CW: Discussion of suicide, sexual assault, rape ahead
Despite living in the Dallas/Fort Worth area my entire life, it wasn't until this past week that I finally attended the Dallas International Film Festival for the first time. First established in 2006, DIFF has been going on for nearly two decades now, which makes my eschewing of the event all the more inexplicable. Thankfully, I finally got the privilege of attending this event over the course of April 26-May 2. Though work and other commitments prevented me from going to this festival every day like I would've loved to, I still went to three of the seven days the 2024 incarnation of DIFF was operating.
Attending this festival, I was reminded of just how wonderful these theatrical film festivals are. It's just so much fun to dedicate days to watching movies. Your field of vision and priorities are just concentrated on the screen in front of you rather than the hundreds of disparate demands that make up a normal day. It's also a hoot to talk to people between screenings or while waiting in line for movies. If you're at DIFF, you're bound to be a film fan and that gives you immediate common ground to connect with folks. I got to meet and chat with quite a few people over the three days I attended DIFF and that's what I really cherish from this festival. The communal setting of theatrical moviegoing can be so beneficial for bringing people together. My DIFF experiences truly highlighted that.
I caught six movies at my first ever DIFF trip and I've decided to drop capsule reviews for each of these titles as well as rank them from "worst" to best. Read on for my takeaways of the six motion pictures I reviewed at what shall not be my last DIFF voyage!
6. Losing Grace Finding Hope
In November 2016, 16-year-old Grace Loncar took her own life. Losing Grace Finding Hope is a reflection on this tragedy containing several pieces of testimony from Loncar’s family and friends that are deeply moving to watch. Despite those moments and a conceptually noble task of removing the stigma around mental health, this documentary is simply not well made. The score keeps hammering home the tone of individual scenes instead of just letting the words in the interview segments. The awkward cuts during archival footage are unnecessary and (when things awkwardly zoom in) render grainy home video footage nearly incomprehensible. Also, what’s going on with all the lens flares anytime we cut to an old photograph? Director Marcia Carroll overwhelms the proceedings with too many "flourishes" that never let the audience just set with the testimony of these emotionally devastated souls.
Worst of all in Losing Grace Finding Hope, though, is the aloof treatment towards the psychological struggles of Grace's siblings. In the final ten minutes of this documentary, it's nonchalantly revealed that two of these siblings struggled with addiction. Mother Sue Loncar off-handled mentions in an early piece of narration that one of Grace's older sisters also has intense mental health struggles. Why was this greater context almost entirely removed from the proceedings? Keeping these elements of the Loncar family so removed from the viewer makes it hard to discern the individual personalities of the interview subjects. Whether intentionally or not, it also makes the proceedings feel "sanitized," as if darker explorations of mental health and addiction have been removed to make Losing Grace Finding Hope “more family friendly” for faith based audiences.
Let's be clear, this documentary doesn't need to become trauma porn nor involve Loncar family members delving into aspects of their personal lives they're not comfortable divulging on-camera. However, the fleeting mentions of these greater struggles for Grace's siblings just reinforced to me how little I knew about any of these people by the time the movie is done. There's a vagueness to Losing Grace Finding Hope that does it no favor. The lack of substantiveness leaves a middle section concerning the Grace Loncar Foundation feeling like it's just a lengthy commercial for this entity. Noble intentions permeate this documentary, but they're not enough to overcome a lot of underwhelming filmmaking and an unwillingness to delve deeper into the central story at hand. The life of Grace Loncar and the heavy topics touched on in Losing Grace Finding Hope deserved a better motion picture.
5. Desire Lines
Director Jules Rosskam is juggling a lot of elements concerning the trans man community in the documentary Desire Lines. There's a framing device concerning a gaggle of trans men, circa. early 2020, navigating an archive seemingly located in the same work building from Severance. The feature is also concerned with the history of stigmatization surrounding gay men sexual experiences as well as interviewing trans men about their most vivid sexual memories. That's a lot to balance in one documentary and it's no wonder Desire Lines as a whole lands a bit on the disjointed side of things. However, it's generally an engaging piece of cinema that especially works in some of the original evocative imagery it conjures up. Rosskam creates intriguing visual parallels between two go-to environments in Desire Lines (a bathhouse and an office building), with their winding hallways and wandering souls often looking for something they can't even describe. A closing sequence depicting a cavalcade of trans men sexual fantasies and bodies (all set to gorgeous blue lighting) is a particularly striking accomplishment in terms of imagery.
4. I Saw the TV Glow
I won't write too much about this one because I've got a full review already up and running for this exploration of suburban angst. Needless to say, though, it's quite good and full of evocative imagery making good use of bright lights clashing against dark tableaus. Even for someone like me that was a tad more mixed about We're All Going to the World's Fair, director Jane Schoenbrun work on I Saw the TV Glow dazzles.
3. An Army of Women
The road to justice is not an easy nor short one. It's not even a road that necessarily promises the tidiest form of catharsis. Such is the reality faced by the multitude of women explored in An Army of Women, a documentary chronicling a cluster of rape and sexual assault survivors living in Austin, Texas. These women experienced unspeakable horrors and afterward received no aid from local politicians or police. Their perpetrators got away scot-free because of Austin's default dismissal of sexual assault cases. An Army of Women follows these people and a pair of lawyers challenging that status quo. Needless to say, that undertaking proves enormously difficult.
