Screen Grabs: Local auteur JP Allen stays offbeat, indie, and frisky

Two special local screen events launch this week. One is the inaugural San Francisco Brazilian Film Festival, at the Vogue Theater Thurs/24 through Sun/27. Those four days comprise a “Bridge to Brazil” (the theme this first year) through selections highlighting that vast nation’s different regions and cultural aspects.

We were not able to preview any of the lineup, but the opening night selection is Pedro Pinho’s West Africa-set I Only Rest in the Storm, a Cannes prize-winning drama that runs nearly four hours. The official closer is Gabriel Mascaro’s excellent near-future parable The Blue Trail aka O Ultimo Azul, which we reviewed when it opened here this spring. For full program, schedule and ticket info, go to www.cinemabrazil.org.

Meanwhile, Coffee and Language Productions is celebrating its 25th year of existence with three of the eleven features that SF-based writer, director, and sometime actor J.P. Allen has produced here over that span. The kickoff at the Roxie next Mon/28 is his most recent, Memorizing Alison; the next night at the Rafael Film Center in Marin it’s 2014’s The Filmmaker; and on Mon/5 at the Rialto Elmwood in Berkeley, there’s his 2021 debut entitled (natch) Coffee and Language.

These are all offbeat indie dramas heavy on Bay Area locations, enigmatic plotlines and frisky adult characters. More info on the series and the company can be found here.

Also arriving this week: 

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
Despite winning two Oscars (for Moonlight and Green Book), Oakland native Mahershala Ali hasn’t quite found his niche onscreen—he’s a strikingly authoritative actor not fully served by the likes of Jurassic Park Rebirth or various voice-only gigs. So it’s good to see him carry this second feature by Bassam Tariq, whose first, Mogul Mowgli, was equally tailored to the talents of Riz Ahmed.

Latif (Ali) is a Houston husband, father and military veteran with a murky criminal past he’s abandoned for Islamic faith, as well as the demands of his three children—who are motherless, his wife having recently passed away. But Latif’s erstwhile boss Mike (Laith Nakli) won’t let him go legit so easily. The latter’s ne’er-do-well nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali) is a wannabe-gangsta porn-monger who’s attracted hostile attention from Pastor Hwan (John Cho), the leader of a particularly crazy local evangelical “Christian” cult. Mike wants Latif to kill this dubious “man of God.” By the film’s midpoint, our hero’s attempt to stay neutral has failed, amid what’s pivoted from pressure-cooker family drama to a violent thriller between warring factions.

This is in gist that somewhat tired chestnut, the “retired hitman forced back into action to protect his loved ones, eventually unleashing all Hell’s Fury” narrative. The emphasis on Latif’s flawed parenting (especially re: Adia as his teenage daughter) and troubled faith does add some depth. Ultimately, however, this is still a genre piece—one that eventually goes over-the-top, to ends at once a bit pretentious and cartoonish. Still, it’s handled with style, providing a strong showcase for the star’s peculiar gravity in both personality and physical presence. Your Mother opens Fri/2 in theaters nationwide.

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Adventures in Nonfiction: “The History of Concrete,’ ‘A Human Year in Seven Earth Years,’ ‘Viktor’
Three notably unusual departures from documentary norms are surfacing this week, each well worth a look. The History of Concrete finds the maker-star of the HBO series “How To With John Wilson” applying the same comically neurotic, endlessly digressive first-person perspective to his first feature. That series having ended, he realizes he needs a new project, so much of Concrete is devoted to trying to set up the film we’re ultimately watching, which Wilson pitches as a doc about the common building material… in terms recommended for those angling to get a Hallmark Channel romcom approved for production. 

Somehow this quest leads him to a very random assortment of people and things, including NYC’s one and only “Gum Buster” (a guy dedicated to extracting hard-to-remove gum spat onto pavement); another business preserving tattoos as mementoes of the deceased; 3-D printing, the apparent future of concrete; Buddhism; late rapper DMX; Kim Kardashian; the air pollution concrete recycling creates; and a middle-aged musician named Jack who primarily earns his living handing out free shot samples in Wilson’s neighborhood liquor store.

