years making a documentary about it, but it is flawed. The most interesting thing about it is that so much ambition and energy went into it, along with so many big creative swings.
My view is that whether these swings work for everyone all the time is not really the point. The point is “What are you doing with your work and your art? Are you doing something different and interesting and taking risks and chances?” This is one of the riskiest films I have ever seen. It would have been nothing for them to spend a quarter of the budget to make another movie about another possessed kid somewhere and just redo the first one somehow without hiring Linda Blair or any big stars. They would have made bank, and they didn’t. Instead, they took this huge risk on this very involved story about metaphysics and the world mind and people coming together in the next phase of evolution and giving Reagan a character. It’s really impressive to me how much they tried and how much they risked—that was pretty much the main inspiration for this documentary.
When you have been screening “Boorman and the Devil” at festivals, it’s often been shown alongside “Exorcist II” itself. When those audiences, most of whom are probably on the younger side, see it, how do you see them reacting to it? One aspect I was particularly curious about was how “The Heretic” tackles the original’s dubious sexual politics. That film could be read as a conservative reaction to things like feminism and the sexual revolution, in which the only cure for such ills is Catholicism.
Or even more reductive, when the shit hits the fan, what is going to save you is not your doctors or science or your secular movie star friends. It is going to be the old guy in the priest’s outfit reading the ancient texts. It is a very conservative and patriarchal message. “Exorcist II” is the opposite. “Exorcist II” says that science and religion, at their best, are trying to do the same thing—they are trying to search for truth and should work together. It has a very pro-feminist and progressive message.
Horror, as subversive as it is, tends to have a more conservative bend if you look at it in any kind of skeptical way. Who are the kids getting killed in the slasher movies? The ones off having sex and doing drugs. The Final Girl is always the virgin who doesn’t smoke pot or whatever. You can go through a lot of horror and kind of boil it down to kind of a conservative and patriarchal message. “Exorcist II” a.) I would argue is not even a horror movie and b.) is the opposite of that. It is not just a one-stop shop message about religion knowing everything—it is religion and science and wisdom and humanity. It is a very humanist movie.
At the beginning, it kicks things off with a failed exorcism, and at the end, good triumphs once the forces of science, religion, and feminism come together as one. Well, depending on which version you are watching.
That is important. I tell people that if you love the movie, you definitely want to see both the shorter version and the longer one, but the longer one is more cohesive and coherent. It is a really involving and valuable film, and even if you don’t like it, laugh at it, or it doesn’t work for you, there is so much in it that is brilliant and amazing. Even just from a technical filmmaking perspective, those ghost glass shots and the fact that all that stuff was done live with a two-way mirror and two sets—that is artistry of the highest order.
It really is one of the most visually impressive films that I have ever seen, and Boorman is certainly no slouch in that department.
No, he is amazing. “Excalibur” alone is amazing. The 4K that Arrow just put out is astonishing, and I am not just saying that because I have a commentary track on it. It is literally one of the most visually astonishing films I have ever seen.
Even a smaller film of his like “Where the Heart Is,” one that doesn’t have big battles and things like that, is absolutely gorgeous to look at throughout.
It really is, and it is so inventive. I don’t think that movie works, but it is really cool to watch. I’d rather have one movie like “Where the Heart Is” than ten that are fine but which don’t try anything. “Where the Heart Is” is trying a lot of stuff. Even with the plot, you are watching it and thinking, “This is going there?” I remember seeing it for the first time and having no idea where it was going, and by the end, you are thinking that you weren’t expecting any of that.
Finally, has Boorman seen “Boorman and the Devil” yet and, if so, what were his thoughts on it?
Yes, he has, and he has been very gracious. I don’t have the quote from the email in front of me, but he was very moved by it and very happy with it. This was all quite emotional for him. I didn’t want to press that because this was a film about one of the greatest traumas of his life, at least career-wise, and he didn’t have to be that open with me in that interview. He didn’t have to tell me all that stuff and talk about his life and art and his theories about cinema.
That was just a gift, and after that interview, it didn’t matter how long it would take—I had to finish this movie, and it had to be one of the best movies ever made about making a movie, and I am not going to stop until it is. I hope we got somewhere up there.
- We Were Warned: On “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” at 35 (August 24, 2026)
A teenage boy talks to his machine, giving it commands.
His first task begins innocently enough: “Stand on one foot,” the boy says. The machine obeys.
His second task reveals a sinister edge: to target nearby onlookers. The boy orders his machine to grab one of them by the head, pulling him into the air while he screams. His friend tries to intervene, and the machine, leather-clad and 6 feet tall, draws a handgun, and just as it’s about to blast a hole in the man’s head, the boy screams “NO! Put the gun down now!” and stops him just in the nick of time.
This short scene from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” captures in elegant shorthand the possibility and danger of using thinking machines. Released in the final months of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation remained a terrifying possibility, “Terminator 2” harnessed those fears and redirected them towards something more intimate: the rise of the computer, and unlike the atom bomb—which could only be misused by Governments—these machines would soon be in millions of homes around the world. The terrifying result? Using them would turn each person into a makeshift cyborg, with silicon computing becoming an amazing, but frightening, transhuman extension of how we think and behave.
