Lily Gladstone already had an impressive career before appearing in Flower Moon Assassins, by Martin Scorsese, and being nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. It’s with a film in which she appeared shortly before being directed by the director of Taxi Driver It is Raging Bullentitled The Unknown Country (2022) and signed by Morrisa Maltz, which opens, on April 30th, the third edition of Outsiders – American Independent Cinema Cycle. Gladstone, who also wrote the script, plays Tana, a young Native American who has left her family and her tribe, the Oglala Lakota, and is mourning a close family member. After receiving an unexpected invitation to a wedding, she gets in her car and heads to the Texas-Mexico border, for a solitary road trip that will turn out to be full of surprises.
The Unknown Country is one of 12 independent American films that make up the Outsiders 2024 program, an initiative by FLAD – Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, in co-production with Cinema São Jorge. As has been the hallmark of this cycle since the beginning, all its titles are indie productions and are unreleased in Portugal. As the initiative’s programmer, Carlos Nogueira, highlights, “these films remain faithful to the spirit that we sought to convey to our Outsiders from the beginning: respect for diversity, search for representation and attention to the playful aspect”.
The cycle takes place at Cinema São Jorge and at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and ends on May 5th. This year’s theme is family, in its various declensions, and asks, more specifically: “What is the American family today?” The 12 films to be shown provide (some) answers.
Patrick Wang presented his first feature film, In the Family (2011), in the debut edition of Outsiders. The director now returns as a guest of this edition number 3. In addition to giving a masterclass at the Faculty of Fine Arts, on May 3rd (17.00), he also presents two of his tapes. Are they The Grief of Others (2015), set within a family trying to deal with the loss of a newborn child; It is The Bread Factory (2018), a work divided into two parts, about an artistic community managed by two friends for 40 years in a small town in the interior of the USA, whose survival is threatened when a couple of famous Chinese performance artists begin to build a huge complex dedicated to the arts on the same street as theirs. The film features Tyne Daly, Elizabeth Henry, Janeane Garofalo and Glynnis O’Connor.
Among the other tapes are titles such as Land Ho! (2015), by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, shot in the USA and Iceland, a comedy about two ex-brothers-in-law who are retired and decide to take a trip to that country to remember their youth and rekindle their friendship, ending up painting the seven throughout Reykjavik; The Cathedral (2021), by Ricky D’Ambrose, in which an only son guides us through the ups and downs of his typically American family over 20 years, and which explores themes such as memory, identity and nostalgia; or yet Birth/Rebirth (2023), by Laura Moss, a horror story about a woman who works as a technician in a morgue and manages to bring a girl back to life, although to keep her that way she needs to collect biological material from pregnant women. The director revisits the myth of Frankenstein through the lens of motherhood, in this film that was considered by many horror fans as one of the best of this genre made in the USA last year.
Outsiders ends with the screening of not one, but two films. The first is Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020). The story told by brothers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross takes place in Las Vegas, in a bar called The Roaring 20’s, which is about to close, and is a hybrid production that combines documentary and fictional elements. The second film is a debut in feature films, A Thousand and One (2023), by director and screenwriter AV Rockwell. A young black woman just released from prison decides, in desperation, to take her six-year-old son away from the foster family he was placed in, repeating what her mother did when she was a child. A Thousand and One It was shown at the Berlin and Locarno festivals and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Sundance Festival, thus closing this third American Independent Cinema Cycle with a flourish.
Cinema São Jorge. 30 Apr-5May. Various schedules. €4.50
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