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IFFBoston Fall Focus will feature more films by women than by men for first time in its history. Here's what to see
“We didn’t deliberately set out to pick so many feminist films this year,” says Independent Film Festival Boston's executive director Brian Tamm.
“That’s what you think,” interrupts program director Nancy Campbell, with a conspiratorial laugh.
We’re chatting about the lineup for this year’s IFFBoston Fall Focus, the organization’s annual four-day weekend at the Brattle Theatre bringing early previews of the season’s award contenders and other favorites culled from festivals around the world. Previous installments gave area audiences our first peeks at “Roma,” “Lady Bird” and “Memoria,” to name a few. This year, six of the eleven movies on the docket are directed by women, a first-time majority in IFFBoston’s history. While Campbell would never intentionally program to meet a quota, given current events and the post-Roe political climate, it’s no surprise to find female stories at the forefront of most conversations in the arts. How perfect that the opening night film is called “Women Talking.”
Directed by Sarah Polley, the former child actress who established such a powerful voice behind the camera with “Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz” and “Stories We Tell,” it’s a loose adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel. Shifting the book’s Bolivian Mennonite community to an unnamed, allegorical English-language space, the movie stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and the great Jessie Buckley as docile and devoutly religious wives trying to assess their options in the aftermath of a brutal child rape. Something like a cross between “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “12 Angry Men,” it co-stars Judith Ivey and Frances McDormand, who also served as a producer on the picture.
Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve follows up her wonderful “Bergman Island” with another maybe-autobiographical drama. “One Fine Morning” features the luminous Léa Seydoux – who apparently you can’t make a French film without these days – as a single mom caring for her ailing father, frustrated to find herself falling in love with a married old friend. Meanwhile, Hansen-Løve’s “Bergman Island” star and “Phantom Thread” phenomenon Vicky Krieps headlines “Corsage,” a prickly biopic of the irreverent 18th century Empress Elisabeth “Sisi” of Austria set to a soundtrack of 20st century ballads by Kris Kristofferson and The Rolling Stones.
Documentarian Alice Diop makes her narrative feature debut with “Saint Omer,” a crushing courtroom drama about a Senegalese immigrant (Guslagie Malanda) accused of abandoning her 15-month-old daughter on a beach in northern France, as chronicled by a true crime writer obsessed with explaining “Medea” to a modern audience. There’s also Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny,” a semi-remake of, and also an answer to, Ousmane Sembène’s seminal 1962 “Black Girl,” examining race relations in the only way that’s proven productive in recent years – as a Blumhouse horror movie. “Squid Game” fans will be psyched to see star Lee Jung-jae making his directorial debut in the bruising, retro-1980s action thriller “Hunt,” while writer-director Elegance Bratton tells his own story of coming out as a gay Marine in “The Inspection.”
The festival’s centerpiece selection, “Broker,” is the latest from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda and something of a pet project for the IFFBoston folks. The venerable Japanese Palme d’Or winner has long been Campbell and Tamm’s favorite living filmmaker, and they’ve been bringing his gentle, humanistic stories to local audiences for as long as they’ve been in business. In recent years the Fall Focus has presented Kore-eda’s “After the Storm,” “Shoplifters” and “The Truth.” This one finds the director filming in South Korea, with a cast including “Parasite” star Song Kang Ho and my personal fave Doona Bae from “The Host” and “Linda Linda Linda” in the tale of grifters selling orphaned babies on the black market. “I could tell you what the movie is about,” Tamm teases, “but since it’s a Kore-eda film you already know it’s about family.” Sold.
“We’ve also got half the ‘Amarcords’ this fall,” he jokes, kidding with an old Fellini film reference to directors obsessively replicating their formative years on screen. Steven Spielberg’s “The Fablemans” and Alejandro Iñárritu's “Bardo” are two nostalgic reminiscences that won’t be arriving in Boston until later this year, but in the meantime IFFBoston’s Fall Focus is bringing Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” about the goings on at a British movie theater showing “Chariots of Fire” and “The Blues Brothers” back in 1981. They’ve also got James Gray’s “Armageddon Time,” which recreates the director’s childhood in Queens when Ronald Reagan first began colonizing the popular consciousness. Anthony Hopkins plays his crotchety grandpa and Anne Hathaway is excellent as Gray’s put-upon mom, with Jeremy Strong acting like he’s Adam Driver auditioning for an Alan Arkin biopic in an erratic picture that nonetheless contains a thoughtful reckoning about what it means to be born white in America. (Jessica Chastain showing up as Trump’s sister is way too much, though.)
This critic’s pick for the best (that I’ve seen so far) of the festival is Lila Neugebauer’s “Causeway,” a beautifully modulated drama starring Jennifer Lawrence as an Afghanistan War vet returning home to New Orleans after suffering a traumatic brain injury in an IED attack. Everything about the synopsis sounds sensationalized, but this is a quiet, unassuming picture that moves at the speed of everyday life. Lawrence was first introduced to local audiences at IFFBoston in 2010 with “Winter’s Bone” (I’ll never forget how excited her co-star John Hawkes was to tell me about the Guitar Hero tournament going on downstairs at the Somerville) and this a welcome return to her roots in tough-minded, small-scaled dramas after losing a decade or so to franchise films and David O. Russell.
She’s outstanding here, employing the clipped diction and precise movements of a military lifer falling into an unexpected friendship with Brian Tyree Henry’s laid-back, pothead mechanic who has nothing better to do than take care of her. Their relationship never goes quite where you expect (for starters, Lawrence plays a lesbian) and I must confess that a lot of the suspense in “Causeway” was me worrying that Neugebauer was gonna screw it up with some sort of contrived external conflict that “raises the stakes” according to Studio Screenwriting 101.
What a relief that instead it’s just a wonderful movie about two ordinary people trying to do their best to muddle through regular circumstances, with the humane acknowledgement that such things are tougher on some folks than others and an opportunity for transcendence in our quietest moments. “Causeway” is the kind of movie we come to festivals like IFFBoston to see.
The Independent Film Festival Boston's Fall Focus runs at the Brattle Theatre from Thursday, Oct. 27 through Sunday, Oct. 30
