Flee follows an Afghan refugee’s journey with his family to find safety in Europe. Years later he recounts the story to a friend who documents the story through animation.
Flee is a great argument for animation’s place in documentary filmmaking. Though we’ve seen refugee stories before, this one is specific and intimate. Filled with nuances about trauma, sexuality, and finding home. An emotional, visceral, and ultimately cathartic experience.
At the start of Flee, which premiered in the World Documentary section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, we watch a man lie back in a bed. We see him from a bird’s eye view. He’s animated, but something about the animation tells us that this is drawn from life. Offscreen we hear director Jonas Poher Rasmussen ask the man, “what does the word ‘home’ mean to you?”
At that, the man, Amin, begins to transport us back to 1984 Kabul, Afghanistan. As he describes the place and time, the rough charcoal sketches morph into vivid colors as we meet his family. He begins to talk about them — his mother, father, brother, and sisters. However, he quickly cuts off the interview saying, “it’s my past. I can’t run away from it. I don’t want to.” But he can’t continue, which Rasmussen understands.
That’s because Rasmussen, we learn, is old school mates with Amin. He describes seeing him on the train. He describes him in great detail. Decades later they’re still friends and Rasmussen has taken interest in telling Amin’s story of fleeing Kabul as the Taliban took control of the city and his journey to eventually settle in Denmark. And the way Rasmussen tells it is the way any other person would learn about their friends’ past. Flee feels like a story that you lie back in a bed and listen to with the storyteller right next to you — this quite literally happens.
This might be a good place to mention that the entire film is animated. That’s in large part to protect Amin’s privacy. At the same time, it allows us to see his memories, as fickle as they are like all memories, as he remembers them. Months later he sits back down to recount the story. And from there, Flee captures you and doesn’t let you go until it cuts to black.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen, director of Flee, an official selection of the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Yann Bean.
There’s so much to unpack in Amin’s story, but I will leave that for you to uncover when you watch it. And I’m telling you now, watch it when it comes out — thankfully Neon has acquired the film for distribution (the first of the fest). Instead, I want to talk about what makes Flee so effective as a documentary.
Documentarians often find archival footage to piece together the story they’re trying to tell. They fill in the gaps with interviews or reenactments. Instead, Flee lets Amin tell the story. Rasmussen simply gives us a way to see it all unfold. Hearing Amin’s voice as it wavers, the animation often following his lead, makes the entire experience feel intimate. Like he’s telling it just to us.
Periodically, we’ll flip back to the present, which we also see in the same hand-drawn animation. It only heightens the intimacy. There are asides about how that past and trauma has shaped who Amin is now, especially his relationship with his partner Kasper, who hopes to move to the countryside with Amin. However, he can tell something is holding him back.
We learn through Amin’s story why he’s so hesitant to take the next step with Kasper. He doesn’t tell us, but we’re able to figure it out. In a gorgeous and poetic scene right before the end of the film, we watch Amin return home to Denmark in the present after a business trip. Kasper is off in the distance waiting for him in the busy airport. Amin stares from afar and says in voiceover, “even when you’re in a safe place, you’re on your guard.” Quickly, he adds, that maybe that’s something that needs to change.
Flee pushes the medium of documentary filmmaking forward by finding a way to get us to both sympathize and empathize with Amin’s feelings through our own experiences. It was almost a visceral experience. I experienced nothing close to the hardships Amin experienced as he tried to escape Afghanistan by way of Russia through human traffickers. However, the film’s intimate understanding of the story it was telling made it possible to find a way to apply his story to my own life. Even in a safe place, you’re on your guard. Maybe it is about time to change that.
The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing. Here is a round up of quick reviews for thrillers playing the fest.
Read all of my reviews, including full-length reviews, from the fest here!
Hany Abu-Assad’s Huda’s Salon. Courtesy of TIFF.
