RELAY (2024)—REVIEW

Some years back I befriended a deaf mute named Mike. Our friendship was revelatory in that he exposed me to the various technologies within our society that assist hearing-impaired individuals, such as keyboards at ATM machines and—pertinent to David Mackenzie’s Relay (2024)—relay switchboards. Compensating for my being slow in learning how to sign, Mike could phone into a relay service, type in a comment, and have that read to me by a relay agent. I found the service not only helpful, but fascinating, and it served to further our friendship. 

Watching how such a service becomes a lynchpin in the methodology of a fixer, Ash (Riz Ahmed), and how the relay service helps him protect whistleblowers from corrupt corporations promised to be a truly compelling narrative device. Relay services are legally blocked from sharing their call records and no logs are kept and so that privacy becomes one of the main tools in Ash’s toolbox. Emulating the tenor of surveillance thrillers from the 1970s such as The French Connection (1971) and The Conversation (1974), Relay succeeds in creating a slow burn that builds towards a satisfying tension, especially when Ash is hired by whistleblower Sarah Grant (Lily James) anxious to return stolen documents so she can avoid a campaign of intimidation. Ash instructs Sarah what she must do to achieve her goal. His instructions are complicated and convoluted with margins of error that ratchet up the suspense. 

But the script is almost too complicated and the bulk of the movie is a giant red herring that reduces the film’s compelling first half into a regrettable and—more importantly—a somewhat unbelievable ending. It makes sense on paper, yes, but on film it left this viewer scratching my head, feeling manipulated to accept a seeming resolution that felt more like the forced ending of a one-hour television cop show. 

Until that disappointing ending, however, I was mesmerized by Riz Ahmed’s restrained yet vibrant performance. It’s been said that Isabelle Huppert can register strong emotion with the mere shift of any eyebrow, and I could say the same about a shift of a glance from Ahmed, who I first admired in the 2016 HBO mini-series The Night Of, and who captured my attention without saying a word of dialogue in the first half hour of Relay, give or take a minute or two. His characterization began to falter when he becomes attracted to his client Sarah and takes risks that endanger the both of them. As necessary as his infatuation was to further the plot, it only leant to the unbelievability of the film’s final scenes.

 

EDEN (2024)—REVIEW

The “Galapagos Affair”, as it came to be known over the years, has captured the imaginations of writers and filmmakers for decades, from the original hearsay reports in the 1930s published in European periodicals extolling the “Eden” created on Floreana Island (Galapagos) by the self-proclaimed “Adam and Eve” (Heinrich Ritter and his companion Dora Strauch) who abandoned civilization to pursue their imagined paradise. Those articles unwittingly lured others to Floreana seeking a similar escape from civilization, albeit a dissimilar imaging of paradise. Those dissimilarities were staged in the published memoirs of surviving participants Strauch and Marget Wittmer whose recollections rearranged facts to compete for the truth. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a revival of interest in the Galapagos Affair through men’s magazines of the era that sensationalized the sexual shenanigans on Floreana. Decades later, the artfully crafted and intricately researched 2013 documentary film The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden ("The Galapagos Affair") by filmmaking team Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller reintroduced the story to contemporary audiences and, most recently, Ron Howard has directed a full-out fictionalization of the narrative—Eden (2024)—with international props by Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, Sydney Sweeney and Ana de Armas. 

Comparison is the death of joy, it is often said, enforcing the caution of confusing apples with oranges let alone one filmic genre with another, but the theatrical release of Eden generates a revived appreciation for The Galapagos Affair, and in some ways Eden feels like a remake, which invites the inevitable question of whether a remake was necessary? Regardless, it’s near to impossible to discuss one without the other. The question hovers over which filmic genre best suits the narrative: documentary or fictional feature? Or more fairly, both reveal aspects of the story that cater to the way the filmmakers prefer to tell the story. 

The first and most obvious distinction between the two films is that Goldfine and Geller elect to retain the mystery and uncertainty of whether or not the Baroness and her lover have been murdered and—if so—by who? They go to clever lengths to present as many existing points of view as available, to hint at what they think might have happened, and to—in effect—craft a whodunnit murder mystery; but, they leave it to their audience to decide for themselves. That finesse is gamely eschewed in Howard’s film, scripted by Howard in collaboration with Noah Pink, where without hesitation or ambiguity Margret Wittmer’s recollection of events is preferenced over Dora Strauch Ritter’s, and argued as a done deal. One can feel Ron Howard’s tight grip for creative control over the loose ends of factual relativity. Where that might make Eden feel more structurally cohesive and entertaining, it delimits the ambiguity that makes The Galapagos Affair so informative and intriguing. For those who just want to know what happened, Howard’s Eden will satisfy. For those who want to wonder what happened, Goldfine and Geller excel, and ensorcell. 

The rhythm of a feature film, after all, requires concessions to continuity and length. There’s no way that a fictional approach could afford the complex texture pursued by The Galapagos Affair. In conversation with documentarians Goldfine and Geller, they expressed their difficulty in broadening the “cast” of The Galapagos Affair to include the testimonials of peripheral agents in the events that took place in the 1930s, but which provided a depth and texture that Eden—in its dramaturgical necessity to abbreviate the story to achieve dramatic force—leaves out altogether. This makes Eden comparable to other feature films that follow the same formula of abbreviated compromise. Admittedly, that makes for a simpler story that is easier to follow, which some audiences might expect, but certainly not one that this reviewer favors as it takes the extraordinary complexity of these events and turns them into formulaic fare.  

Eden becomes, instead, more an exercise in characterization with noted actors delivering competent performances, enacting the personalities and the scenarios that made the Galapagos Affair such a scandal at the time. These characterizations to further a plot are scriptural decisions of how a filmmaker wants to interpret a received narrative. A good case in point here would be the affection of Dora (Kirby) for her burro. Howard and Pink effort to script meaning to the relationship of the woman and her pet, but can only really achieve that through the animal’s death. Goldfine and Geller not only have the remarkable footage of Dora dancing with her burro, which reveals her joy and love for the animal, but the revelation in Strauch’s memoirs that she suffered from severe loneliness because of Friedrich’s cold demeanor and lack of affection, for which the burro compensated. None of that comes across in Eden. But it's important because her fantasies of affection color her recollected perceptions down the line. 

Notably, the casting of Eden has made admirable efforts to match appearances. Toby Wallace and Felix Kammerer as, respectively, Robert Phillipson and Rudolph Lorenz look eerily like the two men at each elbow of the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, who Ana de Armas inhabits as a sultry caricature. Again, it works for a feature film like Eden, but de Armas (already identified with sex goddess Marilyn Monroe) interprets the personality of the Baroness as an irresistible beauty—which de Armas undeniably is—but the Baroness, as seen in the ample footage shared in The Galapagos Affair, is not as beautiful as she is charismatic. It's too easy (or more expected) to be beautiful and have control over others, but it’s more interesting to have a charisma that manipulates and controls men. In other words, I have to give credit to de Armas for trying to be the Baroness when the woman we see in the documentary footage is the Baroness in all her eccentric allure—you can’t get around it—and I don’t think there’s an actress in the world who can do the Baroness better than the Baroness does herself. She was acting, after all. And she had it down. 

The allure of the mysterious events on Floreana Island (Galapagos) and the involvement of the Baroness not only fueled considerable press in the 1930s, but sustained journalistic interest through subsequent decades. The ménage à trois of the Baroness and her two lovers maintained a sordid fascination into the 1950s and 1960s. The October 1961 issue of male adventure magazine Man’s World (v. 7, n. 5, pp. 22-25) catered to their readership’s prurient interest in nymphomania through Myron Brenton’s article “The Insatiable Baroness who Created a Private Paradise” with the added tagline: “She turned an off-shore Eden into a shocking off-limits hell colony.” The April 1935 issue of Real Detective boasts the lurid title “The Nudist ‘Empress’ of the Galapagos.” 

