The partnership of dance with film elevated the movie camera from mere equipment capturing dance to a stylized coordination of dance and camera movement, expanding the impulse towards narrative traction through filmic editing techniques, which provided spectatorial participation within choreography and unique perspectives from varied camera angles. As stated earlier, the matrix of choreocinema were the Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930s that—along with the technological innovations leant to dance—inflected the social climate of the time, namely the palpable effects of the Great Depression and the role that movie musicals played in lifting spirits through the escape of entertainment. The ability of dance and music to further the story of that social moment arguably reached its most popular expression (albeit decades later) in Singin’ In the Rain (1952), which chronicled the shift from silents to talkies (often cited as the greatest musical film and one of the greatest films ever made). Less committed to optimism was Pennies From Heaven (1981) that laid bare the strenuous desire to rise above the weight of the Great Depression.
When the LED production of Silver City premiered at the Morrison Center in October 2021, it too had its social moment to negotiate. The COVID pandemic was in full force, “social distancing” had entered the American lexicon as a scary but necessary caution, and—as Dana Oland detailed at the Idaho Statesman—strict protocols at the Morrison were in place with audience members having to show proof of vaccination or a negative test taken within 48 hours in order to attend, with masks required for everyone while in the building. The decision to perform Silver City at the height of a pandemic was not endeavored blithely, LED knew it would limit the number of people who would be willing to show up, but they felt the need to rise above the pallor of the social moment to offer hope through creativity.
Creativity is always on full display with any LED project. Their multimedia aesthetics—blending dance, music, film, acting—champion a theatricality unique to the company and treasured by their faithful audiences. After being five years in their vault, the filmic record of the Morrison performance of Silver City premiered on Friday, May 15, 2026, at The Dixon as part of LED’s “Moves & Movies” choreocinema festival. Silver City was written by Lauren Edson and Andrew Stensaas, directed by Quinn B. Wharton, choreographed by Edson, and atmospherically scored by Stensaas (with a tip of the cowboy hat to Ennio Morricone).
As Dana Oland described for The Statesman in 2021: “Silver City gives a contemporary twist on the mythology of the American West pulling from the ‘spaghetti western’ genre set against an Idaho backdrop. It’s the tale of the lone stranger looking to make his way in the world and the townsfolk he encounters at the local saloon. These artists are holding their cards close to the vest and not giving too many details. And although the story seems straightforward, they want to turn those well-known movie tropes on their heads.”
That achieved aim is both brave and provocative in Silver City, articulated through a revisionist view of Idaho’s turn-of-the-century history firmly in alignment with robust bodies of scholarship exploring gender variance in the historical American West, challenging traditional, hyper-masculine stereotypes of the frontier. Historians have documented how the region's geographic isolation, male-dominated demographics, and Indigenous cultures fostered environments where gender nonconformity regularly occurred. Key among these studies are those of historian Peter Boag whose book Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (2011) analyzes hundreds of reported historical cases of individuals living as the opposite gender, examining how frontier culture accommodated, and sometimes necessitated, cross-dressing. Research reveals that many pioneer women and immigrants adopted male identities to secure employment, travel safely, or escape restrictive Victorian societal pressures in newly established settlements.
Public history projects, such as the Oregon Historical Society's exhibit “Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West”, and ongoing university theses continue to uncover unrecorded or censored queer and non-binary histories from this era.
Academics aside, Silver City dramatizes those historical reconstructions through the iconoclastic casting of Tony Carnell as a seductive courtesan, Colleen Loverde as a frustrated priest, and the indefatigable Ching Ching Wong (recently showcased at LED) as a mustachioed gambler surreptitiously in love with a saloon bartender (Franco Nieto). Their pas de deux was a gender-spinning tour-de-force that lifted my eyebrows high on my forehead. Further shout-outs to the two undeniably handsome male leads: bad cowboy Elijah Labay and good cowboy Evan Fisk, and costume curation by Izze Rumpp whose fringed vests on the dueling cowboys added swirl and swagger. As value added Colleen Loverde provided a strong live replication of her character’s solo in the film as introduction to the evening’s second act.
