A place to think deeply about movies
In this episode of the podcast, Alex discusses how she almost missed seeing the best movie of the 2010s and what she learned about making space for exploration in our movie-watching diet.
Alex Heeney reviews Crocodile Tears, a genre-inflected first feature film about a toxic mother-son relationship, from Indonesian filmmaker Tumpal Tampubolon. The film is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024.
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
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An impressive debut film from Indonesian filmmaker Tumpal Tampubolon, Crocodile Tears is a horror-inflected story of a too-close relationship between a mother (Marissa Anita, who also appeared in Yuni) and her adult son, Johan (Yusuf Mahardika), who is trying to break free from her clutches. They own and work on a crocodile farm, which isolates them from the world and forces them to interact with deadly predators daily. Indonesia has the most crocodile attacks in the world, so although these are technically in captivity, the threat remains. When Johan meets and falls for a woman, it endangers the bond between mother and son.
In Crocodile Tears, Tampubolon shows an uncommon gift for blocking and mise en scène, sensitive to the space between characters and within the frame. Consider that Johan shares a bed with his mother, where she will embrace him like a lover at night while he carefully removes her arm. Or the first meeting between Johan’s mother and paramour, where Johan and his mother stand close to one another on one side of the frame, and his paramour is placed effectively between them, but also off to the side – not quite part of their world but about to throw a wrench in it. I feel like a bit too much of an ignorant North American to claim to understand the cultural context for Crocodile Tears fully, but that didn’t hamper my enjoyment; it only increased my curiosity.
Read our interview with filmmaker Kamila Andini about her film The Seen and The Unseen.
Andini also directed Yuni, a TIFF 2021 selection, which we also reviewed. Read the review of Yuni. Crocodile Tears star Marissa Anita also appears in Yuni.
Set in Indonesia but directed by an American (Joshua Oppenheimer, whose fiction feature The End is at TIFF this year), The Look of Silence is a documentary that follows an Indonesian man confronting perpetrators of genocide that led to his brother’s death.
Alex Heeney reviews the personal documentary film Tata by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc. The film follows Lina as she reconnects with her estranged father and begins to ponder the origins of her intergenerational trauma and how to prevent passing it on to the daughter she’s expecting. Tata is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.
Tata is a quietly powerful story of director Lina Vdovîi reconnecting with her abusive father. Estranged for over a decade, Vdovîi has made a career as a journalist helping the helpless. In the meantime, her father has become a victim of employer abuse. When he gets in touch out of the blue because he’s doing poorly, Lina, with husband and co-director Radu Ciorniciuc in tow, decides to pay her father a visit where he now lives in Italy. Although Lena grew up in Moldova, her father moved abroad when she was still a girl, meaning they’ve been estranged for years.
On arriving in Italy, Lina finds herself in the strange position of having the power to help her downtrodden father who was once her tormenter. Having spent her early years rendering her powerless, Lina’s father is now the victim of abuse from an employer who cruelly leverages Lina’s father’s status as a caretaker and immigrant.
As Lina and her father plot to get documentary evidence of his boss’s wrongdoings, Lina finds herself struggling with something more difficult. Is she more like her father than she’d like to think? How did feeling controlled as a child make her controlling as an adult? And how much is her father merely a bad person versus the product of a violent and abusive society? These soul-searching questions propel Lina to visit her mother, family, and childhood community in Moldova to learn about the culture that shaped her father into someone who believed beating his children was just good parenting.
Tata starts as an intimate story of a possible reconnection between father and daughter, but quickly becomes a story of cycles of abuse, the society that condones it, and how we prevent ourselves from passing on intergenerational trauma to our children. Lina is pregnant with her first child, so part of her journey in the film to reconnect with her father and his past is about trying to deal with her demons before her daughter arrives. In this way, it recalls the excellent Canadian short Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin at this year’s festival.
Lina’s journey is documented by her husband, Romanian co-director Radu Ciornicuc, whose Acasa, My Home was also a Seventh Row favourite. The cameraman is often seen on screen talking to Lina or in a mirror, emphasizing the intimate nature of the film. The film feels especially unstaged and raw because of the occasional microphone gaffe or messy camerawork.
Although this is Vdovîi’s story, we often see or hear Radu on camera, challenging Lina’s narrative about herself and her father in a way only a husband could: gently, lovingly, and perceptively. Personal documentaries about excavating family trauma have become a genre unto themselves lately, counting Still Processing, North by Current and this year’s A Family among them. But rarely does the filmmaker actually find themselves challenged by the person who knows them best — who also has a say in the making of the film. As Lina acknowledges and addresses the hard truths raised by Radu, the film transforms from a father-daughter story into an excavation of toxic cultural norms and intergenerational trauma.
Alex Heeney reviews Belgian filmmaker Guillaume Senez’s third feature film, A Missing Part screening in the TIFF Special Presentations section. The film is about a French man searching for his Japanese daughter in Tokyo after years of separation because joint custody isn’t possible.