Huda’s Salon
As someone who both writes and consumes film criticism, there is nothing I hate more than hearing, “well, you just have to watch it.” However, there is so little I can divulge about the plot of Huda’s Salon, a new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad,without spoiling the fun that I have to tell you you just have to watch it. But I promise that you’ll thank me for my discretion
The opening scene plays out in a single long take as Huda (Manal Awad) does Reem’s (Maisa Abd Elhadi). The women discuss the latest gossip, complain about the men in their lives, and bond over the difficulty of motherhood. Then something happens. Something you don’t see coming and that will set off a cascading series of events that puts each of the characters in a pressure cooker that is just waiting to burst.
Abu-Assad allows the story to speak for itself rather than making any specific statements about life under occupation. The pure anxiety of the film is enough to tell you what it’s like. The movie struggles with the dichotomy of living in a place where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Whether it’s being a patriot or being a martyr. It plays like a 70s espionage thriller with a Hitchcockian twist as the plot unravels.
Perfectly crafted and shot from beginning to end and full of terrific performances, but particularly Maisa Abd Elhadi, Huda’s Salon had me holding my breath from beginning to end.
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Michael Pearce’s Encounter, which premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Courtesy of TIFF.
Encounter
Riz Ahmed, following his Oscar-nominated turn in Sound of Metal, proves again that he is one of the best actors of his generation in Michael Pearce’s Encounter. The sci-fi thriller follows Malik Khan (Ahmed), a marine veteran and father, who goes on a mission to rescue his sons after he becomes convinced that an alien invasion of bugs is controlling people leading them to become violent.
The beauty of Encounter is that it doesn’t intend to trick you. It’s easy enough to solve exactly what is going before it reveals it to you. Instead, it’s more interested in Ahmed’s Malik and his struggle with PTSD and his relationship with his two sons (Aditya Geddada & Lucian-River Chauhan). With that storyline, the movie finds surprising emotional depths as the older of the two boys struggles with his perception of his father.
However, the movie is formulaic and a subplot featuring Octavia Spencer as a parole officer takes a lot of steam out of the father/son relationship story that fuels the movie. It’s unfortunate considering Pearce’s direction is confident and systematically builds up tension around the mystery as different situations create cracks in Malik’s carefully structured world and the boys a reason to fear their father.
There is value in the film once you wade through the predictable plot. If anything, come for another terrific Riz Ahmed performance.
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DASHCAM
Rob Savage’s DASHCAM, which premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Courtesy of TIFF.
Director Rob Savage brought the world its first, and to date best, pandemic-era film with his computer screen horror Host. The brilliance of that film is that it took place where our world is currently taking place: on screens and on Zoom, more specifically. Though computer screen films aren’t new, Host is the first to feel like it didn’t have to stretch the medium to its absolute max to work – something that his new film DASHCAM has to do and more.
Our protagonist — if you could call her that — is Annie Hardy a Los Angeles-based musician who is supporting herself during the pandemic by live-streaming from her car freestyling for tips. This is the medium through which we see the movie. Annie doesn’t hide her Covid skepticism or MAGA-supporting tendencies from her viewers, some of whom support her and some vehemently hate-watch her as we see from the live chat that remains in the corner of the frame for most of the film. Hardy, who is playing an over-the-top version of herself and hosts a show called “Band Car,” is crass, rude, and unafraid to voice her opposition to restrictions and etiquette around the pandemic.
Looking to escape the “madness of America,” she hops a flight across the Atlantic to London where she intends to stay with her musician friend Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). He is none too happy about her presence, especially when she steals his car and ends up in an empty restaurant where she is asked to bring an elderly woman called Angela (Angela Enahoro) to another location. However, after defecating on herself and then attacking a woman who seems to be looking for her, it becomes clear that Angela may not be entirely human.
From there, DASHCAM becomes a dizzying found footage horror with scenes reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project as Annie and Stretch try to stave off attacks by Angela and the woman after her. And while the horror and gore are repetitive — we have more than one fake-out death involving the same person — it at the very least delivers the kinds of thrills and chills that you’re looking for in this kind of movie. However, through it all, it feels like Annie seems to be trying out material for her Netflix standup special. Her brand of combative libertarianism slowly becomes more grating than funny and the film’s genre inventiveness wears off. As a subversion of the found-footage monster movie DASHCAM is rough around the edges, but works. Whenever it tries to be something more it makes me want to log off.
