How does one take the temperature of a national cinema? In a year when Greek directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Alexandro Avranas popped up on the festival circuit with films shot in languages other than their native one, it feels fitting to bet on a homecoming and look for the answer to this elusive question at Greece’s largest and most prestigeous film festival.

Nested by the shores of the Aegean Sea and with a sprawling beach offering clear views of Mount Olympus, Thessaloniki is a city built upon human resilience and the merging of different cultures. The old docks that now house the city’s Museum of Cinema and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival were once one of the first sights of Jewish people escaping the war – a haven for those in search of freedom. As one walks by the harbour in between the festival’s many screenings, it’s hard not to think of art as a tool of empathy and a shared language.

So, despite the festival’s bountiful crop of Greek features this year — 22 in total, spread across many programmes — two sections feel particularly deserving of a proper rummage to get a deeper understanding of the current state of Greek filmmaking: Meet the Neighbors, comprising first or second features from Greece’s neighbourhood of Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East and >>Film Forward, prodding at the work of filmmakers challenging our reality and the conventions of genre.

Christos Pitharas’s sophomore narrative feature Hunt, and Daniel Bolda’s Maldives centre around the relationship between lonely men and dogs. The former, a tense drama shot in a tight 4:3 ratio, finds hunter Yannis (Yannis Belis) looking for some peace and quiet following the death of his mother and the overwhelming bureaucracy that succeeds it. Instead, he gets a loud next-door neighbour whose neglected dog barks day and night. The latter trails an elementary music teacher in a small mountainside town who begins to question his sanity once the sorrow coming from the disappearance of his beloved dog brings forth eerie visions of the afterlife.

Both films are infused with a stark sense of how loneliness slithers through community as a quiet, treacherous snake. The two men have their meticulously curated routines interrupted by the sudden loss of a last remaining tie to polite society, somewhat finding a twisted, primitive kind of freedom amongst the heaviness of their grief. While Pitharas roots his terse — both in runtime and pacing — thriller in a highly effective, tangible reality that amplifies Yannis’s descent into violence, Bolda taps into magical realism to play with notions of the real and the dreamlike, seesawing between the nostalgic common ground of a classroom and the lawless, uncanny corners of the forest.

If Hunt and Maldives provide fodder for quiet, moving introspection, Christos Massalas’s Killerwood and Alexandros Tsilifonis’s CAFÉ 404 walk in the opposite direction. These two comedies, although starkly differing in tone and earnestness, parody well-established beats: Killerwood takes a stab at both the classic behind-the-scenes mockumentary and true crime soaps and CAFÉ 404 plays with the all-American trope of a night of escalating chaos at a roadside diner.

Massalas’s satire follows a film crew during prep for a thriller investigating a series of unsolved murders in modern-day Athens and strikes just the right dose of sarcasm with a healthy pinch of self-awareness, handing out throwaway digs at how Greek filmmakers worship at the altar of Lanthimos while painting an amusing caricature of the over-preoccupied millennial wannabe auteur. CAFÉ 404 is rougher-around-the-edges, a spoofy action thriller about a young man who, hoping to keep the doors of the titular café open, is dangerously tempted by a mysterious bag.

There’s a sense of playfulness to both films that is welcome even when misguided, their containment allowing for the kind of risk-taking that speaks directly to the joys and possibilities of filmmaking and thus feeds into our opening question. What is Greek cinema looking like these days? Leaving Thessaloniki, the answer is less a definition and more a feeling, and a very good one at that.

The 2024 Thessaloniki International Film Festival ran from 31 Oct to 10 Nov 2024.

In Lars von Trier’s erotic opus Nymphomaniac, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s sex-obsessed Joe defines the erotic as “about saying yes.” It is a definition that lends itself to indulgence, the very sin Joe believes has rendered her body incapable of experiencing pleasure. It is, too, an idea that dangerously flirts with equating willingness to sensuality, a truth Audrey Diwan quickly debunks with her new feature, Emmanuelle.

The French director follows her striking Golden Lion winner Happening with a modernised take on Emmanuelle Arsan’s eponymous novel from 1967 which which has provided fodder for a truckload of increasingly-less competent adaptations across the last half-century. In Diwan’s reimagining, the titular character is no longer a barely adult ingenue, but Noémie Merlant’s 35-year-old luxury hotel inspector, sent to Hong Kong to find dirt on a pristinely-suited manager played by a scarce Naomi Watts.

