{"id":2437,"date":"2021-07-20T10:23:46","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T14:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/?p=2437"},"modified":"2021-07-20T16:02:45","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T20:02:45","slug":"the-year-of-the-everlasting-storm-review-at-last-something-good-that-came-from-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/the-year-of-the-everlasting-storm-review-at-last-something-good-that-came-from-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Year of the Everlasting Storm\u2019 Review: At Last, Something Good That Came From the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Variety<\/a>
\nJULY 14, 2021<\/p>\n

While the world reeled from the pandemic, Neon invited seven art-house helmers to share the view from where they were sequestered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What did you do during the coronavirus lockdown of 2020? Grow a beard? Make bread? Write the Great American Novel? For creative types cooped up during the pandemic, the pressures to adapt to the moment felt enormous, but so did the limitations.<\/p>\n

Premiering at Cannes 2021, \u201cThe Year of the Everlasting Storm\u201d springs from those competing and seemingly contradictory reactions \u2014 to express oneself, or to retreat inward and wait it out \u2014 empowering seven filmmakers from different corners of the globe to do what they do best \u2014 to make films \u2014 during the historic tsunami of uncertainty and fear that was 2020. While the world was in lockdown, this portmanteau project achieved something remarkable, giving artists ranging from Jafar Panahi to Apichatpong Weerasethakul the opportunity to unlock their imaginations.<\/p>\n

Panahi, who came aboard early and also served as an executive producer, is no stranger to shooting in restrictive conditions, having directed a film \u2014 2012\u2019s Cannes-selected \u201cThis Is Not a Movie\u201d \u2014 while under house arrest in Iran. His entry here, \u201cLife,\u201d is likewise bound to his flat in Tehran, where he can identify with his pet iguana, Iggy, who presses its face to the window and licks its lips (do iguanas have lips?) at the pigeon eggs on the other side.<\/p>\n

The project originated with a handful of American producers, who proposed a Dogme 95-like series of restrictions (e.g., \u201cShooting will be confined to the location of filmmaker quarantine. Filmmakers may not shoot in public spaces\u201d and \u201cProps, costumes, and production equipment will be limited to those onsite\u201d). Creativity often thrives within such constraints, and Panahi\u2019s entry reflects the most literal adherence to those rules, incorporating FaceTime sessions with his daughter and a visit from his hilarious, hyper-cautious mother, who arrives armed with disinfectant and dressed in full protective gear.<\/p>\n

Audiences accept the grubby digital results from Panahi, as consumer-grade cameras have made it possible for him to continue working during a period of political persecution, but it\u2019s a relief that the five other contributors bend the rules somewhat. Quarantined in Tongzhou, China, Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen (\u201cWet Season\u201d) offers a time-capsule portrait of how families coped during the pandemic, observing a married couple with a young son during the early days of quarantine.<\/p>\n

Shutting herself in the bedroom, the wife (Dongyu Zhou) tries to focus on her job as a telemarketer, while her newly unemployed husband (Yu Zhang) \u2014 a car salesman whose clients no longer need transportation \u2014 struggles to be useful around the home. As in his Camera d\u2019Or-winning debut feature, \u201cIlo Ilo,\u201d Chen nimbly alternates between the perspectives of various family members, including adorable son Xiahao, who doesn\u2019t understand why he can\u2019t go outside.<\/p>\n

Running only 10 minutes, the segment from Los Angeles-based filmmaker Malik Vitthal, \u201cLittle Measures,\u201d responds to a different crisis altogether \u2014 a reminder that COVID-19 wasn\u2019t the only challenge the world contended with last year. A natural extension of the Black Lives Matter movement in which an African American father can\u2019t visit his kids \u2014 on account of the law, not COVID-19 \u2014 this lo-fi multimedia collage combines elements from various sources, mixing camera-phone footage with animation, music and voiceover recordings.<\/p>\n

Stuck in her New York apartment but hardly idle during the pandemic, Oscar-winning doc maker Laura Poitras (\u201cCitizenfour\u201d) serves up \u201cTerror Contagion,\u201d a sophisticated show-your-work look at her latest investigative project. Technically, it\u2019s a collaboration with a group called Forensic Architecture, who contact her with concerns about the use (and misuse) of surveillance tools countries such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico have licensed from Israel-based NSO Group, which the short identifies as \u201ca private company selling nation-state-level cyberweapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

As if audiences needed something other than COVID-19 to worry about, Poitras and company see a far more insidious \u201cvirus\u201d in governments\u2019 capacity for enacting \u201cdigital violence.\u201d While Poitras\u2019 contribution demonstrates that diligent folks are doing important work during the pandemic, it has a much darker tone than the other shorts (nearly all of which end abruptly, demanding a bit of time to digest, which the format doesn\u2019t necessarily allow).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a relief, therefore, that Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor\u2019s \u201cSin Titulo, 2020\u201d comes next. Shrouded in a deliberate dull brown haze \u2014 the visual equivalent of how 2020 looks in retrospect for so many \u2014 this relatively casual entry demonstrates another way that artists adapted to confinement, concluding with a Zoom-style musical performance in which several singers recorded in isolation manage to harmonize when combined into a virtual choir. Earlier in the segment, Sotomayor bends the rules (\u201cpublic spaces\u201d are forbidden by the film\u2019s producers), sending a mother and daughter out into a near deserted city to throw a spontaneous, socially distanced baby shower.<\/p>\n

Contrast that with the long-delayed burial depicted in \u201cAin\u2019t Them Bodies Saints\u201d director David Lowery\u2019s \u201cDig Up, My Darling,\u201d which functions as an evocative companion piece to his 2017 feature \u201cGhost Story.\u201d Somewhere in Texas, a woman (Catherine Machovsky) in a face mask retrieves a box of letters from storage. As she drives, a man with a deep Southern drawl reads the old pages, describing a family tragedy she sets out to rectify \u2014 which involves locating a makeshift grave from another crisis altogether. Who will tend to the corpses of the coronavirus, we may well wonder, and how long will it take to do right by the many lives it claims?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve read this far to find out what Palme d\u2019Or winner Weerasethakul opted to do with such a challenge. Best to leave that discovery to audiences, if only because the \u201cUncle Boonmee\u201d cine-poet\u2019s \u201cNight Colonies\u201d \u2014 which combines fragments of verse with an empty room (or is it?) \u2014 would inevitably be reduced by description. One might well ask: How do you visualize a virus? Change the scale, and what we can\u2019t (or choose not to) see becomes apparent.<\/p>\n

More art installation than short, the Thai helmer\u2019s segment is modest yet mesmerizing, and could be read as a metaphor for isolation or contagion. Or maybe it\u2019s just a brief reprieve from the exhaustion of being cut off and trapped in our own heads for this long year. In a way, that\u2019s what any movie watched during the shutdown offered, and here we have seven escape routes, each one reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic \u2014 a world where art lives on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Variety JULY 14, 2021 While the world reeled from the pandemic, Neon invited seven art-house helmers to share the view from where they were sequestered. What did you do during the coronavirus lockdown of 2020? Grow a beard? Make bread? Write the Great American Novel? For creative types cooped up during the pandemic, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2437"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2440,"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2437\/revisions\/2440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chiledoc.cl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}