The symbiotic relationship between dance and film—both governed by aesthetics of movement—is near familial, like an older sister taking a younger sister under wing. From the moment that the “moving picture” was introduced in the late 19th century it embraced dance as a ready subject appropriate to cinematic practice and featured in the early motion studies of Edison and the Lumière brothers. Famed early dancers included Ruth St. Denis—who introduced Asian inflections into dance—and Loie Fuller’s widely-imitated “Serpentine Dance.”
During the Silent Era of film in the 1920s, audiences were emotionally “moved” by the expressive possibilities of dance, long before the advent of talking pictures. The 1930s ushered in the Hollywood musicals, which—into the 1950s—gained huge popularity through stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the revolutionary choreography of Busby Berkeley who treated the camera as a partner, creating complex geometric patterns and "cinema dance" designed solely for the screen.
Once the golden era of studio musicals capsized under their own weight, efforts to revive the medium appeared in filmic adaptations of Broadway musicals choreographed by such greats as Bob Fosse through vehicles like Cabaret and Chicago.
Arriving to choreocinema in our current era, the dance film has evolved as a unique art form addressing various aspects of the symbiosis between film and dance. Watching the opening night suite of films at the LED program “Moves and Movies”, I was struck how film documents the ephemeral nature of dance that, otherwise, would be lost to the body memory of dancers and the remembered experience of audiences. Documentation of dance explores time as specific moments of performance as well as the maturation of specific bodies, often famous, such as Anna Pavlova’s 1905 performance of the Dying Swan. Through film audiences can stretch time back to seminal performances. Pavlova, Astaire and Rogers, Minnelli, survive the ravages of time and present bodies in peak form. This is no less true with local personalities such as Lauren Edson, Cydney Covert and Evan Stevans who the camera has watched as their artistry evolves and their bodies adapt.
Another revelation in the roster of films in LED’s opening night program was that of spatiality, of taking dance off the theatrical stage and placing it firmly into the world. Who hasn’t wanted to start tapdancing down a sidewalk or in the marble interiors of a state capitol? Whether abandoned warehouses or parking lots, roller skating rinks, the staircases between floors of a roadside motel, gymnasiums, campsites, or bus stations fallen into disrepair, dance claims its territory and confirms its primary goal to defy gravity wherever gravity exists. Dance negotiates a balance between defying gravity as presumed and aiming to find its own center of gravity, either in the individual dancer or in the ensemble. Film potentially captures that negotiation through the point of view of the dancer, utilizing film editing and angles to create a dance that can only exist on screen, not on stage, and allowing the audience to be taken into the choreography, partner to it, involved within it.
The generous assortment of films in the opening night program of “Moves and Movies” are more than I can explore in detail; but, suffice it to say, that it was an illuminating introduction into a symbiosis that will be explored throughout the weekend. "Moves and Movies" continues through May 17 with tailored programs for each evening. Information can be found here.
I have long found the film capsule to be one of the oddest short form film “review” formats. Its purpose is primarily promotional in advance of a film festival with the caveat that it is supposed to be limited—roughly 75 words per capsule, dependent on festival and publicist—to be followed by a more in-depth review when the film opens theatrically. Promotion aside (I’ve never felt it was the responsibility of a reviewer to fill seats), I’ve often found festival program notes to be much longer than a capsule, more dedicated to narrative synopsis, with the added (arguably true) responsibility of enticing prospective viewers to purchase tickets.
Film coverage is all snakes and ladders, windows of opportunity and doors of perception, expenses and receipts.
Because the frequently well-written festival program note tends to disappear once a festival has concluded and gained dust on its online shelf, I like to include them in my overviews more as a snapshot in time and out of respect to those that have drafted them. My capsules then become instead quick and immediate responses to the films I’ve had the chance to purview.
