A New Genre Fluidity in World Cinema
Arriving on the heels of the Golden Globes and concluding on the cusp of the Oscar nominations, Palm Springs is the award season’s last whistle stop on the festival circuit. Serving on a jury at the festival, with a mandate to watch 36 international feature films selected their countries as Oscar candidates, I had a unique opportunity to map the zeitgeist of world cinema. Inevitably themes emerge. Perhaps the most overarching theme was the acceleration of genre fluidity. That’s not a typo. Yes, gender fluidity was also in evidence. But what struck me was the promiscuous intercourse of genres—and auteur styles—across a wide spectrum of cinema.
There were filmmakers who paid homage to one another’s signature styles with such affection it verged on forgery. A case in point was Kill the Jockey (El Jockey) by Argentine director Luis Ortega. This surreal tale of a racetrack jockey who rides a steeplechase of addiction, gender non-conformity, amnesia and organized crime was perhaps the strangest film of them all, next to Canada’s Universal Language. It plays like an Aki Kaurismäki movie on acid. And influence of the Finnish director was no accident. “He’s probably one of the few filmmakers alive that I really, really admire,” Ortega said in an interview with Hammer to Nail. And to cement that influence, he chose Finnish cinematographer Timo Salminen, who is best known for his work with Kaurismäki, as his Director of Photography. “I just called him because I love how his films look,” Ortega explained. “He’s the master of putting a light where it gives some kind of strange feeling. It doesn’t just look good, it feels strange. It feels like it’s set up . . . not exactly artificial, but it doesn’t look natural.”
Kaurismäki’s deadpan style was also visible in Universal Language, by Canadian writer-director Matthew Rankin, along with more pronounced homages to Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami and Canada’s Guy Maddin — not to mention a toytown touch of Wes Anderson. With an Iranian cast, Universal Language imagines a mock Canada where the two official languages are Farsi and French. The story which unfolds as an absurdist quilt of comedy and pathos, is set in an Iranian-wrapped Winnipeg where Arabic signage extends even to the Tim Horton’s donut franchise, which looks like a Teheran tea shop. Rankin, 44, who lives in Montréal, grew up in Winnipeg, as did Maddin, 68, who still lives there. But Rankin’s hyperbolic mutation of his hometown makes My Winnipeg (2007), Maddin’s delightfully warped ode to the city seem merely eccentric by comparison. The Persian identity of Rankin’s film, meanwhile, goes oddball farce to tap his Iranian heritage with a wistful, long-winding-road narrative akin to Kiarostami’s 1987 classic, Where is the Friend’s House? (Khane-ye doust kodjast).
In the 1960s, Canada built its nascent cultural industries on an anti-colonial search for a national identity. Half a century later, between international co-pros and global streaming, its cinema, like everyone else’s, is mixed into a world cinema that is increasingly mongrelized. In Cannes and elsewhere, festival competitions still identify films with countries, like the Olympics. But if anyone needed more proof that the era of national cinemas is over, Universal Language could serve as a definitive death certificate. As the title implies, the universal language of cinema is now cinema itself. A precarious mission. As the arthouse fortifies its ramparts against the Marvel Universe, it’s in danger of turning into a hall of mirrors, a world of pure artifice with no window on the world.
But Emilia Pérez, a transcultural movie if ever there was one, is a rare and miraculous example of an auteur crowd-pleaser that has bust out of the arthouse while dissolving boundaries of genre, gender and nationality. Talk about new frontiers: a French director who doesn’t speak Spanish makes a musical thriller about Mexico that is not really a thriller or a musical while casting a Spanish transexual, a former Disney pop star, and that blue alien princess from Avatar. In an industry prone to existential despair, suddenly anything seems possible.
