Rebuilding, Renovation, Reconciliation

There is an argument to be made that cinema—not unlike any other art form—possesses restorative qualities. These may be manifold: They can illuminate the formal possibilities of the medium, enable us to uncover or (re)discover past and/or forgotten times, and with them peoples, languages, technologies, (political) movements and other aspects that constitute culture. Or—quite fundamentally—they inspire hope when the world beyond the silver screen fails to do so. This latter point, however, should not be treated too lightly, lest the critical verdict collapse into the offensively inoffensive—yet persistently popular—predicate “life-affirming.”

Rebuilding

Primarily on such grounds, it would seem, Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding (2025) found its way into the Crystal Competition at the 59^th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Educated at Stanford and NYU’s TISCH, the 32-year-old Walker-Silverman, raised in Colorado’s mountainous movie-town Telluride, saw his sophomore outing—similarly to his debut, A Love Song (2022), three years prior—initially premiere at Sundance, before taking its international bow in Europe. And like his debut, in which two widowed former childhood sweethearts reunite after decades, there is—only look at the title—something restorative to his newest film. By placing his tender post-western in the scorched heart of the Anthropocene, Walker-Silverman sets his film up with a compelling conceit that has characters and audiences alike ponder the dividing and unifying forces begetting natural catastrophes. Which, in this case, means the aftermath of the Colorado wild fires. Josh O’Connor’s Thomas—or rather “Dusty”—grew up on his inherited, now-barren land, and with him his herds of livestock. Seeing them gone, there is little that binds Dusty to the place, especially since the bank won’t grant him a mortgage for such nutrient-depleted soil.

There is, however, his former partner Ruby, and their young daughter Callie Rose. And then there is the FEMA-sponsored camp, a governmental emergency relief of sorts that allows survivors trailer-based housing while transitioning into more permanent dwellings. Some may describe the communal life that—once Dusty moves into a trailer himself—soon grows dear to his heart as warm. Others might call it, in the mold of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), romanticizing or saccharine. But no matter where you fall on this question, the ensuing drama of Walker-Silverman’s script uncomfortably overshadows the ethnographic interest on display in the opening moments, where he positions us amid a construction site. There’s a suggestion of realism and earnestness in commencing this kind of film with the mundane sight of busied bulldozers, but they are soon done away with. The irony of telling a story of an uprooted community without even feigning interest in their—well—roots is conspicuous, anyway. Which, resorting to the notion of life affirmation, proves not so much an ethical as an aesthetic problem.

This is apparent, for instance, when Dusty asks his daughter where they left off with the book, only to finish the story ten lines later. Would father and daughter have stopped so close to the end the previous time? Likely not, but then again, how else to convey the moral of the story in this particular scene, intended to be applied to the film overall? Or take the eulogy that we witness mid-film, when one character starts playing a tune on his guitar, stating that the deceased had been especially fond of this song. The ensuing music, however, lasts barely 20 seconds, and appears barely more distinct than the Muzak-like score that suffocates the majority of the scenes. When, toward the end, Walker-Silverman presents a more hopeful vision for the community, the impetus is well appreciated and the sentiment commendable, though, in truth, not quite merited. The image of a water pipe that can be activated without much effort is symbolic of this cinema that is all too eager to arrive at its destination, yet without patience for the processes that help engender it.

Renovation

On a more positive note of restorative cinema, there is Gabrielė Urbonaitė’s solo feature debut Renovation (Renovacija, 2025), which premiered in the Proxima section. The way in which the young Lithuanian filmmaker depicts her protagonist Ilona, a young translator who, on the verge of her 30^th birthday, moves with her boyfriend Matas in a new (but old) apartment, underscores that we are less to sympathize with her than with the overall situation. At least in the eyes of anyone who considers color-sorted book shelves a red flag. Or who sees in Ilona’s actions occasional glimpses of deception and unlikability. Considering the centrality of Ilona’s character, lead actor Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė deserves all the praise for successfully balancing micro eruptions of otherwise well-contained annoyances with the insecurities that sustain them.

The title of the film refers to the construction site in which the condominium transforms the moment the young couple’s move is completed and Ilona tries to finish her doctoral thesis. The thesis, we later learn, is part of why the couple even moved to this place, which is primarily inhabited by immigrants. Through the ongoing building works, Ilona makes the acquaintance of Oleg, a Ukrainian seasonal worker. Upon inviting him over from the scaffolding through the window and having a real encounter, the film’s title reveals a second meaning of an even more transformative nature. Asked by Oleg what she does in life, Ilona, who just learned that Oleg was once a painter—or anyway liked to paint—brings forth the only writing occupation seemingly equal in virtuosity, and calls herself a ‘poet.’

