My experience at the twelfth annual Chelsea Film Festival regrettably began, not on opening night, but on the following afternoon. My lack of proper black-tie attire prevented me from attending the opening festivities; and my frugality, coupled with my observation that Chelsea was also holding a matinée screening of the opening film on Friday, was enough to convince me not to rush to the nearby Nordstrom’s to rent a tuxedo. So, I arrived at the East Village Regal at 4PM on Thursday, picked up a program and a press pass, and made my way into the theater where the film that I had scouted out the night before was playing.
That film was Amit Ulman’s highly ambitious, genre-bending extravaganza, The City, at last enjoying a premiere in New York City after being released in Israel last year. True to its title, The City was a perfect opening film for someone like myself, who hadn’t traveled to a major metropolitan area in years, let alone to one as colossal, as grand, or frankly as nerve-wracking as “The Big Apple.” Originally assembled scene by scene for the stage back in 2009, The City feels remarkably cinematic, blending together the two disparate genres of noir and musical, in what could be described as a three-way union between The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacque Demy, 1964), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), and the latest Kendrick Lamar album. Yes, The City is not simply a noir musical, but a rap–noir-opera, with dialogue that’s almost wholly composed of Hebrew rhymes — and a few instances of operatic song, too.
Though, in many ways, The City plays like an homage — an oddly, very American homage — to the bygone detective films of Hollywood’s Golden Age: it contains unexpected plot twists; a lighting scheme with a penchant for dark, murky shadows; and a highly stylized mise-en-scènethat oozes 1940s underworld. However, The City isn’t as dark or as forbidding as a Fritz Lang picture. Instead, many of its rhymes are laced with light-hearted satire, as it parodies the hardboiled tropes of the noir genre in a similar spirit as Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967). Many of the one-liners are quite funny, too, even if they have the tendency to overindulge a bit. But the true strength of The City lies in its ability to shift tone and attitude, oscillating freely between playful comedy and a more pensive, somber manner of mood.
Meanwhile, Chelsea’s actual opening film, And on the Eighth Day, more closely resembled a popular piece of entertainment than the high-risk, slam poetry experiment attempted (quite successfully, I might add) by Ulman. Revolving around the planning of a heist in a small West Texas town, And on the Eighth Day sees Alexandra Chando make her feature directorial debut, and notably stars Phoebe Tonkin (Babylon [Damien Chazelle, 2022])in the lead female role. The film, which boasts a highly diverse and largely female filmmaking crew, would establish a festival-long trend that I came to notice in Chelsea’s 2024 programming: the abundance of emerging female voices.
As intrigued by this as I was, after the festival was over, I conducted a quick investigation and discovered that out of the thirty-two films I had managed to see over the course of the week, nineteen were directed by women. That’s nearly sixty percent! This is, of course, fantastic to see — and even more encouraging was the fact that many of these women were still in the embryonic stages of their careers.
Films like Steph Barkley’s beautifully brutal Sisters demonstrate the value of uniquely female authorship. The twelve-minute short begins with a fluid handheld tracking shot that follows a woman as she ambles across a vast Irish countryside. An unexpected jump cut occurs — her sister punches her square in the jaw — and a ferocious fight ensues. Fists swing and blood spews — in what is quite a technically impressive sequence of violence amid an oddly placid background — until one sister spots a dead lamb lying by a pond, triggering an abrupt ceasefire. Why had the fighting stopped? Why were these two sisters fighting in the first place? Very little is revealed in Sisters, in what functions as an absurdist work of black comedy — and a transgressive one at that.
Director Zainab Shaheen provides a much more gladdening example of female filmic ingenuity with her child-centric feature, Mountain Boy, which follows the adventures of an autistic boy shunned by his father, as he travels across the UAE in search of his late mother’s family. Shaheen — a debutant filmmaker, who was discovered by the film’s producer at a film school in the UAE — bravely, and quite justly, employs a child actor with autism to assume the lead role, a decision that paid off well, earning the performance the festival’s best young actor award. With superb direction from cinematographer Denson Baker, the film’s visuals augment interest in the story, with large, expansive wide shots of the desert terrain; as well as many shots, some point-of-view, that work to align the viewer with the boy’s subjectivity. Though the film seemed, at times, artificially uplifting — bogged down a bit by a lack of conflict and tension — perhaps it’s just what the doctor ordered: an unapologetically positive film that hails from a region of the world that simultaneously feels rather bleak.
As I understand, Chelsea has historically prioritized global issues in their programming, and 2024 was no different. Of the films I was able to see, many nationally and/or internationally pertinent topics arose: political extremism (Andrew Goldberg’s White with Fear), inner-city poverty (Jonathan Cipiti’s In the Paint), the Israel-Hamas conflict (Anna Fathov’s Projected Space), governmental tyranny (Amir Zargara’s A Good Day Will Come), and post-colonialism (Yann Mounir Demange’s Dammi). The issue of LGBTQ+ rights came up too, discussed systematically in Rosemarie Reed’s documentary on Britain’s past criminalization of homosexuality, Forgetting the Many: The Royal Pardon of Alan Turing — but more in alignment with my cinematic interests, was Romas Zabarauskas’s wildly discursive yak-fest, The Writer, another fine example of queer programming in Chelsea’s lineup.
The Writer, while consisting entirely of lengthy dialogue, remains topically interesting — its banter fruitful in many instances — as it muses on a broad range of subjects, including politics, sexuality, national identity, and mortality. It centers on two openly gay men — one Lithuanian-American (Kostas), and one Russian-Lithuanian (Dima), both of whom originally met in the USSR — as they attempt to rekindle their long-lost relationship in Kostas’s modish New York City apartment. The Writer weaves together an uneasy push-and-pull romance with a determined point of view, that tackles those sensitive subjects with nuance and subtlety — mostly — although there are a few heavy-handed lines scattered throughout its modest 87-minute runtime. But that alone did not spoil Zabarauskas’s latest picture for me. It was possibly the most enjoyable viewing experience I had during the entire festival — second perhaps only to The City — and certainly the most thought-provoking one at that. The Writer really encapsulates what I loved holistically about the films I saw at Chelsea, whilst reminding me of what I admire most about independent filmmaking: authenticity.
Yes, of the thirty-plus films I saw at Chelsea, production values varied (many were quite good!); but, despite these filmmakers’ modest means, you see the passion of someone who probably won’t be receiving a paycheck for the work that they have just completed – the finished product is its own reward, even if it shouldn’t be. My wish is one day for all the 150-plus filmmakers featured at this festival to make enough money to support themselves on filmmaking alone. But I can’t lie and say it isn’t refreshing to see movies made by filmmakers who themselves are not beholden to wealthy producers, who are able to make any picture they desire that their modest budget allows. Small- to medium-sized festivals like Chelsea’s remain vitally important to the medium: they enable filmmakers of all ethnicities, genders, classes, and creeds to either continue to do what they love most, or to use the platform made available to them to climb to the next filmmaking echelon.
Author Biography
Ben Holland is currently finishing up his master’s degree in film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He finds himself fascinated with films that depict loneliness, alienation, and ennui; but, more generally, he is interested in studio-era Hollywood cinema, European and East Asian art cinema, film noir, and nontraditional coming-of-age stories.