 In gist, the Galapagos Affair in whole is, without question, a great story, which was made into a great documentary, but unfortunately into just a good—but not a great—film.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN COMES TO EDEN (2013)—THE EVENING CLASS INTERVIEW WITH DAYNA GOLDFINE AND DANIEL GELLER

Originally published by Fandor in April 2014, the release of Ron Howard’s Eden (2025) calls for another look at the conversation I had with Dayna Goldfine and Daniel Geller upon the theatrical release of The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden (2013). It’s hard not to think of Howard’s fictionalization as a “remake.” 

For over thirty years, Emmy®-award winning directors/producers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine have jointly created critically acclaimed, multi-character documentary narratives that braid their characters' individual personal stories into expanded portraits of the human experience. Their award-winning film Something Ventured (2011), premiered at SXSW, went on to play at festivals internationally, and was eventually broadcast nationwide on PBS. Geller and Goldfine's work also includes: Ballets Russes (2005), which was recognized as one of the top five documentaries of 2005 by both the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review and appeared on a dozen critical "10 Best Films" lists, including those of Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle and Slate; Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors, which premiered theatrically in October 1999 and aired on PBS in October 2000 as the lead program of the Independent Lens series; Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (1996), a feature-length documentary about the South Bronx-based art group Tim Rollins & K.O.S., which aired on Cinemax in September 1998 and was the recipient of two national Emmy® Awards; Frosh: Nine Months In A Freshman Dorm (1994); and, the award-winning Isadora Duncan: Movement From the Soul (1988). 

With their 2013 collaboration, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden, Darwin meets Hitchcock in their fascinating documentary portrait of a 1930's murder mystery. Fleeing conventional society, a Berlin doctor and his mistress start a new life on the uninhabited Floreana Island, but after the international press sensationalizes the exploits of the Galapagos' "Adam and Eve", others flock to the island, including a self-styled Swiss Family Robinson and a gun-toting Viennese Baroness and her two lovers. Interweaving recently unearthed home movies from the original settlers, testimonies of modern day islanders, stunning HD footage, and voice performances by Cate Blanchett, Dian Kruger, Connie Nielsen, Sebastian Koch, Thomas Kretschmann, Kustaf Skarsgård and Josh Radnor, filmmakers Goldfine and Geller create a gripping parable of a Robinson Crusoe adventure and utopian dreams gone awry.  

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, screened next at the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Palm Springs International Film Festival and, most recently, as an official selection to the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival. It was shortly before Berlin that Dayna and Daniel agreed to meet me mid-afternoon at Mojo Café on Divisadero to finesse the craft behind their captivating documentary hybrid.

* * *  

Michael Guillén: Can you speak to your documentary impulse and why you choose to film documentaries over narrative features?  

Daniel Geller: First of all, I have this bugaboo that for some reason fiction films are called narrative and non-fiction films are documentary. If you go into a bookstore, it doesn't say narrative and non-fiction. The assumption would be that if a book is good it has a narrative, in fiction or non-fiction. A lot of the independent theatrical documentaries from the last 10-15 years have moved away from the tired constructions of TV formulas to something that is much more story-driven, and character-driven as well. That's more compelling to an audience. At the same time, a lot of the "larger" movies for financial reasons have drifted towards telling the same story over and over; but, the other thing is that there are these independent fiction films—relatively independent, like what the Coen Brothers are doing or what David Russell has recently done, among others, or Woody Allen for that matter—that are stories that are interesting and breaking ground. Those are more directly aligned to the documentary impulse to get into someone's mind to find an interesting story about somebody's life. 

Dayna Goldfine: What's interesting with regard to the Oscar® race this year is that a huge number of the fiction films are based upon true stories: Dallas Buyers Club, Captain Phillips, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, Saving Mr. Banks. To a certain extent, there's a grain of truth in all of those. It's interesting that—not only in documentary theatrical films—but in fiction theatrical films at least this year so many stories are based upon true stories.  

Guillén: I accept that; however, I still believe documentary tells the true tale better. What I've noticed about documentaries over the years, though—and why I didn't like documentaries when I first started watching them—is that they're predominantly issue-driven and not artful and that, sometimes, especially if the issue is particularly strong, there doesn't seem to be any need for artfulness. Where I must commend the two of you is in the compelling artfulness of your documentary. 

Goldfine: Thank you. That means a lot. 

Geller: Thank you. We aim to do that. We try. We never know if it will work, but that's definitely the impulse. 

Goldfine: This year's Oscar® entries The Square and The Act of Killing are both issue-oriented films but they're both done so artfully that they're a giant stride forward in the documentary form. This almost seems like the first year where I've seen more than one documentary nominated where you could really make an argument that it was a piece of art, as well as being political.  

Guillén: So before we begin to discuss the craft of how you constructed Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden, I have to ask a hard-hitting question. [I lean forward and stare directly at Dayna.] Dayna, did you pull the spark plug on the boat so that you would land on Floreana Island?!! [Laughter.] 

Goldfine: Psychologically? If there was a poltergeist, I was challenging that poltergeist to come forward. Our friend who had hired us was so annoyed with me before it finally happened. He couldn't believe that I kept at him every single day about going to Floreana. I didn't know it then—though I do now since we've been there so many times—but the boat trip is circumscribed by the national park. You can only really go to the islands that they say you can go to. Then, I had no idea. So when we broke down alongside Floreana Island, he literally stormed into our cabin and accused me of sabotage!

Guillén: Your previous film Ballets Russes was simply magnificent, as was Galapagos, and what I might say about both of them would be framed within the Amerindian concept of the long body. Are you familiar with the concept of the long body? 

Geller: No. Say more. 

Guillén: My most immediate understanding of the long body is when a young person is sent on a vision quest, with one aspect of that quest being a search for ancestors, and another being a visualized projection of who they will literally be when they are older. The long body acknowledges the span of a lifetime within generations of lifetimes. I noticed that both Ballets Russes and Galapagos start in the 1930s and progress into the contemporary era. This makes sense, of course, as there would still be living agents who could speak to the original narratives. But can you speak to your personal interest in these kinds of life arc narratives? 

Geller: Well, the longitudinal narratives are really interesting, especially in a documentary, because—if you stick around long enough in anybody's life or look back on someone's life—you'll find dramatic movement. This even applies to films like Kids of Survival where we shot for three years in the South Bronx in that workshop with the kids. A lot happened over those three years that would not have happened if we had just dropped in for four weeks of shooting and then left. Which also addresses your point of how documentaries are becoming seemingly more artful. Filmmakers are not writing scripts and then going in to back them up with images. It's the other way around these days. We're exploring a topic, or exploring a human character, and then taking however much time we need to make it work. It was the same with Frosh (1994): nine months we lived in that freshman dorm. So it does become a question of time.  

Ballets Russes and Galapagos have this other aspect, which is a huge amount of available visual material. To access the pictorial record of someone's life is an amazing privilege and that's something we've only really had in the last 100 years or so where you can see someone's physicality from youth to old age. There's something powerful, poignant, and wistful about that, which adds a layer of emotion. 

Goldfine: Even though Dan and I make these films together, we come up with something at the end that we both feel passionately about; but, for me, it was more of a conscious transition. Not that I would never go back to making a coming-of-age film like Frosh or The Kids of Survival or Now and Then. We had made those three films and right around the time I turned 40 we started thinking about doing Ballets Russes. I realized, first subconsciously and then consciously, that I needed to do some work about looking for role models in the aging process. I think the only way you can do that is to do the long body, as you call it. It was satisfying to do those coming-of-age pieces, but starting with Ballets Russes and continuing into Galapagos, it felt important to look at the whole life story and to look for people who were fortunate to be 70, 80 or 90, like the Ballets Russes dancers, or some of the people in the Galapagos. I hope my life will have been lived as richly.  

Guillén: Allow me to pursue two points. First, you say that nowadays you're no longer writing a script but exploring more the unfolding material; in other words, developing narratives through accretion. Secondly, you mentioned using archival material to emotionally texture a documentary. The access to this archival material is indeed astounding in and of itself; but, my question regards your craft in making it interesting to a movie audience. How do you decide to present the archival material? When do you decide to animate a still photo? Can you speak to those decisions? 

