"If cinema was a 19th-century dream actualised in the 20th century through chemistry, then the auteur was a 20th-century dream that needs to be actualised in the 21st through digital. Canadian experimentalist Isiah Medina is hellbent on that task in his latest feature, which almost entirely comprises a troupe of po-faced cineastes declaiming such theory-freighted slogans, and bemoaning what dogs the genuine auteur these days: western-centric power hierarchies, industry racism, the economic exclusion of serious artistic work, the tyranny of language."
"Mark Bacolcol plays Clem, a director struggling to finance his next feature in the face of the system. Boyfriend Ez (Kalil Haddad) is an unblinking ideologue, who peps Clem up by telling him: Be proud: regardless of race, most people don't like your work. Collaborators Nico (Jonalyn Aguilar) and March (Charlotte Zhang) are struggling to hurdle the same structural obstacles."
"There are flare-ups of self-awareness, or at least pre-emptiveness. Now I've found out that the way my characters talk isn't human, says Clem. Why is it we're afraid of appearing inhuman? Not a question that seems to bother the aggressively high-minded Medina, though it's difficult to know how tongue-in-cheek this (presumably) auto-portrait is. It doesn't seem to qualify as satire, or even psychological candour; rather, a burst of self-referential chaff to throw off anyone with conventional narrative expectations."
A feature almost entirely comprises a troupe of po-faced cineastes declaiming theory-laden slogans while diagnosing what weakens the auteur: western-centric power hierarchies, industry racism, economic exclusion of serious artistic work, and the tyranny of language. A director named Clem struggles to finance his next project amid ideologues and collaborators who face identical structural obstacles. Dialogue is deliberately non-naturalistic and self-conscious, with characters noting the inhuman quality of their speech. Visual and narrative strategies splice viewpoints cubist-style, moving between adjacent scenes and reveries. Collage and ironic detachment function to unsettle conventional narrative expectations and foreground aesthetic critique.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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