Kent Jones’ Late Fame (2026) flexes one of the most important—Jungian theorist James Hillman argues the most important and the only—dyad in psychologist C.G. Jung’s system of archetypology; namely, the relationship between the archetype of the Senex / Crone and that of the Puer / Puella, a hyphenated structure that speaks to the dynamic of the relationship between them. For definition’s sake, the “Senex” represents the masculine spirit, structure, and tradition as reflected in the Wise Old Man, whereas the Wise Old Woman represents the feminine aspect of the "mana personality"—a figure of spiritual authority and deep, often intuitive, knowledge. In simpler terms it represents the crosscurrent of energy between older and younger individuals and the importance of each to the other.
Now, see, that’s already 125 words and so we will have to wait until Late Fame opens in movie houses before I can get into what I would like to say about this intelligent and poignant film. But so you don’t feel shorted, here’s what Jessie Fairbanks wrote in SFFILM’s program note: “The latest feature from Kent Jones (former director of the New York Film Festival) is a gently piercing dramedy about ambition, obscurity, and the echoes of youthful dreams. Ed Saxberger (a beautifully restrained Willem Dafoe) once arrived in New York determined to be a poet, publishing a slim volume before settling into the quiet routines of postal work. As his retirement nears, an ardent group of downtown bohemians, led by the captivating Gloria (Greta Lee), discover Ed’s long-forgotten book and insist on honoring him with a literary salon. What begins as flattery soon stirs doubt, longing, and unexpected desire. With a sharp, literate screenplay by Samy Burch, Jones crafts a wise, sparkling New York tale about reinvention and the courage it takes to be truly seen.”
Late Fame served as SFFILM’s opening night and here’s a clip of Kent Jones and Greta Lee interacting with their San Francisco audience in the Castro Theatre; specifically of Greta Lee describing how she developed the character of Gloria.
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Next up, the Serbian narrative documentary feature To Hold A Mountain (2026) directed by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić. Bedatri Choudhury synopsizes for SFFILM: “At first glance, Gara is a simple farmer, tending her crops and animals, making cheese, and caring for adolescent Nada. But there is far more to this woman who lives amid the beauty and isolation of Montenegro’s mountainous Sinjajevina plateau. Gara’s quiet but intense love for Nada is an extension of the deep love she feels for this land she calls home. Her story is intertwined with that of this breathtaking region, the place where she protects Nada and nurtures the girl’s future with hard-earned wisdom. When NATO forces propose turning the area into a field for military exercises, Gara further demonstrates her grit as she takes action to oppose the plan. A mesmerizing vérité plunge into rural life, what could have been a simple and romanticizing document of women’s lives in Montenegro is instead a portrait of quiet and steadfast resilience.”
To Hold A Mountain’s title speaks not only to the resistance against militaristic forces seeking to exploit Montenegro’s Sinjajevina plateau for war maneuvers, but also a heartfelt environmental embrace rooted in the etymology of “to hold”, which originates from the Proto-Germanic verb *haldanan ("to tend, herd, watch over, or keep"), often used in the context of tending cattle (of which there’s plenty in this film), but which then morphed into the Old English healdan (West Saxon) or halden (Anglian), meaning "to grasp, retain, contain, or keep watch over". In gist, while it historically meant protecting or tending, the usage expanded early to include "keeping fast in the hand," "observing a rule," "controlling," and "possessing". While protection of ancestral land is the film’s main theme, it deepens into yet another example of the Crone-Puella archetype.
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Once again giving credit to Jessie Fairbanks, here’s her synopsis of Time and Water (2026) for SFFILM: “Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason faces an unthinkable task: composing the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier declared dead due to climate change. In Sara Dosa’s (Fire of Love, Festival 2022) luminous documentary, Magnason confronts the disappearance of his country’s ice while preserving the stories of his grandparents, intertwining personal history with vanishing landscapes. Drawing from home movies, photographs, songs, and folklore, Dosa constructs an immersive portrait of loss and continuity. Moving seamlessly between intimate recollections and the monumental sweep of glaciers over millennia, Time and Water is a visually striking meditation on vulnerability, charting the fragility of the natural world and the urgent need to bear witness before vital elements of it disappear.”