At release, “Terminator 2” was a tech-noir cautionary tale on the rise of computers (in military application and at home). 35 years later, it plays as a cyberpunk mirror of how far we’ve already let technology disrupt and dominate our lives. From the devices we hold in our hands to “smart” algorithms and predictive language models, we don’t have to carry laser rifles or battle armies of skeletal machines to feel as though we’re in a cyber-dystopia. Machines replace us in the workforce, our dopamine is dependent on the addictive scrolling of our devices, and it’s never been easier to blur ethical lines in how you behave online. Whether through the moral prompts of how to use the T-800 or the propulsive set-pieces, “Terminator 2” demonstrates the more we use machines, the more we risk becoming like them. The danger from A.I. isn’t necessarily a singularity superbeing starting World War III, but the way we let technology change who we are in the first place.
So when that boy, John Connor (Edward Furlong), escalates a physical gag into physical violence, he’s proven just how quickly machines blindside us into morally pernicious choices we may never have otherwise. Vigilance is required. It’s that key scene that sets John on the path to become the future leader of the human resistance, where, in the far future (in the film, 2029), he fights against Skynet, a synthetic super-intelligence that enslaved humanity. To save his younger self, he sends a reformatted version of the villain in “The Terminator,” the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), which obeys any and all commands John Connor (of any age) gives. It’s for good reason: Skynet has sent the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) after John, a nexus point to save this once and future leader. The young John may have been told how this android operates—it will follow precise instructions without question—and yet his careless teenage words still nearly get a man killed.
Sometimes seen as a softer, less hardcore sequel to the straight-horror original, “Terminator 2” is still plenty horrifying; beyond the tests of will that Cameron imposes on the human characters, the film’s scares reveal the ways a digital intelligence can penetrate, and then distort, what we know reality to be. In what was a landmark leap in CGI technology, the T-1000’s body is a kind of shape-shifting, liquid metal, and thus can take on any physical form, have any voice, or become any non-complex object: deepfakes that can kill you. It can trick a husband that his wife—already deceased off-screen—is still in the room. It can take on the blue dress of law enforcement, a not-so-subtle hint at Cameron’s dismal view of authority.In one of the film’s most uncanny moments, the T-1000 breaks into a mental health facility by taking on the appearance of a security guard and terrifies the guard with, well, himself. Gazing at this digital homunculus leaves him terrified, only for the villain to morph his hand into a shimmering metal spike and kill him. It’s a warning by Cameron that soon, computer technology will be able to inhabit, if not also replace, human beings. Thus, the T-1000 is, itself, a meta-cinematic device. On its most basic level, the plot follows a killer computer repeatedly trying to kill a teenager, but on another, the clearly digital liquid-metal visual effects add an uncanny wrongness to the film’s moments, where something clearly synthetic, diegetically and to the movie audience, is attempting to replicate being human.
Part of Cameron’s genius with spectacle comes from his magician’s way to blend multiple techniques across micro-seconds of footage, like stop motion, reverse photography, CGI, practical explosions, and miniatures, to create a convincing tableau for his impossibly epic images. It’s just the same in “Terminator 2” and the T-1000, a mix of Robert Patrick’s lithe stunt work, makeup and prosthetics in the form of metallic geometry attached to Patrick’s body, and computer-generated imagery. Together, they make him a frightening, wholly credible foe. It also, however, shows possibilities of the limits of machines: when the T-1000 liquifies and moves through a gate in the hospital, he forgets he’s carrying a gun and is snagged on the bars. The weapon can’t move through as he can, and the T-1000 didn’t realize it.
On one level, this is Cameron’s way of selling a cool visual effect. But on another, it reveals that something so seemingly advanced can still have blind spots. Even the way the T-1000 always re-absorbs its liquid metal is a disarming reminder that machines are closed systems; they cannot iterate on themselves, and if they can adapt, they’re still slow learners. Each masterful set-piece becomes a chess match where the underdog heroes try to exploit a machine’s weaknesses (something that, if anything, is more cathartic today than at release). Sometimes that’s brute force—pumping round after round into its fluid metallic body—and, in others, it’s by forcing it into the extreme elements of ice and fire.In fact, in some ways Cameron’s obsessive desire for photorealistic visual effects has led us to where we are today. From the enchanted tentacle of animated sea water in “The Abyss” to the effervescent beauty of the Na’vi in “Avatar,” the creation of a digital character as perceptually real as any human has been his life’s pursuit. Pause any close-up from “The Way of Water” and marvel at its artistry: the cracks of Ikran-feet around the hero’s aging eyes, the perfect pores that dot Neytiri’s face, the fidelity of skin as it wrinkles from an outburst of a teenager’s volatile emotion. The greatest triumph of his “Avatar” Trilogy is how, while watching, you are seduced by its mimetic spectacle; you soon forget that none of it is really happening.
“Avatar” is the crowning achievement of how persuasively computers could create a fully believable, lush, dynamic and hyper-immersive digital world. Or, at least it was, until that same push for verisimilitude has (in a sense) encouraged A.I. programs like Grok, Sora and Midjourney to achieve the same, but with more unsettling results. Just as the T-1000 was a shape-shifting metaphor for digital tech in the ’90s since we can perceive a certain offness as it tries to inhabit different shapes and people, these programs have largely produced images that are lifelike but with details that betray their veneer of fidelity. For a long time, the most upsetting part was studying the hands: while the location, props, and even faces might look alright (if somehow, undefinably weird), images made by these applications might have too many fingers or too few. In some cases, the hands would appear as if they melted together under intense heat (ironically, one of the weaknesses of the T-1000). Today, A.I. images come eerily close to replicating whatever they want, and just as John initially used his terminator as a bad actor to razz some nearby onlookers, the potential consequences for easy, thoughtless misuse are massive.