Geller: It's always a question of rhythm, timing, and the musicality of the moment. Those decisions are partly driven by how to re-experience a photograph in this funny temporal medium where you can't just stand there and look at it for however long you want. Some guidance is appreciated, right? To bring your eye around through the story in a fabulous photo. We have so many beautiful photos. They're not our photos. Someone else took these beautiful photos and we're trying to bring the most out of them in our funny little temporal medium. There's also the question of how much time do we need to allow the voice that's associated with a story that's being told at that moment that influences your perception of the image? How much time does that require? The pacing of these decisions is sometimes based on the sheer musicality, but some of it is allowing the thought to be told in voiceover and allowing time for it to be absorbed. It's a little dance almost between those two factors. 

Goldfine: It's also about asking yourself from the moment you select a photo: to what do you want to draw the audience's eye? There are so many elements in a photograph. I do need to give Bill Weber, our editor, some credit because a lot of those camera moves he came up with in the editing room and we went along with them.  

Guillén: Once you've shot your film, how involved are the two of you in the editing process? 

Goldfine: Very. I'm sure if you talked to Bill, he'd say too much. [Laughter.] 

Geller: With Galapagos, we were writing the movie as we were editing the movie, in a way. We had all these primary sources—we had Margaret Wittmer's book (Floreana: A Woman's Pilgrimage to the Galapagos, 1959), we had journals from John Garth, we had Dore Strauch's book (Satan Came to Eden, 1935), we had articles and newspapers, which formed this first person dialogue among the characters. We would write it sitting there with our right hand Celeste Schaefer Snyder, and often with Bill (even though Bill said he couldn't stand the writing anymore and would send us off to write any given chapter). That's pretty much how we did it, by chapter, and we would bring back the script and work through that with Bill. He'd show us a version of what he'd cut and then we'd look at the script again and say, "You know, we need to rewrite that script." We'd either need to take someone out of that flow of dialogue or change the wording slightly to give a sense of clarity that might not have been added to the original article from which we took our quotes. It was very iterative that way. 

Goldfine: Before we decided that we had to bite the bullet and write the murder mystery script—we'd never really done something like that before—we spent a lot of time going back and forth, cutting sequences with the modern characters, and then easing them in to work with the archival stories. We were already about six months into the editing process when we looked at each other and said, "We're never going to accomplish this film and solve the structure of the film if we don't first build the mystery sequences." Once we had that arc, then we were able to begin figuring out where the modern characters fit. But it took a lot of trying to do both at the same time and finally just throwing up our hands and saying, "Okay. We have to write this script."  

Guillén: So therein you're already melding expected documentary tropes with narrative feature tropes, which you further achieved through your use of voiceover. Can you speak to casting your voices? You have a Hollywood dream cast! 

Goldfine: Talk about luck! It was luck that our boat broke down in front of Floreana....  

Guillén: [Suspiciously, with a raised eyebrow] It didn't sound like luck.... 

Goldfine: [Laughs.] Okay, it was luck that our friend hired us to go to the Galapagos. 

Geller: [Laughs.] It was luck that you weren't discovered pulling out the spark plug. 

Goldfine: Okay, okay. But it was really luck that Woody Allen chose to film Blue Jasmine in San Francisco right at the time that we were ready to start seriously thinking about casting, and that someone who we had become very close friends with in Sydney through the Ballets Russes film had gone to work for the Sydney Theatre Company and was the E.D. to Cate Blanchett and her husband's artistic director. It was sheer luck that those things happened to draw Cate to our film. It was further luck that Cate liked us and our film.  

Guillén: So the narrative structure had been completely outlined by the time Cate read it? 

Geller: Largely, the film was intact. 

Goldfine: When Cate was in San Francisco a year ago August, we had the two and a half hour cut. 

Geller: There was still work to do on the script but the whole story was in place and Cate could sense that and feel the movie. We didn't ask her at that time to be in the movie. She had become a friend and we respected her too much as a friend. We thought it would be too awkward to approach her so we decided to just let it be. She gave us wonderful feedback and we accepted that as enough. We didn't want to trade on our friendship. Another weird bit of business was how we wound up with our casting director. Jonathan Dana, our executive producer, was at an industry screening in Los Angeles and right in front of him sat this woman who he hadn't seen in a year or two, Margery Simkin. Margery asked Jonathan what he was up to and he told her he was working on this film with me and Dayna. Turns out, Margery had been to the Galapagos in the late '80s and Margery had met Margaret Wittmer! 

Goldfine: In fact, her boat had also broken down in front of Floreana! 

Geller: Margery said that she wanted to do this project. So when we met with Margery and I offhandedly said something about Cate, Margery moreoreless said that the only way she would continue with the project was if we went back and figured out a way to ask Cate. We thought, "Oh, God! Now what do we do?" We called our friend Patrick, who had introduced us to Cate, and asked, "Patrick, what would you do?" We weren't meeting her to make her do a movie; we were meeting her because Patrick had raved about her and said that she is who she seems to be: a smart, wonderful, interesting, fabulous person. Well, we didn't hear back for a couple of weeks and we thought, "Oh, we really put Patrick into a corner too just now, didn't we?" He wrote back and said that he had decided the smartest thing would just be for him to ask if she would be at all interested. And that opened the door. She was interested, right off, and we made it work. Once Cate came on, then casting became a lot easier. Margery could start proposing different actors to go after their agents to figure out if it was at all possible, for timing and schedule mostly. And that's how this dream cast came together. It was amazing. 

Goldfine: We pretty much suggested the other six actors to Margery and she came up with Josh Radner. I'm really happy that she did.  

Guillén: Give me a sense of this, then: you're documentarians but you're directing a Hollywood cast. How do you do that? 

Goldfine: Well half of great directing is to choose the right cast member. You don't even really need to direct if you have the right cast member.  

Guillén: Would you run footage that they would look at and voice over? 

Goldfine: We didn't do it to time. We actually told them all. 

Geller: They had all seen the rough cut. 

Goldfine: Initially, when we actually started talking to Cate seriously about doing the film, we felt that the best we could do for her was to cast her as the Baroness, because it was a small part and wouldn't take her much time. But then as we started actually having this phone call with her, we looked at each other and were like, "We think she's actually saying she will do Dore Strauch!"  

Guillén: Dore is the root of this narrative. 

Geller: She is! 

Goldfine: So when she said that, we were like, "Okay, okay, if you will do Dore Strauch, we will fly to Sydney to record you." But with some of them, like Thomas Kretschmann, Sebastian Koch, and Gustaf Skarsgård, we had to direct them through SKYPE. They had all seen our rough cut with our horrible acting.... 

Guillén: Ah, you did the original voiceovers? 

Geller: Yeah. Dayna was Dore. I was Dr. Ritter. Bill was Heinz Wittmer and John Garth. Dayna was also the Baroness. Celeste played Margret Wittmer. We were a cast of terrible actors. 

Goldfine: One of the most excruciating moments I've ever had in the last several years was to sit next to Cate Blanchett as she was listening to me doing the voice that she was supposed to do.  

Guillén: If I ever interview her, I'll ask her what she felt in that moment. 

Goldfine: Okay! But you know what? She's such a sweet human being that she'll be incredibly generous and say I was good. Anyway, they had seen the footage but we also told them that we didn't want them to look at the footage while they were recording because we wanted them to give the voiceover its own breath, time, and meter.  

Guillén: Interesting. You trust your actors' articulate rhythm of the primary source material? And then edit and shape around that? 

Goldfine: Exactly. Like with Josh Radnor, we talked a lot about the 1930s, the movies, how the men were all "Aw shucks"-ey. What John Garth's character was, if you read his journals, was someone in his late twenties early thirties, and definitely someone of that era, of the 1930s, who hadn't yet seen a lot of ironic things in the world. We showed Josh the scene from All's Quiet On the Western Front where the men are standing around the hospital bed, trying to "aw shucks" away the fact that this guy's leg's been amputated. Josh looked at that and said, "Okay, I get it. It's the pre-ironic moment in time." 

