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‘Exile’
Rent it for free on the Goethe-Institut’s website.
“It’s not necessarily because you’re a foreigner … maybe they dislike you as a person,” Nora, the German wife of Kosovan immigrant Xhafer (Misel Maticevic), says in Visar Morina’s drama, after her husband relates his feeling of being ostracized at his job. For anyone who’s ever experienced racist microaggressions, that statement will cut deep. Everyday bigotry thrives by turning the political into the personal, by making you wonder: Is it society, or is it just me? “Exile” builds a taut thriller around this uncertainty. Xhafer comes home one day to find a dead rat hanging from his door. Already driven up the wall by problems at work — he is often mistaken for a Croatian; he seems to be routinely left off mailing lists — he becomes convinced that it’s the doing of a xenophobic colleague.
Whether Xhafer is paranoid and deluded or genuinely being persecuted is the film’s central mystery, and it brings to light both the real wounds of microaggressions and the ways in which they can be weaponized even by those who suffer their brunt. That Xhafer is treated as an outsider is evident, but his dismissive interactions with a Kosovan cleaning woman at work and colleagues struggling with mental health issues drive home his blinkered self-pity, his indignant indifference to those worse off than him. One of the sharpest films I’ve seen about the immigrant experience in some time, “Exile” dramatizes Toni Morrison’s famous assertion: “The very serious function of racism … is distraction.”
‘Another World’
Starring Vincent Lindon as Philippe, an executive at a multinational firm, this French drama is a sinister vision of corporate amorality — a slow-burn portrait of how profit-hungry capitalism corrodes people’s consciences. The film opens with a divorce settlement meeting that emphasizes how mercenary concerns have invaded every inch of Philippe’s life: As their lawyers argue about properties and alimony, he and his estranged wife Anne (Sandrine Kiberlain) recoil at the flattening of their shared life into crude numbers.
From then on, “Another World” unfolds as a Russian roulette of the meetings Philippe takes in icy, impersonal rooms with men and women in suits. In Paris, Philippe pushes futilely against bosses who demand he lay off 10 percent of the staff at the factory he manages, no matter the threat to their safety; at the factory, he struggles to reassure overstretched workers and union leaders who fear for their livelihoods; at a mental health clinic, he and his wife confront the deteriorating psychological state of their son, who’s been taken out of college.
The film often cuts abruptly from one setting to the next, bringing into sharp focus Philippe’s chameleonic — but increasingly tortured — shifts in personality, from aggrieved underling to cruel boss to failing husband and father. But if Lindon brings great tenderness and depth to his role, “Another World” keeps its focus on the system rather than the individual, and on the insidious forces that blur the two.
‘The Alleys’
Set on the gritty, mazelike streets of East Amman, Jordan, Bassel Ghandour’s thriller moves and turns like a kaleidoscope: In each of its four chapters, characters shuffle about and meet in new configurations, heroes becoming villains and villains becoming victims. At the heart of the film’s web of deceptions, conspiracies and deaths is a tale as old as time: a forbidden love affair between Ali (Emad Azmi), a street hustler who pretends that he works for an American company, and Lana (Baraka Rahmani), the daughter of a disapproving salon owner, Aseel (Nadira Omran). When an anonymous voyeur tries to blackmail Aseel with a video of Ali and Lana’s secret trysts, the mother goes to Abbas, a local mob boss, for help — setting off uncontrollable, domino-like consequences.
The film digresses into wry backstories at every turn, relating how Aseel’s failed elopement with a good-for-nothing man turned her against love, and how Abbas’s sidekick, Hanadi, went from being a prostitute to a fearsome gangster. Somewhere between a mafia movie and a comedy of errors, “The Alleys” turns all its characters into casualties of chance; every twist in this movie is unpredictable, because every character is both morally dubious and somewhat idiotic. What emerges from all the high jinks is a portrait of the striving underclass of Amman, a city whose roil of people and aspirations outpaces even the most determined hustlers.
‘Crystal Swan’
Set in Belarus in the 1990s, Darya Zhuk’s slacker comedy gently satirizes the dreams of America that enamored young people in Eastern Europe in the years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The film follows a feisty punk teenager, Velya (Alina Nasibullina), who yearns to leave behind her worthless boyfriend and hippie mother in Minsk and move to Chicago to hack it as a D.J. She manages to fake an employment letter for her visa interview, but when she realizes that the embassy intends to call the phone number she made up on the application, Velya has to hunt down the house associated with those digits — a mission that takes her to a small factory town outside of Minsk, and embroils her in the goings-on of a family preparing for a wedding.
The joke of it all is that Velya doesn’t need to go to America to experience a foreign land; just a short bus ride away from her hometown is a place starkly unlike her urban milieu, where people live and dream at a much more modest scale. Anchored by a riveting Nasibullina, with her flashing, pastel-lined eyes and insouciant dirty-blond bob, “Crystal Swan” vividly evokes the hunger for individualism in post-Soviet countries and the precariousness of new capitalist realities.
“Myanmar Diaries” opens with a startling scene that sets the stage for what is to come. A young woman, dressed in bright yellow exercise gear, records a fitness video on the street, bopping cheerily to pop tunes, when black military cars suddenly appear in the background, heading toward the parliament building on the horizon. The invasion of everyday life by authoritarian violence is the subject of this stirring movie, which collages together footage shot by various anonymous Burmese filmmakers in the aftermath of the country’s 2021 military coup.
The film creates an urgent audiovisual symphony out of shaky, on-the-ground footage of citizen protests and the terrible violence inflicted by soldiers, and intimate, staged scenes based on testimonies of people living under violence and uncertainty. The documentary sequences confront us with the physical toll of the coup and the military’s reckless bloodletting; the fictional scenes, which include animations and horror-tinged set pieces, get at the psychological effects: the fear, the lost dreams, the fractured families. “Myanmar Diaries” is the rare work that captures the now of a historical upheaval, pleading to us to pay attention before a brutal present congeals into the past and determines the future.
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