In the far future, in a sterile world without nature or animals, Pasi (Miro Lopperi), a lonely designer of synthetic pets, unexpectedly discovers the last surviving squirrel. He decides to defy the rules and keep it alive, but things don’t go quite according to plan: the squirrel gets depressed, Pasi falls in love, and his carefully controlled life begins to unravel. The Squirrel is Finland's Official Entry for the Academy Awards Best International Feature Film. Here is the trailer:
On my last day at the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival I was able to have a sit down conversation with Ukrainian filmmaker Pavlo Ostrikov. We spoke about his science fiction movie U Are The Universe. The seven year journey it took to realize the film, finding his cast, the design of the movie as well as what life is like during the war to stop the Russian invasion.
Here are some more exclusive stills from U Are The Universe.
By: Carol Borden
Bertrand Mandico After Blue (Dirty Paradise) / After Blue (Paradis Sale) (France, 2021) Humanity has moved off Earth, after wrecking it, and colonized another planet called, After Blue. Only “ovary-bearers” survived, as the planet has strange effects on the growth of hair and cis-men died when their hair grew inwards. The surviving high femme women made rules to prevent what happened on Earth from happening again. Well, at least some of it. They allowed only horses for travel and guns--bearing the brands of Gucci and Paul Smith--for hunting. They lived in small groups based on national identity, mostly. The film opens with a teenager named Roxy (Paula Luna) talking to another woman. She tells the story of finding a woman buried up to her neck in sand and releasing her in exchange for three wishes. Unfortunately for Roxy’s friends, the woman is the notorious criminal Kate Bush (Agata Buzek) and she kills all three of them.
As punishment the women of Roxy’s village order her mother, Zora (Elina Löwensohn), the village hairdresser, to hunt down Kate Bush and bring back proof of her death. Roxy comes along to help and because “she has nothing better to do.” And so they meet other women wearing broad brimmed 1970s lady hats for stetsons and glittery eye-shadow along the way and face death and sexual menace.
After Blue looks fantastic, with stylized space sound stages and dressing natural areas to they look like stylized space sound stages. I like the design of the dead. I like the sound design and the score. I like the make-up and the glowing femdroid eyes. Basically, I like almost everything about this film except the world-building and the story. They rub me wrong. I’m not comfortable with the implicit gender essentialism. And while I always enjoy rock people on alien worlds and dig these particular rock people’s geode heads, I’m not comfortable with the Indigenous people of After Blue, the “Indiams” or how they are treated or how they are represented even while knowing that Mandico probably means nothing by it. But I’m not in France. I’m in the United States. And “Indiams” especially rub me wrong after watching the TIFF Land Acknowledgment and a celebration of the work of Indigenous film maker and artist Alanis Obomsawin. And yes, I have watched Westerns with terrible people in them. And I have watched movies, like Neptune Frost, where the people are largely allegorical. But Zora aside, the women of After Blue are one note and that note is unpleasant. And the premise of a planet ruled by women who are sorta fashion-obsessed and whose civilization is catty and/or bitchy is hardly new. Please see nearly any post-World War II space lady movie from Cat-Women Of The Moon (1953) to Queen Of Outer Space (1958). (Ship Of Monsters / La Nave De Los Monstruous (1960) is lovely, though). Sometimes stream of consciousness just washes up the easiest and shallowest thoughtless representations. I can’t help wondering what Neptune Frost (Rwanda / USA, 2021) or Night Raiders (Canada, 2021) might have been like with these resources. And I really hope we decolonize better before we colonize other worlds. The human women of After Blue have not learned enough.
After Blue reminds me of 1970s French science fiction comics and looks like a very faithful adaptation of one that is happy to stay in the 1970s. But you might not have this reaction. You might find more effective and playful satire than I did. Maybe you’re just looking for style and cool ideas for aliens and alien landscapes to wash over you. Like I said, After Blue is well within the tradition of French science fiction--especially bande dessinée science fiction and if you like that, you might like After Blue (Dirty Paradise).
Danis Goulet Night Raiders (Canada/New Zealand 2021)
In Saskatchewan-born Cree-Métis writer/director, Danis Goulet’s feature film debut Night Raiders the year is 2043. The resonance of this story could reflect 1883 or 1943 or 1997. In the aftermath of a North American civil war people have suffered greatly, food is scarce and opportunities are few. The film opens with Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) who is a Cree mother trying to navigate this stark and dangerous world and protect her daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart). They forge for food while trying to stay out of view of the omnipresent drones. Waseese encounters a bird and calls to it. After several attempts the bird responds to Waseese’s call. She then gets caught in a man-made trap and a drone appears from the gray, chilly sky. Niska and Waseese return to their current place of residence, an old school bus. Niska destroys the dwelling as they try to cover their tracks from the ever-present surveillance state.
Even with the world in ruins the powers that be do everything possible to exert maximum control. Danger is everywhere. Children are property of the state. People are not naturally citizens of the state. That must be “earned” by sending a child to the Academy. As Niska and Waseese make their way through the ruins of the nearest city, large, loudspeakers are everywhere proclaiming, “The academy keeps your children safe”, “Every child deserves a brighter future”. The academy is a sprawling state system that is brainwashing children to turn them into soldiers for the state. As I watch and write this I am currently sitting in my wife’s civics classroom in a small town in South Texas where the politics of the day is a battle between teaching “critical race theory”, referencing the “1619 project” and the state trying to impose the “1836 project”. Who controls the textbooks, controls the history and the narrative, which ultimately controls the common knowledge of events which influences how people treat one another. History is powerful. Both freeing and controlling, depending what is being taught. To truly find justice for the horrors of colonialism, the kidnapping and killing of Indigenous children, broken treaties, stolen land and genocide the truth must be sought out and taught.
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Brooklyn Letexier-Hart deliver powerhouse performances as they navigate this world. We see the strength, determination and the emotional toll of daily survival avoiding viruses, a state that wants to control and kill you. The world of 2043 is fully realized. There are elements that are both recognizable and pieces of a future that are realistically not that far away.
There are films that arrive a precise moment of time. Night Raiders was years in the making and the result of several generations preceding it. In October, 2018, Goulet emailed Taika Watiti. "I've known Taika for about 15 years: at Sundance where we both had our films, through my work at Imaginative where Taika has been many times, and then meeting on the festival circuit as we do year after year. There's a tight-knit global community of Indigenous filmmakers who have all grown up together. I sent him the script and asked if he wanted to be involved. He said, he'd do whatever he could. And then Ainslee Gardner and Georgina Condor, who he'd also worked with, came on as the New Zealand producers and that was when Chelsea came on as the New Zealand on-set producer representing their company." Night Raiders became the first Canadian/ New Zealand Indigenous co-production.
The amount of work and imagination that Goulet has put into this also show how prescient this story is. The Meekaw Virus first occurs in the Night Raiders timeline in the year 2042. Principal photography for the film took place in October through early November, 2020 and predated the first mention of COVID-19 by a month. This is both a story of a hundred years ago, our own present and if white people do not actually embrace reconciliation and justice for what our forefathers have sown, this story will continue in the year 2043. The state of cinema in recent years has sparks of light bursting through. Here in 2021 although the events of the modern day are frightening and isolating, we are also living in an exciting time of seeing new voices smash through glass ceilings and long controlled systems of who helms a film and what stories are elevated. Cinema at it’s finest is inspiring and brings us together. Congratulations to Danis Goulet and her entire team for making a dystopian film that illuminates, scares us, and gives us hope.