Geller: In terms of directing really fabulous actors, I have two quick stories. First, going way back to our Isadora Duncan film, Julie Harris did the voice of Isadora. So the first film we made had a first person acting performance. Julie came into the studio. She had marked up her script fairly well and read so beautifully and wonderfully as Isadora. There was only one direction we had to give her: an anticipation moment when Isadora discovers she's pregnant out of wedlock. Julie thought that was a problem for Isadora as a dancer and what it would do to her career. We said no, if you actually read the literature, it was one of the greatest moments of her life. Boom, on a dime, she turned the performance around. 

The other was Connie Nielsen as the Baroness. When we sat down and recorded her here in the studio, she asked a brilliant question. Was the Baroness a narcissist who only loved herself? Or the kind of narcissist who wants everyone to love her? It was a wonderful question for an actor to ask because it could color the performance one way or the other. We said, she wanted everyone to love her and boom, off she went. So there's not a lot to direct at that point. 

Goldfine: It's true, and even though the Baroness had maybe 15 lines in the whole film, we spent a good hour talking to Connie about what kind of a human being the Baroness was.  

Guillén: I agree that's a brilliant and important question to ask about possibly one of the most fascinating personalities ever presented on film! I was stunned by this woman, the Baroness. What a force of nature! What I love about your films—specifically, Ballets Russes and Galapagos—is your understanding that the only true narrative is human nature. By contrast to Ballets Russes, which had a cast of hundreds, in Galapagos you honed the cast down and through a limited ensemble expressed so much about human nature. 

Goldfine: I love that you think we honed it down! Thank you for that! Because one of the problems one of the fiction scripts has is that it can't handle the number of characters we managed to juggle.  

Guillén: Basically, the whole first section of the film is only two people. 

Geller: Right. And they're archetypes. Straightaway, they're so distinguished.  

Guillén: And already there's tension there. 

Geller: Yes. But what was tricky about that was weaving in the modern characters—what we call the modern characters (some of them were born in the 1930s)—that was where we had the hardest time. We really wanted them to be a part of the movie, to expand the notion, the feel and the psychology of the movie, but how to add all those extra characters in and to do it succinctly tracked back to a lot of the problems we were having with Ballets Russes, very similar. How do you introduce a character three quarters of a way into a movie and not exhaust an audience? But even though we were back with the same problems, they were not yielding to the same solutions.  

Guillén: Though I respect and, of course, acknowledge the addition of the modern characters, that's not what I'm focusing on. I'm thinking about the original core of characters from the 1930s that truly make up the anchor of this narrative. What fascinated me was that—within that core group—everything about human nature was being expressed. 

Geller: That's right. Early on, we knew this story was more than a murder mystery. It's about the question: "What is Paradise?" What if your notion of Paradise—even if it's in some way achievable—conflicts with somebody else's notion? 

Goldfine: What struck me immediately was the need of everyone—not just these characters—to mythologize themselves. In other words, every single person that came to that island had developed a myth about themselves and was living it out. Ritter and Strauch were very much the Adam and Eve and they came to Floreana with that sense of mythology. Then the Wittmers came in liederhosen; they were like the Swift Family Robinson. All of these people were, I would say, consciously living out these myths. Because at the time the world, the press, was already identifying them this way. Ritter wrote a three-part essay for The Atlantic Monthly published in 1931 wherein he himself used the terms Adam and Eve.  

Guillén: I'm aware that you recovered the archival footage for Galapagos in Los Angeles in extremely bad condition. How involved were you with the process of film preservation? 

Goldfine: They were kind enough to let us bring this frail 16mm footage to San Francisco where we worked with John Carlton at Monaco to engineer its digital transfer. 

Geller: We did a fair bit of that on Ballets Russes too with these archives that would pop up out of some closet in somebody's house. The arrangement has always been that we would give a digital copy to the institution or the person who was kind enough to give us the use of the footage in the first place. 

Goldfine: The bulk of what we were working with were the 16mm reels, but we also preserved a lot of the still images. Those rot in archives as well.  

Guillén: And here I have to compliment your editorial wizardry in how you placed this archival footage within the grand narrative of your documentary. Specifically, as I was watching the first sequence about Ritter and Strauch arriving on the island and their first isolated weeks there, I kept thinking, "Who's filming this?" If they were supposed to be alone on the island, how could anyone be filming them? Of course, the footage was taken by one of the expeditions that later visited them on Floreana, but as filmmakers you didn't tell us that. We didn't know about the visiting expeditions yet. I've got to say that was a clever manipulation of cognitive dissonance and chronological displacement. 

Goldfine: We definitely went through this dialogue where we asked whether we needed to make that clear up front but we ultimately decided not to. It might have been more documentarian.... 

Geller: But it would have taken you out of the moment and would have interfered with the narrative of two people on an island without anybody there. And look, part of what we set out to do from the beginning was to make a weird movie, at least slightly weird. In the past we'd never set out to make a weird movie, so we thought that would be part of our aesthetic challenge: to make it slightly off balance, which suits the subject of course. It suits the people who are in the movie. They're all off a little bit. Some of the weirdness of the movie feels like a reflection.  

Guillén: And, of course, it suits the film's central mystery. When you spoke to Scott Foundas, you admitted to borrowing foreshadowing from Hitchcock to amplify the film's mystery. You don't feel in any way that this undermines the documentary impulse? The true story? 

Geller: A story about unreliable narrators self-mythologizing the fabulous? What is the truth in all that?!

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—FLUSH (2025): REVIEW

The Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) World Premiere of Grégory Morin’s Flush (2025) scored the Audience Award for Best International Feature and it’s easy to understand why. Flush is intense, offensive, perverse, grotesque, disturbing and hilarious all at once: just what Fantasia audiences love and—let’s face it—require. 

Talk about a drug deal gone wrong!! Luc (Jonathan Lambert) has snuck into a bathroom stall to snort a few lines of cocaine when he accidentally gets his foot wedged in the toilet where his drug dealer has stashed his supply. Paranoid accusations ensue and—almost before he knows it—it’s not his foot wedged in the toilet but his head. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined such a scenario nor that it would become such a visceral thriller and—in its own weird way—a sentimental family drama. Between richocheting bullets and drug-addled mice, Flush is a shitload of the unexpected, even the unwanted, veering into the unavoidable. 

As Mitch Davis describes it for Fantasia’s program, Flush is “utterly, gloriously insane. Evocative of Dupieux by way of Gaspar Noé and early Álex de la Iglesia, Flush is as inventively delirious as it is hyper-cinematic, a real-time, over-the-top blast of indie brilliance with gross-out curves to spare. In the center of it all, Lambert delivers a wild performance ripping with mania and unexpected emotional depth, a unique presence amidst the escalating, absurd circumstances that twist and turn (and smash and cut) around him. Tight, imaginative and quite frankly miraculous, Flush consistently ups the ante in darkly comic sleaze and shock, strapping it together with bigger-than-life heart to deliver a singular huis clos [“no exit”] thrill ride on the wings of drain pipes and degeneracy.” 

This ain't your daddy's Roto-Rooter. Your pipes will never be the same!!

 

FANTASIA 29 (2025): SPANISH CINEMA—THE WAILING (2024) / CIELO (2025) / I AM FRANKELDA (2025): REVIEW

By “Spanish” I mean Spanish-speaking, of course, as The Wailing (2024) is a co-production from France, Argentina and Spain; Cielo (2025) a co-production from the United Kingdom and Bolivia; and I Am Frankelda (2025) from Mexico. Though their language is shared, their visions are uniquely distinct. 

Not to be confused with Na Hong Jin’s 2016 South Korean horror film of the same name, The Wailing / El Llanto (2024), directed by Pedro Martín-Calero and written by Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña, had its World Premiere at the 2024 San Sebastián International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Seashell for Best Director. Picked up by Film Movement for U.S. distribution, The Wailing enjoys its Canadian premiere at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”). 

