In mid-October, we caught a few titles at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, which reclaimed some of the vigor from its heyday 20 years ago.
FREE LEONARD PELTIER (B+) - If you haven't caught up on the developments of jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier, hold off on running to Wikipedia. Instead, watch this energetic history of the admired member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) as he awaits word on clemency in 2024 over his conviction in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
Directors David France ("How to Survive a Plague") and Jesse Short Bull ("Lakota Nation vs. United States") curate a treasure trove of footage from the early '70s, catapulting the viewer into a specific time and place in American history. By 1972, Peltier had been recruited by Dennis Banks to join AIM in leading the opposition to the militia organized by tribal chairman Dennis Wilson, who was seen as corrupt and a sell-out to Washington. Pine Ridge was known in 1973 for the Wounded Knee occupation. That eventually culminated in a 1975 showdown, where the FBI agents were shot to death, and Peltier was hunted down and convicted on shaky evidence.
The filmmakers are meticulous in the rendering of these events and the trial that put Peltier away on two consecutive life sentences. We see interviews of Peltier during the early years of his incarceration, and we hear him by phone in the present day, as activists champion the 80-year-old inmate in the final months and weeks of the Biden administration, trying to convince the lame-duck president to heed the years-long call to free Peltier. The film, over a brisk two hours, thus melds past and present, providing an overview of AIM and the long-standing struggles on reservations for decades and balancing it with present-day drama over whether Peltier will be freed or left to almost certainly die behind bars.
I had forgotten the outcome of January 2025, and I was rewarded with a suspenseful climax to the film. All the while, admiration builds for Peltier, who likely could have been sprung by President Clinton had Peltier admitted guilt to something he adamantly denies. Contemporary interviews with veterans of Wounded Knee and other struggles add heft to the storytelling. This is rousing filmmaking.
THE LOVE THAT REMAINS (B+) - From Iceland, we get a fascinating, granular study of a relatively content household, where the parent happen to be splitting up. There is no high drama or trauma for the adolescent children; it just so happens that mom and dad don't want to be married anymore.
This comes from Hlynur Palmason, who emerged in 2020 with "A White, White Day," but bogged down a couple of years later with the sluggish "Godland." Here he hits a sweet spot with a depiction of an artist, Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir), and her husband, Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), who mostly lives separately and is often at sea working on fishing expeditions. He also fishes for invitations to return home and is often sniffing around for sex, which Anna is loath to consent to. She's just over him.
The children, an older girl and two boys (apparently the director's offspring), engage in fun rural high jinks (be careful with that bow and arrow, kids), and are fully aware of their parents' estrangement, but they merely work that odd rapport into their own naive conversations about sex and relationships. (The girl is just about old enough to date, but she shows no interest in boys.) The children engage in random kid behavior -- playing outside, admiring baby chicks -- and don't seem to be repressing things that will later burst out into the open; they mostly go with the flow of the day-to-day.
Palmason makes an odd choice to inject magical realism into the proceedings. Those scenes come out of left field, and perhaps they are a means to convey to the viewer how off-guard and confused Anna and Magnus are during this absurd phase when their paths are diverging. Palmason begins the film with a shot of a crane forcefully removing the roof from Anna's industrial work space, a perfect metaphor about the upheaval the two adults will encounter going forward.
Anna's art process is fascinating -- it involves industrial metal cuttings, large objects, exposure to the elements and the passage of time. By the film's final reveal, it provides an apt parallel to the slow drift apart by a man and woman as they protect their children through uncharted waters.
PETER HUJAR'S DAY (C-minus) - There is such a thing as being too faithful to your source material. Here we spend 24 hours with '70s New York photographer Peter Hujar, in a dramatization of an interview transcript that had been lost to history until recently. Ben Whishaw tries to salvage the project as the chain-smoking interview subject dropping names during the Big Apple's Drop Dead era from the avant-garde arts scene.
And there's not much more too it than that. This is literally 75 minutes of the interviewer, Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), running a tape machine as Hujar babbles on describing one recent day hobnobbing around New York with the likes of Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz and Allen Ginsberg. Hujar also drops dozens of names, most of whom you've probably never heard. (Halfway through I fantasized about a version of this along the lines of a VH-1 "pop-up" video device, which would identify the obscure characters name-checked throughout the film.)
There is something almost audacious about the numbing recitation of minutiae by Hujar. It's almost as if writer-director Ira Sachs is daring you to walk out; but I was oddly frozen in my seat, convinced that a plot would rear up at any moment. Alas, there really is no there there. (We first heard of Hujar from the great documentary about his former lover, "Wojnarowicz.")
We have a love-hate relationship with Sachs, whose previous films have never scored higher than a B (2023's "Passages"; see also, "Little Men," "Love Is Strange" and "Keep the Lights On"). Here he sets aside his usual drama and light comedy for a quirky sociological experiment. Whishaw and Hall can be fascinating to watch at times, but very few people will find it worthwhile to trudge through this random Rolodex and bland recitation of a day in the life of an artist from 50 years ago.
BONUS TRACK
A break from the tedium in "Hujar" comes when he and Rosenkrantz dance in her apartment to the rockabilly nugget "Hold Me Tight" by Tennessee Jim:
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