Family Lineage: A Focal Point at the Dubuque Festival

Amid the indie offerings at the Dubuque film festival, Guyanese critic Andrew Kendall finds two films that explore the rich subject of family legacy—echoing the family-oriented nature of the festival itself.

What burdens await the first born child in the wake of a dead parent?

Two features at this year’s Julien Dubuque International Film Festival (JDIFF) turned family inheritance and lineage into evocative stories that felt apt for the family-oriented dynamics of the festival in Dubuque, Iowa.

Since its inaugural year in 2012, JDIFF has been a family-oriented festival devoted to platforming independent cinema. The festival’s executive director, Susan Gorrell, is joined by family members spanning several generations, turning the regional festival into an intimate affair. The lines of family and legacy seep into the very fabric of the weeklong festival, and it felt fitting that two of the sharpest entries in the festival’s feature category were just as preoccupied with notions of family, legacy, and inheritance.

Two of the best films this year, the moody Brazilian psychological thriller Narcisa’s Will (Herança de Narcisa) from writer-director duo Clarissa Appelt and Daniel Dias, and the tender indie drama A Woman’s Work, find their focus in female protagonists contemplating their relationship with familial pasts and futures. In Narcisa’s Will, Ana (Paolla Oliveira) returns to her childhood home after her mother’s death. There she finds her life bleeding into her mother’s in unsettling ways. In A Woman’s Work, Jolene (Louisa Harland), has become the parental figure for her two younger sisters, even working in the coal mines like her dead father. The chance of a life on the East Coast beckons, but so does her duty to her family. The films diverge in genre, language, tone, and focus but the two women, and their relationship with familial bonds, turn Narcisa’s Will and A Woman’s Work into thoughtful independent work that considers legacy, inheritances, and female ambivalence.

Appelt and Diaz opt for overt symbolism as a childhood home becomes the site for a gothic thriller of sorts. Olivera stalks through the halls as Ana, and then subsequently as images of her mother Narcisa in her youth. It’s a double performance that unsubtly, but vividly, turns the question of lineage into a literal quandary of child becoming parent. Oliveira, who spends much of the film alone with only her face to anchor the emotions, is excellent. Her emotional clarity shepherds the competing formal swerves of Narcisa’s Will into a humane and affecting exploration.

Here, familial connections are evinced more in the sensorial tapestry than in exigencies of the plot. The film’s coda, which unravels a mystery of sorts, becomes a play on the multiple meanings of the world “will.” The film ends on a moment of recognition, rather than one of decision. So we are left uncertain what Ana will do with the weight of her family’s legacy on her shoulders, but Narcisa’s Will feels meaningful for its patient journey to her acceptance of her fate.

Queries of acceptance versus ambivalence are just as cogent in A Woman’s Work. Jolene seems too young to be shouldering the burden of caring for her two sisters, one approaching adulthood and the other years from adolescence. She has taken up a job in the coal mines in rural Kentucky, a job her father did before he died. And, a job that few women take. Her one source of genuine solace is a not-quite secret relationship with Kylie. A small town like hers is not the place for a love between two women to bloom, and her 16-year-old sister’s decision to get married to her high school sweetheart signals a looming entrapment in this rural town. But Jolene is bound to her family home in ways that might be hard to articulate. Even to herself.

In her debut film, director and writer A.R. Ephraim insists on dignity and tenderness in her point-of-view. A story of muted queer desire in a rural town might touch on several clichés of Appalachia, except that A Woman’s Work, even when it shows the signs of a first-feature, resists anything insincere or effortful. Harland, an Irish actress, grounds Jolene’s uncertainty in a believable stolidity that immediately establishes the film’s emotional through-line. Newcomer Emma Duchesneau is a find, and under Ephraim’s direction turns the role of the love-struck middle sister into the focal point for the film’s secret weapon.

One might read the choices made in its final stretch as limiting, but it’s a sharp reminder than a film is more than its plot. Ephraim mediates the quest for freedom with the inheritance of family duty with tremendous surety. There is a thrilling sense of space in A Woman’s Work, plaintive music and a knowing soundtrack evoking a realistically small world of hope amidst drudgery.

And it’s in their music intelligibility the two also find connection. A Woman’s Work uses a sparer soundscape but its musical intelligence offers a gentle pathway into this southern place. A wistful cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” becomes an emotional anchor for a soft moment. In the same way, the haunting songs of Narcisa’s celebrity past begin to evoke calamity and tension in Narcisa’s Will. In both films, spatiality becomes bound to music, and with them memory comes in waves.

A value of a festival like Dubuque is the chance to venture towards films that rarely appear at larger festivals. So many more films are being made every year but as arts criticism grows more endangered so does sincere attention to them. Critics can hardly fund travel to major festivals. Regional ones like Dubuque are even rarer. These two films stand out from the eclectic slate for the emotional legibility maintained to their closing credits. Filmmakers exist out there tilling familiar soil and reaping sincere emotional affect and turning the grief into a crucible for realizations and transformations. At key moments, both Ana and Jolene gaze out into mirrors at reflections of themselves. Their eyes convey enough. In those moments where a face expands to fill the frame, these two films prove their thoughtfulness in remembering that no special effect can rival the expressive human face, on film. It was an apt message for a festival like Dubuque which eschewed the familiar festival bluster of big celebrities, and instead focused on the intimate humanity of independent filmmakers discussing their work.

May we see more of these filmmakers with such thoughtfulness on human emotions. And may festivals like Dubuque continue to encourage independent filmmakers.

Andrew Kendall

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