Debanjan Dhar

Once again, the alleys of Delhi hum their ache, regrets and yearnings in Shaunak Sen’s debut fiction outing, Termite. It’s a short film as if Sen is testing the ground before hoisting his flag on it. Like his Oscar-nominated 2022 breakout doc, All That Breathes, the fiction short is also alive and porous to an ecological world, the fellow non-inhuman inhabitants we share our lives with, marginality and the deep curl of thoughts and fears you swat away in recesses.

With Resident Evil, Zach Cregger builds one of the year’s most pin-sharp, nerve-rattling cinematic openings. It lurches between extremes amid an expert orchestration of unpredictability. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier who’s having issues with his girlfriend, Michelle, over having kids. She wants an honest, direct conversation, but his deliveries keep coming in the way. He’s not sure if he’s ready for such a big change as parenthood. The film opens at a hospital. Amidst his efforts to get a delivery signed, he’s tapped to ferry a critical bag to Raccoon City. He’s cautioned that the location is far and the terrain snowy. But the pay is double. In just a beat, he agrees. However, shortly after, he realises things might be way harder than it seemed.

Pioneering Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás is the truest inheritor of the Borgesian tradition with a vision of cinema that trumps settled notions. There are no limits or a stiffening of what cinema can be allowed to do. Llinás co-founded Argentina’s, a radical El Pampero Cine collective, a group that includes the other great filmmaker of our times, Laura Citarella. In his latest massive undertaking, Life of Jorge Luis Borges, Llinás sculpts a new form of the creative biography. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Open – Non-Fiction section, this nearly six-hour saga flirts with the tether of creative possibility. An extensive foray into the life, work and politics of Jorges Luis Borges, who saw literature as a kingdom and books the only nation to believe in, the film achieves its mammoth scale through the smallest, most minute interventions. Llinás has no interest in a straightforward chronicle, a regular documentary’s beats. His probing builds through interruptions and flickering curiosities, stretching as far from the linear and conventional as possible.

Kamei (Naoto Shimajiri) has been silently grieving. His father’s recent death hangs over his thoughts. In Xavier Tera’s The Colour of the Sun, bereavement also turns a conduit for the inevitable exploration youthfulness catapults. There’s a lot of hurt, unprocessed emotion which has him darting in circles. Neither can he really open up to his mother. The closed line of dialogue, a stunted chance to vent, makes healing an incredibly lonely journey. Premiering in Orizzonti competition at the Venice Film Festival, Tera’s gently shaped drama zeroes in on fine emotional detail, accruing power through modest, nevertheless piercing suggestion.

Maya (Maya Mehta) was never supposed to be privy to the risky work over which her industrialist father Rohan (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub) presides. He has designed his well-settled life and sand mining work, involving day-labourers, to be separated by an inveterate distance. This breeds indifference, a stiffening up against the real dangers and worries of those having to take the plunge. In Shalini Adnani’s debut feature, Our Share of Sand, the 12-year-old British-Asian Maya returns with her mother Priti (Ellora Torchia) to stay with her father in India. Having been in the UK for years, the occasion marks Maya’s first encounter with her roots. However, it brings her up distressingly close against the deep-entrenched class inequality and densely hierarchical negotiations Indian life is riven with.

True-crime narratives trade in lurid shocks. They have this unseemly, grotesque fascination that inadvertently replaces human consideration. The rush for dramatic re-staging bleeds out any concern for the victim, what their fuller story preceding the tragedy might be. The event itself becomes the driving lens through which we view an entire life. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival, Edoardo Gabbriellini’s The City of The Living’s greatest triumph is that it wholly goes beyond this limiting approach, constantly finding the complex, fledgling humanity of the victim.

Phuttiphong Aroonpheng is among the most aesthetically committed, politically cogent filmmakers working today. The Thai filmmaker who broke out with Manta Ray (2018) is back at Venice Film Festival, competing in Orizzonti with The Burning Giants. A mysterious virus cloaks a population in fear and uncertainty. There have been forceful evacuation, disappearances and uprooting of a community from their homes. When the film opens, we are placed right in its peculiar setting. Smoke envelops. The forest is manned by officers who have cordoned off entire sections.

Leading Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain is a fascinating voice with brave, brilliant ideas. Premiering in Orizzonti Competition, her new film, The Difficult Bride, comes with massive expectations. It’s billed as a historic selection, the first-ever Bangladeshi film to land a Venice film festival competitive slot. On top of that, Hossain has repeatedly described it as a passion project, an idea that has been with her for two decades. She has honed and shaped it over many years, taking it through notable labs and grabbing prestigious grants. So, it’s a real mystery to find the eventual shape the film has resulted in as so terribly undercooked, unconvincing and painfully strained.