Container #26 Neighbouring Sounds screening
...along with notes on the Toronto International Film Festival lineup and New York Film Festival
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Next Tuesday’s Screening:
Neighbouring Sounds, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012, 131m
Life in a middle-class neighbourhood in present day Recife, Brazil, takes an unexpected turn after the arrival of an independent private security firm. The presence of these men brings a sense of safety and a good deal of anxiety to a culture which runs on fear. Meanwhile, Bia, married and mother of two, must find a way to deal with the constant barking and howling of her neighbour’s dog. A slice of ‘Braziliana’, a reflection on history, violence and noise.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s startling feature debut reveals a number of his ongoing concerns: a seamless blend of genre and arthouse film tactics (in this case producing a slowburn thriller) used to study the northern city of Recife and how its history inexorably shapes contemporary race and class relations. A study of a street and a study of a family. A study of a city and a study of a country.
Unrated 15+ and with thanks to CinemaScópio
Part of our gradual Kleber Mendonça Filho retrospective.
Additional Readings (for those who have the time and curiosity): Two pieces from Artforum on Neighbouring Sounds: Dennis Lim’s festival report on IFFR and the film’s world premiere along with its later review by Melissa Anderson. Filmmaker Magazine also provides a clear-minded interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho. As an ex-critic and programmer, Kleber Mendonca Filho is quite clear-minded about his interests and strategies, which he articulates in his interview with Filmmaker Magazine. (Also particularly fun to return to after watching Pictures of Ghosts, he’s always been very open with what he’s up to.)
Upcoming Screenings:
29 August: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds
12 September: Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka
Neighbouring Sounds begins and Aquarius continues our retrospective of the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho.
Toronto and New York Film Festival notes:
Toronto International Film Festival have finished announcing their lineup. Their main slate is never that exciting (it’s more important as the North American catchall film festival for earlier European festivals.) However Wavelengths, their festival within a festival, is the key experimental showcase of the year.
Noteworthy features include Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3 (the two standouts from this year’s Locarno), Angela Shelanac’s Music and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, which we’ll be screening in October as part of our Filho retrospective. However it is Wavelengths’ shorts section with world premieres like Shambhabi Kaul’s Slow Shift (that somehow manages to suggest a cosmic duel between monkeys and a granite landscape), Jorge Jácome’s Shrooms (a bucolic work about a magic mushroom picker who then posts them via pigeons,) Tomonari Nishikawa’s Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (a startling patterning of fireworks and their aftermath), Joshua Gen Solondz’s We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (heartfelt noise cinema) and Simon Liu’s Let’s Talk (whose The Devil’s Peak was possible our favourite short of 2022.)
New York Film Festival feels in part like a canon building exercise for each year. Whereas most festivals groan with 100s of titles, NYFF restricts itself to 30-odd titles that have defined the year—the new Bonello, Hamaguchi, Haynes, Mann, Erice, etc along with Eureka and Pictures of Ghosts which we’ll screen shortly. Most will get theatrical screenings here, let alone New York. Its companion festival Currents, is a lot less focused than the main slate, but we’re eagerly anticipating the world premiere of Ross Meckfessel’s Spark From a Falling Star (whose work we screened as part of our 16mm NYC showcase) and Luke Fowler’s N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild) a portrait of the composer Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari.
Thank you. We look forward to catching you on Tuesday for our screening of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds, and then a fortnight later for our presentation of Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (pictured above), a three-part mythic epic and our favourite film of Cannes 2023.