Far more insidious than any Terminator attacker is how machines create gateways for our behavior to change for the worse, and how easy it becomes to embrace the digital devils of our worst selves. It’s why John’s interactions with the T-800 are so revealingly dangerous. It exposes the (now cliché) difficulty of choosing our words carefully when communicating with literal-minded machines; a technical design comes with technically specific instructions. A.I. can only know what we program it to know, and even the most advanced language models in the world expose huge gaps in problem-solving. This dilemma has given rise to a whole subset of sci-fi storytelling—from “I, Robot” (2004) and beyond—where the infamous scenario involves telling an A.I. super-intelligence to “protect humans,” only for it to enslave the human race because we are the greatest threat to ourselves. This is at the heart of landmark sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov’s law of robotics, where the first states “a robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.” His stories would create complicated scenarios where artificial intelligence could do just that.Likewise, John quickly realizes he still hasn’t solved the dilemma of how to work with the T-800. In one of Cameron’s most intense sequences, designed with low-angled shots that make the characters look a thousand feet tall, they have to spring his mom, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the main character of “The Terminator,” out of a mental institution. Though John has already given the command never to kill, the T-800 pulls his handgun and casually double-taps a security guard in both of his legs; John screams “what are you doing,” and the T-800 replies with Schwarzenegger’s effortless comic timing: “he’ll live.” John’s input removed one sort of action from the table, without accounting for others. The rest of the movie shows the T-800 balancing his non-kill rule with Cameronian blockbuster badassery, none more so than pumping rounds of gas into an army of police who have the building surrounding. They’ll live, but only just.
Worse, it reveals the critical issue isn’t whether John can control the T-800, but whether John can control himself. When John had the T-800 razz the two men nearby, they only approached after “his” android seized John, and the boy screamed for help; they weren’t just random bystanders, they were good samaritans. Drunk off the power fantasy that this all-powerful action figure clad in biker leather will do whatever he wants, his line of empathy temporarily clicks off, and he abuses these men for no reason other than a cruel pleasure.
No one reveals that entangled psychology more than Sarah, who begins the film with enough hatred towards robotics that she gets thrown in a mental ward for trying to blow up machine factories. She gave up her motherhood for the cause. By the time the reprogrammed T-800 shows up to liberate her, she still holds a repulsive, virulent anger towards all machines. Expectedly, she panics when it first appears. But after they’ve escaped and she has time to stage her next steps, Sarah makes the decision, in Cameron’s words, to become a terminator herself and assassinate the man about to create the chip that will eventually launch Skynet, Mike Dyson.
What gets overlooked isn’t the ethics of her is-it-ethical-to-kill-baby-hitler sniper mission, but what comes immediately before it: in narration, she gives an uncharacteristically sentimental speech on why the T-800 is an ideal father for John. This machine isn’t only a valid or valuable ally, but a fit father figure, one that’s better than her past boyfriends and better, she imagines, than most fathers period. What she says is simultaneously true and untrue: a harsh, if fair, judgment of humanity. By this point, the T-800 hasn’t just learned to crack jokes or evolve with his “thinking chip” (in the “Special Edition,” they remove a chip Skynet built to inhibit learning as a way to explain his personality shift); he’s protected John better than Sarah ever has.
But Cameron, typically sharper a writer than he’s given credit for, has a dual meaning beneath what could sound like a mom’s cornball parental philosophizing: this speech is Sarah’s rationalization that the murder she’s about to commit is okay, that John will have someone to take care of him, that this new robotic dad, this machine, this computer moments ago she thought she could never bring herself to stop hating, will take care of him.
In other words, Sarah has made herself into a terminator by projecting shades of humanity onto a terminator, a more psychological version of the dilemma of John back in that parking lot. It’s not the orders she’s giving the machine that matters; it’s that the machine has allowed her to change, that it has allowed her to act on her worst impulses. In those moments, neither she nor John understands how the very existence of these super-machines can reprogram their behavior in ways beyond their self-conscious understanding. Once these machines exist, we need to police what they let us convince ourselves to do, rather than policing the machines.
In one of Cameron’s greatest bars, the iconic “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves” speaks to today as much as it did when he wrote it. It’s a line that speaks against a predetermined universe, and that no amount of certainty about a worse tomorrow justifies inaction today. It’s a crucial bit of dialogue that recalls one of the ending lines from “Tenet”: “What’s happened happened. It’s an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, but it’s not an excuse to do nothing.” The same is true in “Terminator 2,” where a time loop should make their situation fruitless. The chip Dyson is about to make is based on technology he only had access to because of the events of “The Terminator,” but that doesn’t mean we should not act to change it.
In 1991, computers were about to enter our homes before we realized all that meant. As if to complete the metaphor, Cameron set both “Terminator” climaxes in the iconic backdrops of an automated machine factory, making his breathless action a forewarning that if we aren’t careful, we’ll soon be just as mechanized ourselves. Today, Cameron warns the next cycle of escalation won’t be in stock loads of nuclear weapons, but artificial intelligence, where wars will be fought between data centers instead of battlefields. At home, jobs will be lost. The CEOs of companies building these products insist these changes are inevitable, that there’s no use fighting the tide. The most powerful legacy of “Terminator 2” is to fight the fatalism of tomorrow, and to remember its refrain, “no fate.” Our digital age may have dehumanized and changed us, but we are still in control—and the future is always in our hands.
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” will be re-released in a new 4K edition this Friday, August 28.