Far be it from Emmanuelle to abstain from mixing business and pleasure, she thus spends her days circulating the luxurious Rosefield Palace, half prowling and half appraising. She times how long it takes a waitress to fetch a glass of sparkling water with the same nonchalant effectiveness it takes her to land a threesome with a couple by the rooftop bar and exchanges as few words with a concierge as she does with the stranger with whom she had casual sex in an airplane bathroom.

This impersonal sense of apathy permeates the entirety of Diwan’s half-hearted affair, with the blasé Emmanuelle perking up only when in the presence of two opposing forces: chatty escort Zelda (Chacha Huang) and mysterious hotel client Kei (Will Sharpe). With the subtlety of a rusty hammer, Diwan gives the sex worker a battered copy of Wuthering Heights and the elusive man the job of an engineer specialising in dams — a woman who sells affection carrying a book about the selfishness of love and an emotionally stunted man whose job is to erect physical barriers. How clever.

Such lack of nuance would be more easily forgivable if this erotic drama was, well, erotic. Or even fun. Alas, Emmanuelle plays out with unmovable frigidity, a sanitised look at sex that features plenty of nudity and a handful of fairly explicit sex scenes but is as successful in eliciting arousal as an airport security check. Shot as languidly as a perfume ad (and the prominent feature of a certain smartphone would lead one to believe it might actually be an ad), this is a film that renders lifeless the intoxicating, labyrinthine Hong Kong of Wong Kar Wai.

If the city lacks a beating pulse, so do the people in the frame. Diwan’s gaze is aimless, puzzlingly more preoccupied with scattered objects within the fortified walls of this liminal space than the curves and edges of the bodies of her characters. Backless silk dresses make evident the contour of perky breasts and long limbs sparkle with droplets of water against the soft light of a spa and yet none of it feels sensual, the suggestion of eroticism proving a flimsy foundation for eroticism itself. That a filmmaker who previously displayed such a deep understanding of the pleasures and burdens of the female body is behind this tepid exercise in desire is a great shock — and an even bigger shame.

For ten whole minutes, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili holds her gaze — and her camera — still. In the frame, the back of a nurse, and a naked woman’s body stretched atop an improvised operating bed made out of a worn-out dinner table. There are three women in this scene, the third being obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), whose skilled hands work at retrieving the embryo growing inside the young girl. We hear metal tools clink, their sharp sound made ever sharper against the softness of leaking fluids and skin brushing against skin. We hear words, too, cutting through primal grunts, sparse and objective. The girl needs to keep still. Almost there.

In his seminal poem The Waste Land, T.S. Elliot famously calls April “the cruellest month,” but springtime has rarely looked as bleak as it does in Kulumbegashvili’s elusive, eerie sophomore outing. On the surface, this is the story of Nina, whose mishandling of a patient’s labour resulted in the stillbirth of a baby boy. She now faces scrutiny not only from the hospital she works at but also from the grieving father who threatens to expose her illicit activities.

It is an open secret that Nina sneaks patients the contraception pill and performs illicit abortions in the small villages nearby. Although a secular country with laws that allow abortion up to 12 weeks, Georgia has a majorly Orthodox Christian population, which means that the laws on paper are not always the ones of the land. Many of the women who come into Nina’s care are girls made mothers far too young, ushered into a life of forced procreation they know they won’t be able to escape from.

When confronted with the danger of her underground practice, Nina is quick to insist that, were she not to do what she does, someone else would. But much of April is about the opposite truth — it is the danger, much more than any burning sense of duty or morality, that seems to feed the restless creature trapped within Nina. Kulumbegashvili weaves in disturbing images of an emaciated crone throughout the film, seesawing between the placidity of open fields and the darkness of the angled corners of the doctor’s house, where this alien being often lurks. Is this how Nina sees herself, drained of life after years of death? Has seeing the horrors of others’s bodies blurred her perception of her own?