Dear Evan Hansen follows a high school senior with a social anxiety disorder who suddenly finds himself as the hero of his town after a student commits suicide
Undoubtedly one of the worst movie-musicals ever made. Overwrought and emotionless at the same time, insensitive towards trauma and mental illness, and out of touch with reality. Jail to everyone.
Dear Evan Hansen,
Today was not a good day because I was subjected to watching you.
Sincerely, Me
Usually I don’t like being mean about the films I don’t like. Also, I’m a firm believer that almost every film made with the best of intentions has some good you can derive from it. However, Dear Evan Hansen doesn’t sit right with me. At its root, it feels rotten. Like its intentions are misplaced or, given the benefit of the doubt, misunderstood. Director Stephen Chbosky, whose films The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder I truly enjoy, was simply handed a bad project.
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The moviefollows Evan Hansen (played by Ben Platt), your typical high school senior with a social anxiety disorder who is tasked by his therapist to write a letter to himself every day. After a misunderstanding causes him to become the hero of his town following the suicide of his classmate Connor (Colton Ryan), Evan must continually expand his web of lies and keep all he has gained from the fallout.
This includes lying to Connor’s family (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) about being friends with their son, dating Connor’s sister (Kaitlyn Dever), working with Alana (Amandla Stenberg) on an entire organization and fundraiser honoring him. The list goes on and on. No one is safe from his deceit. The fact that this is a musical is confounding because watching Evan spin lie after lie in songs like “For Forever” and, even more maliciously, fabricate evidence in “Sincerely, Me” almost makes light of the damage his actions are bound to cause.
At this point, if you’re already asking yourself why this seemingly terrible human is the protagonist of the story then we are on the same page. The film, which is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name featuring music by Oscar winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, was meant to “immortalize” 27-year-old Platt’s Tony-winning performance. However, Dear Evan Hansen seems to be a story that only worked in the thin period of time when it came out. It already feels dated — as does Platt’s hair.
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Reportedly, changes were made in the adaptation to address some of the more polarizing issues with the story. If that’s the case, then I’d hate to see what was wrong with the musical. At its core, the musical is meant to preach that everyone is dealing with their own traumas whether it be depression, social anxiety, suicidal thoughts, insecurities, however it doesn’t take any time to actually explore the reality of those traumas. Instead, it’s a surface level assessment of them. Hollywood’s “glamourized” version where consequences don’t exist.
Because of its purely uninformed and disingenuous portrayal of mental illness — and apparent disregard of therapy — the movie feels overwrought and emotionless at the same time. It mines melodrama with no actual basis for it. It feels like the characters are just pawns in this power grab for sympathy. And while there is some good acting here — Julianne Moore, Amandla Stenberg, and Kaitlyn Dever, in particular — the rest of the cast feels like they’re in a competition of who can ugly cry the most.
Evan Hansen, whose actions throughout the film could only be described as monstrous, is meant to meet consequences at the end of the film and Connor is meant to be humanized. Instead, Evan’s behavior, which is harmful to the stigma around mental illness, is excused as a product of past trauma. Something the movie was supposedly supposed to fix. Or maybe, just maybe, this was a story we didn’t need to have told again.
Director and writer Martin Edralin talks about his new film Islands, which is premiering in the narrative feature competition at the 2021 Online SXSW Film Festival
As I was perusing the lineup for the 2021 Online SXSW Film Festival one film, in particular, caught my eye. Martin Edralin’s Islands had a logline that immediately captured my attention with one word: Filipino. As a Filipino-American, it was a visceral experience to see my race so unabashedly showcased in a film premiering at a major festival. But that wasn’t even something that directorand writerMartin Edralin had thought about.
“It seems like there’s a movement in the US with foreign language right now, so it’s really interesting timing,” he told to me in an interview the week before the film premieres on Tuesday, March 16th.
