Eight under-the-radar LFF films

Lois Patiño, Spain 

You’ve never seen Shakespeare quite like this. Galician director Lois Patiño’s Ariel transforms The Tempest into an enchanting mystery set in the Azores, where all the archipelago’s a stage. Travelling to the island of Faial to join a theatrical tour of the play, Agustina, an actress, finds everyone on her ferry fast asleep. Upon arriving, she learns that each of the island’s inhabitants embodies a Shakespearean character, ceaselessly reciting his work; elderly women enact Macbeth as they load their food shopping into their cars. As the only one who recalls life outside this surreal thespian territory, Agustina attempts to break the spell. Ariel is Patiño’s most accessible narrative yet, but its plot is less important than submitting to its strange, sensuous magic. 

— Hope Rangaswami

Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil-Mexico-Chile-Netherlands 

Following Divine Love (2019), his neon-styled religious parable set in 2027, Gabriel Mascaro has returned with another idiosyncratic vision of a near-future Brazil – a dystopia, certainly, but one that’s played for its absurdity and wry social critique rather than any lasting sense of terror or gloom. The film’s protagonist is 77-year-old Tereza, who’s to be moved to a government colony where senior citizens are taken to live out their final years. Tereza’s attempt to shape a different future for herself becomes a picaresque odyssey that twists and turns like the bends of a river, and is less about the threat of pursuit than her freewheeling encounters, the rough-and-ready charm of the outsiders who help her along her way and the route to a new sense of herself. 

— Sam Wigley

Michel Franco, Mexico 

Three dream-titled films premiered at Berlin earlier this year – including Dreams (Sex Love), which won the Golden Bear – but Michel Franco’s was the one you emerged from in a clammy sweat. Set in an upscale world of SUVs, luxury hotels and high-end galleries, it’s an exacting parable about wealth and desire, in which Jessica Chastain – icily chic and dressed to kill – plays a philanthropist entangled in a lust-fuelled affair with a Mexican ballet dancer (Isaac Hernández), whose arrival north of the border threatens to upend her cultivated lifestyle. I wasn’t sure about Franco’s over-obvious class satire New Order (2020), but Dreams picks away at the privilege gap with far greater precision and a more engaging grasp of character. The images are pristine, but there’s ferocity in them. 

— Sam Wigley

Seth & Peter Scriver, Canada 

The phrase ‘documentary animation’ brings to mind solemn subjects – so many filmmakers seem to need to excuse the perceived unseriousness of their chosen medium. With Endless Cookie, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In the Shamattawa First Nation, a community in icy North Manitoba, Canada, a (white) filmmaker, Seth Scriver, visits his (First Nation) brother, Peter, to make the very film we’re watching. As he attempts to record his brother’s stories, a series of digressions and interruptions throw us into a world of punkish visuals, dense in-jokes and weird and wonderful characters, from a talking sock to mushroom-nosed creatures. But sift through the fart gags and there is poignancy; this film looks back through the generations to traditions both continued and lost. 

— Thomas Flew

Reid Davenport, US

In 1983, Elizabeth Bouvia, a 26-year-old American woman with cerebral palsy and severe degenerative arthritis, entered a hospital for the purpose of ending her life, but her attempt was rebuffed in the courts. In Life After, Reid Davenport revisits the case and embarks on an insightful consideration that braids together philosophical, personal and political implications to create a film essay on the disabled experience. On the policy front, he also illuminates (and, for many viewers, exposes) how right-to-die initiatives can have chilling results. But as clearly and subtly as Davenport conveys the implications of such a policy, he maintains a grounded sense of compassion and an appreciation for the human complexity in every story that he brings into the folds of this film. 

— Nicolas Rapold

Joel Alfonso Vargas, US

Joel Alfonso Vargas’s first film has love for both the hustle and the hustler. You can feel the affection the director has for his charismatic lead, Rico (Juan Collado), a Dominican teen who spends his days at the Bronx’s Orchard Beach selling bottles of luminous, sugary, homebrewed booze for $15 a pop. Vargas takes an almost fly-on-the-wall approach, as Rico tries to go legit with a regular job when he learns he’s going to become a father. Static shots by Rufai Ajala fix us in the cramped flat Rico shares with his mother, sister and 16-year-old soon-to-be-momma Destiny, as though we’re sitting on the couch witnessing their rows about Rico’s weed-smoking and slackerdom. It’s a slow-burn coming-of-ager without sudden jolts, but like the potent beverages in Rico’s cooler, its effects last. 

— Katie McCabe

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, Thailand-France-Singapore-Germany 

A broken Hoover and the arrival of a sexy repairman trigger the events of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s bewitching dark comedy A Useful Ghost. In a series of elegantly arranged static compositions, the film unfolds a fantastically off-kilter world in which humans live casually among ghosts that take the form of household appliances. The ghost of the title is a friendly vacuum cleaner – the deceased wife (Davika Hoorne) of the son of an exploitative factory owner who seems less disturbed by the fact that her son is having sex with a machine than the fact that he’s in love with a working-class woman. A tragic love story that blooms into an indictment of unethical labour practices, A Useful Ghost surprises you at every turn. 

— Beatrice Loayza

Frédéric Hambalek, Germany

The most uproarious German comedy since Toni Erdmann (2016), this second feature by writer-director Frédéric Hambalek puts a gentrified arthouse gloss on the kind of high-concept comic scenario that Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler would be right at home in – Liar Liar (1997) scored to Beethoven string quartets. What Marielle Knows continues the director’s interest in the bond between parents and withdrawn, unfathomable kids, but moves into the realm of satire and fantasy, as teenage Marielle develops a telepathic ability to listen in on her parents’ private lives. Hambalek uses this Tales of the Unexpected-style device without any other fantasy trappings to arrive at a uniquely contemporary comedy of manners that pulls off an impressive balance of insight and playful provocation. 

— Sam Wigley