There is likely to be a lot of reportage coming from the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) with Nadine Whitney on the ground. Luckily, Nadine has had a chance to see some films in the lineup and can give a first round of recommendations. Over the next weeks up to the lead up to the festival, The Curb will be providing dispatches.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
dir. Raven Jackson
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt screens at MIFF on 9 and 11 August. Tickets are available here.
You wanna know a secret? It doesn’t end or begin. It just changes form.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Water. All these drops might be a river one day. Might be snow. Might be in you.”
Graceful, elegant, tactile, moving poetry by poet, photographer, and filmmaker, Raven Jackson.
The question posed at the beginning of the film comes from the poet Lucille Clifton:
If our lives were to flood, what are the moments that would float to the surface?”
Raven Jackson answers the question by telling us it would be fragments that are indelible for a multitude of reasons. There are memories that don’t even belong to you that you have become a keeper of.
Mack (played by four actors at different life stages) lives in Mississippi. Her gaze is always steady — filled sometimes with immense longing and melancholy. Sometimes with overwhelming grief. Sometimes with joy at watching the miracle that is her sister Josie, her mother, or a child.
Time happens all at once. We move from Mack caressing a fish, to learning how to fish by her father Isaiah, to her mother Evelyn teaching her how to gut a catfish.
Time slips again and Mack the child is now Mack the young teen with breasts and desire. It slips back again, and it is Mack the child with her best friend and life-long love, Wood, riding through the streets and watching a house on fire.
It moves forwards, and Mack is saying goodbye to Wood with regret — being held in an embrace that never ends.
We see Evelyn dance with Isaiah. It’s sensual and beautiful. Then she is gone. But when, why, and how she went, we don’t really know.
Life is a tapestry of formative moments. Some can be life altering. A death, a birth. Some are simply reaching your hand into the river and touching the mud. There are thunderstorms, there is rain. There are the moments you didn’t speak and just observed. There are the words you didn’t say out loud but spoke with gestures. Tactile memories. Hands touching a forehead, being held, holding someone., and letting go.
Braids, hair bobbles, ribbons, terry cloth. The taste of rain. The salt of sweat, the taste of salt on the lips of a lover. Everyone’s life is filled with impressions. Mack’s connection to Mississippi and the tendrils of the Black community are the mosaic times which make up life.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is sense memory, but it is also an ode to how life ebbs and flows. Sisters, mothers, grandmothers, babies. All connected. Fathers present and absent.
“‘You are made of dirt and water,’ that’s what my Mama told me, and her Mama told her, and what I told your father.” Grandma tells Mack and her sister Josie.
Eventually we all become memories. We feed the trees, or we swirl as dust. We are part of a cycle.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is unmissable.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt screens at MIFF on 9 and 11 August. Tickets are available here.
Sujo
dir. Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero
Sujo screens at MIFF on 16 and 24 August. Tickets are available here.
After a prequel which doubles as the end of the film Sujo begins with a young father Josue pulling the trigger on the wrong cartel son. Four-year-old Sujo becomes an orphan and a target in well-known trope of “Wipe out the whole family, and a son for a son, he can’t be allowed to grow up and seek out revenge.” In Michoacán and the Tierra Caliente there are cartels and there are people who work for cartels and there are people who try to avoid cartels. In Sujo’s world, as an innocent, he doesn’t really know what is going on, but he knows enough to be terrified.
He is saved by his maternal aunt Nemesia, and his other aunt, Rosalia. Nemesia lives outside the town and has a reputation for being a witch. One thing is for certain is that she refuses to participate in the violence of men. With Rosalia and her two young sons Jeremy and Jaizel, Nemesia hopes she can encourage Sujo to take another path — a path which seems more in tune with his gentleness and curiosity.
Sujo works in chapters. The first Josue sets up the conflict. The second, Nemesia, sets up the healing, family and Rosalia and Nemesia’s bond which extends to the three young boys.
The third Jeremy and Jai has the time jump where Sujo, Jeremy and Jai are young adults and Sujo is close to being inducted into the cartel. This is the most brutal part of the film and the bleakest. Even with the healing is the destiny of Sujo to fall into a now generational trap?
The final chapter is titled Susan. Sujo must leave Tierre Caliente as it burns behind him in a scorched earth cartel war. He heads to Mexico City and gets a series of menial jobs and wanders the halls of a university by day so he can experience some of the life he would have chosen for himself. Susan is a university lecturer who notices his interest and brings him into her home.
Sujo is a story about self-actualisation and free will. Sujo insists even as a teen that he’s not his father but wonders if it is his fate to end up like him. Susan, Rosalia, and Nemesia (all names from types of flowers) are the gardens that nurture Sujo. Each woman has her own pain — Susan was from Argentina and left around the same age Sujo left the south. She lost her brother. Nemesia lost her sister when Sujo was born, and probably many other men through generations of violence. Rosalia is the wife of a drunken sicario, and death stalks her family.
Sujo works because it is both impressionistic and grounded. There is a wealth of symbolism, especially when dealing with Nemesia’s cabin home and the landscape of Tierra Caliente. People come from and return to the wild. The dogs that roam the place belong to the hill. The eagles show where a body is. Ghosts appear to Nemesia and Sujo’s dreams speak of keys and revenge.
When Susan talks about what Argentina was like to Sujo she says, “It was joyful and alive. And it was also dark and full of death.” The directors are making that statement about Mexico and the psychological states of the various characters.
It’s fascinating that we never really see enough of the powerful Aurelio’s face to know who he actually is. He’s just “cartel boss.” Similarly, it’s possible that the older Sujo and adult Josue are played by the same actor. The women are distinct. But often the boys and the men are interchangeable.
“Do you think people can change?” asks Sujo
Violence is the bedrock of Sujo’s life. Empathy, love, and forgiveness is the soil above it. Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero plant seeds of life in the devastating Mexican drama.