‘The Sparrow in the Chimney’
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Over a series of shorts and features, the Swiss-German brothers Ramon Zürcher (who usually directs) and Silvan Zürcher (who produces) have developed a body of work that riffs uniquely on familial melodramas, inflecting them with an ingenious, twisted absurdity. “The Sparrow in the Chimney” is the third in a trilogy that also includes “The Strange Little Cat” (2014) and “The Girl and the Spider” (2022). All three films share a basic template: They take place in a single apartment or home, in which families (or a set of apartment mates and their parents, in the second film’s case) come together for an occasion that brings out the repressed psychosexual currents running through all of their relationships.
While in the first two films, those currents simmered just below the surface, in this film, they finally come to a boiling point as a birthday dinner at a German home in the countryside brings together parents, sisters, kids, cousins, in-laws, mistresses and pets, with all of them harboring their own grudges and desires. Like pieces in a kaleidoscope, the characters crisscross each other around the setting, and each configuration provokes different confrontations and reveals new secrets. Emotions oscillate unpredictably between tenderness, resentment, euphoria and cruelty, often not in the order you’d expect. If the film unfolds like a nightmare version of a Thanksgiving dinner, it also feels strangely cathartic — like steam escaping from a pressure cooker.
‘Humans in the Loop’
The rise of artificial intelligence may conjure a world of magical automation, but it is still human labor — outsourced to some of the world’s most vulnerable and exploited people — that powers it. The Indian filmmaker Aranya Sahay crafts a kind of dystopian fable around this premise, made all the more sinister by the fact that it is rooted in present-day realities. In a village in the northeast Indian state of Jharkhand, a center employs Adivasi, or tribal, women to label data in order to train an A.I. model. When Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) arrives there looking for a job, she is desperate. She is a “Dhukni,” a term used for tribal women in unmarried relationships, and is being challenged by her partner for custody of her teenage daughter and infant son. He is from an upper caste and ready to move on, leaving her to deal with the double-bind of social stigma and poverty.
As Nehma learns her new job and navigates a fraught relationship with her daughter, Sahay articulates a compelling metaphor. To train an A.I. model is like “teaching a child,” Nehma’s supervisor at the center says; its view of the world depends on the human ideas that it is fed. One scene drives the political implications of this home with great effect: Nehma gets in trouble for failing to label an insect as a “pest,” but she knows, based on her tribe’s in-depth know-how of plants, that the creature is in fact not harmful to crops. Maintaining a gentle touch throughout, “Humans in the Loop” draws parallels between Nehma’s insights at her job and at home as a parent, as she grapples with the generational loss of her lived knowledge and ancestral heritage — a common fate in tribal communities in India whose ways of life are being systematically destroyed by rampant urbanization.
‘Goodbye Julia’
Set in Khartoum the years leading up to the partition of Sudan in 2011, “Goodbye Julia” is a psychological thriller with political heft. The movie starts in 2005, when the death of the Sudanese vice president John Garang unleashed clashes between the country’s northern populations, who are largely Arab Muslims, and southern populations, who are predominantly Black and Christian. Mona (Eiman Yousif), an Arab Muslim housewife, watches cautiously from the windows of her upscale house, insulated from the violence — until she falls right into its midst. When she hits a young southern boy by accident with her car and flees, the child’s father comes chasing after her — and is shot dead by Mona’s racist husband, Akram (Nazar Gomaa).
A cover-up follows, but Mona is wracked with guilt, and she tracks down the dead man’s wife, Julia (Siran Riak), and offers her a job as a live-in maid without revealing her connection to Julia’s husband’s death. The secret hangs over them like a sword as they become close friends, and Mona reckons with her internalized racism and the joylessness of her marriage to a bigoted man who stifles her with his possessiveness. The director Mohamed Kordofani deftly stages this domestic drama against the backdrop of Sudan’s civil conflicts from 2005 to 2011, painting an on-the-ground portrait of the ways in which political upheavals trickle into the everyday.
‘Winter in Sokcho’
A delicate, melancholic film of few words but swelling emotions, “Winter in Sokcho,” by the director Koya Kamura, takes place in the snow-covered seaside South Korean city of the title. There, Sooha (Bella Kim), a young woman of mixed Korean-French parentage, works as a chef and attendant at a guesthouse. Her Korean mother sells and cooks fish; her father, a Frenchman, has never been in her life, and his absence looms large. Sooha looks different from those around her, as she is frequently reminded by people encouraging her to get plastic surgery; she has a degree in French literature, and fluency in the language, that she has no opportunity to put to use. That is until a mysterious French artist (Roschdy Zem) arrives at the guesthouse for an indefinite stay. Becoming his de facto guide and interpreter, Sooha starts, almost without realizing it, to regard him as a stand-in for the French father who abandoned her, seeking in this beguiling stranger answers for the questions that plague her. Of course, only disappointment awaits, but also acceptance: Amid the film’s soft, lustrous shadows and wintry blue landscapes, Sooha experiences a delayed coming of age.
‘The Time It Takes’
The director Luigi Comencini was one of the greats of postwar Italian cinema, known particularly for excellent films about children and parents — including a lauded television production of “Pinocchio” in 1972. In “The Time It Takes,” Luigi’s daughter, Francesca Comencini, a filmmaker herself, tells the tale of their own parent-child relationship, weaving skillfully between film history and autobiography. The movie begins with a young, preteen Francesca (Anna Mangiocavallo) learning life lessons from her father (played by Fabrizio Gifuni) as he works on his mini-series “The Adventures of Pinocchio.” On the set, she keenly observes his insistence on equity and respect, and his buoyant delight at his craft.
As a young woman, Francesca (now played by Romana Maggiora Vergano) starts to become disillusioned. The generational chasms between father and daughter become evident, as Italy experiences political turmoil during the Years of Lea, conveyed through archival footage and TV reports. Francesca falls in with drug addicts and grows increasingly distant from her father, who can only respond with unwitting disdain; his moral teachings, once so inspiring, now feel like impossible burdens. And yet, the two never let go, finding each other again and again as time passes and changes them both: Luigi grows older and frailer; Francesca finally grows into an artist of her own. This is a film that exudes the love of a parent-child bond without concealing its thorns — and it feels all the sweeter for it.
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