For his debut feature, director and co-writer Martín-Calero has crafted an intense thriller layered in chapters examining sustained violence against women—one might say an institutional violence disguised as a supernatural curse—where the women are victimized by an assailant they cannot see, though one susceptible to documentation. It’s as if to say that over generations there can be no denying women have suffered violence, statistics document as much, though for each woman it feels singular and unexplainable; a horrific unjust mystery. The interstitial proof in The Wailing is captured on film, witnessed indirectly on camcorders and—decades later—on laptop screens and smartphones. What is witnessed is embodied in the figure of an old man, otherwise an invisible presence, hovering in the background, claiming his victims, passing from mother to daughter to younger sister. 

The source of this generational curse or why it has attached itself to these particular women is not forthcoming in Martín-Calero’s narrative, which lends the threat power for not being fully understood. Was there a past action, a sin, that initiated this embodiment, this entity, that enforces punishment? How has it attached itself to a bloodline of women, influencing them physically, emotionally, and mentally? Is this violence against women and those they love a demon unto itself? Can it be undone? Which is the main question of the film, isn’t it? It’s the sound of the wailing, the weeping, heard by the women as they near danger. Can violence against women be undone? Can danger be averted? Or are women doomed to join the wailing, generation after generation? 

It begins with Andrea (Ester Expósito) who discovers herself adopted, given away at birth by a woman institutionalized for being criminally insane. Notified of her mother’s death, Andrea goes looking for answers and finds them in an abandoned apartment building that—for all extents and purposes—could be considered a doorway to a nightmare. The next chapter introduces us to Camilia (Malena Villa), an aspiring filmmaker whose voyeuristic infatuation with Marie (Mathilde Ollivier) inadvertently reveals through her film footage the malevolent spirit attached to Marie who we next discover is Andrea’s mother. Marie’s backstory helps to piece together the patterns of violence, if not the reasons. Engaging and unflinching, The Wailing establishes dread early and sustains it throughout.

  

“How far would you go to reach Heaven?” asks the tagline for Cielo (2025), Alberto Sciamma’s magical realist fable about the tenacity of the feminine spirit. Winner of the Special Jury Prize, the Audience Award, and Best Cinematography at Fantasporto, where Cielo had its World Premiere, Fantasia claims its North American premiere in their flagship section Cheval Noir. 

From the moment that Santa (movingly portrayed by newcomer Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) swallows a fish whole, we enter the realm of magical realism, long established in Latin American culture as a means of expressing deep political and psychological truths. Borrowing from Buddhism, the fish—often shown in pairs (frequently referenced as Pisces in Cielo)—represents happiness, freedom, and liberation from the cycle of life and death, which is what Santa wishes for her mother, who has been maltreated by her cruel drunkard husband far too long. Pisces likewise references the navigation between fantasy and reality, informing and guiding Santa’s many adventures. 

In the years that I was a student of mythologist Joseph Campbell, women participating in his seminars frequently questioned his gendered monomyth thesis regarding the hero’s journey. They wanted to know why women weren’t represented in his schemata? Just as frequently he would dutifully reply that it was up to women to interpret the monomyth by their own gender. Cielo certainly tracks with that impulse as Santa invites her allies to help her deliver her mother to Heaven. Her allies are multiple: a dead condor that she brings back to life, a fish in a bucket named Manolo (nicknamed Manolito), a spirited luchadora known as La Reina (Mariela Salaverry), a disspirited priest (Luis Bredow), and a weary cop (Fernando Arze Echalar) imprisoned by reason and logic and oh so susceptible to the flourishes of fancy that Santa brings to his world and which—like a firefly—he wants to capture in a jar. 

The scene where the Cholita female wrestlers joyously board their bus laughing and talking all at once is sheer beauty, as are many of Bolivia’s dramatic landscapes through which their bus travels. My breath halted in my chest as they negotiate a narrow rutted road high in the mountains: one of many moments demonstrating Alex Metcalfe’s cinematographic brilliance. 

As Kat Ellinger nails it for Fantasia’s program capsule: “The film is not content with drab realism, and instead, via its bold primary color palette, its fantastical use of overpowering, sublime landscapes, and its dedication to joy, dance, and female intuition as defiance, ventures into the realm of myth, where survival becomes a sacred act: a ritual of the divine feminine.” 

I adored this film and it has emerged as one of my favorites from the festival. The translated lyrics of Cielo’s closing rap anthem “La Boliviana”, written and performed by Alwa, bear reciting: 

I am the Bolivian woman, bearer of my sorrows. / My life is mine alone, my karma all my own. / My hope is always here, dreams forever clear. / What I want is to fly, soar without guilt. / I will stride the road with no compass or fear. / I will touch the sky, words to my dreams. / The road is long, the going can be slow. / But the wind has told me: you’re going to touch the sky. / My fate is written, the future a done deal. / In my life is a fire that no one can extinguish. / May time forgive me when I despair. / When I lose myself, let life be fair. / I will escape beyond, running from my fear. / Aware of my mistakes, they cannot be eternal. / The path of my life is far from easy. / Despite heavy burdens I don’t give up. / If this is my destiny, it is what I live for. / And to that alone I dedicate my heartbeats. / My search for love and peace are my survival. / Leaving my solitude and reality behind. / I seek happiness, no matter what it takes. / I am the Bolivian who fears nothing. / No matter what I must endure, I will not doubt it. / Following the stars, I will surely get there; / Following the moon, I will find you. / I want to embrace your soul; not lose hope. / If joy reaches me, it won’t be out of ingratitude. / I am the Bolivian Woman, no longer bearing sorrows; / Owner of my life, unfollowed by my Karma. / I am now in Heaven; I am now with my Mother. 

  

 I Am Frankelda (2025), a North American premiere in Fantasia’s Animation Plus section, is framed by Rupert Bottenberg in Fantasia’s program capsule: “The task of crafting Mexico’s very first stop-motion animated feature film could not have fallen to four more worthy hands than those of Rodolfo and Arturo Ambriz.” Los Hermanos Ambriz, proteges of Guillermo del Toro, first gained widespread recognition with the short film Revoltoso (Fantasia 2016).  

Mexico’s zoomorphic alebrijes achieved voice and characterization in Revoltoso (which translates as “rebellious”) “demonstrating daring ideas and a bedeviled attention to detail” (again, Fantasia). The band Altermutz who scored the short received a Certificate of Outstanding Achievement for Best Original Score at the Brooklyn Film Festival. That score is available on Spotify. 

Rebellion abounds in Revoltoso, which features a “revolting” three-eyed boar named Jabalito who is on the scene of one of the first filmed wars in history: the Mexican Revolution. Los Hermanos Ambriz followed up with Frankelda’s Book of Spooks (2021), a five-episode miniseries on Cartoon Network Latin America and HBO Max, introducing the phantom “ghostwriter” Frankelda and her companion Herneval, a grumpy enchanted book, both trapped in a sentient haunted house. Eager to tell her handful of spooky stories, Frankelda addresses stories of children not wanting to be themselves and the danger that wishes come true, not free. The series ended on a disappointing cliffhanger and so I Am Frankelda remedies that by fleshing out Frankelda’s origin story. “It turns out that the most astonishing tale the two have to tell is their own!” Fantasia asserts. “The dazzling I Am Frankelda explores the challenging childhood of Francisca Imelda, and how she came to befriend Herneval, prince of the realm that lies on the other side of our dreams.”

 

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—DOG OF GOD / HELLCAT: REVIEW

Dogs and cats kenneled at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”). 

Anadromatic and inversive at its core, Dog of God (2025) is a provocative animation of Hell holding up a dark and grotesque mirror to Heaven. From its initial castration to its final transmogrified confrontation, Dog of God atmospherically conjures a 17th century witch trial in the Swedish Livonian village of Zaube using imaginative and beautifully-hued rotoscoped animation by Harijs Grundmanis. Phantasmagoric, feverish, orgiastic, perverse and unabashedly adult, Dog of God may not have the family draw of its Latvian co-hort Oscar® winner Flow, but—in my estimation—far exceeds Flow in narrative scope and technical execution. It is clearly a labor of love (or should I say lust?) from the Ābele brothers: Lauris serves as co-director, co-writer, composer and co-editor; Raitis as producer, co-director, co-writer, and co-editor; and Marcis as cinematographer. 

