By Peter Keough

At the Global Cinema Film Festival, some look for love and life in all the wrong places.

The Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston. At the West Newton Cinema May 16-18.

A scene from Beirut Forever. Photo: Patrick Hasso Kohl

An end note in Patrick Hasso Kohl’s provocative, if conventional, Beirut Forever (2024; screens May 16 at 8:15 p.m. with video introduction by director) points out that 120 million people had been displaced from their homes in 2024, a record high. And that doesn’t include those who, for various reasons, would leave home if they had the means to do so. This world trend of displacement, whether imposed, desired, or frustrated, is one of the notable themes in this year’s Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston

Among those seen in Kohl’s film is Hani, a charming and highly educated young man who fled the Syrian Civil War for the relative safety of Beirut years ago. It was meant to be a brief stop en route to somewhere in the West, but he is now stuck. He manages to eke out a living at odd jobs, including serving as a guide for journalists like Kohl. But things are becoming tougher, what with Lebanon’s failing economy, the corruption of the government, and the growing hostility of the native population singling out the refugee community as a scapegoat for all their problems.

A turning point for the worse came along when a warehouse containing poorly stored ammonium nitrate exploded on August 4, 2020, killing scores and injuring thousands. Hani was among those hurt, and that was just the beginning of troubles for the refugee community (these events are covered from the point of view of Lebanese expatriates living in New York in Loulwa Khoury’s We Never Left, which screened at last year’s Salem Film Fest). Hani’s redoubled attempts to relocate to another country have so far failed. He, like many others in his situation, has almost given up.

Some of those in Kohl’s film, though, have been more fortunate. Alvera, in her 20s, is a Chaldean Christian who, with her family, fled when ISIS was ravaging her native Iraq. She was able to relocate successfully to a Chaldean community outside San Diego where she received support from family members already living there. But this was a year ago — who knows what the future holds given the anti-immigrant policies of the current administration?

Libuše Jarcovjáková in I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Photo: Libuše Jarcovjáková

When Libuše Jarcovjáková, the subject of Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be (2024; screens May 18 at 6 p.m.), was 17 she wanted to become a photographer. It was 1968, a good time for the arts in Czechoslovakia, what with the arrival of Prague Spring, Dubček gently trying to usher in socialism with a human face, and the Czech New Wave electrifying the world with films by Milos Forman, Vera Chytilová, and Jiří Menzel. Then the Russian tanks rolled in and Jarcovjáková’s dream of attending a university to learn her craft was quashed. The authorities found her parents, both of them artists, to be politically suspect. In order to advance her dreams of becoming a photographer, she needed to shed her bourgeois roots and become more proletarian.

So she found a job at a printing press, put in the hours, got drunk with her colleagues, and even landed a lumpen boyfriend, Franta, a train worker with no schooling who lived with his mother and could quote Nietzsche. To Jarcovjáková’s surprise, she liked this demimonde. Plus, she could take revealing photos of the scene, snapping grittily realistic, sordid, and surreal images of workers passed out drunk at their machines or carousing after hours. Her photos were so accomplished that even the members of the local communist committee heard about them. They took a look and immediately forbade her from taking any more pictures at work — they found them to be demeaning to the working class.

Undaunted, she began to take pictures at one of Prague’s few gay bars and of the Roma community — places where she felt at home with outsiders like herself. Miraculously, a university finally accepted her, but Jarcovjáková found it to be elitist, filled with teachers dismissive of her interest in the despised and dispossessed. Increasingly frustrated by a system that perversely stymied her as she tried to follow her calling, she became desperate.

Then, a break: a friend who had moved to Tokyo invited her to visit. But the friend turned out to be hospitalized with postpartum depression and Jarcovjáková was passed from household to household. Despite, or because of, this transience and uncertainty, she found she liked the place and decided to stay. A supporter made some connections and set her up as a fashion photographer. The assignments poured in, as did the money. But the work left her cold. So she returned to Prague where more opportunities and disappointments awaited her.

This was the pattern of her life: she relocated somewhere with high expectations, some of which were fulfilled, most were not. Disillusioned, she moved on. But all the while Jarcovjáková was taking pictures, which gave her a sense of identity and definition throughout the flux of the ephemeral. In 1989, she returned to Berlin to work as a housekeeper in a hotel  — just as mass demonstrations were tearing down the Wall. It seemed to break down a wall within herself, too, and Jarcovjáková decided to return to Prague, just as the Velvet Revolution was gently escorting the communist regime to the garbage bin of history.

The film ends with over three decades of self-portraits passing in the blink of an eye. It begins with Jarcovjáková talking over a black screen about how she had just received incredible news: an exhibition of her work to take place at Arles, the first such recognition she has gotten in over 50 years. “Now I have to choose photos that represent who I am,” she says. Those that she has chosen presumably are those that compose the movie, artfully edited together into a narrative with voice-over, music, and sound effects not unlike Chris Marker’s masterful short La Jetée (1963). The show is a triumph, as is her life.

A scene from Faithful Unto Death. Photo: Global Cinema Film Festival

Perhaps if Jarcovjáková had stuck it out with Franta back in the day, instead of pursuing her career and eventually becoming a world-renowned photographer, she might have ended up like Ivars and Mara in Latvian director Ivars Zviedris’s Faithful Unto Death (screens May 17 at 4 p.m.; a Q&A with Zviedris and the editor Haralds Ozols follows the screening).

But probably not. Neither of those two has any evident talent, insight, or ambition (Mara’s one claim to fame is having a surgical tool left undiscovered in her body for almost three decades). But they have each other, something they often regret but can’t shake off. He moved in with her some 24 years ago and never left. Both had been married before — Mara is twice a widow — and will not marry again. When Ivars first arrived, he was thin and relatively hale, but after a work accident he grew idle, fretful, and obese. Now they spend their days nagging each other, quarreling, and threatening to leave. But, in the end, both are resigned to the status quo. It is like a low-rent Grey Gardens (1975), and Zviedris demonstrates the same shrewd eye, compassion, irony, and humanity as Albert and David Maysles do in that film.

Apart from the mismatched, inseparable pair, there is also on hand a black cat which, except for a nipped off ear, is an uncanny ringer for the one in Flow. And, like that star of that Oscar-winning animation, this cat witnesses an endless sturm and drang of calamities, though on a smaller scale. Another supporting character: the wizened old faith-healer Austra, a born-again Christian who tries to whip Ivars back into shape by flogging him with nettles and plying him with evangelical nostrums and warnings of the Apocalypse.

Maybe she is right. The title refers to what is written on the crude wood sign arching over the entrance to the local cemetery.

Though all the films in this festival are, as usual, worth seeing, I’d like to specifically recommend a few others. I previously reviewed  Nelson Makengo’s Rising up at Night (2024; screens May 18 at 2 p.m.) about the struggles of poor people during a flood in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when it played at last year’s Camden Film Fest. You should take advantage of this new opportunity to view it.

Giacomo Gex’s The Treasure Hunter (2025; screens May 16 at 6 p.m. followed by a live, virtual Q & A with the director) is a kind of reverse rags-to-riches story. The scion of a shipping mogul threatens family financial ruin by obsessively seeking Yamashita’s gold — a legendary horde of bullion stolen by the Japanese in WWII and allegedly hidden in the Philippines.

And Kristine Nrecaj and Birthe Templin’s extraordinarily subversive House with a Voice (2024; screens May 17 at 6:15 p.m. with a video introduction by the directors), about the burrneshas, Albanian women who, according to tradition, are able to declare themselves to be men and live their lives as such.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).