The answers to this riddle are as slippery as Nina herself, a woman of contained poise but also staggering self-hatred. She picks up strangers by the road on her long drives into the bowels of Georgia, all too aware that the further she is from the sanitised walls of the hospital, the further she is from the perceived safety of civilised society. She matter-of-factly offers to blow a guy off, and is just as casual in her request for reciprocation, soon finding out that very little separates the elation of pleasure from that of violence. Her relationships are just as strange—she speaks of no family or friends, and the only connection in her life is David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), a doctor at her clinic with whom she was once involved. It is as if Nina walks the world gnawing at a figurative umbilical cord, intent on detaching herself from those around her.

Despite striking, haunting imagery — including two graphic, prolonged childbirth scenes — April is, at its core, a film about what we don’t see. Lars Ginzel’s rich, precise sound design immerses one into this fable-like landscape, where all there is to hold on to is sonance. It is a disorienting, all-consuming sensorial experience and made all the much better to those willing to surrender to its mysteries.

Contentment is arguably better than happiness, for what it lacks in giddy ebullience, it makes up for in a comfortable, lingering peace. In Dag Johan Haugerud’s Love, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) says she is happy, but what she seems to be is content. Curiosity about the personal and the private within the human body led her to a career in urology and a job that mostly comprises telling men about their prostate cancer diagnosis. But Marianne isn’t all that fazed to be the bearer of bad news. It’s life, people go on.

Haugerud’s second entry in his Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy juxtaposes Marianne’s aloofness with the personability of her nurse, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen). If the doctor is pragmatic, the nurse is heartfelt, following patients out of the office to ensure their emotional well-being as well as their physical. This is why it comes as a surprise to Marianne to find out Tor is going back and forth from Oslo on the ferry in the hopes of meeting the men he spots on Grindr. From the app, the nurse moves things out to the deck, where the urgency of a short commute makes things all the more exciting.

And therein lies the central conversation of Love, a film eager to explore the modern metamorphosis of human relationships as ties once so constricted by the rigid rules of institutions become much more fluid. Hovig plays Marianne with muted inquisitiveness, attentively listening to her greener co-worker as she feels her own notions of what is acceptable and what isn’t begin to shift. In turn, Jacobsen encapsulates the easygoing charm of the beautiful and young, but with an undercurrent of yearning that makes for a surprisingly touching performance. A handful of secondary characters come in and out to support the story’s central throughline, from a recently divorced geologist eager to find love again to an ageing man whose cancer diagnosis has him reliving the pain that comes from facing a life denied of pleasure.

Although there is a welcome palpability in these characters and their plights, there is also a certain sense of aimlessness as Haugerud hammers in on issues of sexual freedom and sexism to get his capital P point across. This insistence also presents an odd dichotomy, as Love feels at once lengthy and rushed, with interesting metaphors on the geography of the land and that of the body introduced early on and then left unexplored, set aside in favour of overstretched – and, at times, overexposed – dialogue.

It feels a shame, too, that a film about love but, crucially, also about sex plays out so tamely. The bodies on screen, so greatly scrutinised through words, are spared any interesting visual scrutiny, with Haugerud and cinematographer Cecilie Semec framing the characters through an oddly chaste lens. Even the sex itself, present yet scarce, feels void of any sliver of passion, a merely practical interlude where limbs interlock but never truly connect—almost as sterile as Marianne’s consulting room. Sadly, without insight into the intimacy of communion, many of the conversations Haugerud brings to the fore end up laying a bit too close to the didactic.

The titular quiet son in Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son is, it turns out, not that quiet after all. He’s quite outspoken about one subject in particular: the merits of France’s far-right.

Fus’ (Benjamin Voisin) newfound passion for the white nationalist movement comes as a surprise to his dad Pierre (Vincent Lindon), a rail worker who spent his youth plastering antifascist posters across the same train lines he now tiredly maintains. A premature widower, Pierre prides himself on having raised Fus and his younger brother Louis (Stefan Crepon) to be kind, compassionate men who share his beliefs about the importance of honest labour and contributing positively to their community.

But then Fus begins hanging out with young thugs with shaved heads. It isn’t political, he says. They are just kids wasting time after football matches, fooling around. Will their beloved Bordeaux make it into the Premier League this season? Unlikely. But then they are just kids harassing African immigrants online. And then they are just kids prowling outside supermarkets and accosting people of colour. And then they are just kids with brass knuckles and crowbars, looming. Planning.