As synopsized by Rupert Bottenberg for Fantasia: “In late 17th-century Livonia (the Baltic region, on modern-day maps), rule over a dismal, nameless backwater town is shared between a domineering priest and a decadent baron, each with his own cringing lackey to carry out their dishonorable errands. When a holy relic precious to the pastor vanishes, he casts blame upon the object of his secret lust, the tough but lovely tavern-keeper whose clandestine dabbling in esoteric medicinal alchemy invites suspicions of witchcraft. Meanwhile, an uncouth, otherworldly figure drifts ever closer to the town, bearing a gift of sorts, one sure to upend what faint traces of normalcy remain—the torn-off testicles of the Devil himself!” 

As detailed at the film’s website: “The plot of the film Dog of God by the Ābele brothers is rooted in a historical event: the most famous werewolf trial in Northern Europe, the case of Thiess of Kaltenbrun, in which an 82-year-old man bravely declared himself a werewolf or a Dog of God during a trial in a church, recounting his battles against witches and wizards in the depths of hell.” 

In other words, the werewolf in Dog of God is more shamanic than lycanthropic and is an agent of God rather than the Devil. I’m not sure what kind of distribution Dog of God can achieve in the United States whose Christian posturing resembles the cruel and hypocritical priest in Dog of God way too much, but it deserves widespread recognition for its scriptural and visual accomplishments and I sincerely hope it gains the audience it deserves.

  

Within the same domain of moon-jangled transmogrifications is the Fantasia World Premiere of Brock Bodell’s Hellcat (2025), commendable for the slow burn of its first half and the solid performances of its two main actors: Dakota Gorman, as Lena (a kidnapped woman who awakens inside a moving trailer unsure of how she got there and why she is wounded), and her captor Clive who seems genuinely concerned with helping her. Said performances competently carry the film to its conclusion, though murky cinematography and idle practical effects unfortunately weaken its final sequences.

 

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—FANTASIA RETRO: THE DEVIL’S BRIDE (1974) / THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS (1976) / THE NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (1980)—REVIEWS

As committed as the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”), now in their 29th edition, has been in securing the premiering edge of genre film from all around the world, recognizing and setting trends, they have likewise set their sights on paying tribute to and acknowledging influences from years past of projects that may have slipped under the radar of audience reception in recent decades. Nine entries in their Fantasia Retro sidebar addressed the need—and the entertainment—in taking a second look at these filmic forebearers. I profile three that I had the fortunate opportunity to view. 

With The Devil’s Bride (1974) I can now check off my bucket list the Lithuanian musical I’ve been meaning to see. For that matter, it may be the only Lithuanian musical I will ever need to see, now that I’ve caught its North American premiere at Fantasia in a gorgeous restoration by the Lithuanian Film Centre.  At the time of its release, The Devil’s Bride was one of the most successful and celebrated movies in the Lithuanian cinema of the Soviet era and its first rock opera, garnering comparisons to Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Tommy (1975), which both came out about the same time. 

Based on the 1945 fantasy novel Baltaragis's Mill, the most notable work by writer, poet and political activist Kazys Boruta, and in turn based on Lithuanian folklore, the story carries hints of John Milton’s 1667 poem “Paradise Lost” (with rebellious angels exiled from Heaven) and Eastern European fairy tales involving the “rash promise” motif (such as in “Rumplestiltskin” where a miller’s daughter offers her first born in exchange for escaping death by being able to spin straw into gold). I don’t know what it is about millers and their daughters, but the same blind promise is granted in The Devil’s Bride. 

Once Pinciukas (a puckish Gediminas Girvainis) has been demoted from disobedient angel to an exiled devil cast out of Heaven into the pond of the miller Baltaragis (Vasilijus Simčičius), he is captured and put to work at the mill. To lessen his work load, Pinciukas strikes a deal with Baltaragis, granting him success at the mill and the hand of the beautiful, melodius Marcelé (Vaiva Mainelytė), if he is awarded their first born. The boon backfires on the miller when Marcelé dies in childbirth and their daughter Jurga—the spitting image of her mother (and likewise played by Mainelytė)—is doomed to marry the devil. But in rides the dashingly handsome Girdvainis (Regimantas Adomaitis), he and Jurga fall in love, and Pinciukas is left warding off the advances of the miller’s sister Ursule, who the miller attempts to pawn off on him. When Ursule saves Pinciukas from a vengeful mob, his affections transfer to her, they marry and happily have children of their own. 

Entirely sung, The Devil’s Bride requires cultural allowances. I can’t say the music was my idea of a rock opera, but I certainly enjoyed the colorful cinematography and Arūnas Žebriūnas’ zany, spirited direction.

  

The bloody kills of giallo cinema have long fascinated me with their fatal choreography and lurid beauty and—as familiar as I might be with the films of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Mario Bava—I’d not yet sampled the work of Pupi Avati, known for the giallo classic The House With Laughing Windows (1976). As noted by Kat Ellinger in Fantasia’s program notes: “While not inherently supernatural, the film belongs to a small but ever-so-sweet subset of the genre, giallo fantastico: works that stretch the genre’s core footing in thriller and mystery, moving instead toward surrealism and the avant garde.” 

 I knew something was up in the opening sequence. Ordinarily, giallo films—like many genre films—begin with the murder or the dead body of a woman. I’ve never quite understood the gendered necessity of this narrative trope, but can’t buck a lineage that stretches back decades. So it was a refreshing—if that word is appropriate—surprise when the film opens with a muscular man being tortured and stabbed with knives. That scenario segues into the painting of St. Sebastian who—instead of being pierced with arrows—has been martyred by sharp cutlery. 

 My gaydar kicked into high gear. You don’t introduce St. Sebastian without suggesting inversion or gender variance as some kind of perverse subplot and, sure enough, The House With Laughing Windows leads its male protagonist through several badly-lit if atmospheric set pieces in order to deliver a truly twisted joke at film’s end. 

Again, from Kat Ellinger’s write-up, our protagonist Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) arrives in a seemingly sleepy village to restore the church mural of St. Sebastian—already disturbing in its replacement of arrows with knives—and finds himself drawn into chaotic and sinister scenarios, let alone the beds of every available woman in sight. Comparing Stefano to the male protagonist in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Ellinger writes: “Stefano is the outsider—a man of intellect and rational curiosity—entering a closed, rural world shaped by silence, denial, and local tradition. Here, the past is not a place of clarity, but a conduit for primordial madness and deadly intent.”

  

The Fantasia World Premiere of a 4K restoration of Robert Butler’s Night of the Juggler (1980), available for the first time in 40 years, plunges the viewer into the energized if politically incorrect moviemaking of the late ‘70s-early ‘80s when urban verisimilitude was captured by the gutter bigot-speak rampant before woke politics. I winced at some of the racist and sexist slurs hurled between characters even as I recognized they hit their marks. 

Ex-cop Sean Boyd (James Brolin, at his hunkiest) spends the entire film chasing Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman, former Boys of the Band nelly turned perverse psychopath) because he’s kidnapped his daughter Kathy (Abbie Bluestone), on her birthday no less, mistaking her for his intended victim: the daughter of a wealthy real-estate magnate responsible for tearing down his families’ properties and decimating their livelihood. He wants a million dollars as recompense. It’s bad enough that Gus is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way, but his gradual collapse into a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome where he becomes attracted to his teenage hostage feels genuinely icky, right down to the kiss. It leads me to wonder if this film wasn’t an influence on Donald Trump at 34 when he was first fielding questions about potentially running for President?

