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Film Review: Three notable films to see in the Denver Film Festival

A young girl looks longingly past lit candles on a birthday cake with the arm of an adult reaching past her to light the candles.
Denver Film Festival
Children deserve to hold on to their uncompromised happiness, says KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz. But the film Totem recognizes that these assaults on innocence always happen too soon.

The 46th Denver Film Festival runs from November 3 through November 12, with more than 100 features and 75 shorts in the mix. KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz discusses three standouts.

Assaults on innocence

Totem, by Mexican filmmaker Lila Avilés, opens on 7-year-old Sol singing and giggling with her mother while they sit on toilets in a public bathroom. She’s a happy kid, and they drive home in a car filled with balloons. They hold their breath through a tunnel, and when the mother asks Sol if she’d made a wish, Sol – now looking serious – says she hopes Daddy will not die.

The balloons are for a surprise party for her father, who can barely get out of bed. He is dying, and Totem combines the unhindered happiness of this beloved child in a comfortable home with those things that undermine happiness as all people grow out of childhood – sickness and death, lack of money, infidelity.

But Sol is only seven. It’s too soon. Children deserve to hold their uncompromised happiness for longer, but Totem recognizes that these assaults on innocence always happen too soon.

Totem is not a grim movie, though. It’s filled with humor. For instance, a nutty woman comes to heal the house of its bad spirits.

“But don’t worry,” she says, “I can get rid of them.”

The grandfather then wonders caustically how walking through the house with a piece of burning bread is going to make life good again. Totem thus has a rich sense of how sorrow and joy come together.

The elusive past

Back in 2012, Spanish filmmaker Oskar Alegria went looking for the meaning of Emak Bakia, the title of a 1926 short film by the surrealist/dadaist artist Man Ray. The movie took off on a fascinating journey, and with his latest work, Zinzindurrunkarratz, Alegria again takes off on an unexpected trip.

He starts with an image of his father standing in a town. There’s no sound. Subtitles describe that Alegria is using his father’s 41-year-old Super-8 film camera, but cannot record sound because the Super-8 film now available can’t do that. Another title says that journeys into the past are never easy. And then, after images of his family in 1981, the film asks silently, “How can we recover the voice of the past with a camera that has become mute?”

On cement, the shadows of a person with a tophat on and of a horse or donkey are visible.
Denver Film Festival
Zinzindurrunkarratz is a picture of deep yearning, about the desire to recall the past.

Oskar Alegria has a unique vision. With the Super-8 camera, he follows the path his sheepherder grandfather took when he moved his flock to the mountains for the summer. Alegria says he will glue together the pictures he takes with the sounds he records separately along the way. So when people talk about his grandfather on camera, we don’t hear their voices. In the moments between these images, the screen goes dark, and the film adds other sounds.

Zinzindurrunkarratz is a picture of deep yearning – the desire to recall the past. It's frustrated by being partial, because the past is elusive and, in this film, is glimpsed only in fascinating and thrilling fragments.

Irresistible

Nikki Giovanni is a young, fast-talking, often-angry poet from another thrilling film in the Denver Film Festival called Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project by Joe Brewster and . In later moments, Giovanni, now 80 and more circumspect, still presents a formidable challenge. She’s brilliant, thoughtful, wild — and with piercing intelligence and wit.

A closeup of an older woman's face wearing reading glasses with an orange glow of sunlight cast toward the face and picture frames on a wall visible in the background.
Denver Film Festival
The filming of 'Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project' matches Giovanni's real-life dynamic person. The film sets her furious speaking voice and certainty when she was young against James Baldwin’s older, more experienced and measured conversation.

The filming matches her dynamic person. It sets her furious speaking voice and certainty when she was young against James Baldwin’s older, more experienced and measured conversation. It blends in images of ocean surf and the Milky Way that feel infinite.

But as an older woman, Giovanni is a marvel. She mesmerizes women, especially the young — white and black — who look transfixed by her speeches. She’s irresistible.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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