The plight of glaciers facing global climate change has challenged documentary filmmakers since Jeff Orlowski-Yang’s 2012 warning cry Chasing Ice. Clearly many in power are not listening, including the current Trump administration whose fingers are plugging their ears as they scream “hoax.” If they would listen, they would hear the dying cries of glaciers, written about by Robert Draper (“The Sound of Ice”) for National Geographic magazine where yet another glacier—this time in Chile—is slowly receding from the heat. Sara Dosa’s environmental documentary deepens the theme and bears connective tissue with To Hold A Mountain in its portrait of indigenous relation to the land rendered in protracted poetic reverie.
On Saturday, May 9, 2026, Berkeley’s Boise Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) wraps up this year’s edition of the African Film Festival with a screening of Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s Bouchra (2025). For the past two months PFA has been showcasing The African Film Festival National Traveling Series as organized by the African Film Festival, Inc. in New York. This is a collaboration that has been ongoing since 2005 when PFA launched the African Film Festival as an annual event, borrowing from the National Traveling Series but enhancing it with their own programming. I attended that 2005 launch and it opened my eyes to the diversity of films coming from Africa and the African diaspora and their importance to World Cinema. The Evening Class, in fact, found its name from a quote by Ousmane Sembene, the “Father of African Cinema” who said that “cinema is the evening class for discriminating adults.”
I was loyal to the series for subsequent years until relocating from California to Idaho. It’s a rare if not nonexistent opportunity to view an African film in Boise, Idaho. Thus, I am deeply grateful to Kathryn MacKay and A.J. Fox for granting me remote access to the program this year.
The 2025 National Traveling Series features films selected from the 2024 New York African Film Festival, which was presented under the theme “Convergence of Time.” This lineup invited audiences to explore the boundless realms of African and diaspora storytelling—celebrating its visionary, thought-provoking, and fearless spirit. I’ll touch first on the upcoming screening of Bouchra and work my way back through the series.
As synopsized by PFA: “Set between New York, Rabat, and Casablanca, in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals and suspended between realism, autobiography, and fiction, this artwork, the culmination of a long creative process, blends documentary and 3D animation languages. The film follows Bouchra, a thirty-five-year-old Moroccan jackal and filmmaker living in New York, as she writes an autobiographical film exploring how her queerness has impacted her mother, Aicha, a cardiologist jackal living in Casablanca. The story blends fiction—Bouchra’s film within the film—with an adaptation of recorded nonfiction conversations between Meriem Bennani and her mother.”
Over the years in looking at films—particularly foreign genre films—I’ve noticed that some qualities (like humor) don’t travel well. What’s funny in Africa might not induce laughter in the U.S. The same applies to animation. U.S. cinema is notoriously rife with anthropomorphized animal characters, usually painted by number with a broad brush, lots of slapstick, wisecracking, and so cute they often hurt. By contrast, Barki and Bennani’s debut feature Bouchra eschews the clownish stereotype of talking animals in formulaic scenarios and delivers a thoroughly unique and stylish examination of a lesbian jackal filmmaker coming to terms with her mother’s prudish response to her coming out and the complicated effort to resolve their attitudes. The dialogue boasts naturalistic and culturally specific cadence and conversational flow. The film is also admirably erotic.
Bouchra is less a coming-out film as it is a having come out film. It’s significant enough to come out to a parent but then to weather the response takes the experience to another level. When I first came out to my mother, for example, she blamed my sister who calmly reprimanded her and reminded her that it wasn’t anybody’s fault for who I was. Freed from responsibility, my mother then took the next step, which was to ask me to hide my sexuality from the relatives and to never mention it. She was concerned they would not understand, convinced they would be intolerant, and feared it would all reflect back on her (and then she wondered years later why I abandoned family visits where I could never be myself).
The years tempered the experience of coming out to her and shortly before her death I mentioned to her that I was probably going to marry my partner of thirty years. She was quiet for a moment and then said, “If you want me to, I will be happy to give you away at the wedding.” I found it sweet and sad that she could only perceive a gay wedding as hetero-imitative and that somehow I had to be the bride. She died before my wedding and I gave myself away.