Supporting turns are solid. Richard Castellano as Lt. Tonelli has a comic steal when he samples frozen yogurt for the first time. Frozen yogurt, you might remember, was introduced to the United States in the 1970s. Mandy Patinkin, long before Barbra Streisand sang to him bathing naked, and before he nearly drove himself crazy painting dots on a canvas, has a brief, accent-laden cameo as Alessandro, a Puerto Rican cab driver with crazy driving skills and few good things to say about white people. Julie Carmen’s sensuous beauty as Maria, a street smart young clerk from the New York City dog pound, stole every scene she was in. Bug-eyed Dan Hedaya as Sergeant Barnes is—as Michael Gingold describes in his Fantasia program capsule—“juicily overacted.” Gingold also notes that an 11-year-old C. Thomas Howell served as Bluestone’s stunt double. 

Finally, I have to admit that one of my favorite scenes in the film is when we’re allowed a peep into a 42nd Street peep show back when the Deuce wasn’t overrun by the horrifying throngs of tourists that inhabit Times Square today.

 

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—STUNTMAN: REVIEW

Skillfully pitched between sentiment and action, Stuntman (2024)—the debut feature from Herbert Leung Koon-Shun and Albert Leung Koon-Yiu—screened at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”). While paying homage to the world of golden age Hong Kong stunts and kung fu, Stuntman manages to also deliver a family drama about a father seeking to reconcile with his estranged daughter, as well as debating the merits of the old school style of stunt work where safety was incidental to cinematic effect, and a newer school where stuntmen are protected by evolved industry standards. 

Sam (Wei Tung, aka Stephen Tung) is an action choreographer committed to taking risks that endanger his stuntmen in an effort to create energized action films popular to the public. Intensely focused on filmmaking, Sam forfeits meaningful relationships with his wife and daughter and—when a stuntman is seriously injured and paralyzed on set—forfeits his reputation as well, becoming persona non grata in the Hong Kong action industry. No one wants to work with him. He’s given one last chance by a former colleague producing a final film but finds himself in conflict with a new generation of stuntmen willing to say no to proposed directions that might bring them harm. How then is he to achieve the glory and transcultural appeal of Hong Kong’s golden age of action filmmaking (the 1970s to the 1990s)? 

Casting Stephen Tung as the aged action choreographer attempting to make a comeback is key here as Tung hardly needs to act the part, having been an action choreographer, actor and film director since the 1970s, working with the likes of John Woo, Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-Wai and winning the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Choreography seven times: the most awarded individual in that category. Further, he is the head of the Hong Kong Stuntmen Association. He adds not only authenticity to his role, but a keen awareness of how stunt work has transitioned from Hong Kong’s golden age to the present.

HEMA HEMA: SING ME A SONG WHILE I WAIT (2016)—REVIEW

What can be said of a person who—in the act of trying to conceal himself with a mask—reveals who he really is? I first tackled that conundrum when studying Dionysos, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, whose association with masks symbolized transformation and religious fervor. Masks in his cults and in Greek theatre, which he patronized, allowed wearers to assume new identities, from human to animal or from one gender to another, enabling a state of uninhibited behavior. Not to argue too much a case for cultural diffusion, but it also interests me that Hellenistic culture was transmitted to the region of Gandhara in ancient India, accounting for how Buddhist art has incorporated Dionysian imagery and narrative forms. 

In his fourth film Hema Hema: Sing Me A Song While I Wait (2016) Bhutanese director and Buddhist Lama Khyentse Norbu continued developing the Buddhist cinema he almost single-handedly created. His filmic practice began with consultative work for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993), followed six years later by his first feature film The Cup (1999); Travelers & Magicians (2003), the first full-length feature film shot in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan; and Vara: A Blessing (2013). All four films have strong festival pedigree as arthouse darlings. Hema Hema premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, made its festival rounds, and is finally being released theatrically by New York-based Dekanalog on Friday, August 8, 2025 at the Quad Cinema. 

“Hema Hema” means “once upon a time” in native Dzongkha language and the English subtitle refers to a bardo state, a waiting room where departed souls pass before entering their next incarnation. Every twelve years an elder selects individuals to attend a ritual ceremony lasting a lunar cycle where they’re taught the concept of the bardo as they “prepare for the gap between death and birth”. Said preparation involves shedding one’s notion of identity by delving into the realm of anonymity, achieved through a required use of masks. 

As articulated by Italian film critic Lorenzo Paci at Cinepaxy, the mask is “a device for establishing a community of anonymous individuals, without subjection or individuality, but also a mask to protect oneself from oneself, from one's own identity. Thus, one enters a role-playing game where the stakes are one's own life and that of others; one conforms to an otherness regardless of what one was, almost as if the ritual were a path to resurrection in another life, a chance to recreate oneself and escape the constant obligation of recognizing oneself. There is no longer any need to conform one's being to an identity, one's essence to matter; conforming to a precept means, in a certain sense, excluding it, denying it by subjecting oneself to it, in this case, reshaping oneself with a new consistency.” 

“Anonymity is intoxicating,” the ceremonial elder teaches. “Anonymity is power. If you give away your identity, you give a way to power.” Donning masks, becoming faceless, allows the participants to be lascivious, playful and daring. Identity is understood to be a form of death and anonymity a rebirth. The narrative grip of the past, the thirst for fame and respect, are understood as the identity the ceremonial participants are tasked to relinquish. At HighOnFilms, Nafees Ahmed extrapolates that people are “bucketing along to make our identity unique; donning ‘masks’ when required to make it possible in a world besieged by modern technology. Our virtual social presence matters the most. We have let these technologies define our life. We fear anonymity so much that our real self is lost while doing so.” Slaying this “earned” identity, Ahmed suggests, is what “lies at the heart of this spiritual elevating film.” Adriana Rosati furthers at AsianMoviePulse that, indeed, Norbu gained inspiration from chat rooms and social medias where users feel freedom of action behind the anonymity of their screens. 

So I return to the conundrum originally posed. What if the anonymity that allegedly allows you to escape your identity, that essentially conceals it, actually results in unleashing it, revealing it, in dark, unexpected ways? What if the wisdom of a Buddhist teaching promoting rebirth becomes another form of death? As stated in their program note, Quad Cinema writes: “The Bhutanese lama and filmmaker, recognized by Tibetan Buddhists as the third incarnation of the founder of Khyentse lineage, imbues his films with a rare spiritual wisdom—though not at the expense of the traditional movie-going pleasures of spectacle, character, and suspense.” 

Though the usage of masks in this film are not inherently Buddhist in practice, they fascinate; either through the inscrutable and expressionless mask of our main protagonist, as compared to the brightly painted, if garish, masks of other participants (some of the masks are hundreds of years old). Cinematographer Jigme Tenzing creates a vibrant palette of oranges and reds amidst the verdant greens of the southeastern locations in Bhutan, then switches to blues in the film’s urban scenes where the anonymity of dancers in a club rhymes with the ritual dances at the ceremonial retreat. The urban scenarios that bookend the film are also the ones that provoke the most unease, causing lingering ruminations on how beautiful teachings might be impossible to practice in our modern world of earned identities.

 

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—TOUCH ME (2025): REVIEW

Sporting its Canadian premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) after a robust festival run that included premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, South by Southwest, Frameline, Overlook and Night Visions, Addison Heimann’s Touch Me (2025) offers up an incredible premise tempered by credible acting. Understood as a satirical reflection on the traumatic underpinnings of addiction, codependency, lust, toxic relationships, and body horror, I viewed Touch Me at about the same time that I caught James Gunn’s latest iteration of Superman (2025) and that chance collision provoked questions and insights. 

Let’s talk frankly about intergalactic interspecies sex, shall we? Whereas miscegenation references sex between races, and interspecies mating refers to sex between Earthen species, there doesn’t appear to be a specific term for intercourse between humans and space aliens, though genre provides a means of imagining it. Which is exactly the response I got when I Googled it (yes, I Googled it). “There's no definitive scientific term for breeding between humans and hypothetical alien species because it's currently considered impossible and exists mostly within the realm of science fiction,” Google advises. So science fiction it is. 