Therein lies the central issue of The Quiet Son, a film so frustratingly set on infantilising grown men it circumvents the conversation around accountability entirely. The Coulin Sisters set out to build a cautionary tale on the easiness with which the far-right can convert the susceptible, cushioned middle-class, but find in this susceptibility a crutch for permeating their unhurried drama with a dangerous sense of passivity. In an unfortunate mirror to the mentality of bigots, The Quiet One heedlessly attributes blame to all but the grown men whose hate-filled rhetoric directly fuels life-threatening actions

The film’s English title does little to disperse this rhetoric of exemption. Switching the original Playing With Fire to The Quiet Son changes the framing of this story from the direct consequences of one’s actions to a slippery idea of silence as permission — or remission, in Pierre’s case. The Coulin Sisters are much less concerned with delineating the tactics supremacists employ in their conversion than they are with punishing Lindon’s ageing rail worker, an infuriating throughline that culminates in the film’s emotional climax: a monologue so outrageously misguided as to have one asking if The Quiet Son is actually in favour of us all showing a little more leniency to fascists as long as they have loving families.

While one may be cautious of placing moral judgments upon a fictional story, The Quiet Son is far too intent on rooting its fiction in the factual to merit the luxury of the unaccountability it so easily grants its characters. The Coulins set their story by the border of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, and pepper their film with newscasts on the boiling cauldron of European white nationalism brewing in the region, proving all too aware of the very real, very urgent consequences of the dangers of such idealism. That they still make a film this willing to focus the conversation on redemption shows that the cautionary tale The Quiet Son succeeds in building is not one on the perverse sneakiness of recruitment but on the dangers of rooting a story solely on the flimsiness of good intentions.

As they drag their sand-covered feet from Ipanema beach to their house across the road in 1970, the Paiva children can’t imagine that, 50 years later, people would be marching down those same streets asking for the reestablishment of the military regime that violently killed their father. But history is cruel in its cycles, and the most willing to forget are often the easiest to convert.

Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here is about memory as resistance. Based on the eponymous biographical book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Salles’s first narrative film in over a decade – and his first made in his home country since 2008’s Linha de Passe – tackles one of the most emblematic cases of Brazil’s military regime: the forced disappearance of Marcelo’s father, former congressman Rubens Paiva (played here by Selton Mello).

Instead of opting for a traditional biopic chronicling the congressman’s life and career leading up to his arrest, the director turns his attention to the Paiva matriarch Eunice (Fernanda Torres). We first find her floating in the ocean, rocked by gentle waves as the harsh Brazilian sun turns glistening the water that envelops her. A mother of five, Eunice finds in the sea a rare chance for quiet contemplation, keeping her ears just enough below water to soften the frenzy of her surroundings but never immersed as deep as to drown out the laughter of her children playing nearby.

This laughter is a permanent fixture in the Paiva household, home not only to the family and their adorable dog Pimpão, but to all those who wish them well. Books, records and art line every nook and cranny of their large house in Ipanema, where friends dance to Gilberto Gil and make plans to watch the new Antonioni over a shared cigar. In this, Salles paints the Paiva residence as the physical manifestation of the artistic freedom of the early 60s and a place where the kindhearted and open-minded will always find a home.

But this is 1970, and gone is the hopeful age of enlightenment that inspired cultural movements like the Tropicália and Cinema Novo. In its place is the dark opposite: an antidemocratic military regime funded by the United States and fuelled by post-Cold War nationalist idealism. In periods of legitimised oppression, there is no such thing as a safe haven, and this truth becomes painfully clear to the Paiva family on the morning that a group of unidentified officials drives Rubens away for questioning, not yet knowing that their father and husband will never return.

Brazilian cinema is no stranger to films about the regime, from Camilo Galli Tavares’s The Day That Lasted 21 Years to Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation. Still, I’m Still Here triumphs in pairing Salles’s intrinsic understanding of the emotional potential of realism with two brilliant performers in Mello and Torres. The latter is so arresting as to rival her mother Fernanda Montenegro’s shattering turn in Salles’s 1998 drama Central Station, imbuing her Eunice with a pained understanding of the heavy cross carried by the resilient. It is a lead performance that finds great potency in containment, with Torres never as striking as when the camera quietly rests on her face, her eyes always looking forward, her intent unshakeable.