In this examination of the familial wake that follows the honest affirmation of one’s identity, Bouchra is charmingly sophisticated, as is the photorealistic animation technique of a mixing live-action footage with 3D imaging, providing a palpable sense of urbanity; neon gleaming in the rain. I was reminded of Laura Nyro’s New York lyric: “Where is the night luster? Past my trials.”
As value added to Bouchra finishing up the African Film Festival, the Berkeley Art Museum is featuring a crossover exhibition “Life on the CAPS” spotlighting Meriem Bennani’s multidisciplinary practices (May 6, 2026 through August 23, 2026). “Fueled by the accelerating ubiquity of technology and visual culture,” they write, “Bennani’s approach to video is a layered amalgamation of visual languages spanning documentary, social media, cartoons, and reality television. Through this composite visuality, Bennani constructs fictitious worlds that expose the dynamics of power that persist in the postcolonial histories of Morocco and the wider African continent.”
This exhibition is the California debut of Bennani’s acclaimed video trilogy “Life on the CAPS” (2018–22). Set in a dystopian future, the series takes place in the CAPS, a fictional island where migrants are interned after teleporting “illegally” across borders. The videos themselves mirror the liminal status of the CAPS residents, rendered with layers...
Fantaspoa’s regional premiere of Matheus Marchetti’s “erotic thriller” Labyrinth of Lost Boys (2025) suggests that a horror specific to gay subculture is how sexual desire and promiscuous curiosity cloud good judgment and threaten personal safety; a theme previously and famously explored by William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising (1980). On a shadowy night in a large city young men are lured through a door into a stranger’s apartment where, during anonymous sex, they are murdered. Despite this publicized danger, small-town resident Pedro (Lucas Bocalon) is drawn to the city where he takes great risks in seeking a soulmate.
A subtle critique of how gay men are socialized at the same time that they are marginalized within their own subculture, Labyrinth negotiates the sad tension of anticipation, rejection, and the eventual frustration of romantic ideals. It’s admirable in its endeavor to characterize risky sexual behavior as internalized homophobia and self-loathing—not caring enough for oneself to watch out for one’s safety—but its “eroticism” caters to a narrow audience. It lacks the prurient charge of, let’s say, Heated Rivalry, and it is less “thriller” than a gloomy meditation on bad judgment’s gamble with bad luck as it hazards fate.
Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm (2026) opens with a rapid photocollage of an adorable tow-haired baby becoming a toddler, then a young boy resembling any young boy growing up in a suburban cul de sac, then a normal-looking tween, finally landing on a nebbish and socially awkward man named Carroll who’s just “a little bit off” with some peculiar ideas and a failure at every online date he sets up. What happened to that cute little blonde boy? Naturally, Carroll’s lonely and horny, sideswiping on Tinder and living in squalor, unable to hold down a job.
And yet … Peter Falls cleverly pitches Carroll with a touch of R. Crumb, David Lynch and David Cronenberg all mixed up together, which is no small feat, especially since—despite his obvious faults—Carroll is oddly likeable. He lacks confidence, yes. His best friend stole his girlfriend and—even when he makes peace with that—Carroll continues to trip himself up in admittedly clumsy and stupid ways, especially when he steps on a nail, doesn’t tend to it, and begins to physically deteriorate before our very eyes. He’s a schmuck, no way around it, but you want his luck to turn around so things can go his way, even a little bit.
Bagworm is an eccentric and unique film with a rambling narrative seemingly made up as it goes along, but never fails to intrigue and is strangely satisfying. Carroll is a loser to the end when the closing credits dissolve into alphabet soup. You kind of want to know what’s going to happen to him. Is his life a chrysalis and something better is morphing inside? Hard to predict. But my guess would be not.
Harbingers of doom, comets have traditionally been associated with disaster (i.e., “ill-starred”) leaving behind misfortune and calamity in their tail. Its role is no different in Cristian Ponce’s animation / live action hybrid The Kirlian Frequency (2025), based on Ponce’s web series of the same name. Structured as an anthology of loosely related events, a skull-masked disk jockey broadcasts his conversations with five visitors to his station live over the airwaves to a small Argentine town named Kirlian while a comet streaks overhead. The conversations are laced with macabre scenarios, noticeably invented, imagined; what might even be called “fake news.” Thus, The Kirlian Frequency comments on the role and influence of media and the way that rumors can veer into fact through fear and guilt, shame and aimed blame.