- Liminal Spaces, Transitional States: Alexander Ullom on “It Ends” (August 21, 2026)
Fred Rogers’s song “What do you do with the Mad that you Feel” comes to mind when watching director Alexander Ullom’s existential road-trip nightmare, “It Ends.” In his song, Rogers articulates a need for vessels to place our rage, angst, and grief, and sings how easy it is to feel powerless in the face of all that afflicts us. That same thorny longing, terrifying questioning, and ultimately deep-seated hope that depression won’t rule the day courses through Ullom’s film, which takes the straitjackets of horror and hangout movies and blends them into a unique meditation on growing up and finding your way.
Ullom’s film follows four recent college grads, James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson), who embark on a late-night drive before they go their separate ways. They realize that they’ve turned onto a never-ending road, and any time they try to pause to catch their breath, they have only ninety seconds of respite before hordes of screaming people swarm and attack them. As the odometer climbs and days begin to blend, each member of the crew has to wrestle with what this purgatory means for the futures they once thought they had.
Though the foursome are plagued by eternal monotony, the road to “It Ends” finding a movie home was far from straightforward. After a premiere at SXSW, a subsequent tour on the festival circuit that included the 2025 Chicago Critics Film Festival, a stint on the Letterboxd Video Store, and creative persistence from Ullom himself (“insanity,” he corrects me in our interview) involving influencers at a “Jurassic World: Rebirth” event, “It Ends” finally roars into theaters now.
RogerEbert.com spoke with Ullom once in person during the film’s Chicago premiere and once over Zoom after Ullom wrapped principal photography on his follow-up, “4×4: The Event”; this piece combines those interviews into one fluid conversation. Ullom spoke about the importance of silly questions when navigating our present hellscape, humanity’s tendency to create liturgies to process suffering, and how his decisions to balance the film’s horror and hangout elements manifest in the characters’ arcs.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I found the sequence where James is pleading out to some unknown force for the car to start to be relatable for those who come from religious backgrounds, in particular, the ways people of faith or dechurched people can be so quick to revert to crying out to God in a moment of crisis. Did drawing from your own faith background prove prudent when articulating some of these characters’ spiritual angsts?
Alexander Ullom: The film is definitely religious trauma coded, but I have nothing against religion. Anything that would give people a sense of comfort as they’re dying is probably a good thing, and we have an increasingly short supply of those balms. That scene where Fisher is lamenting that his mother might think he’s going to hell because he told her he was not religious has personal resonance.
In the two-and-a-half-hour version of this movie, there was a whole swath of scenes where the group was trying to remember stories from the Bible. They were talking about Lot’s wife and how she turned to a pillar of salt because she turned around to look at the destruction of Sodom when God told her not to, and trying to understand why she’d do that. Like, dude, if God–like literally, God– fucking showed up and was like, “Do not turn around or else …” I would be like, “Yeah, absolutely. Assignment understood.”
Director Alex Ullom. (Photo: Chris Violette)
One thing that your film really dives into is the fear of eternity. I feel like as human beings we’re not built to fully reckon with the concept of “forever.” What’s your relationship to eternity?
I think for people my age, our relationship with infiniteness and liminality–call it “Backrooms,” if you will–all stems less from a religious place and more from the fact that we don’t really have a destination to “arrive at” anymore. There’s a movement away from any sort of interconnected moral system in our generation that there might have been in the past. The tent poles of structure that used to hold up society, whether it was having a family or buying a house, or literally religion–which used to be one of the moral center points of what held all the kids together–all of those structures have kind of dissolved, and in their place is kind of nothing, like a transitional state.
If liminal spaces are transitionary states, it just feels like we’re in a long one right now. Our relationship with nature is off right now, and because, in general, I think people are becoming less religious or spiritual, we’re losing a connection to something bigger than ourselves.
I was struck by a relatable, futile tendency to graft ritual onto otherworldly situations to shrink them down to size and make them relatable. It’s why I resonated so much with the on-screen rituals we see the characters undergo once they accept their fate. What was the origin of coming up with these rituals?
The guide rails were that each practice or “time” was crafted to process a specific emotion. The screaming is the physical sensation of getting the fear out; the memes are brain gooping, to give your mind space to unwind. I’m probably not smart enough to articulate this, but with the dancing, one of the things I was trying to communicate was how, within the confines of capitalism, every emotion and physical need is exploited, individual time that needs to exist inside of a larger structure. So dancing was a way to break free from some of that.
Are there practices you find yourself implementing now that act as your form of release? What do you do with your anger, despondency, and despair?
It has changed over time. When I was young, meditating was ridiculous to me, but now I figured out how to climb our fire escape to get to the roof of my apartment. So now I’ll go up there and just sit in the sun for a while. Reading has reentered my life, which is crazy. I’m trying to commit to doing things that actually are good for your well-being. Eating all the food groups …
Where do Clif Bars–which get a nice payoff at the end of the film–fall into that diet?
I don’t think I can eat those anymore. I told Phineas I’d eat bar for bar what he ate during production, and I ended up eating a lot of them. This stuff to actually improve your life is just what everyone already knows; you just have to commit to doing it, which sucks. With meditation, my attitude was, “ I don’t want to waste 15 minutes sitting in silence when I could be, I don’t know, doing anything else.” But then after 15 minutes, I’m like, “All right, I feel a little better. I can enjoy TikTok a little better now.” (Laughs)
NEON
How do you think growing up terminally online has shaped your (or Gen Z’s) approach to processing trauma?
Personally, I was fifteen when I saw the Russian Brick Video. I saw a cartel execution online when I was twelve years old. Every single time you watch anything on a phone–even in movies– there’s a simulation of emotion, and so if I was going to feel the real thing, I had already been desensitized to the actual sensation of that feeling. I think we’re all walking around with a functioning numbness, spawned in part due to a collective dissociation.