Many of Brazil’s great thinkers and artists lived in forced exile during the two decades of the regime, Emília Viotti da Costa amongst them. The historian would come to coin the seminal encapsulation of that era, one that in its grasp of both warning and lament, also elucidates Salles’s moving elegy: “A people without memory is a people without history. And a people without history is doomed to make, in the present and the future, the same mistakes of the past.”

Few modern thinkers have reached as powerful and concise a conclusion on what happens to a society subjected to the weaponisation of knowledge as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire: “When education doesn’t lead to liberation, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.” Little did Freire know that, two decades later, a man in the American Pacific Northwest would use a very similar maximum to justify the desire of the uneducated oppressor to take down the oppressed.

That man was Robert Jay Mathews, the founder of the white supremacist organisation that lends its name to Justin Kurzel’s The Order. In a 1984 letter declaring war on the Federal Government of the United States, Mathews explained his racially motivated attack as a desire to “quit being the hunted and become the hunter.” This hunting analogy sits at the heart of Kurzel’s take on the cop procedural, a captivating game of cat and mouse chronicling the downfall of The Order and the rise of Nazi-inspired ideology in the US in the 80s.

Of course, a police procedural needs a tormented copper whose overly demanding career has cost him a once-loving family, and Jude Law fills this role as ageing FBI Agent Terry Husk. The veteran arrives at a small town to investigate a series of violent robberies but ends up heading a large operation to catch Nicholas Hoult’s Bob Mathews, who executed the robberies to fund his ambitious plan to kickstart a violent race war in America and establish white power. Tye Sheridan completes the trio, playing yet another well-meaning rookie willing to walk down a dangerous path to please an emotionally distant mentor in Deputy Jamie Bowden.

As an entry to the procedural genre, The Order proves a competently realised affair. Kurzel’s longtime collaborator Adam Arkapaw captures the American Northwest in all its vastness, with the sinewy roads nested within the mountains proving the only way in or out of this no man’s land where hatred is allowed to fester away from prying eyes. Law plays against type as the scruffy Husk, a downtrodden officer drained of joy by the horrors of his vocation and functioning on a tricky mix of spite and rage, while Hoult embodies the particular kind of charm that allows the cruellest of people to reign over the most gullible. The cast is rounded by a roster of rising stars in Jurnee Smollett as a Black FBI agent navigating the personal ripples of the case and Alison Oliver as Mathews’ wife Debbie, a refreshing portrayal of a criminal’s partner that bypasses the cliché of the passive housewife unable to detach herself from a man she knows to be bad news.

For those heading into The Order hoping for another dose of Kurzel’s violent brand of social realism, however, tough luck. This is not the Australian backlands, and The Order sees the director at his most tame, with few violent sequences interspersed through a tense thriller that favours large ethical questionings over the minutiae of heinous crimes. The horror here comes from seeing the seismic consequences of an ideology that feels closer to newspaper headlines than history books, knowing far too well that figureheads die, but words live on, with new self-serving grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same old hateful rhetoric.

Every book tells a story, but can a book ever tell the whole truth? This question plagues renowned documentarian Catherine (Cate Blanchett), who one day receives a mysterious book in the post and finds within its pages a version of a truth she long believed to be buried. The book, it turns out, is only the beginning of a ruthless vendetta orchestrated by retired professor Stephen (Kevin Kline), who finds in his swansong years a powerful motivation to keep going: avenging the early death of his 19-year-old son, Jonathan (Louis Partridge).

This clash between a woman protecting a rotting secret and a grieving father drives Disclaimer, the first series fully written, directed and produced by Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón. Adapted from the eponymous book by Renée Knight, the effort may mark a new creative format for the Mexican director but sees him revisit some of the themes explored in depth throughout his career, from carnal desire as a treacherous motivator and the very particular kind of grief that burdens parents sentenced to live longer than their children.