Ilona’s made-up story certainly feeds into some kind of inferiority complex, triggered by the bare suggestion of creative aspirations. But what is more, her on-the-spot professional reinvention drives home the analogous relationship between the ongoing constructions outside and her indecisive mind. She wonders, in other words, whether her partnership with Matas and the direction in which it is headed are what she really wants. Based on the tentative epistemology that renovation necessitates destruction, she then probes whether the fundaments of her all-too-fixed seeming future prove solid enough to endure necessary construction measures.

Reconciliation

Attending international festivals of the scope of Karlovy Vary, one, inadvertently, also notices the ongoing ‘renovation’ of genres and even mere plot premises. A renovation of this kind can be seen in Serbian auteur Nikola Ležaić’s autofictional How Come It’s All Green Out Here? (Kako je ovde tako zeleno?, 2025), which likewise premiered in the Proxima competition. Centering on Nikola, a filmmaker stuck in the advertisement industry (it shall be noted that this marks Ležaić’s only second feature after his award-winning Tilva Ros (2010) fifteen years ago), Ležaić sends his Belgrade-based protagonist on a road trip of sorts through Dalmatia to re-bury Nikola’s grandma. There are so many films in this mold—on the return to and the rediscorvery of one’s roots—that it may as well qualify as a genre unto itself, with Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004) being one of the genre’s undeniably most influential predecessors. Yet there is so much texture, subtlety, and cultural intrigue about the locale that Ležaić’s vision still feels original.

A case in point is Nikola’s incessant struggle with duct tape, a new strip of which he repeatedly applies to cover the ‘swoosh’ of his beloved Nike hoody. Why? Because he likes the value for money the apparel affords, but does not want to do free marketing for the brand. Fitting imagery for a career that continuously has him entrapped in the much more lucrative branch of advertisement. The centerpiece of the film, however, is Nikola’s relationship with his father. They may not share many scenes, but the conversations they have linger, especially as Nikola is soon going to be a father. There are underlying conflicts, with some of them, as would seem only natural for two men who grew up under such significantly different circumstances, bordering on the irreconcilable. And still, they never erupt, peter out instead in frail shrugs or by the onset of sleep. More than once, his father resents Nikola’s tendency to prioritize book learning over lived experience—a paradigm that is hereafter challenged on a number of occasions as Nikola finds his memories of his family’s home inaccurate.

There, among his relatives, are two driving forces. One has him noticeably shrink, at least in the eyes of the community. Inescapably, he is the son of his father who, although trying not to show it, aches for validation amongst this wider circle of family and friends who don’t outright dismiss him as an outsider. In fact, they may pay him their greatest respect by treating him no differently than any other member of the community. And yet, there is this growing sense that, through his decades-long absence, a chasm of intelligibility has naturally formed between Nikola and the rest, that, while they do overtly speak the same language (though the specificities of the local vernacular are explicitly addressed at one point), there is an understanding gathered only from living at a place, absorbed from the texture of everyday experience. Which might also be the reason why Nikola, an educated cosmopolitan of blended languages (the opening scene on the set of a pastry commercial with a Bulgarian lead hints at that), cannot help but perpetuate a veneer of distance to his environment. At his grandma’s funeral, for instance, he hides his emotions behind his photo camera. When he suddenly finds himself struck by grief, he only releases a curiously sounding sob, upon which he is rebuked for laughing inappropriately.

The ensuing car ride home further exemplifies this ambivalence and the peculiar kind of intimacy central to Ležaić’s project. Nikola, in the driver’s seat, imparts to his father that he recently bought a VW camper that he will have refurbished by a good mechanic. “One of the old ones,” he adds, not devoid of pride, knowing that his father is more likely to approve of his plans if they are executed by a man of his generation. Even so, Nikola’s rarely surfacing yet ever-present desire to satisfy his father is met with contemplation. “But who,” his father asks, “is going to fix our cars once all the old mechanics are gone?” The conversation, after expanding further, eventually ends when we see his father asleep, before the camera finally pans over and reminds us that, all along, there were the other men in the backseat, as if appending an asterisk to the heretofore felt intimacy.

Deep reconciliation, Ležaić’s film suggests, might not be attainable, yet, by the end of the film, it seems as if a sense of self has been restored. And perhaps there lies some wisdom in insisting on a cinema that, in its incompletion, allows us to dwell in possibility.

Patrick Fey
Edited by Ela Bittencourt
©FIPRESCI 2025