I’m curious if someone in medieval times who saw their family’s heads chopped off in real time would process it better than how we’re processing similar images now because their emotions are rooted in witnessing something real. Every time we see awful footage online and go on with our lives, we are–as Fisher says–experiencing weaker shades of emotions.
I remember my first heartbreak, and it was world-ending, and then I got used to it. It feels like we only have a certain reservoir for a specific emotion, and over time, it gets ground down and down. You run out of it, and the more you’re online watching stuff, the more I think you use up that reservoir.
Even with watching a horror movie, about an hour in, I just get desensitized to the actual sound of the theater. There’s only a certain number of times a speaker gets really loud before I’m completely used to it.
It’s terrifying how easily we get used to things. In addition to the aforementioned Russian Brick Video and Bible story retelling scene, I also know there were lots of conversations and scenes that you ultimately didn’t include in this edited cut, like another one including the song “Viva La Vida.” Tell me more about the process of choosing the cultural references in this film, knowing that by the time of release, the film may feel dated by what its characters talk about?
I just wanted to root the dialogue in the stuff that’s stuck around with my actual friends in real life. It’s weird because by the time this movie comes out, people are going to think that we’re copying the “100 men versus gorillas” meme based on the question that the characters bicker about at the start of the film. This interview proves we are ahead of the game right now. I think what will keep it universal and fresh is that the references aren’t necessarily rooted in a specific trend. Like modern art, people use memes to process what they’re going through, and that’s what will be familiar, less so the content of the meme itself.
You’ve shared before that when you were in a dark place, the silly debate you had with a friend about whether a gorilla or bear would win in a fight galvanized something in you that helped make life worth living. Tell me more about the role of silly questions in friendships.
There’s no such thing as objective truth anymore. So now these questions are a truth in a way. The actual limit of the human experience is questions with no answers. The confines of existence are questions without an answer, but also know that since there’s no truth, everyone’s subjective opinion is the most important thing now. So the person arguing for the gorilla …. That debate is essentially a spiritual battle, because that’s all that’s left (Laughs). I feel like scholars and scientists have kind of already figured out everything there needs to be, and now it’s for us to debate the silly questions of life. Maybe that’s the unifying moral structure our generation can push together in the absence of religion. In many ways, arguing over a stupid hypothetical is actually the most important thing in the entire world.
A lot of the characters’ grief stems from a legitimate nihilism that anyone would feel living in the world we’re in now. I found their grief to be an almost righteous form of discontent.
If there’s all this horror, if all this shit is going on around us all the time, then the only real thing we can do to make our fellow conscious experience a little bit better is hang out and connect with someone through conversation. Talking with people, hearing different perspectives- to me, these feel like the ways to combat that desensitized meaninglessness. They don’t necessarily need to be these “bear versus gorilla” questions either. If everything’s horrifying, terrifying, and meaningless, then the only reaction is to hear everyone talking about it.
NEON
You talked about how one read of “It Ends” that you like is that there’s a war over the film’s tone with the characters themselves, right down to the changes in aspect ratio. The film widens during the hangout moments, whereas in its “horror” phase the frame is tighter. Talk to me a little bit about that wrestling you were undergoing as a director with this film, and then transplanting that struggle onto the characters?
I think that if they didn’t make that turn, the group would have gone and had a “Dazed and Confused” kind of night. The film would have been a dope little hangout movie, and they probably would have kept butting heads because James is a bit of an asshole. But the film turns onto the road, and now it’s in horror movie mode.
Horror and genre are built on overcoming conflict as quickly as possible. A belief runs through those projects, rooted in the hero’s journey: I’m going to conquer this object, this conflict, and then I will return having changed. That is not how adulthood works at all, or real life. There’s just this scrap in the mud where you pull meaning from wherever, and that’s the thing that James couldn’t fully understand.
So while James is on one end, bringing in that framework and horror, you have Fisher and Day on the other, who, after the time jump, are just trying to hang out. There’s a healing in vibing, and that helps save us from the period of transition we’re in. James is literally saying: “I want the new thing? What is the new thing?” That’s very typical of a genre audience member. For James, he can’t accept that relationships and the people you love are what give life meaning. He doesn’t want to hang out. That was me when I was younger; I couldn’t be present. I couldn’t live in a world where I couldn’t get an answer for that, partly because of my religious upbringing too.
Fisher and Day have to literally turn off the story vehicle. James can’t accept that, so he takes the same vehicle, the one driving the plot, and takes off on his own. They’re battling, and the movie can’t conclude till the plot concludes and, by extension, he takes the movie from them.
Going just off the logline of your next film, “4×4: The Event,” it feels like if “It Ends” is going to be about that transition to adulthood, your follow-up is about how to survive the reality of adulthood.
Yeah, if “It Ends is like “Hey, don’t kill yourself. Love the people around you,” “4×4: The Event” is very much “Okay, now that you didn’t kill yourself, we need to unite.” It’s an intense escalation. If “It Ends” was about the transition from 18 to the ages 23-25, then the next project is about me going from 25 to 30 and watching the people I love’s lives be deeply and negatively affected by the state of the world.
Visually, the film was inspired by my time living in that windowless walk-in closet while I was making “It Ends.” You don’t get this from the logline, but yeah, all the contestants are living in small, dark, windowless concrete rooms with tunnels between them. There’s a drop chute where their orders come in. It’s a setup that truly inverts the natural world. There’s not a single thing in that room that’s organic. They’re pretty much told, “Hey, here’s your computer … here’s your tool to conquer the world. Good fucking luck.” That’s modern life in a nutshell.
“It Ends” is in select theaters via NEON.