Disclaimer is at its most interesting whenever it allows Kline the time to physically translate the toll of loss. Stephen is the actor’s greatest role in well over a decade, a conniving, exceptionally intelligent man drained of any sliver of compassion by twenty years of slow and permanent emotional erosion. Kline leans into Stephen’s villainous strain, his voice-over bearing the signature raspiness of a crooked bad guy. As the former teacher becomes more and more intertwined with the memory of his late wife, Kline slides into the Norman Bates-esque, dressing up in his spouse’s pink cardigan, pruning his hair and speaking in softer tones.

In contrast, Blanchett returns to the sternness of Lydia Tár to portray Catherine, who, much like the conductor, is a successful woman unwilling to admit she has little regrets about neglecting time with her child in search of professional excellence. That her son turned out to be a meek, deeply incompetent young man (played not much more competently by Kodi Smit McPhee) comes back to plague her later in life, this walking reminder of her ineptitude at motherhood a direct connection to the night she first met Stephen’s son and the dark legacy of that encounter.

While the show’s first two episodes do an interesting job of laying out the murky lines connecting the characters, the storyline dwindles as Cuarón takes his time teasing out a secret he only begins properly prodding at much later. This stumble in pace and focus may require a bit more patience than the show is earned at times, but its true Achilles’s heel is Sacha Baron Cohen’s as Catherine’s lawyer husband Robert. A staggering feat of miscasting, the role sees the physically towering Borat actor painfully contort himself next to his much more impressive wife, the perfect picture of the doting, coy husband just waiting for the right moment to bank on the sexist bitter grudge he’s been slowly feeding throughout their relationship.

Robert is meant to kick down the first solid pillar of the documentarian’s life, and the fact Cohen can’t create a character compelling enough to make the viewer feel the enormity of this schism is a disservice to Cuarón’s refined direction in those early chapters. Still, there are many pleasures to be had with Disclaimer, from the beautifully realised erotic scenes that set the tone for this investigation of the consequences of desire, to how Cuarón works with two cinematographers — longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezi and Bruno Delbonnel – to visually translate the voiceover narrations throughout the show, from the first person used by Stephen, to the omniscient narrator played by Indira Varma and a rare second person narration following Catherine.

This experimental approach when it comes to narrative construction makes for an interesting exercise in perspective, further blurring the lines between the story’s concurring truths. That it is done with Cuarón’s sharp, curious eye is good enough of a sell.

As he runs freely across the sprawling dunes of Ceará, flitting back and forth between the crisp water and the blazing heat of the Brazilian sun, it is hard to imagine why Heraldo (Iago Xavier) would want to leave this slice of paradise. Alas, things are rarely as idyllic as they seem – even more so in small towns where one is hidden away from the rest of the world but never sheltered from prying neighbouring eyes.

In Heraldo’s case, he’s always under the heavy gaze of his drug boss, an artist who splits her time between painting colourful canvases and taking care of late-payers. Her crowded house is the closest thing Heraldo ever had to a home, made even more intimate by sharing it with his older brother who sings promises of a future living in quiet lawfulness, raising their children close together, brothers made fathers and uncles made godfathers. Those dreams uttered under the vast skies of the Brazilian Northeast are cut short by a violent crime that sends Heraldo into hiding at the titular seedy motel.

The same destiny that lends its name to the shaggy establishment off the highway has seldom been kind to the downtrodden 21-year-old. Such kindness comes naturally to the cheery Dayana (Nataly Rocha) who, taken by this man who is everything her abusive husband Elias (Fábio Assunção) isn’t, agrees to let Heraldo stay in the motel in exchange for acting as the motel’s handyman. And, boy, does he prove handy.

Motel Destino sees Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz return to the language – both in theme and form – of earlier works like Madame Satã and Futuro Beach, prodding at the undercurrent of desire that clouds an already frail sense of morality. It does, however, crucially lack the tangible yearning of such films, much due to newcomer Iago Xavier being miscast in this love triangle that never quite joins its corners. This teasing unravels as a frustrating withholding in a film that sets out to comment on notions of power and possession but can’t keep up with its own throbbing, sensual rhythms.