Whereas Candy Clark freaked out by the prospect when David Bowie attempted sex in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris) can’t get enough of it in Touch Me. Can you blame them? Their alien tryst Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) dispenses a euphoric toxin to all those he touches that obliviates the psychological anxieties engendered by past trauma. Aware of his gift, Brian manipulates his human lovers with shifting offers of interspecies intercourse or—in the case of his assistant Laura (Marlene Forte)—its denial. The fact that sex with Brian is not only spectacular but tentacular assures that all three humans are trembling with lust. Why he’s being so polyamorous belies a sinister agenda. 

Jump to Superman, restrained by pandering to general summer audiences with the palliative of intergalactic interspecies romance. Oh, brother. Not only has Gunn’s version of Superman and David Corenswet’s characterization been criticized for being too “woke”, but his saving of a squirrel was almost more than I could handle (admittedly, I hate squirrels and think they all should die insufferable deaths). My disgruntlement is only because we all know what has been on everyone’s minds since Superman’s strapping good looks and pronounced assets attracted Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). Presumably, the two are a number and I find it hard to believe that Lois could be satisfied with floating around mid-air with her Kryptonian exile. I mean, c’mon. Is she getting it good? Can she take it? 

So kudos to Addison Heimann for pulling no punches and fantasizing not only on Joey and Craig being suspended in mid-air, intoxicated by the drug introduced into their bodies from Brian’s touch, and no doubt penetrated by those … endowed tentacles; but, even further, to discover (SPOILER ALERT) that it’s not Joey who can be impregnated by alien sperm (I’m presuming it’s sperm) but Craig, which—I don’t know—suggests what? The dangers of gay sex? I recommend you watch Touch Me on your own while I chance a cold shower. 

Back to Google: “It's important to remember that for any actual interspecies breeding to occur, there would need to be a significant degree of biological compatibility between the two species. This is considered highly unlikely with genuinely alien life forms due to vast differences in genetics and evolutionary paths. In most fictional scenarios, any such breeding would likely be achieved through advanced genetic engineering rather than natural reproduction.” 

Heimann eschews “genetic engineering” for bumping uglies and, again, I laud him for that. Otherwise we’d be languishing in the anemic romance of Superman. So before I take my cold shower, I’d like to touch for a moment (pun intended) on the character of Craig, a not-entirely-likeable trust fund slacker. Representation holds an inherent conundrum: you have to know enough about yourself and any group with which you identify in order to be able to represent yourself as a constituent of that group; and, often, how you come to know yourself is through the example, or the guidance, of that group’s representation. It’s something of a feedback loop: identity and representation. 

Gay males of my generation, by example, were offered a feedback loop of evolving media to find ourselves, see ourselves, and identify ourselves writ large projected onto the silver screen or represented on the living room screen of television. Queer scholars much more accomplished than me have studied how television seems to be the first medium where challenges to representation are first addressed and where the nature of representation itself begins to evolve. Movies tend to follow suit much later, tending to be conservative mouthpieces for the status quo, being reluctant to hazard box office. So here we have Craig, impregnated by an alien (God-knows-how) and I seriously don’t quite know what I’m supposed to do with this risk of representation that Heimann has taken. Suffice it to say that I’m glad I’m in my elder years and exhausted with influences.

FANTASIA 29 (2025): KOREAN CINEMA—OMNISCIENT READER: THE PROPHECY (2025); HOLY NIGHT: DEMON HUNTERS (2025)—REVIEWS

In contrast to the Korean psychological thrillers slated in the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) via Finecut distributors, Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025) and Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025) represent the opposite end of the genre spectrum with spectacular optics aimed at pop cultural trends, namely webtoons. 

The Canadian premiere of director and co-writer Kim Byung-woo’s Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025) brings to Fantasia’s big screen the addictive pleasures of smartphone webtoons, the episodic digital comics (i.e., web novels) originating in South Korea that have gained in international popularity through easy internet access. Adapted from singNsong's eponymous webtoon (singNsong being the pseudonym for the married couple who co-authored the popular web novel (i.e., manhwa) "Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint" and "The World After the Fall"), Byung-woo’s filmic treatment holds true to the manhwa’s premise of a fan’s unexpected immersion into the world that he has read about faithfully for years while commuting to and from work. 

As events in his manhwa begin to suddenly play out in his “real” life in Seoul, shy, discreet office worker Dok-ja (award-winning K-drama star Hahn Hyo-seop) has the advantage—as the manhwa’s most devoted reader—of knowing what’s going to happen before it happens and who the key players are. Knowing the rules of this digital universe inside-out, Dok-ja seeks to help his fellow Seoulians but rapidly discovers that omniscience doesn’t mean he can be a passive observer. Just because he is omniscient does not mean he’s a god; only the author—Dok-ja understands—is god, but the author is giving him an opportunity to rewrite the manhwa’s ending. In order to do so, Dok-ja has to engage in the events unfolding before him, acquiring power through video game acuity and skill, and adjusting to the dangerous shift from familiar events to the unfamiliar. Knowing that in the original manhwa everyone dies when the omnipotent hero Jung-hyeok (Lee Min-ho) dies, Dok-ja realizes he must change the ending of the story and make the story his own if he is to survive. His challenge is to convince Jung-hyeok, who disbelieves that a mere reader can alter the manhwa’s narrative trajectory. 

Although death games have been part of the filmic landscape since Kinji Fukasaku shocked the filmic world with Battle Royale (2000), audiences have come to enjoy the myriad ways in which young characters battle it out in inventive scenarios, whether Hunger Games, or more recently Squid Game. But Omniscient Reader leans into new territory with its meld of Korean pop culture with folklore. An overtly cute but sinister dokkaebi (a mischievous, goblin-like creature with supernatural powers) introduces the ground rules of the scenarios that will determine the fate of humanity caught in Dok-ja’s manhwa-made-“real”; a reality adjudicated by “Constellations” out in space who are bemused by the follies of the human race and seek to either favor them with sponsorship or punish them. 

The special effects are spectacular and the action sequences exciting: giant sea monsters sever bridges, an ichthyosaur swallows our protagonist whole (like an Irwin Allen retro-update), a giant praying mantis pursues him, as do tentacle-faced demons, and the film’s final scenario is a mind-blowing stand-off with a Luciferian fire dragon in a Seoul subway station. This adrenalin-paced Korean blockbuster fully satisfies.

  

With his first feature Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025) boasting its Quebecois premiere at Fantasia, director and screenwriter Lim Dae-hee faithfully adapts yet another of South Korea’s most popular webtoons, “Holy Night: The Zero”, whose synopsis reads: “Raised as brothers in an orphanage, Bawoo and Joseph take opposite paths—Joseph becoming a priest and Bawoo becoming an underground fighting champion. However, when Joseph awakens as the great demon Lucifer and massacres the residents of their orphanage, their brotherly relationship turns into one fueled by revenge. In order to bring Joseph to justice, Bawoo sets off on a relentless pursuit of him and his cult. As threats mount and doubts creep in, can Bawoo’s powerful fists and allies overcome Joseph’s overwhelming supernatural powers and influence?” 

Though thoroughly and successfully aimed at sheer kinetic entertainment, Holy Night’s Catholic underpinnings made me question the religion’s presence in South Korea. I discovered that Catholicism is the second largest Christian denomination after Protestantism, with approximately 11% of the population identifying as Catholic. Thus, it was not at all out of the ordinary that a trio of extraordinary exorcists called Holy Night would have ample opportunity to pull out all the stops and chew up the scenery with the ritual tropes familiar to American audiences through The Exorcist franchise: you know, the possessed girl with stringy hair bound to a chair duplicitly preying upon the psychological frailties of her captors, the sudden drops to sub-zero temperatures whenever evil enters the room, the cussing, the agonized screaming as the exorcists demand the demon leave the girl’s body, demand the demon name itself, the guilt tripping, the possessed girl suddenly breaking free and skittering crab-like down the hall and up the wall, all those things fearful Catholics pray will not harm them. 

I laughed outloud when one of the exorcists pointedly asks a demon: “Are you Korean?” (That’s what actually prompted me to investigate Catholicism’s presence in South Korea; I mean, it seemed like such a sensible and honest question and I wanted to know the answer.) 

Kudos to Lim Dae-hee’s animated coda that honors and provides a visual sense of the webtoon format.