SFFILM 62 Day 12: The Load

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival is almost over; tonight's the official "closing night" but repeat screenings continue through Tuesday, April 23rd. Each day during the festival I've been posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A still from Ognjen Glavonic's The Load, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The Load (SERBIA/FRANCE/CROATIA/IRAN/QATAR: Ognjen Glavonic, 2018)
playing: 6:00PM today at BAMPFA & 3:30PM tomorrow at the Victoria.

I went into The Load knowing almost nothing other than the information above and the fact that it's part of the SFFILM New Directors Golden Gate Awards competition, which other than undergoing a re-branding a several years back (it used to be sponsored by a vodka brand and called the SKYY Prize) has probably been the most consistent corner of San Francisco International Film Festival programming since I started attending twenty years ago. That year Jia Zhang-ke's feature-length debut Xiao Wu a.k.a. Pickpocket took home the prize, and since then other winning films have included Pedro González-Rubio's Alamar and Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade. Only directors on their first or second "narrative" feature are eligible for this award, so it's inevitable that all but the most deeply knowledgeable viewers won't have heard of any of them before the competition slate is announced. It turns out that 34-year-old Glanovic was not a completely unknown quantity to close festival observers, as he's made documentaries before including at least one that has played at the Berlinale.

I'm glad I went into The Load with so little foreknowledge. Part of this motion picture's effectiveness is derived from the position of unknowing that its lead character played by Croatian actor Leon Lučev, a truck driver tasked with bringing an undisclosed cargo across the border of Southern Serbia into Belgrade. Knowing little more than he does is a highly effective strategy for keeping a viewer's attention gripped, wondering what might be revealed. If that's not your style of movie-watching feel free to read the excellent review of The Load in Slant, or the interview with Glanovic in Film Comment before watching. In the meantime I'll make a few comments about an interesting aesthetic strategy employed in the movie that I'll try to avoid bringing anything at all spoiler-ish into.

Several times throughout The Load, our naturally-solitary driver encounters someone along his travels who makes some impact on his progress, and rather than simply confining these "external" characters' screen time to their interaction with the protagonist, Glanovic chooses to linger on their activities after their encounter before cutting back to Lučev. At first these moments are disorienting, appearing to launch into a "network narrative" structure for the movie. But after repetition of the structural technique makes it clear that Glanovic has something else in mind for these momentary fragments, they become clearly vital to his method of isolating his main character from the world he inhabits, a thematic underlining that gives ever more power to The Load's reflection on Serbia's past and its at-best-incomplete reconciliation. Of all the features I've seen at SFFILM this year, this is the one I feel will be most likely to reward a second viewing. Luckily there are two more showings scheduled during the festival.

SFFILM62 Day 12
Other festival options: I can recommend the final SFFILM showing of The Edge of Democracy to anyone who (like myself, before I saw it Friday) has felt confused by Brazil's political history over the past couple decades. Though a Netflix doc, it justifies its presence on the big screen with some very dynamic drone photography and more visceral protest footage. It screens at BAMPFA today at 12:30PM with the director in person. Today's also the last day to see Irene Taylor Brodsky, whose debut Hear and Now was among my favorite documentaries seen at Sundance way back in 2007, introduce her latest Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Acts. She and her doc will screen at SFMOMA at 6:00PM.

Non-SFFILM option: The Stanford Theatre launched its Doris Day program on Friday, and today's the final day they're showing two of her most auteur-centric films, Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and Gordon Douglas's Young At Heart, together on a 35mm double-bill. The full program, all in 35mm prints as is the Stanford's m.o., runs five days a week through May 23rd and includes My Dream is Yours with its famous Friz Freleng animation sequence, The Pajama Game, co-directed by the late great Stanley Donen, and Andrew & Virginia Stones' Julie, shot largely in Northern California, mostly near Carmel where Day lives to this day.