New Voices

The title of Pavel Klushantsev’s book “Away from the High Roads” might serve as the motto of New Voices as the programme has been imagined and curated these last four years. It has always tried to find exceptional cinema in obscure, hidden, marginal territories. Among its chief criteria and tunings: an independent voice, a distinctive timbre, and the complexity of the overall harmony.

This year, that path yielded very few discoveries. Among them: a wonderful film by the young Mexican Diego Hernández, A Skyless Roof, a requiem in the form of a fairy tale; and a harsh verdict on the creative class and the millennial generation, a digital arte povera — The Misconceived, by the Brooklyn experimenter James N. Kienitz Wilkins.

One screening brings together new films by two auteurs of the Russian cinematic avant-garde: Dasha Likhaya’s a sea, a sea, a sea, a sea and Genrikh Ignatov’s Desire to Heaven — cinema of small sensations and vast longing; private sensory experiments against a background of grave losses in shared purpose and collectivity.

But the programme also includes films that speak directly, plainly, and clearly. What they have in common is a sense of purpose and necessity — a rare quality in an age of image hyperinflation. That necessity may be dictated by the time itself, as in Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Sundays (Golden Shell at San Sebastián; Goya for Best Film), where Christian faith begins to show a possibility at the moment when all the main possibilities seem exhausted — as if, in a boarded-up house, a secret window suddenly opened, welcoming or threatening. Or the necessity may be inward and personal — as with Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche in Algerican Road, where a director who has been at this for years stays on his solitary path — spare, exacting, and off the festival circuit.

Mikhail Ratgauz