By Steve Erickson

The New York Film Festival’s Revivals section offers a preview of valuable recent restorations. Even if these superb movies don’t all make it to American theaters, they’re likely to pop up on physical media or VOD.

New York Film Festival — Revivals. Check here for information on remaining screenings and ticket availability.

The film industry’s release schedule has slowed down over the last few years, so interest in older films is helping to take up the slack. At the moment, Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash and several Studio Ghibli releases are playing US theaters. Most streaming services (apart from specialists like the Criterion Channel and OVID) still treat films made before the 21st century as if they were plague carriers. But some American distributors have discovered that there is a cult audience for great directors who never received their due in the US while they were alive, such as Nobuhiko Obayashi and Shinji Somai. The New York Film Festival’s Revivals section offers a valuable preview of recent restorations. Even if these movies don’t all make it to American theaters, they’re likely to pop up on physical media or VOD. Apart from the films I saw, this year’s selection includes Marguerite Duras’s first film, La Musica, Cambridge’s documentary genius Frederick Wiseman’s The Model, the Kazakh historical epic The Fall of Otrar, and Clive Barker’s horror classic Hellraiser.

A scene from Bona. Photo: NYFF

The late Filipino director Lino Brocka may be his country’s best-known director, with two films in the Criterion Collection, but out of an oeuvre of 68 movies, a tiny number are available to Americans. With ’80s Bona, Brocka turned in an utterly unglamorous vision of his own industry. The title character (producer Nora Aunor), escapes her boring family by spending all day hanging out on the street, watching from the edges of film sets. A teenage girl, she’s enamored of the actor Gardo (Philip Salvador), who lives in a slum and barely gets by working bit parts. In a downpour one night, Bona befriends him after rescuing him from an assault. When the teen’s dad attacks her with a belt, she insists upon moving in with Gardo.

Bona mercilessly sketches out the traps laid for women. The girl’s living conditions worsen when she leaves her family to move in with Gardo; rather than offering love or friendship, he ends up valuing Bona as an unpaid servant. According to critic Noel Vera, the film riffs on Aunor’s popular image. She became a major star by specializing in roles where poor women ended up triumphing over their circumstances. Soft, grainy cinematography and the selection of Academy ratio contribute to a compelling mood of entrapment. Gardo is in his own cage. The drab look also is used to defuse the glamorous image of filmmaking. Brocka exercises his penchant for melodrama; there are several violent fights fueled by Gardo’s drunken rage. Still, though this is a scathing depiction of the naivete of adoration — Vera argues stardom is compared with religious worship — the real tragedy of Bona is that the protagonist devotes herself to submitting to a man who exploits her.

A scene from Northern Lights. Photo: NYFF

Made in 1977, John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Northern Lights won the prize for best first film at Cannes the following year. An unfashionably earnest tribute to socialism and the strength of union organizing, the movie’s vision is tied to its setting: North Dakota in winter. Drawing on black-and-white cinematography, the directors capture the harsh tone of a blizzard and the dark shades of interiors. In a framing device, we see a 94-year-old man, Henry Martinson, typing up the journal of his friend Ray Sorenson, which details his experiences in 1915 and 1916. (Martinson is a real-life player in North Dakota’s NPL movement and grandfather of writer and producer John Hanson.) The Nonpartisan League formed to combat the exploitation of farmers in the region.They are forced to toil away all day for the profit of banks that buy their grain at low prices and, when necessary, exercise their power to foreclose on their property.

Sorenson travels around North Dakota urging skeptical workers to join the League, which is agitating to transfer the banks’ authority to the state and co-ops. Hanson and Nilsson balance the drama of political organizing with their characters’ home lives. But the main takeaway from Northern Lights is the power of its physical environment. The landscape of North Dakota is inseparable from the characters’ experiences. Hanson and Nilsson film the area’s nature with a hard beauty: even a scene where farmers desperately try to preserve their crops from a blizzard is beautifully shot. Most of the characters come from Scandinavia; much of the dialogue is in Norwegian. Yet the film comes off as detached from the time in which it was made — it is not simply a period piece. Given the decline of the New Left and rise of neoliberal economics, what did it mean to Hanson and Nilsson to turn 60 years back for their source material and present it with such optimism? In this respect, Northern Lights is oddly impersonal.

A scene from The Sealed Soiled. Photo: NYFF

According to critic Arsaid Gilbert, Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil is the second feature directed by a woman in Iran. Directed over six days during 1977 without direct sound recording, the story exposes the patriarchy’s domination of women’s lives, which is reinforced by poverty. Ironically, it was completed just before the Islamic revolution cracked down even further. (Glimpses of women’s hair reads differently now that such displays are illegal in Iran.) A PhD student who had acted in other filmmakers’ work and directed several made-for-TV movies, Nabili made this as her thesis film. Given its subject matter, she had to leave Iran and smuggle a rough cut in her luggage. Editing was completed after Nabili had immigrated to the US. The Sealed Soil features one startling moment: the reveal that its protagonist, Rooy-Bekheir (Flora Shabaviz), is 18. At that age she already displays the stoic grimace and dejected body language of a woman who has lived a long, hard life.

While inspired by the cinema of Robert Bresson, The Sealed Soil also has a precedent in ’70s Iran: the slow cinema of Sohrab Shahid-Saless. The first half hour throws us into the world of Rooy-Bekheir, who lives in a parched village without electricity, where women toil endlessly picking herbs and washing clothes. Nabili eschews close-ups — most scenes are long takes. On the rare occasions the characters talk, they discuss the expectations they have for Rooy-Bekeheir. Men and women believe that the teenager should already be married — she is reminded of a seven-year-old child bride in their village. But Rooy-Bekeheir rejects each suitor who approaches her. The teen’s life offers little relief: a scene where she takes off her scarves and shirt and sits outside by a river as rain pours down is her only moment of relaxation. The Sealed Soil takes a long time to get going given that its style keeps viewers at a distance but, once it does, it is a powerful revelation of Rooy-Bekhir’s life of quiet desperation.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here.