- Locarno Film Festival 2026 Wrap-up (August 19, 2026)
Every year I’m reminded that Locarno is a festival whose cinema is earned. This is my third straight year covering the festival that’s nestled amid picturesque Swiss mountains, which requires a trans-Atlantic flight into Milan, an extended train ride over the Italian border, and a thick skin for the unforgiving heat that radiates from the luminous sun that bears down onto the pebbled pavement that grounds the Piazza Grande, which, when filled with 8,000 people, who are watching the newest work from a cinematic master, makes for a sight to behold. This time around, the festival, which ran August 5-15, was brimming with more experimental works, gorgeous restorations, and a new retrospective program that sought to put HUAC and the Blacklist in its filmic context.
Per usual, I arrived in the second half of the festival. It’s a decision that’s sometimes presents an obstacle, at least on a personal level, because you’re arriving when most of your colleagues are venturing off to the next fest, usually Sarajevo Film Festival, rather than remaining (though, on an inside baseball note, you do end up forming very close bonds with those who do stay, if only because you have more time to hang out specifically with them).
Nevertheless, an advantage to arriving “late” is that many others have done some of the legwork for you. They’ve seen several of the premieres and have already parsed what’s forgettable, notable, or good—making your job a two-fold venture: catching up with the good that you’ve missed while consuming what’s yet to premiere. I can’t adequately tell you how much time that saves, especially at a festival where some of the shiniest options are actually classic films playing at the mercifully air-conditioned GranRex cinema.
And while I’m still watching films, another positive of Locarno for press is that the movies on the digital platform stay active through the end of August; I have already seen enough to look back fondly on this edition of Locarno as a real opportunity for discovery and proselytization.
As you can already tell, I split my time between new films and restorations or retrospective titles. For the former, I watched 16 films, and, for the latter, I saw 12. My new movie viewing, funnily enough, began with a movie I’ve already seen: James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” which screened at Piazza Grande with Gray on hand to accept the festival’s Lifetime Achievement award. While I admired the film out of Cannes, watching it a second time at Locarno, where I could focus on how the film’s rich visual and aural techniques bring to life the story of a working class father (Miles Teller) and a flashy uncle (Adam Driver) who strive for the mirage of the American dream with such abandonment that it imperils their family (a fantastic Scarlett Johansson, Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel), was an incredible luxury to open the festival with.
Further highlights followed in the coming days. In the main competition were several stirring works: Isabelle Stever’s queer wartime drama “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,” Hong Sang-soo’s latest melancholic treatise on art “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes” (which won Best Performance for Kim Min-hee and Best Director), Ann Oren’s horny and sensorial surgical fever dream “Objet A,” Lê Bảo’s ambitious dreamscape “Hearing,” and Florin Șerban’s Golden Leopard winning paternal drama “You Don’t Belong Here.”
Equally great wealth could also be discovered in the sidebars. Umair Bilal’s culturally specific Pakistani experimental film “As Light As Air” in the Semaine de la Critique was a small gem, as was Mamadou Dia’s Pan-African dance documentary “Atcha Atcha,” which bowed in the Fuori Concorso section.
The most adventurous section, however, might’ve been Concorso Cineasti del Presente—which is often reserved for promising filmmakers on their first or second feature. Beatrice Gibson’s ruminative feminist conversation “At Night,” Ana Vaz’s experimental essayist narrative “Fire Flower” (“Hanabi”), and Uta Beria’s rebellious free speech rallying cry “Tear Gas” were all towering works that were on display.
Accompanying the festival premieres were several major stars and creatives, also honored by Locarno and the fest’s Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro. Before I arrived, Olivia Wilde, who came to send off her latest directorial effort, “The Invite,” for its European Premiere (the film sold out the 8,000-seat Piazza Grande), Isabella Rossellini, Sigurjón Sighvatsson, and Virginie Efira were honored. During my stay, Gray, Zoe Saldaña, Rick Baker, Asia Argento, and Darren Aronofsky were also feted (during the festival, I was fortunate enough to dine with Baker and his wife Silvia, a noted film and television hairstylist in her own right, a personal highlight of mine).
And as always, the major thrill of Locarno arose from squirreling away time to catch the fest’s incredible retrospective series. “Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist,” which was produced in conjunction with Cinémathèque suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, see curator Ehsan Khoshbakht once again utilizing his deep knowledge of classic cinema to tell a story about a specific and imperative period in moviemaking (in prior years he’s curated a celebration of Columbia Pictures’ 100th anniversary called “The Lady With the Torch” and a look back on British postwar cinema).
While I won’t take too much time to give my thoughts on the retrospective, as I don’t want to subtract from Marya E. Gates’ far more historically informed coverage for the site, I will say this, “Red & Black” makes a remarkable effort to fully contextualize a period of anti-art facism that destroyed many people’s lives and creatively set back Hollywood for so long that it still hasn’t totally dug its way out of the grave ramifications caused by the period. I was honored, in fact, to introduce Emile de Antonio’s revealing documentary “Point of Order,” a film composed wholly of footage from the Army-McCarthy hearings (you can get a version of what I spoke about via the festival’s Instagram page). Other speakers included Eddie Muller, Imogen Sara Smith, Phuong Le, Tanya Goldman, Christopher Small, Eva Markovits, Thierry Méranger, Joseph Losey’s 88-year-old son, Gaverick, and more.