But the one area where national cinema still has a vital role is in telling stories of political and historic importance. And this is where I noticed an erosion of the traditional boundary between non-fiction film’s two solitudes — drama and documentary. On the documentary side, Mati Diop’s Dahomey chronicles the repatriation of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey that had been languishing in exile in a museum in France. After they are un-crated at an art museum in Benin (present-day Dahomey), the museum hosts a vibrant political debate about colonialism. But throughout this cultural odyssey, the film’s documentary realism is violated by a cavernous ancestral voice coming from the objects. Which could be seen as a magic realist conceit, or a suggestion that ancient spirits have, in fact, been imprisoned in a glass case in France, flown to Africa in a box, then transplanted to yet another museum.
Among the dramatic features, the genre fluidity went in the opposite direction, with the importation of documentary elements into the scripted narrative. This was most striking in three period films about dictatorial repression in Brazil, Cambodia and the former Czechoslovakia.
Brazil’s I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), by Oscar-winning director Walter Salles (Central Station, Motorcycle Diaries), illuminates a national trauma with the true story of a family in Rio de Janeiro — a single household that becomes a microcosm for an entire of generation of imprisoned, tortured and murdered civilians. This harrowing political thriller is anchored by a ferocious performance from Fernanda Torres as the family’s defiant matriarch, Eunice Paiva, whose husband, an activist lawyer, is targeted by the Brazil’s dictatorship in the 1970s. The story, spanning several decades, charts the family’s resilience in such granular detail that it feels like a documentary, while stark flashes of archival footage keep it grounded in historic events. Eventually, drama morphs into documentary in an extended epilogue, which is arguably over-extended. But as an completist act of due diligence, it makes whole the film’s essential mission.
Waves resurrects another cataclysmic piece of history — 1968’s Prague Spring protests and the subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets and its Warsaw Pact allies. Czech writer-director Jiří Mádl dramatizes the courageous actions of journalists at the national radio network who work to keep free speech on the air as the Russian tanks are about to roll in. It’s yet another thriller, a breathless race against the clock filmed with an energy that mirrors that of its journalist heroes. There are fictional flourishes, notably a love story, but seamless incursions of archival footage keep it real. Given the current revival of Russian aggression, Waves has a chilling contemporary resonance. And in the end it’s far more robust and valuable film than the recent newsroom drama, September 5, about an ABC TV crew responding in real time to the terrorist hostage-taking at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
On the other side of the world, My Meeting With Pol Pot tells the story of two French journalists and a Marxist academic who are invited by the Khmer Rouge in 1978 to tour the Cambodian countryside and observe the “marvels” of their new regime. Loosely based on events chronicled by American war correspondent Elizabeth Becker in her book When the War Was Over, this dramatic feature is the latest offering from Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who has mined his homeland’s tragic history in some two dozen films since 1989, most of them documentaries. For Panh, the political could not be more personal: his parents, siblings and other family members died of starvation in forced labour camps during the Cambodian genocide, which resulted in two million deaths, a quarter of the population.
My Meeting With Pol Pot is a paranoia-fueled engine of suspense that creeps toward an insidious horror as the visiting journalists begin to uncover what’s going beyond the perimeter of their official tour. And as the tension mounts, the drama is spiked with jarring archival photos and fragments of footage that are like radioactive relics. But the film’s most eerily subversive images are inventions—hand-carved clay figurines that inhabit dioramas in a Khmer Rouge propaganda studio. As the dolls come to include totemic likenesses of the imperilled journalists, we begin to feel that the entire country is a haunted house.
It’s not first time Panh has created clay figurines for a film. He used them as a dramatic device in his Oscar-nominated documentary, The Missing Picture (2013). And now in My Meeting With Pol Pot, a véritédrama inflected with ghostly images, he keeps building upon his life’s work, conjuring ancestral voices with layer upon layer of memory. The mix of dire politics and ritual fantasy is reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. It’s as if the ritual process of making art is the only way one can fathom unspeakable horror. At a certain point, documentary investigation and dramatic re-enactment can go only so far. And as cinema searches for a palpable truth in the rubble of past lives, its ultimate weapon is imagination.
©FIPRESCI 2025