By David D’Arcy

A review of a trio of standout films at this year’s New York Film Festival: Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Marta Mateus’s Fogo do Vento, and Jem Cohen’s Little, Big, and Far.

The New York Film Festival showed new work from Pedro Almodóvar and director Pablo Larrain’s homage to Maria Callas, starring no less than Angelina Jolie. There were also more modestly scaled films well worth seeing.

One of the Benin treasures at the center of Mati Diop’s Dahomey. Photo: NYFF

Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop, played at the NYFF and opens at Coolidge Corner Theatre on November 1. The documentary follows 26 works from West Africa as they are shipped from the the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris to the Republic of Benin — restituted by order of the French President Emmanuel Macron.

The objects are a fraction of what French museums hold from that region, once called Dahomey. But for the Beninois, this shipment is an achievement, approached with solemnity by the French Senegalese filmmaker, who won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for Dahomey earlier this year.

The film critics in Berlin were rapturous, as they were in New York. The Beninois were far less enthusiastic, given that far more than 26 pillaged objects, some 7,000, still remain in French museums. On top of that, objects that found their way into private collections in France and elsewhere in Europe are out of Benin’s reach legally. Macron explained that “The purpose of this adventure is not for France to get rid of every piece of the heritage of others. That would be a terrible vision.” That is, don’t expect too much.

In Diop’s film, the camera lingers on each of the 26 objects as it is placed carefully in its own shipping container, shot with the same soft lighting that one might expect in a generic documentary for a museum exhibition or in a commercial for a perfume. One of the objects even speaks. It’s not just that these objects are important to their region of origin. They feel expensive.

That gilded visual touch won’t be a surprise for those who saw Atlantics, Diop’s earlier feature about migration from West Africa — part meditation on the perils and allure of the sea, part ghost story. That film, an elegy, was nothing less than elegant — an odd fit, given the grim subject matter and the horrors of migration, especially on the open sea where so many have died.

Dahomey pivots after its welcoming ceremony in Benin to a meeting of students and young people who see the return of the objects as the first steps in a barely begun work-in-progress, which it is. They debate a new challenge — how do they integrate these repatriated objects into a culture that they have been forced to build without them? It’s an improbable ending — what is the solution? — but an encouraging one.

A scene from Marta Mateus’s Fogo do Vento. Photo: NYFF

Director Marta Mateus’s Fogo do Vento (“Fire of Wind”) brought a special visual power to the NYFF. Set in Mateus’s native Portugal, the feature begins with a scene set at the annual harvesting of grapes, mounds of dust rising in the autumn heat. Once the team finishes for the day, bruised and cut from clipping bunches of grapes, the workers head home, but find themselves forced to climb up the trunks of thick cork trees, seeking refuge in mazes of branches.

An angry bull is pacing around the tree trunks. The creature — a reincarnated minotaur? — has already gored one of the workers, who bleeds out on the ground. We learn that the landowner is modernizing the harvest, bringing in trucks with machines that strip grapes from the vines. Sending out the bull seems to be the boss’s way of warning displaced workers not to complain.

As the action moves from the vineyards to the sheltering trees, Mateus slows the pace down while the camera lingers on the workers and the animal moves in and out of the background. That slow pace clearly shows the influence of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, a mentor of Mateus’s who is one of Fogo do Vento’s producers. The thick, dense tree branches serve as both a refuge and a prison. They are part of the local landscape; there are no special effects besides letting the camera take its time as it watches what’s happening. Families are in danger of being forced out of the work that they’ve had for generations, helpless to save themselves from a belligerent creature that’s been sent to intimidate them, or worse.

From those powerful sequences, which would be the envy of animators, Mateus moves on to figures in that same landscape, minus the bull — women sitting in the sun or men with weapons marching about silently. She leaves us to wonder what’s happening in those scenes.

In the moments when the bull roams free, Fogo do Vento is a parable of strength and fear. Is it just a coincidence that Portugal endured a long period of fascism in the 20th century?

A scene from Jem Cohen’s Little, Big, and Far. Photo: NYFF

Centuries are brief periods of time in Little, Big, and Far, American filmmaker Jem Cohen’s latest film, which played in the “Currents” section of the NYFF. This one leans toward the abstract, a discussion led by scientific fact-finders, as it moves from contemplating the age of the universe, as we can discern it, and short lifespan of humans. That’s a lot of territory to move through.

The title, with its suggestive juxtapositions, evokes 1988’s A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (filmed by Errol Morris in 1991) and Morris’s own underappreciated examination of so many things, 1997’s Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.

Cohen takes us through the enormity and age of the universe with Karl (Franz Schwartz), an Austrian astronomer who has just reached the ripe human age of 70 with a sense of longing.

Looking at the skies is Karl’s profession, and understanding the little, the big, and the far is his mission. So he is on a mission to find a sky that hasn’t been “polluted” by light. He heads from Vienna to Greece, where tourists have taken their toll on the islands, the sea, and the sky. Locating an island where only Greek tourists travel — at least so far — he experiences moments of relative isolation. The sky and stars are radiant. Looking begets thinking. “People don’t think about the stars because they don’t get to see them,” he comments in a voice-over, keeping a taxi driver waiting on a hill as he gazes at the skies. Noting that businesses are contemplating putting ads in space and projecting them onto the surface of the moon, Karl notes that the stars are “increasingly out of reach” from an over-lit world, “extinguished.”

Little, Big, and Far’s sense of yearning is enhanced by long shots of the moon seen through clouds. These visuals might have been inspired by the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Glimpses of light on the sea resonate with a sense of the infinite that makes you think of the art of Gustav Klimt; observations of the seascape framed through a window could be an update on Henri Matisse’s views of the Mediterranean at Collioure. If those transcendent images aren’t enough to lift your spirits from stark reflections on the climate crisis (“only discussed when it’s too late”), fueled by thoughts of extinction and denial, keep in mind what a colleague tells Karl: “I don’t think there’s something interesting about despair.” That’s a start.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.