Some of my personal favorites from the series were Luis Buñuel’s racial critique “The Young One,” Allan Dwan’s “High Noon” riff “Silver Lode,” Herbert J. Biberman’s pro-union melodrama “Salt of the Earth,” and Lewis Milestone’s wildly pro-Soviet war flick “The North Star.” If you’d like a further taste of the full series, I’d recommend checking out Marya’s piece, picking up the accompanying same-titled book edited by Khoshbakht (for now it’s sold out!!), or listening to the podcast series.
And as I file this edition of Locarno into my memory, I am once again filled with immense joy. Never let anyone tell you that it’s been a terrible year for movies. There are always innumerable movies to find at festivals big and small, hidden gems that deserve words and eyes, notable new voices awaiting uplift. I curse how few hours in the day I have to find many of them, fearing to immeasurable ends that I am right now, as I type away, missing a truly great film.
I hope that some of these works will make it to your theater, screens, and eyes (a few that I highlighted are slated to appear at NYFF, TIFF, and many regional festivals, hopefully, near you). As I have written in the past, the future of film resides in discovery; it’s made fertile when one takes a leap in watching a film from a country they haven’t visited, from a people they don’t know, in a tongue that is different but no less melodic. In these five days, Locarno has once again revitalized my pursuit of those discoveries. I hope to be at the festival next year to experience it once again.
- Locarno 2026: You Don’t Belong Here, Who Is Still Alive, Sixteen Moments of My Life, Letter From My Village (August 19, 2026)
My final dispatch from Locarno is probably the most varied of the quartet that I’ve filed. Fittingly, it’s composed of four films, each from a different section of the festival. Collectively, they’re also the most likely to travel outside of the festival to a screen near you. Most of all, they’re either about defiant people telling their own stories against their oppressors or are works that decry hate and bigotry. They characterize what Locarno Artistic Director Giona A Nazzaro said would be the aim of this festival: “To regain cinema as a freedom that can’t be predicted through algorithms or consumer habits.” These films resist any strict definition.
Florin Șerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here,” the winner of the Golden Leopard, is a classically styled Romanian drama whose methodical rhythm often belies its radical message. It begins unassumingly, maybe even plaintively, with an opening shot of an aged nuclear power plant’s smokestack nestled in a rural field. From there it cuts to an ornate water fountain then to a skate park and then to a sleepy residential neighborhood. This is a small town not unlike many others. But its daytime calm will soon be broken by nighttime hate: We see an army of armored cyclists roll onto a quiet street, slashing car tires, breaking windows, and vandalizing these parked vehicles by placing posters that say “you don’t belong here.” One man, a Romani, tries to defend the neighborhood, only to be savagely beaten to death.
That captivating opening is but a small part of a puzzle whose many pieces will be sequentially added throughout the 254 minutes of Șerban’s interrogative work. By dawn we’re introduced to a new character, Marius Călimanescu (Adrian Văncică), a surgeon who after his morning jog finds his car damaged by that evening’s hooligans. He thinks little of property damage. This single father, whose son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu) is hiding a gnarly leg contusion from an unknown source, is more enamored with keeping his hospital afloat than to worry about what he perceives as outside noise. Unbeknownst to him, the troubles of his town and his son will soon come barreling toward him.
Șerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here” is an intricate picture of misplaced masculinity, toxic discrimination and parental anguish. Its well-earned profundity, reliant on assured compositions and a detailed sound design, pulls one deep into its whirlpool-sized narrative that only seems to gain speed and viciousness as the film progresses. It’s telling, in fact, how much happens underneath Marius’ nose: Ioan visits a clinic for his leg, meets up a mysterious biker guy at the local dam and gives away the yellow bike that Marius bought for him. Instead, Marius is consumed with his reputation. When angry Romani men trash his hospital because the police have decided to autopsy the deceased man who was beaten to death the night before—an order the film suggests is a vindictive bigoted act by Marius’ former high school classmate and current inspector—Marius simply demands the problem be placed outside of his hospital. Worse yet, the only other subject pulling at his attention is his high school reunion where laments he won’t be seen as truly great.
The film smartly closes in on Marius. Cramped compositions between himself and his son show how uncomfortable he is fulfilling his fatherly role, especially as he expresses disappointment that Ioan seemingly has zero ambition. The perpetual presence of police sirens in the soundscape, which increases in volume and in frequency as the film lurches forward further teases reality creeping toward Marius. Văncică’s evolutionary performance, which sees this once confident man reduced to shambles, is another excellent car on a melancholic train barreling toward the heart (his quiet, observational performance does make Șerban’s decision to employ a late on-the-nose voiceover monologue quite disappointing). All these sturdy components combine to patiently render “You Don’t Belong Here” into a soul-shattering picture of grief and regret.
For these dispatches, I’ve tried to primarily focus on films having their world premiere at Locarno. A 2025 Venice Film Festival selection, Nicolas Wadimoff’s “Who Is Still Alive” breaks that trend a bit—especially because it only had a single screening at the Swiss fest. Last week, however, it was announced that Switzerland would be selecting the pro-Palestine documentary as their submission to the 99th Academy Awards, so combined with the imperative subject matter it made even more sense to include some words about Wadimoff’s film.
“Who Is Still Alive” concerns ten subjects: Each hail from Gaza, each escaped to Egypt before the Rafa border was closed on May 7, 2024. They all have a story to tell about survival and loss, with each detail more harrowing than the last. While Wadimoff, who previously directed “Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza)” in 2010, wanted to film his subjects in Switzerland, the country doesn’t accept Palestinians lacking a visa. He instead opted to shoot on a South African soundstage where Adel Altaweel, a visual artist and one of the subjects, has decided to draw a large map of Gaza in white marker on a black floor. On that map he draws individual boxes that represent where each subject’s home was in Gaza.
