Diversity S e pecial
dition
July 17, 2019
Diverse Films Stand Out
C ontinueD from p age 2
in the U.S.
“Yomeddine,” set in Egypt, takes
its name from the Arabic word for
judgment. It’s been racking up audi-
ence awards at various film festivals,
which may improve its prospects for
an online and limited theatrical re-
lease in the U.S. It tells the story of
Beshay, a leper who has spent most
of his life inside an Egyptian leper
colony. After his wife dies, he un-
dertakes an arduous cross-country
journey to find the family who aban-
doned him in the colony in child-
hood, and ends up with an orphan
boy tagging along. The storytelling
here is simple, but the lens is not;
the first-time actor playing Beshay
lives in a body ravaged by leprosy,
and the film is shot in parts of Egypt
that don’t appear on a tourist map,
yet the film doesn’t feel like pover-
ty porn. Rather, I experienced it as
an opportunity to journey alongside
perspectives and experiences that I
am unlikely to encounter and might
well recoil from, approached with
humanity and care. Judgment is op-
erating on many levels, in terms of
how we judge people, and what sort
of judgment animals and humans
may face as they pass from this life
to the next. There is beauty here be-
yond what we typically see or even
look for, and a journey worth taking.
“The Days to Come” isn’t win-
ning any audience awards; audienc-
es like their romances to be more in
the realm of sheer fantasy, as a rule,
and this depiction of how pregnancy
changes a relationship is relentless-
ly real. But for those who, like me,
can’t abide fake romance, no one
does relationship realism better than
Spanish director Carlos Marques-
Marcet. Here he is aided by the fact
that his lead actors are a real-life
couple becoming parents; the film
has an immediacy that would be
well-nigh impossible to capture this
well otherwise. We witness their
struggle with how to talk about
whether to carry the pregnancy to
term, their disagreements over the
career and economic consequences
of parenthood, the way the raised
stakes also surface resentments that
might otherwise have remained dor-
mant. Honest parents will especially
experience many moments of rec-
ognition here; real relationships, for
all their occasional beauty, are also
mysterious and anything but easy.
I’m guessing this film will find at
least an online home.
“Ms. Purple” benefits from an
intriguing performance by Tiffa-
ny Chu as Kasie, a young Kore-
an-American woman stuck in the
trap that beauty lays. Her beautiful
mother left the family when Kasie
was a child and leveraged her beau-
ty for a more lucrative match, leav-
ing Kasie and her brother Carey and
“Yomeddine,” tells the story
of a man who spent most of
his life inside a leper colony
in Egypt and who takes a
cross-country journey to
learn about the family who
abandoned him as a child,
tagged along by an orphan
boy who joins him.
their father devastated--and now
Kasie has left behind her dreams
of being a concert pianist, forced to
leverage her own beauty to care for
her father, who is unable to care for
himself, by working as a karaoke
hostess. The plot does no more than
connect those dots, without much
added insight--but Kasie is never
less than compelling, including in
her relationship to Carey, who she
finally enlists for help.
“Them That Follow” is headed
for a theatrical release, but deserves
it less than any of the films above,
though it is filled with good per-
formances. It’s set in a backwoods
community where a small number
of folks find in scripture an encour-
agement to treat deadly rattlesnakes
as faith detectors. I don’t doubt that
such communities exist, but artis-
tic renderings of faith--particularly
faith outside the experience of most
of audience members--often strike
me as voyeuristic and not very true.
This film, despite the work of a sol-
id cast that kept me intrigued, never
fully won me over; the extreme cir-
cumstances seem to be exploited for
dramatic effect.
Nine other films are likely to
appeal to a more limited set of
viewers. “Another Day of Life” in-
ventively combines animation and
documentary footage to shed light
on the Angolan Civil War, through
the life of a gutsy Polish journalist.
“All My Loving” manages to tell
parallel stories of three privileged
and self-indulgent German sib-
lings in an absorbing way though,
in the end, it is hard to find some-
one to like. In “Take It or Leave
It,” a young Estonian man finds
in single parenthood a reason to
evolve a bit from irresponsible tox-
ic masculinity, and “Ghost Town
Anthology” tells a story of grief
in a remote Quebecoise town; both
those films make up for their nar-
rative shortcomings by providing
interesting windows into Estonian
and small-town Canadian life. The
campy “Knife+Heart” was not
my cup of tea but was a huge hit
with queer audience members, who
came and cheered in force for this
crime thriller set in the late-’70s gay
porn industry. “Before the Vows”
is a rare opportunity to see a film
from Ghana; its young director has
Page 7
been dubbed “the Shonda Rhimes
of Ghana” for her series “An Afri-
can City,” and the plotting here is as
conventional as they come, though
set among gorgeous Africans. “The
Sharks” is likely to be too opaque
for all but the most dedicated of
viewers, but gained awards recog-
nition at the Sundance Film Fes-
tival for its first-time Uruguayan
director Lucia Garibaldi; it’s a close
observation of an impassive young
girl’s dicey exploration of her pow-
er and desire. “EXT. Night” takes
a chaotic journey with a filmmaker,
a cabbie, and a prostitute who are
thrown together for a night; it aims
to shed light on the unrelenting tur-
moil and social stratification of Cai-
ro in the wake of failed revolution
but bogs down narratively. Finally,
“A Faithful Man” is an overrated
vanity project in which carelessly
handsome French actor-director
Louis Garrel directs himself star-
ring as a carelessly handsome man
being fought over by two gorgeous
women (one played by his real-life
gorgeous model wife and the other
played by the lovely daughter of
Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis).
My advice is to hunt for everything
else on this list first!
Darleen Ortega is a judge on
the Oregon Court of Appeals and
the first woman of color to serve
in that capacity. Her movie review
column Opinionated Judge appears
regularly in The Portland Observer.
Find her movie blog at opinionated-
judge.blogspot.com.