Volume 130: Malta / The In Between
The Voice of Energy Vol. 130
Greetings, my lovely subscribers. I hope you are well today. I'm coming to the end of an incredibly busy but positive week of activity that included seeing three concerts (Laetitia Sadier, the new music ensemble 45th Parallel, and the Irish punk band Sprints) and multiple movies (including the achingly beautiful The Taste of Things and the two I've reviewed this week), as well as working and trying to maintain a work-life balance that ain't easy to maintain. As for today, the sun is out, I'm in good health, and things feel okay.
Check out this week's newsletter below. I've got reviews of two films premiering this weekend at SXSW and a streaming recommendation. Enjoy.
Malta (2024, dir. Natalia Santa)
Mariana (Estefanía Piñeres) spends much of her waking life in her own head. On breaks from her day job at a call center, she uses Google Earth to zoom in on cities that she hopes to visit, and she spends much of her alone time listening to German language podcasts.
Her hopes for escape are understandable. Her home life is fraught, packed as she is into a small home with her extended family that includes her wheelchair bound grandfather and her mother. The only relief, if you can call it that, Mariana gets from this bleakness are her frequent one-night-stands. She doesn't seem broken so much as she seems numb to the world.
Writer / director Natalia Santa gave herself all the pieces of what could have been an easily assembled coming-of-age film but opted instead to scramble the picture, slicing up her digits on the more jagged edges to create a quietly stirring character study.
There's a potential romantic partner for Mariana in Gabriel (Emmanuel Restrepo), a young man who pursues her with a puppy dog-like devotion. But she eyes him suspiciously even as they are tangled together comfortably after their first sexual encounter. The only close friend she does have is a gay man who treats her like a stray cat, letting her crash at his place as a last resort.
Neither relationship offers up any wisdom or promise of an escape route for Mariana. They are means to an end for her as she bides her time before leaving for parts unknown. (The reference to Malta in the title is one potential destination Mariana gets stuck on.)
Much like Joanna Hogg did with The Souvenir, Santa peels away all the expected layers and elements. There's no ambient score to lead the viewer's emotion in any one direction and the backstory of Mariana and the people in her life are doled out in small morsels, often coming to light well into the film's running time. Yet through the well-trained eye of the camera and a subtly compelling performance by Piñeres, we remain locked into Mariana's comings and goings, her daydreams and desires.
Malta premieres on March 9 at SXSW with three other screenings scheduled during the festival.
The In Between (2024, dir. Robie Flores)
The buoyant and heartfelt documentary The In Between was shot on the U.S. / Mexico border but it's not the same border that dominates our current news coverage. In her hometown of Eagle Pass, Texas, folks move between the two countries as freely as their conversations slip from English to Spanish. It's a fairly typical small town with beauty pageants, high school sports, and family barbecues. And it's precisely all those things that first-time director Robie Flores scowled at and inspired her to zip away to New York as soon as she graduated from high school.
Her return to her hometown is bittersweet, coming as it does after the death of her younger brother Marcelo, another budding filmmaker who loved Eagle Pass and wanted to stay there. Robie has come back in search of answers, looking to uncover the charm and beauty that she overlooked during her childhood — essentially to see Eagle Pass through Marcelo's eyes.
She accomplishes that, in part, literally, utilizing footage that her brother shot over the years of various family gatherings and little poignant moments captured around town. Mostly, though she points her own camera at the children of Eagle Pass, following them as they jog along the border fence or prepare for their quinceañera or get ready to binge drink on the other side of the border. She becomes a silent witness to their lives, as she builds a stockpile of imagery that her own parents denied her. As she explains in her narration, "they were the type that would take photos with no film in the camera" and didn't hold on to any of her schoolwork or elementary school drawings. "Maybe if I look for what I know about this place," she says, "it can make my past feel more real."
Intentionally or not, Flores also offers up a portrait of border life that is, again, a vibrant contrast to the chaos that is engulfing Eagle Pass these days thanks to terrible immigration policies and the even worse Texas governor Greg Abbott. Her idyllic images present a lively, colorful town rolling along at the steady pace of the trains that cut through the downtown on a regular basis. That work doesn't diminish or dull the power of her efforts to pay tribute to her late brother. She sees what she missed out on in this town during the first 17 years of her life and through her lens, and that of Marcelo, provides a permanent living document aching with wistfulness and bustling with life.
The In Between premieres on March 9 at SXSW with three other screenings scheduled during the festival.
FTA Pick of the Week
Our regular feature — a recommendation of a movie to watch that is hiding below the fold on one of the major streaming services. In other words: fuck the algorithm.
Babylon (1980, dir. Franco Rosso)
As it looks like the truly awful Bob Marley biopic won't be leaving theaters any time soon, I recommend looking elsewhere to get a better sense of the impact that reggae music had on global culture. One fine place to start is this powerful drama from 1980 that centers on a young Jamaican scraping by in Thatcher's England and finding those moments of bliss as part of a dub soundsystem and jostling with a group of fellow music lovers. Franco Rosso's film is unflinching in how institutional and casual racism weighed heavy on the shoulders of Black immigrants in the U.K. and how for those moments when a great record is playing, the weight can be temporarily lifted.
Babylon is streaming on Kanopy and Criterion Channel.
That's my story for this week. Back again next. Do no harm. Take no shit. Ceasefire now.
Artwork for this edition is from Pan Daijing's exhibition Mute, opening on March 9 at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.