Before launching into their respective story, each person shares their intimate memory of what their house and neighborhood looked like, holding back tears as they recall their former, now erased, abodes. Wadimoff mixes these recollections with some unique staging, allowing the camera to track and pan around each subject as they stand upright, bathed in theatrical lighting.
Following these lyrical sequences, the film becomes familiar in form, compiling one-on-one interviews with the figures. All of them have different backgrounds. The defiant Haneen Harara, for instance, is a journalist. A heartbroken Jawdat Khoudary is a businessman. The former mourns the 13 people from her family who died on March 5 in an Israeli airstrike; the latter laments the history and culture permanently lost in the devastating missile strike of Al Mat’haf museum, which he owned. Fascinatingly, in a midway break in the film, Jawdat and Haneen argue over whether they should return to rebuild Gaza. Haneen castigates Jawdat for not being strong enough to take part, demonstrating the magnitude of the hurt Palestinians have endured in war and in exile.
For his part, Wadimoff is attentive to the film’s aching tone. He doesn’t want to make a documentary wholly predicated on trauma. He reaches for ruminative moments like the aforementioned lyrical theatrical sequences and toward the end of the film finds time to get the subjects out of the darkened soundstage to the outside, which is filled with sounds of the wind blowing and children playing. He also leans on the talents of Feras, who, when his family was issued an evacuation order, only took his Qanun with him from his home. That stringed instrument provides a kind of comfort for the end of the film to the subjects and to the viewer for a final bold note that fortifies “Who Is Still Alive” as a story of survival and determination.
On its face, “Sixteen Moments of My Life,” the latest from Spanish auteur Albert Serra, isn’t terribly notable. Unlike “Pacification” or “Afternoons of Solitude,” idiosyncratic works that embed viewers in insular worlds, his latest film initially appears to be far more conventional. A concert documentary that observes German singer/actress Ingrid Caven’s one-off performance at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, the film, nevertheless, is just as operatic yet intuitively focused as his prior films.
Caven, who’s best known to cinephiles as a consistent collaborator with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, sings a sixteen song set filled with pieces composed in conjunction with Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson. She rarely speaks to the audience, only offering a courteous “merci” every half hour or so; neither Serra nor her ever notify the viewer of each track’s name either. Those details aren’t imperative to them. What counts is allowing space for the overall story to be told without distraction. The result is spellbinding yet stimulating, tangible but fleeting. That’s partly because of the reserve Serra employs in shooting Cavern. He’ll rely on a slow push-in on the opening song for dramatic effect or hold on Verdaguer and Robinson’s accompanying band as they provide kinetic abstract textures to the avant-garde these arrangements for rousing moments of musical alchemy.
And while Cavern remains an island unto herself, situated in the middle of the stage with instrumentalists on either flank, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t work the crowd. Her side door exit off stage, which allows her to steal a few sips of water, leaves the crowd pining for more; her contorted dance with the microphone actualizes the evocative imagery of her songs’ lyrics; her blue satin gown mixed with her mysterious dark sunglasses give a transcendent impression. While performing, Cavern switches between French and German and sings of distant memories and lost loves, bending her voice tightly around these imaginative musical scenes.
Once again, “Sixteen Moments of My Life” isn’t a major work by Serra. But its existence is still major to someone: Cavern. And while this will be more of an oddity for hardcore fans of the director than a necessary example of his filmmaking, it’s a major statement for his subject.
In another change-up, this dispatch isn’t filled entirely of new films. While at Locarno, I saw a restoration of Senegalese auteur Safi Faye’s “Letter from My Village” (“Kaddu Beykat”). The restoration feels notable for a few reasons. For one, Faye’s work is difficult to see because her films aren’t available on streaming (though you can locate them through other means). Also, the 2K revitalization of her classic film, which was carried out by Locarno Heritage in collaboration with Cinegrel from a 16mm master, was touted throughout the festival before most screenings with a brief sizzle reel of the before and after of the restoration. Most importantly, “Letter from My Village” is an integral piece of African cinematic history and a quintessential example of Faye’s interest in the travails of rural Senegalese life.
While the film takes care to record the day-by-day customs and discussions shared in a small African village, it would be a grave mistake to relate it to any ethnographic leanings. Rather Faye crafts a loose narrative about a drought that’s afflicting this small community so badly that it’s revealing the many systematic inequalities engineered against them. We view this oncoming calamity through the eyes of Ngor (Assane Faye), a young man whose aim of marrying Coumba (Maguette Gueye) is momentarily dashed because the drought, which has severely impacted the local groundnut crops, has rendered his family too disadvantaged to afford the necessary cultural accoutrements for the ceremony. To make ends meet, he ventures to Dakar in search of work only to be exploited by those who’ve seen enough people with a similiar plight to know he’s vulnerable and naive.
Accompanying this primary plot, is, of course, the epistolary component—which comes in the form of letters written from a villager to a friend. These letters are read by Faye herself and give voice to the many customs, expectations and roles, particularly between men and women, within this community. These observational words are matched with Faye’s equally expressive lens, which absorbs the many sights of village and urban life—the delineation between the calm pace of the former and bustling force of the latter, especially regarding unnavigable traffic—gives a full picture of the many faces of Senegal. Her winking humor, often displayed in Ngor’s metropolitan troubles, also keeps this work from being a dour affair. By the end, through the monumental achievement that is “Letter from My Village,” one gets a tantalizing sense of Faye as an empathetic filmmaker and a biting storyteller. And hopefully, with a new 2K DCP now readily available, one hopes Faye’s inquisitive picture travels the world once more.