There’s a gentle absurdism to History that is quite winning. Simultaneously, you’ll learn a lot about various subjects that (like concrete) you probably never really thought much about previously. The film opens Fri/25 at SF’s Balboa, then Fri/2 at the Alamo Drafthouses in SF and Mountain View.

All over the map in an entirely different way is A Human Year Is 7 Earth Years, a long-aborning 2022 feature by Adrian Quetzal Randall being shown Sat/26 only by Other Cinema at Artists Television Access. It is clear OC’s impresario Craig Baldwin had a big impact on Randall, as the film compiles a mountain of fascinating archival elements into an unpredictable indictment of US imperialism in Honduras, among other things. 

These freewheeling, conspiracy-embracing 83 minutes draw connections between the filmmaker’s family background, multinational agricultural concerns, electronic advances usurped by the military-industrial complex, and much more. Very much in the mode of such classic Baldwin joints as Tribulation 99, it’s as dense with information and audiovisual errata as it is eccentrically entertaining. Randall will appear in person for a “Post-Kolonial Spectres” program that also includes Riar Rizaldi’s half-hour Tellurian Drama, another investigation of an obscure historical chapter involving politics, control, and communications technology. More info here.

Finally, there’s Olivier Sarbil’s 2024 Viktor, which counts Darren Aronofsky among its producers. It’s a contrastingly narrow-focused character study whose subject Viktor Korotovskyi is a handsome 30-ish day laborer and aspiring photographer living with his mother in the northeastern Ukraine city Kharkiv. When Russia invades the region, he is frustrated (not for the first time) in his eagerness to join the military—an impossibility, since Viktor has been almost completely deaf since a childhood illness. So he must settle for living out his personal fantasies of combat by watching samurai movies and practicing swordplay, though eventually he does find a place on the frontlines photographing war’s damage. 

Shot in black and white, Viktor is so exquisite-looking, and so shaped like a narrative film, that it is hard to believe at least some elements weren’t staged in a fashion that falls outside strict “documentary” categorization. But those liberties are taken in the effort to more vividly convey our subject’s perspective, which is also achieved via a highly worked sound design alternating between the regular “hearing world” and what Sarbil imagines Viktor’s muffled perception to be. It’s a singular work that’s accessible via arthouse streaming platform Film Movement Plus as of Fri/25. 

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
American writer-director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s first two features, the 2014 Colombia-shot narco-smuggling tale Dirty Hands and 2021’s very good “female boxer on a dangerous quest” Catch the Fair One, were both gritty, character-based dramas involving reluctant protagonists in criminal mischief. This third effort is a huge departure, in that it’s a primarily comedic quasi-musical romance set in Tokyo, with most of the dialogue in Japanese. Haru (Rinko Kikuchi from Babel and Kumiko the Treasure Hunter) is a middle-aged Tokyo eccentric whose sharp personality edges are balmed by emigre husband Luis (Alejandro Edda), with whom she shares a passion for ballroom dance. During one such competition, however, there is an unexpected health emergency that leaves her partner-less, on and off the dancefloor. 

Without Luis, Haru founders. Months later, she is forced out of seclusion by concerned friends Hiromi (You) and Yuki (Yoh Yoshida), who drag her back to their weekly Latin dance class. There, Haru experiences something unexpected: Immediate infatuation with the hunky new instructor (Cuban actor Alberto Guerra), a minor celebrity who’s been on “Dancing With the Stars”—as has his wife, alas, though she’s currently doing her own career thing in Paris. Rumors fly that they have an “open marriage,” though Haru is more the possessive than the sharing type. This potential liaison soon heats up, complicated further by our heroine’s very active fantasy life (which often takes the form of large-scale production numbers), as well as the persistent materializing of her husband’s spirit, in and out of a giant Pokemon-like furry costume. 

This oddball mix of Ghost, Dirty Dancing, grief processing, and antic social satire keeps threatening to go off the rails. But somehow the center holds, the more crowdpleasing elements cut with enough vinegary humor to avoid a formulaic feel-good air. Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty opens Fri/25 at Bay Area theaters.

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