The stories that are recounted through each on-air conversation—interrupted now and then with listeners phoning in—are stylistically visualized through animated sequences impressive for their subtle but beautiful palette. I’m presuming this falls under the strength of Hernán Bengoa’s art direction in collaboration with Marcelo Cataldo’s atmospherically lit cinematography. The Kirlian Frequency is an ambitious project, visually engaging, though a bit too talky in its storytelling. Still, talk radio is the point. I guess this is to be expected from a program that drones all night long with fantastic confabulations.
Fantaspoa’s slate of 88 feature-length films include tiers of premieres, boasting 11 regional, 12 national, (an impressive) 38 Latin American, 11 international and 10 world premieres, along with 7 revival screenings and special presentations. Here are my thoughts on three of the world premieres (always my favorites to write up).
Kyle Mangione-Smith’s debut feature Compliance (2026) is a one-man tour-de-force of writing, directing, editing and production (assisted by an impressive Kickstarter campaign). It introduces Mangione-Smith as a formidable genre talent to keep an eye on. Categorizing Compliance as a found-footage horror/thriller barely scratches the densely textured surface of a narrative constructed from multiple sources of footage—home surveillance cameras, dashcams, bodycams, hacked webcams, smartphone text messages—to create a narrative exploring modern surveillance, dark web crime, and conspiracy twisted together in a dread-inducing knot of dystopian paranoia.
As synopsized by Mangione-Smith, Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox), a young crisis manager at the tech startup UVisit, is given the mission to contain the damage of a sexual assault scandal that threatens to undo a multi-million-dollar deal. While trying to control the narrative and support an uncollaborative victim (Lindsey Normington), Sam eventually becomes a targeted pawn in a deadly game architected by a powerful and obscure shadow organization. True to the film’s title, Sam becomes both behaviorally compliant and unwittingly complicit in a corporate, prurient dive into dark perversity whose endgame is far from clear.
Compliance asks questions that strike at the heart of fear and uncertainty, bracketing a seeming normalcy as the stage for looming abnormality and subversion.
What fascinated me was how Sam's full compliance is achieved, most notably in the film’s final sequences where mass media images and key political moments are overlaid and distressed, nearly beyond recognition, though threateningly subliminal. It rivals the brainwashing sequences of John Frankenhemer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) or Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and harkens the Spanish conception of evil entering through the eye.
Karen Lam’s Armageddon Road (2026) is stylistically radiant. Described as "biblical horror" with a "Coens vibe," Armageddon Road easily fits as well into the dark comedy and road trip genres. Whichever way you want to approach it, however, the film is a lot of fun in its unique blend of retro visuals of 1970s Las Vegas with modern technology, utilizing LED volume walls for backgrounds and physical miniature sets created by Gary Young. I was propelled backwards into the stop-action wizardry of Ray Harryhausen, inducing a sense of child’s play, especially when I finally realized that this was a road movie filled with vintage miniature cars. How cool is that?!
The plot is both psychedelic and supernatural. Steve (Brian McCaig) is an incurably romantic and nubbish ex-con with big dreams of converting a Las Vegas parking lot into a luxury resort, all in hopes of regaining custody of his son. The only problem is he needs investors and lots of money. To earn some quick cash, Steve accepts a gig to drive a mob boss’ girlfriend around for the night. Her name is Delilah (Natalie Grace) and she’s insolent and crass and has no taste whatsoever in wigs. She’s an “andale, andale, andale” kind of bitch. At one of her stops she overdoses on drugs, dies, and her body is taken over by one of the Four Horsemen (Death, of course) who is trying to avoid her duties at the upcoming Armageddon. She takes off her wig, looks in a mirror, fixes her make-up by touching up her apocalypse (pun intended), and adopts a faintly British accent. Steve is blissfully unaware that his passenger has transformed but—in Delilah’s new incarnation—they meet cute and Steve falls in love. Unavoidable Fate has rarely felt so inevitably fantastic or irresistibly fun.