Director Julie Lunde Lillesæter doesn't shy away from capturing how gut-wrenching it is to have to stand up for your basic rights day in and day out. In the middle of all that turmoil, though, An Army of Women makes time to flesh out these women beyond their trauma as well as depict them bonding through their legal process. Scenes of these survivors growing closer to one another reminded me of similarly impactful sequences from I'll Be Gone in the Dark chronicling survivors of a serial killer developing friendships with one another. In the face of overwhelming trauma, human bonds endure. These women are not alone. Focusing on that concept and the complex road to suing an attorney general and police department allows An Army of Women to truly register as transfixing.
2. Ghostlight
In its first act, Ghostlight (helmed by Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson, the creative team behind the excellent 2020 indie Saint Frances) had me worried. This story of a family, father Dan (Keith Kupferer), mother Sharon (Tara Mallen), and troubled daughter Daisy (Katherine May Kupferer), recovering from an initially unknown tragedy begins in media res. It also kicks off with a tone that starts off on a wobbly note. O'Sullivan and Thompson struggle with balancing broader moments like an extended fart gag or Daisy's most outsized outbursts with heavier material related to coping with immense sorrow. However, O'Sullivan and Thompson also consistently reaffirm their keen eye for depicting subtly lived-in human behavior and nuanced sense of morality from Saint Frances.
Those retained elements from their earlier film keep one latched into Ghostlight until it finds its stride. Once bottled up Dan finds himself cast in a local production of Romeo & Juliet, Ghostlight discovers its voice as an exploration of coping with grief. The cramped darkened room where rehearsals are held is a a great realistic backdrop for Dan's navigation of the trauma he's kept inside. The assorted actors in the play (including Dolly de Leon as the forceful and endlessly charming Rita) are endearing personalities to be around. I love how they each feel like such distinctively different souls even when they only deliver a single line in a scene. Meanwhile, the quiet depictions of Dan bonding with these other actors demonstrate an impressive level of restraint on the part of O'Sullivan and Thompson. They're willing to eschew lengthy pieces of dialogue and Quinn Tsan's original score in favor of just letting hugs, short phrases, or physical gestures take center stage. The sparse execution of these moving moments lets the underlying emotions really flourish.
By the time the third act of Ghostlight rolled around, the messier first 20-25-ish minutes had largely vanished from my mind. When a movie gets me this emotionally invested, it's doing enough right to mitigate its weakest spots. The greatest microcosm of how Ghostlight evolves into something special across its runtime has to be the performance delivered by Katherine May Kupferer. In her first bursts of screentime, I was so worried about the character of Daisy. Was this going to turn into another instance of Sadie Sink's role in The Whale, where an adult drama has a cringe-inducing portrait of teenage girls? As the movie goes on, though, May Kupferer is given some downright fascinating dimensions to handle with Daisy and she executes them with such finesse. The mixture of rebellion and yearning for connection within this teenager is vividly rendered in the hands of this impressive performer. Like Ghostlight as an entire movie, Katherine May Kupferer's performance initially left me worried before thoroughly impressing me.
1. Sing Sing
John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo) resides in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State. One of the many fantastic touches in Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing screenplay (the latter of whom also directs) is how the story begins decades into Whitfield's prison stint. The idea of living in captivity is still confining to him, but it's not a new sensation. There's a lived-in quality to how he and his fellow inmates navigate day-to-day life here. They have their routines. They have their spots they go to for comfort. There's a real naturalism to this depiction that eschews clumsy expository dialogue in favor of observational sequences of characters like Whitfield and Mike Mike (Sean San Jose) sitting under a tree. The point here isn't to bend this world so that it's constantly holding the hands of moviegoers. Sing Sing is a film about humanizing the people on-screen through intimate and nonchalant means. That's the focus and one it accomplishes with remarkable success.
Such humanization largely comes from the exploits of Whitfield and his fellow prisoners in Sing Sing's theater program. I'm always a sucker for a "let's put on a show!" movie and Sing Sing is a great manifestation of that endearing narrative mold. Just watching Whitfield interact with his fellow actors (many of whom are former Sing Sing inmates and veterans of this theater program playing themselves) is incredibly transfixing. The standard exercises stage actors do to get comfortable with each other prove richly rewarding for these inmates. Divulging their dream destinations or getting outside of their default personality forces them to be vulnerable with others. The walls they've built are slowly crumbling. Kwedar's writing and direction depicts those alterations in a terrifically realistic gradual fashion.
Sing Sing is chock full of small moments that profoundly touched me. Supporting player Sean "Dino" Johnson going over his lines while playing basketball or eating in the cafeteria, for instance, is such an instantly moving sight. The dedication he's exhibiting to his craft is so readily apparent and I love that we get to see that quality while getting glimpses into his life outside of the stage. The rapport between Whitfield and newcomer to the troupe Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin is similarly richly detailed. Their dynamic goes down a flurry of different avenues, with those nuanced interactions accentuating the sense of realism permeating all of Sing Sing. Kwedar and cinematographer Pat Scola heighten the authenticity of this feature by capturing everything on 35mm film. The textures and bursts of natural lighting feel extra alive through embracing traditional filmmaking techniques.
None of us can exist on our own. We need community and vulnerability to properly function. Sing Sing is a stirring testament to these truths. The proceedings are made all the more engrossing thanks to the presence of leading man Coleman Domingo nailing the lead role of Whitfield. He alone is enough to make Sing Sing a must-see. Luckily, there's so much more to this movie than even one outstanding performance.
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