In our chat, we talked about how Filipino culture shaped the film, how it relates to his great short film Hole, and how it was working with two non-professional actors in the lead roles.
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed.
Martin Edralin, director of Islands, premiering at the 2021 Online SXSW Film Festival. Credit: Karen Tsang
Karl Delossantos (Smash Cut):I watched the film last night and I don’t know if I should thank you for the therapy or charge you for the emotional distress. It was terrific!
Martin Edralin: Oh, thank you!
This is the first film in Tagalog to premiere at SXSW and as a Filipino-American that was great to see. How does it feel to have that distinction?
It feels great! I had no idea. It wasn’t something I even thought about. I think it was after they accepted the film that I looked into it and noticed it. I didn’t even know as a Canadian movie that we could be in the narrative competition. I thought it would be world cinema. It’s really exciting. It seems like there’s a movement in the US with foreign language right now, so it’s really interesting timing.
Yeah, especially coming off the heels of the Minari Golden Globe controversy where it was considered foreign language even though it’s an American film. The Filipino diaspora is at the center of Islands. What about that was interesting for you to explore?
That’s what I lived. Originally this was going to be made in the Philippines. Because of some funding in the development process that I qualified for I had to move it to Canada. And in that process, I realized that yeah I’m Filipino but I don’t actually know what it’s like to live in the Philippines. I visited a few times, but being Filipino in Canada or the US is very different.
And it’s my first Filipino film too so there was an awareness in the process where I really know [the material]. Where in my other films with white characters I was telling stories about humans and emotions I’m familiar with, but for Islands we could really color it with the houses we know and the family relationships. It all feels so natural. Even though I was on set, when I watched the movie for the first time I could smell the food in the scenes.
Joshua (Rogelio Bataglas) calls for help in Martin Edralin’s Islands | Credit: Film still
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Watching the opening scene was such a visceral experience for me because it was these artifacts of my childhood that I recognized. The one that really got to me was chopping the whole raw chicken with the cleaver!
Exactly! It’s little things like that. We know those sounds.
The theme of Islands is actually pretty similar to your short film Hole in that it’s about intimacy and someone trying to find it and they’re unable to.
It’s something I didn’t really realize until I was writing it or filming it that it was kind of like a follow-up. [Both films] have lead characters that are past their “prime dating years” and aren’t going to have an experience of love or sex or any real human connection.
Yeah, they’re definitely similar in that way. How did you find Rogelio Balagtas [Josua in Islands]? He and Sheila Lotuaco [Marisol in Islands] are both remarkable.
We went out to the community and we went on Facebook and I emailed every Filipino organization I could find in Canada and eventually we went to the US and the Philippines. We just really had to find the right people. With Rogelio, someone told me about a short that was made in Winnipeg and I saw him in it. He was a dad, it wasn’t the lead role or anything and he barely spoke, but there was something interesting about him.
So we asked him to self-tape and there was still just something about him. So we did a Skype audition, which was super fun because we did a few dialogue scenes but it was really about him doing things without dialogue. So we made him dance in a room by himself and cry into a pillow and pretend to masturbate and we were like wow this is the guy. Because we didn’t want the character to be sad or pathetic. We didn’t want him to masturbate and have it be seen as gross. And he’s just a sweet guy. He’s a nice guy.
Another connection with Hole where sexuality isn’t a taboo and it’s embraced and seen as a part of human life.
Yes! And especially with masturbation with men. It’s always portrayed as something as gross or bad or wrong unlike with women where it’s hypersexualized. I just felt like that’s just what everybody does.
I’m glad you mentioned too that you had Rogelio dance in his audition because I was texting my parents while watching it that line dancing is a plot device, which is so Filipino! Was that a part of the fabric of the film?
I don’t actually remember. I have a feeling that it was during casting when we were looking for senior actors — and they’re always difficult in any ethnicity to find. And I knew there were a lot of these line dancing classes out there — my mom actually goes to one — and there was one in particular that was four-hours long. The first time I went there I was almost moved to tears. It was so beautiful to see all these people that are old and some could barely dance, but they were there and doing this thing together.