Luke Jaden’s Animals of the Land (2026) proves that every idyll needs its idol. Ever since Robin Hardy linked agricultural rhythms to the horror genre in The Wicker Man (1973)—almost single-handedly creating the folk horror-thriller—inheritors such as Neil LaBute’s remake (2006) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) have had a field day with the ominous countryside.
Comparable to Armageddon Road, Animals of the Land could be classified as Biblical horror, though the Bible is never mentioned. It’s opening is Edenic, however, set at the beginning of time where a mother and father and their two sons live in perfect harmony with Mother Nature, but—as mythologist Joseph Campbell detailed in his study The Way of the Animal Powers (1983)—early humanity emphasized a spiritual, animistic connection between humans and nature. They understood life through animal totems, rituals designed to honor the "animal master," and the acceptance of life and death as interdependent cycles. Defiance of the “animal master”—in this case a female tusked boar (in whose name mayhem erupts)—upsets the natural balance, requiring a blood sacrifice to regain equilibrium.
The set-up is solid, but the film capsizes into one of the common and unfortunate pitfalls of low-budget independent filmmaking. Cinematographer Jon Patterson plunges the film’s most cathartic scenes into murky darkness so that it’s very difficult to see and, thus, understand what’s going on. In all fairness, this might have been the result of a poor streaming link and possibly corrected in theatrical exhibition. But it wasn’t just the lack of visibility that pulled me right out of the film. The final quarter seems to be nothing but incessant screaming and shouting and howling as the characters devolve into animalistic and endocannibalistic behavior. I can watch news coverage of the Trump regime for that.
In their 22nd edition, Fantaspoa—situated in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 2005—rightfully claims their stature as Latin America’s largest film festival dedicated exclusively to fantastic genre films (fantasy, science fiction, horror and thriller). Fantaspoa kicked off on April 8 and continues through April 26, 2026 in several cultural spaces of the city with an international slate of 210 films, both short and feature films, many premiering for the first time in Brazil, accompanied by several world premieres. Further, Fantaspoa flexes its outreach as a hybrid festival with a portion of the programming available online, exclusively for users in Brazilian territory.
For starters, to demonstrate Fantaspoa’s international range and premiere divisions, the Brazilian premiere of Turkey’s The Turkish Coffee Table (2025) directed by Can Evrenol and the Latin American premiere of Mexico’s Sacrificios (2025) directed by Mauricio Chernovetzky share a thematic through line: the horrific consequences of the traumatic death of children.
It’s expected that parents are willing to sacrifice for their children, fathers for their sons, but what if—substituting for willingness—unwitting parental negligence becomes the means by which children are sacrificed to dark primordial forces? The fathers in both of these competent films become culpable for immense tragedy through minor failures of the flesh.
In Can Evrenol’s The Turkish Coffee Table (2025)—his remake of the 2022 Spanish film The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor)—Ibrahim, a browbeaten husband intensely enacted by Alper Kul (also instrumental in convincing the producers to greenlight the film)—is forced to answer to one too many overbearing women in his life—a pregnant wife who isn’t happy unless everything goes her way, an adolescent neighbor whose fantasized infatuation is veering into blackmail, and a saleswoman who won’t take no for an answer when Ibrahim and his wife Zehra (Algi Eke) are shopping for a coffee table. Zehra, who has taken charge of decorating their apartment, begrudgingly concedes to letting Ibrahim have one item of his choice and regrets it immediately. He settles on an expensive, gaudy glass coffee table that Zehra abhors and the saleswoman is all too happy to sell him.
