Seventh Row

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First Feature

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TIFF 2024 Film Review: Tumpal Tampubolon’s Crocodile Tears

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.

Still from Tumpal Tampubolon's debut feature film Crocodile Tears, photo courtesy of TIFF
Still from Tumpal Tampubolon’s debut feature film Crocodile Tears, photo courtesy of TIFF

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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. 

More films from Indonesia like Tumpal Tampubolon’s Crocodile Tears

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.

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TIFF 2024 Film Review: Koya Kamura’s Winter in Sokcho

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.

Still from Koya Kamura's Winter in Sockho, photo courtesy of TIFF. An Algerian middle-aged man and a Korean young woman walk together on a bridge in Sokcho in winter. The image is full of blues, greys, and whites.
Still from Koya Kamura’s Winter in Sockho, photo courtesy of TIFF

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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. 

A beautifully made film

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 the TIFF 2024 film Winter in Sokcho

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.

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TIFF 2024 Film Review: Egil Pederson’s My Father’s Daughter

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.

Still from My Father's Daughter, a TIFF 2024 film which we review.
Still from Egil Pederson’s film My Father’s Daughter, photo courtesy of TIFF

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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. 

Exploring the challenges of a minority identity in the film My Father’s Daughter

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 the TIFF 2024 film My Father’s Daughter

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.

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TIFF 2024 Review: Leonardo van Dijl’s Julie Keeps Quiet

Alex Heeney reviews Belgian filmmaker Leonardo van Dijl’s tennis-set film Julie Keeps Quiet about a teenage girl re-learning the importance of boundaries after a possible sexual assault.

Listen to our TIFF 2024 podcast on sports films — out Saturday — that aren’t about sports for a more detailed discussion fo the film. Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated

Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.

Julie in the TIFF 2024 Julie Keeps Quiet, directed by Leonardo van Dijl. Photo Courtesy of TIFF. A white athletic teenage girl in a tank top and long hair in a bun sits on the ground in a washroom and turns her head toward two girls talking, who are blurred in the background.
Julie in the TIFF 2024 Julie Keeps Quiet, directed by Leonardo van Dijl. Photo Courtesy of TIFF

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Leonardo van Dijl’s Cannes Critics’ Week highlight, Julie Keeps Quiet, is a thoughtful character study about a teenage tennis athlete coping with the aftermath of a sexual abuse scandal from her coach. The eponymous Julie spends the film in a very internal world, removed from her surroundings; van Dijl uses shallow focus and deep frames to emphasize this. The star tennis player at her local tennis club, she already feels alienated as the only person in the club who isn’t paying her way through. When a former student of her coach dies by suicide, an investigation begins into the coach’s culpability. 

The film is about a girl coping with what happens when boundaries have been so irreparably breached that you don’t even know what is appropriate anymore. Tennis, with its carefully outlined court and rules about what is in and out of bounds, is an excellent metaphor for this. Van Dijl is conscious of when sounds, like an unseen phone alert, and people breach the frame or push across it into another person’s space. Van Dijl directed Julie Keeps Quiet with an incredible formal precision, favouring carefully blocked still frames. One particularly tense scene finds two characters seated across from each other at a table, and the choreography is all in where their hands are. 

How Julie Keeps Quiet differs from other stories of childhood sexual assault

Unlike other stories about adults inappropriately crossing boundaries with children, like Una and Slalom, Van Dijl models what good boundaries look like in the form of Julie’s replacement coach. As viewers, we are wary whenever he shares a frame with her: will he come too close? But there’s a casualness to his body language, an understanding of what’s appropriate when and where, and how he quietly but respectfully enforces this while ensuring he respects Julie’s boundaries. It’s a hopeful addition that renders Julie Keeps Quiet more than just an excavation of trauma but of the possibilities for moving forward.

The title Julie Keeps Quiet reminds me of the oppositely titled The Screaming Man, a film in which nobody actually screams — except on the inside. From the beginning, we sense that Julie has a secret, and it’s true that she never explicitly shares it. But she repeatedly hints at it to the people around her she trusts in ways she knows they couldn’t have missed. The script by Leonardo van Dijl and Ruth Becqueart is very thoughtful about how we talk around difficult subjects, communicating with body language and adjacent truths.

Unlike the hit tennis film of the year, Challengers, Julie Keeps Quiet stars a real teenage tennis athlete (Tessa Van den Broeck). As a story about bodies and people pushing their bodies, a non-professional actor who looks the part — in a way only possible from years of training — helps immensely. The performance feels very much crafted by van Dijl’s directorial eye, as the frame usually prioritizes his mise en scène over her reactions, and she’s only asked to play one note. Still, Van den Broeck has some incredible moments.