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I love that the ability to dance alone is seen as something liberating in the film.
Yeah liberating and thinking of it as pleasure. It’s something we take for granted, the ability to move and to move to music. Thinking about love or sex, it’s just one of those things where it’s joy that needs to be experienced.
I want to talk about Sheila Lotuaco and the watershed scene in the middle of the film where she talks about her experience working abroad as a Filipino expatriate.What was it like shooting that scene?
That scene was made very early. This film was originally about that character, an overseas Filipino worker. It was becoming muddled and felt like two different stories so that script is away in a drawer somewhere. I did a lot of research about the OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) experience and just read a lot of horror stories about these things happening in the Middle East and I felt like I had to keep that in the movie and say something about it.
I actually thought shooting it was going to be really challenging, but she was a natural. Even in the audition and in rehearsals, she would just cry. Actually both actors when we were rehearsing they would just cry. And I would be like, “you’re not even professional actors!” But they could really just live the experience.
And Sheila is a caregiver [like in the film], she’s a healthcare worker in Canada so it’s a little different than what other OFWs are doing around the world, but it was something important we had to say.
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We’ve all been thinking about mortality a lot with the pandemic. How did the entire story of Joshua bearing the burden of taking care of his aging parents come together?
My mom had just retired at the time in 2015 when I had just started thinking about the film, and my dad was on his way to retiring. And you hear these stories about how after someone retires they start to get old really fast from the inactivity or not using their brains in the same way. So I was thinking about that. As you know in Filipino culture we take care of our parents and I have a lot of South Asian friends who also have these multigenerational households where you’re taking care of your parents and they’re taking care of your kids, so I was also thinking about that.
Living a freelance filmmaker life with a busy schedule and whether you’re being paid well one month or paid at all the next month, how do you in this sort of life take care of your parents?
Yeah, it’s a distinction between American and Asian culture. It’s always something in the back of your mind: how do you live your life and also take care of them?
I almost feel guilty thinking about how am I going to do this. In the Philippines it isn’t even a question. It’s just something you do, it’s a part of life.
For an audience that is not familiar with the Filipino experience, what do you want them to take away from the film?
There was never really any intention of putting our culture on display, but we were certainly looking to decorate the film with it — in the production design and including line dancing and religion, how we mourn, our food. It’s all in there. We wanted to show what’s it like to be in a Filipino home.
The film was going to be quite dark. Hole and other shorts I’ve done are slower and there’s almost no levity whereas with Islands there are touches of dry humor and it’s brighter and more colorful overall. But if anyone is going to take anything from it, and I’m going to get a little dark, but we’re all aging and we’re all going to lose everybody in our lives and eventually we’re going to leave. I was thinking a lot about avoiding regret and experience these things whether it’s love or dance. We should just enjoy and experience the things we can while we can and take chances and if you life someone you should just ask them, maybe not if they’re your cousin *laughs* but yeah, just live.
Islands is premiering on Tuesday, March 16thduring the 2021 SXSW film festival. Visit sxsw.com to register.
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The 2021 Sundance Film Festival went from the mountains of Park City, Utah to my living room. Here’s what the experience was like.
This post about the 2021 Sundance Film Festival first appeared in my newsletter! Sign up here.
I was fortunate enough to be invited back to cover the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, the first major fest of the year. 19 movies. 4 hours of sleep. 1 couch. Here’s how it went:
Virtual Park City, UT (aka my living room)
The experience
Last year, I was on a snowy mountaintop in Park City, Utah lacking sleep, hungry from skipping meals, and battling minor altitude sickness as I trudged through snow and ice-covered sidewalks to watch movies that may never be seen by the public. I loved every minute of it.
And while this year’s Sundance Film Festival was held virtually so that I could enjoy it from the comfort of my own couch, there was still a sense of anticipation largely thanks to clever work from the Sundance Institute to mimic the experience of the festival itself.
