People, Places, Things

 

MALNI: TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE (B) - This ode to the Pacific Northwest is grounded in the culture of the American Indian. It is a coy, ruminative pastiche of conversations and images, offering a gravitas that is mostly hinted at. The images of nature are captivating and are wasted on anything other than a big movie screen. 

Washington State product Sky Hopinka is behind this valentine to his heritage and homeland. He picks two subjects around Portland, Ore. -- Jordan a married father of young children, including a newborn, and Sweetwater Sahme, a pregnant woman setting her life on course after a wild youth. Both connect their beliefs to their ancestors and to the generations to come, embracing the circle of life. 

Hopinka's camera likes to wander away from his subjects, creating disjointed visuals, often involving water, whether it is Jordan or other unrelated people canoeing across a lake, or Sweetwater Sahme longing for the cleansing powers of the waterfalls she gazes on. Hopinka also weaves in a narrative connected to the Origin of Death myth, not always making clean connections but creating more of a atmospheric tone poem. He makes his point in 82 minutes, offering snippets of cultural touchstones but not overstaying his welcome or staking any claims to creating a comprehensive document on his subject.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES (B+) - Immersive documentary filmmaker Hanna Jayanti spent three years cultivating a relationship with five residents of Truth or Consequences, N.M., and she presents their stories in the form of a tone poem that ponders both the past and the future, using the nearby Spaceport (and its infinite possibilities) as a framing device for how we deal with space and time. Jayanti creates a narrative (science) fiction, set in the near future, of these five souls having been left behind on planet Earth after space travel has begun.

Jayanti is obviously going for a mood here, though she does not ignore her subjects or reduce them to props. The biggest gimmick is a camera trick, in which she does something with focus or lighting to atomize a scene -- a room or a landscape -- to make it look like the granular detail of an iced-over distant planet, only to eventually morph the image back to reality. I guess that's the futuristic space-travel theme at work. It makes for some fascinating visuals amid the bleak desert backdrop.

The characters here are quirky but real. They skew older, though there is a 30-year-old native who has boomeranged back to town to work at the Bullocks general store only to feel trapped and seriously depressed. She copes by joining a crystals club with a bunch of old folks. Then there is an 80-year-old chain-smoking woman who lives in a trailer with her two dogs and reminisces about her days running a circus. We meet a hoarder and a painter, too, each one with a unique philosophical take on life in southern New Mexico. 

It's not that the people here are incidental, but they are bit players in Jayanti's creation, and the sum of their parts, combined with the visual elements, add up to a provocative whole.