Listen to our TIFF 2024 podcast on bicultural daughters and their absent fathers Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
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In Guillaume Senez’s film A Missing Part, French taxi driver Jay (Romain Duris) lives in Tokyo, where he is married to (but separated from) a woman he pays alimony to but whose whereabouts – and that of the daughter they share – are unknown. His Japanese wife effectively kidnapped his daughter when she was three, granting her full custody by Japanese law. He’s been searching for his daughter for eight years. Just as he plans to sell his house and return home to France, he gets a lead that could change his plans entirely.
This sensitively made feature from Senez is a character study about a father who isn’t allowed to be a father, an unjust system that won’t allow joint custody, and the people caught within it. Carefully observed, Senez finds moments of joy and grace in an often brutal world and asks what sacrifices a father would make to see his daughter – when long-term and short-term goals may be at loggerheads.
Listen to the podcast on Bi-cultural daughters and their absent fathers at TIFF 2024 for a more detailed discussion of the film A Missing Part.
On the podcast, I discuss the films A Missing Part, Winter in Sokcho, and My Father’s Daughter.
Alex Heeney reviews Japanese-French filmmaker Koya Kamura’s impressive debut film, Winter in Sokcho, screening in the TIFF Platform Competition.
Listen to our TIFF 2024 podcast on bicultural daughters and their absent fathers Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.
Japanese-French filmmaker Koya Kamura’s impressively realized feature debut, Winter in Sokcho, is a story about a place, a young woman’s search for identity and place in the world, and a brief encounter between a visiting French artist and a Korean hotel worker. Soo-ha works at a lodging house in Sokcho, in her hometown; it may be a dead-end job where she’s killing time before she really starts her life or perhaps this could lead to something long-term. She is non-committal with her high school boyfriend, who dreams of being a model in Seoul and is superficial, whereas Soo-ha is serious. And she worries about her aging, lonely mother, who one day soon may not be so independent.
Soo-ha’s life gets upended when a French graphic artist comes to stay in the hotel. Her boss encourages Soo-ha to help the artist with everything he needs, from finding paper and ink to taking him to the demilitarized zone and the border to showing him around town. Their tentative friendship of forced proximity gives Soo-ha a taste of what her mother may have experienced with her French engineer father, who left Sokcho before Soo-ha was born.
An ode to the blues, greys, and whites of Sokcho – the production design and costumes match the landscape – a beautiful place that the inhabitants rarely remember to enjoy, so focused are they on the daily grind or escaping. Kamura is sensitive to the boundaries people build and break, tracking Soo-ha’s desire for a growing intimacy with the artist through how she invades his personal space – in the hotel, in the frame, and by one ill-advised touch of the hand. This is a satisfying, emotionally resonant film about family, identity, and finding your own path, featuring a breakout performance from Bella Kim.
Listen to the podcast on Bi-cultural daughters and their absent fathers at TIFF 2024 for a more detailed discussion of the film Winter in Sokcho.
Alex Heeney reviews Sámi filmmaker Egil Pederson’s film My Father’s Daughter at TIFF 2024
Listen to our TIFF 2024 podcast on bicultural daughters and their absent fathers Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.
Sámi-Norwegian filmmaker Egil Pederson’s My Father’s Daughter begins with a sort of Looking for Eric premise before expanding into a very thoughtful, often funny, coming-of-ager about the search for identity and the impossibility of ever really finding it. Sámi teenager Elvira (Sarah Olaussen Eira in a winning breakout performance) has spent her whole life believing she was a test tube baby with a Danish sperm donor, who, in her mind, is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones), who appears to comfort her as an imaginary dad friend.
Having spent her life vehemently rejecting her Sámi identity, she suddenly finds herself unsure who she is when she discovers her father might be Sámi, too. Elvira responds to the revelation about her father by suddenly embracing her Sámi identity in ways that seem not particularly authentic. In one hilarious piece of subtle production design, her poster of Coster-Waldau gets replaced with one for the film Sámi Blood.
For Pederson, figuring out your identity as a minority is an often funny minefield when everyone around you wants to leverage that identity for personal gain. Pederson sets up Elvira’s influencer classmate as a foil, as she’s constantly manipulating her own identity by claiming authenticity. At one point, she uses her connection to Elvira and Elvira’s Sámi identity to get more followers. When she thinks Elvira might be queer, too, it’s like a jackpot.
But everyone around Elvira struggles with their identity. Her best friend is constantly reading Karl Marx as though his pontifications on women were gospel. Her mother has recently come out as queer and started dating a woman but hasn’t quite figured out appropriate boundaries; Elvira regularly catches them making out. Elvira’s father turns up out of the blue, suddenly claiming being a father is crucial to his identity after years of absence. Everyone gives Elvira contradictory and bad advice about how a person should be. My Father’s Daughter is a sharp, satirical look at the irony of trying on different identities you can’t claim in search of your own identity.
Listen to the podcast on Bi-cultural daughters and their absent fathers at TIFF 2024 for a more detailed discussion of the film My Father’s Daughter.