Part of the fun — and frustration — of any festival is taking bets on the right film to see. There were still screening blocks that forced you to pick between films and limited “seats” available for premieres. However, this time if you weren’t feeling a movie and wanted to start another you didn’t have to change theaters. It took two clicks.
Each film was still started with a slightly awkward introduction from a programmer and the filmmaker before we were treated to a beautiful homage to the Indigenous people and the land where Sundance usually takes place. But missing were the interactions with the hoards of volunteers that often were the best part of the fest.
However, what I did miss was the in-person aspect. Interacting with other critics and bloggers while waiting to get into the theater or finally finding a moment of peace to write in the corner of a hotel or the anticipation of maybe getting into a premiere if it had open space. My couch is still no Park City, especially when the buzzer from my food delivery can take you out of even the most engrossing film.
New year, new fest, new shirt
The films + acquisitions
There were certainly less buzzy films at this year’s fest, which was a blessing and a curse. Coming into the festival the only large centerpiece film was Judas and the Black Messiah, which we’ll get to. Fewer films came in with distribution meaning more chances to be surprised — and disappointed.
And even though there were more films available for acquisitions, there were few with one huge exception. Coda was acquired by Apple TV+, after a bidding war with Netflix and Amazon, for a record-breaking $25 million — it bested last year’s Palm Springs which broke the previous record with $22.5 million.
Usual streaming players like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu were largely absent while indie studio A24, perhaps the most successful studio when it comes to Sundance, didn’t show or acquire anything at the fest. Though Neon, hot on their tails as always, acquired three documentaries and premiered one film.
Compared to last year, which may have just been my first-time glow, this year’s slate felt minor by comparison. I came away last year loving a few films, this year I loved a couple and admired a few. Surely there were fewer submissions and fewer studios willing to premiere a film when they’d be unable to show it in theaters, so the programming team did the best with what they had. Here were my favorites:
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
My final film of the fest and the best. Questlove’s Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)is an archived look at the often forgotten Harlem Cultural Festival, a celebration of Black music and culture in the summer of 1969. Though it was often overshadowed by Woodstock, the festival was a watershed moment for the Black community. The movie is presented as a concert doc, except it uses the rhythm of each performance to underscore segments about the political and social environment happening around it — the various assassinations of the 60s, the Black Panther Party, etc. It’s a stunning, joyful, but enlightening doc of Black joy.
Where to watch it: The doc was acquired by Searchlight and Hulu for a record-breaking $12 million, the most for a documentary ever at a festival.
Judas and the Black Messiah
I won’t scoop myself here. More on this film next week…
Animation is an underutilized medium in documentary filmmaking, as Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee clearly demonstrates. Rasmussen tells the story of his friend Amir — a pseudonym — about his life in Afghanistan, his escape to Russia as a refugee family during the Taliban’s occupation of Kabul, and how he found himself settled in Europe. To protect Amir’s identity, the film uses beautiful hand-drawn animation with bits of archival footage mixed in to give us an incredibly intimate look at Amir’s journey. However, what makes this documentary truly great is how it demonstrates how past trauma can affect your present life as Amir tries to move in with his boyfriend. [Full review]
Where to watch it: The doc was acquired by Neon. They’re looking to release it this year.
CODA
The first film that I enjoyed was the first one I saw: Sian Heder’s CODA. The film focuses on shy high schooler Ruby (breakout Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of a culturally deaf family consisting of Jackie (Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin), Frank (Troy Kotsur), and Leo (Daniel Durant), who joins the school choir to spend more time with her crush. However, after the choir director realizes her raw talent, he encourages her to apply to music school — forcing her to decide between staying with her family or following her dreams. It doesn’t break far out of the coming-of-age drama formula, but there are beautiful moments of direction that help you understand what it’s like to be deaf in a hearing world. [Full review]
Where to watch it: CODA was acquired by Apple TV+ for a record-shattering $25 million. Expect to see it streaming on the platform for next year’s award season.
Every movie I watched ranked
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
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Chloé Zhao makesNomadland‘s melancholic but hopeful story of nomads traversing the American West a stunningly complex character study of life on the margins of society.
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