Zehra and Ibrahim continue to quarrel over the coffee table as he assembles it in their living room and it angers Ibrahim that Zehra just won’t let him alone about the one thing he wants for himself when his life is made up of continuous episodes of being unnoticed and unheard after Zehra’s first pregnancy and now her second. Only later does he realize that this impulse to have the right to one choice is what becomes his only sin. Alper Kul does a great job of hiding his sin from everyone, which steers the narrative into what Evrenol has described as “a dark joke”, though its humor feels more like a timebomb waiting to explode. On the outside Ibrahim struggles to remain calm, detached and quiet, but director Evrenol provides the visual contrast of what Ibrahim is actually feeling inside: wailing, crying, flailing, gnashing his teeth, pounding his fists, and wanting to die. Evrenol’s directorial intention was to present a claustrophobic family scenario that echoes the society within which it’s set and Ibrahim’s increasing inability to breathe feels palpable. As the tension mounts towards the film’s inevitable reveal, the audience is almost begging for what feels like an impossible resolution, which—when it arrives—literally goes overboard and not in any expected way imaginable, though it satisfyingly puts the issue and all its conflicting feelings to rest.
It is a foundational belief among Mesoamerican cultures that human blood is a direct gift to nourish the divine. Blood is the vital, sacred substance essential for sustaining gods and maintaining cosmic balance. Whereas the Maya concept of ch’ulel is specific to the internal soul located in the blood, the Aztec reference yoatl (i.e., the “enemy”) as the vital nourishment needed to feed the sun. Both cultures are well-known for equating their bloodletting and sacrificial rituals with honored acts of devotion, but it’s the Aztecs who—in their devotion to Mictlantecuhtli, the Nahua God of Death—include practices of cannibalism and vampirism.
Mictlantecuhtli makes an early appearance in Mauricio Chernovetzky’s Sacraficios as a photograph in a volume on Aztec art that serves as the framework for entering this troubling story of a stay-at-home dad Juan (in a grounded and tormented performance by Jorge A. Jimenez) who’s left to take care of his little boy Andrés (Siddhartha Tonalli) while his wife Alma (Frida Astrid) goes off to work. His sin? Jacking off while he’s watching pornography online and neglecting to make sure that Andrés is okay. He fails. Andrés suffers a fatal accident and—guilt-stricken—Juan retreats to the ocean where he isolates himself on an island, but not before hauling a mass of kelp out of the sea within which Juan discovers his son suspiciously resurrected.
He has cause to be suspicious. Andrés is acting strangely. His eyes are as dead as fisheyes, and he’s constantly hungry, and ordinary food disinterests him. His appetite is for his father’s blood and because—as the film’s tagline attests—a father’s love is eternal, Juan bloodlets to feed Andrés who never seems satisfied. The slurping sounds are unnerving and Andrés’ bloody mouth is vampiric. What’s intriguing is Chernovetzky’s exploration of male nurturance, which is seldom explored let alone understood. Feeding Andrés with his blood becomes conflated with a child drinking milk off a mother’s breast and—in a scene that made me squirm in my seat—is further attached to a scene where Juan’s favorite blonde-haired porno star offers her blood-dripping breast to suckle. These overlapping substitution of images are psychic projections, of course, induced by guilt and grief and Juan is forced to reconsider his love for his son, to let him and his guilt go, yet another sacrifice, before he can return to his wife and a life less normal for now being in the grip of the death horizon far out at sea, Mictlan, the island of the dead.
Jay Arden Black utilizes his skill set as a video game designer to effect his feature film debut Bluebird (2026) boasting its World Premiere at Fantaspoa. True to form, Bluebird requires mastering three narrative levels in order to achieve film’s end where—as the aphorism goes—you’ll find the bluebird of happiness at your very own console.
Bluebird is described as a satirical near-future love story, part neo-noir, part surreal dark comedy, which is ambitious, if at times amorphous. Its braided premise doesn’t fully hold together but it doesn’t completely fall apart either largely due to the sympathetic portrayal of nerdy protagonist Charles (David McElwee) whose relatable loneliness and frequent confusion is actually charming. He guides our attention through the film’s levels as he finds and falls in love with Chloe (Avery Joy Davis), loses Chloe, and goes through a series of uncanny tasks in order to find her again. Allies abound along the way: the Plastic Knight; the Prism Man; Rhonda and Not Rhonda. It’s a little hard to follow but compelling and promising in its idiosyncracy.
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