Nikhol Boosheri is a woman torn in “Refuge” by Mohammad Gorjestani, one of three young directors who spoke at the Cinematheque on Saturday.
Independent filmmaking came to the UW Cinematheque on Saturday, only this time it wasn’t in the form of a fully restored 35mm print of a once-lost Paraguayan art house film. In collaboration with Filmmaker Magazine, the university’s eclectic outlet scored yet another victory in hosting three up-and-coming directors and their respective short films: Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, Mohammad Gorjestani, and Scott Blake, all selected from the magazine’s annual “25 New Faces” talent list.
That “talent” part is no exaggeration. Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, whose film “Needle” screened first, won the Cinéfondation Prize for young international filmmakers at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film spends the better part of an afternoon in the life of Lilly (Florence Winners), a quiet young girl who endures the loneliness of parental neglect en route to getting her ears pierced. Lilly’s mother (Meghan Moe Beitiks) and father (Noah Lepawsky) each nail their roles in crafting a dysfunctional marriage, but Winners is the standout here. Ghazvinizadeh made a bold decision in resting much of the drama on the face of a young actor, but Winners delivers a surprisingly accomplished performance as a prepubescent learning to think and act for herself, especially when those around her don’t seem to care.
The second selection, Mohammad Gorjestani’s “Refuge,” is a prophecy of near futurist science-fiction, foretelling international woes through the eyes of Sonia, an Iranian immigrant studying journalism in the United States. In the midst of a cyberwar between America and Iran, Sonia is threatened with deportation back to the country from which she has fled. While the horrors of Japanese internment camps in the 1940s carry a broad, affecting resonance, Gorjestani finds subtler ways to skewer sociopolitical issues, both foreign and domestic. As Sonia, Nikhol Boosheri is tempted with the possibility of staying in America in exchange for volunteering in an embryo fertilization program. In forcing its character to submit to gender norms, “Refuge” has a devastation that’s anchored by its near-future plausibility. Government chambers detail room capacity via digital counters, while upgraded metal detectors detect a person’s entire identity. And was someone wearing a San Jose Athletics shirsey on the metro transit? Everything in Gorjestani’s conception of the year 2020 seems so frighteningly plausible, and given the often limited budgets of independent filmmakers, that’s a real accomplishment.
Scott Blake’s “Surveyor” reversed its trajectory in time. Set in 1848, Blake travels across dry desert terrain with David Kulcsar’s government surveyor, as he encounters cutthroat robbers, Comanche witch doctors and the perils of manifest destiny. In this drawn-out “anti-Western, “Blake seems more concerned with confronting Hollywood convention than crafting a cohesive narrative, but his spaced-out long shots facilitate a languid sense of pace, occasionally affording his camera visual digressions into stop watches or “olde time” photographs. Punctuated by brief moments of violence, “Surveyor” uses its eponymous character as a yard stick, measuring the relative triviality of our desires and pursuits against the ticking hands of time.
In the post-screening Q&A that followed, one audience member suggested that the current state of independent filmmaking seemed less than favorable, what with the homogenization of filmmaking technologies and editing software and the near ubiquity of streaming services and free video channels. It was reassuring then that the consensus response from these three directors was just the opposite. Don’t think of those things as competition; they’re opportunities for new blood. Given the nature of their visit, it seemed all too fitting an answer.