The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) by Ivan Dixon

The Spook Who Sat by the Door, from the Revival section of the festival, is a radical political thriller on a fictional African-American revolution that was suppressed from public upon its initial release, and allegedly, its print disappeared until a negative resurfaced some 30 years later. But that’s about the only sensible elements that keeps the film interesting. From its first couple of framings, the film can’t help but reveal itself as a TV movie, that is to say, the camera doesn’t see anything. Granted, it’s a TV movie with radical politics, but it’s a shame to see it progresses like a numb machine, with no rhythm or staging whatsoever, much like the CIA examination procedures used in the attempt to pick out their, very strategic, first Black officer in history. Our well-read and quietly combative protagonist then, after finishing his career as a CIA officer (a career that is largely omitted in the film except for the selection process), returns to Chicago to secretly assemble a group of Black guerrilla warriors, using the exact techniques he had mastered from the agency, under the nickname “Uncle Sam.” There’re still some images, of course, for the film festival made it clear that this movie is topical for the moment, where protests and riots are displayed, where strategies of activism are examined, troublingly echos the reality in 2020 that is the George Floyd protests and many more. But while the modern images of police brutality and systemic racism are remembered, a “radical” TV movie remains a TV movie, and under the umbrella of its explosive pitch (Black revolution! Battle of Algiers tactics! Censored by US government!), the movie remains in its cozy nest of safe coverages, and with its puppet characters, it tells its story safely from its clockwork narrative, programmed like a good little game, waiting for the inevitable end. The world of “Uncle Sam” is a closed set, where life is staged as stationary, where the real human struggle non-existent – an engrossing fantasy at best, and a dreadful lie at worst.

Fauna (2020) by Nicolás Pereda

The cinema of Latin America always has a fascination for the non-endings: narratives unfulfilled, characters disappeared, the collages, the fragmentizations, the Bolaño sensitivity…… Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda’s new film Fauna, selected in the Current section, is a continuation of that thread, a 2-part narrative that revolves around a couple of actors, Paco and Luisa, one of which played a minor role in the Netflix series Narco (in real life and in the fiction). The thesis here then becomes intact with Latin Cinema’s founding principle, to challenge the colonial narrative of Hollywood cinema, where series like Narcos being one of its latest incarnations. Luisa introduces Paco to his father, who later asked him to act out a scene he played from the show, to which Paco replied: “I had no lines. There will be lines in the next season.” “Do it,” the father-in-law commands, thinking it was a piece of cake for the “rising star.” Under pressure, he proceeded to act out his scene: aloof, rigid, without any words, and of course, the patriarch doesn’t understand. The Hollywood production had rigged his thought. Also on that night, the actress rehearses with her mother, also a performer, a scene based on Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, a mirror image. Struggle to perform her lines for an audition, the daughter is tense and fragile, where the mother then performs with a tone almost like pure reading, but somehow possessed even stronger emotion. The undercurrents are, no doubt, evident. What does this text means for the mother and daughter? Will there really be a “next season” for Paco? But those stories ended there (or did it?), and abruptly, the film went on to unravel a fiction within the narrative, loosely based on Mario Levrero’s novel “Fauna.” Much like Mariano Llinas’ 14-hour La flor, but sans its unmatched amateurish texture, the actors in the previous narrative evolve into new characters, and this is where the film really shined as a good practice  and examination on the act of performing itself, and playful curiosity gets to breathe from grim obligations.