Still, Motel Destino is shot beautifully by Aïnouz’s frequent collaborator Hélène Louvart, a tropical neo-noir that does away with darkness in favour of a riveting spiral of colour and sweat. Yellows meet purples meet blues, lime green bikinis lying against orange hammocks, and sweat-drenched bodies slithering under a curtain of crimson. The workers at the motel eat, clean and sleep to a soundtrack of constant groaning and panting, the loud, chaotic nature of want and ecstasy as natural to them as the pages on an accounting book. In this depraved Eden, deep moans casually cut through ordinary conversations as two donkeys fornicate outside and chickens peck happily at tufts of dry grass – Aïnouz’s gaze as free of judgment as his characters.

The director is an expert in this precise kind of world-building, one intricately related to yearning – for another, for belonging, for redemption. If Xavier is a misfire, unable to tap into the kind of rogue unpredictability required of a character like Heraldo and never quite grasping the volatile nature of the love triangle at its core, Assunção and Rocha prove the opposite. The actress channels the great Sônia Braga in her easy-flowing seductiveness, untamed hair sticking to the sweat dripping from her chest, a cheeky smile always looming at the corner of her mouth. Assunção makes for a great sleazeball with trunks just as short as his temper, whose inflated sense of self barely manages to keep him afloat. The pair is one of the many pleasures of Aïnouz’s latest, a homecoming that isn’t without its flaws but one that will prove kind to those willing to walk into its grimy, frisky arms.

Oliver Stone’s latest documentary is about two men: the titular Lula, and Oliver Stone. It is 2022 and the American filmmaker reunites with the Brazilian politician for the first time since 2009’s South of the Border, Stone’s attempt to chronicle the Pink Tide that saw South America lean into left-wing governments and more socially and economically progressive leaders.

In the fifteen years since that last meeting, much has changed in Brazil (and South America). With Lula, Stone sets out to better understand how the country he left many years ago, one that venerated the man at its helm, could so violently turn their backs on its leader. How could one of the greatest rising modern democracies fall into the hands of fascism? This is, of course, a great, pertinent question, but Stone is much more interested in being the man with the answers than he is in the answers themselves.

The documentary is structured around an interview between Lula and Stone recorded soon after the politician was released from 18 months of unlawful imprisonment and right before the presidential election that would lead to his third mandate. The two speak via an interpreter, a level of separation that is not an issue in itself but emphasises the expanding gulf that lies between the men. Stone’s gaze — both physical and cinematic — is unfocused and ever-shifting, and the questions that he asks are superficial, a guiding frame concocted solely to be interwoven with the archival material of Lula’s rise and demise.

The footage shows Lula as a small boy growing up in the Northeast of Brazil as one of many children raised by a single mother with little means. Like many other Northeasterners in the 1950s, the Silvas leave their homeland for the promises of São Paulo, Lula quickly becoming the family’s breadwinner through money made as a steelworker. It is the steel company’s union that first entices the young worker into a life of politics and ushers in the birth of the Labour Party he would come to spearhead.

Barack Obama once called Lula “the most popular politician in the world”, and it is easy to see why. Beyond the president’s groundbreaking socially-focused initiatives that lifted 20 million people out of poverty, Lula is just a very, very likeable guy. He speaks candidly and beautifully about his commitment to the people and his calling as a leader, both a privilege and a curse. When Stone prods at Lula’s relationship with the American government, the president answers in a refreshingly candid way. Hilary Clinton hates South America; Bush was a better partner than Obama; the US wants nothing but to keep Brazil in its place as a tame, third-world colony.

One would think hearing all of this spoken with such clarity would elicit at least a sliver of self-reflection from Stone, who purposefully inserts himself in the frame as the equally relevant counterpart in this conversation, but that epiphany never comes. The filmmaker then enlists journalist Glenn Greenwald, yet another American with a famous interest in Brazil, to help elucidate Brazil’s fall into the hands of Bolsonaro and the right-wing movement. The conversation between the two Americans plays as an over-extended YouTube explainer, Stone sitting awkwardly on a wooden bench parallel to Greenwald as his lack of knowledge on the subject grows clearer and clearer.

During his Lula introduction at Cannes, Stone claimed his film would endear the politician to the agnostics and downright opposers. That he was saying that to a room very clearly filled with nothing but passionate supporters says much about the film he was about to present, yet another effusive pat in the back from an American director whose uncurious, self-congratulatory gaze does very little justice to the legendary man he sets out to portray.