celluloid consommé

Leticia Jorge and Ana Guevara’s meditation on mortality and legacy creates something beyond revisiting the twilight slice of love, recaptured to experience one last time.  Don’t You Let Me Go   illustrates what feminine love feels like without the need for things to be expressed aloud simply because a film audience is present. Their writing allows the performances of Chiara Hourcade’s Adela, Eva Dans’s Luci, and especially Vicky Jorge’s Elena to show us what unconditional love is between women — whether it’s connected by blood or a found family that supports each other. At the start of the film, Elena has passed away, her family and friends filing in to see each other. While Adela seems put together during the wake, she still juggles between disjointed conversations and arguments within the austere meeting areas made to look like hellish waiting rooms. At one point, she finds herself fielding an issue with the family’s polite animosity towards the hosts using a room where a la...

  Endless Cookie , a family documentary 9 years in the making by filmmaker and animator Seth Scriver. It’s rooted in Toronto culture from the 80s and 90s, but pays special attention to Seth’s half-brother Pete and his life in Shamattawa, a First Nations community in Manitoba. As Seth says himself in the film’s opening to the anthropomorphized square ruler from the film board, there to deliver the good news that his grant has been approved, “the goal is to make something funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true.” What Scriver creates is less a documentary in the way today’s audiences understand them, but a patchwork of a multigenerational family’s personal stories by way of oral tradition, embellished by a continually tongue-in-cheek visual treatment via Seth’s unique art style. Each person in the feature is represented by some visual manifestation of their persona or name, like Cookie (whom the film is partially named after), who has a giant chocolate chip c...