timespace coordinates: 19th century ‘bizarre winter realm’ Wisconsin
Hundreds of Beavers is a 2022 American slapstick comedy film directed by Mike Cheslik and written by Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews. The film stars Tews as an applejack maker conflicting with beavers to win the hand of a fur trader’s daughter. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: today in Fremont, California, the town with the biggest Afghan community in the US.
A real-life Afghan refugee and former TV news presenter Anaita Wali Zada plays Donya, a former translator for the US army who lives in a nondescript little apartment with other Afghan expats. This is the fourth feature of London-based Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali. It is an amazing little indie gem of a movie reminiscent of the early unsuspecting quirkiness and observant calmness of early Jim Jarmusch features. It is a testament of how much alternate weight and down-to-earth importance such small movies can carry in an age of hyperbolic statements, xenophobia, and race to the bottom. Also, we should avoid the easy US collapse of everything into bland “finding oneself” one-liners that some of the reviewers have spewed out.
And when I say race to the boom I mean what is happening about anti-immigrant laws and how difficult life is made for those who try to find a better life elsewhere and are being constantly criminalized. Climate emergency and endless wars have multiplied the number of displaced persons, refugees, and migrants. Yet, today both US presidential candidates (Biden and Trump) are pushing for anti-immigration policies. They have both visited the US-Mexico border in Texas (the state with the biggest Mexico border) and both are trying to militarize the border and restrict asylum. They are competing on a key election issue: immigration. Everyone seems to out-bid each other in the harshness of anti-immigration laws.
This is one of my favorite movies about the afterlife of the Afghan Wars and their aftermath. In a sense it touched only lightly on that reality, but the directors makes sure everything that we understand how the lives of countless people have been affected by such incredible and brutal wars. Suffice to say Donya is working at a Chinese fortune cookie factory and somehow ends up finding her happiness, I do not want to give more spoilers on that.
She is dealing with insomnia and survivor’s guilt and when she gets promoted to the position of fortune cookie copywriter, she starts to write small prophecies and even smuggles messages with the telephone number with the hope of finding human contact and love somewhere out there even where one expects it the least. It is a wonderful movie that we need more in such hard times, creating an atmosphere of incredible gentleness, cozy intimacy, openness, and serendipitous friendliness that seems to be so rare these days. All the relations in this movie are incredibly nice and warming, be it the almost metaphysical discussions with the ‘boss’, or the advice she gets from her friend and fellow fortune cookie co-worker. In a where everything becomes more and more uncertain and hazardous, this movie shows the way.
Maybe it is a specific way that California or the American West turns into the Middle East – a way that turns all the tropes of noir movies and Americana on their head, bringing them closer to a sort of Iranian neo-noir (familiar from the Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Alone at Night 2014 hit directed by Ana Lily Amirpour). Artist friend Anca Benera used to tell me about a residency she did in California researching exactly these desertic connections, the way camels were brought into the US. Palms that are so iconic today of the whole Californian or Florida landscape and cinematic universe trees are also new immigrants that have been adopted and are a signature of that region.
One of my favorite scenes is when Donya uses a therapy ‘slot’ ticket from some other fellow Afghan to visit a psychiatrist, Dr Anthony (a phenomenal and humorous performance from Gregg Turkington). It is one of the most telling and hilarious scenes of therapy you’ll see in any movie. It is both unnerving, annoying, bizarre, and ridiculously realistic. There is also a lot to be said about a system that cannot deal with such ‘mundane’ issues as suffering from trauma or actually being the result of US “Great Game” overseas campaigns. After trying to find what ‘her’ problem is and refusing to give her any sleeping pills he pulls out one of his favorite childhood books. Anyone of us has had some similar experience probably. He relates Donya’s story and probably every other patient story to Jack London’s ‘White Fang’, while at the same time succumbing to his own memories of his mom in the most funny cringe way. Basically, nothing of what she says fits into the patterns or profiling that such sessions are supposed to ‘file away’ or solve.
timespace coordinates: Set in 1962, the series’ main setting is a parallel universe where the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan have won World War II in 1946 after Giuseppe Zangara successfully assassinates United States President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, creating a series of developments that include the Germans dropping an atomic bomb on Washington, D.C. (now renamed “District of Contamination”). The German Reich extends to Europe and Africa and the Empire of Japan comprises Asia, but most of the series is set in the former US and in Germany proper.
Western North America, now part of the “Japanese Pacific States”, is occupied by the technologically less-advanced Shōwa-period Empire of Japan, which has assimilated its formerly American citizens into Japanese culture, although high-class ethnic Japanese are extremely fascinated by pre-War American culture. Japan’s Trade and Science ministers work in the Pacific States’ capital, San Francisco. The Japanese rulers subject non-Japanese people to racial discrimination and grant them fewer rights.
Eastern and Midwestern North America is a colony controlled by the Greater Nazi Reich (GNR) under an aging Führer Adolf Hitler. The colony, headed by a “Reichsmarschall of North America”, is commonly referred to as “Nazi America” or “the American Reich” and its capital is New York City. The Nazis continue to hunt minorities and euthanize the physically and mentally sick. The superior technology of the Germans is highlighted by the use of video phones and Concorde-like “rockets” for intercontinental travel.
A Neutral Zone, which encompasses the Rocky Mountains, serves as a buffer zone between the Japanese Pacific States and Nazi America due to Cold War–like tensions between the German and Japanese blocs. Another buffer zone is present in the Urals.
Films collected by the eponymous “Man in the High Castle” show views of numerous other Earths, including some where the Allies were victorious, some featuring executed Allied leaders (such as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin), and some where an American resistance is doing well.
The Man in the High Castle is an American dystopian alternate history television series created for streaming service Amazon Prime Video. It was created by Frank Spotnitz and produced by Amazon Studios, Ridley Scott‘s Scott Free Productions (with Scott serving as executive producer), Headline Pictures, Electric Shepherd Productions, and Big Light Productions. The series is based on Philip K. Dick‘s 1962 novel of the same name. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 1920s Oklahoma
Killers of the Flower Moon is a 2023 American epic Western crime drama film directed and co-produced by Martin Scorsese, who also co-wrote the script alongside Eric Roth, based on the 2017 non-fiction book by David Grann Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI Set in 1920s Oklahoma, it focuses on a series of murders of Osage members and relations in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on tribal land. The tribal members had retained mineral rights on their reservation, and white opportunists sought to take the tribal members’ wealth.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone lead an ensemble cast, also including Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser. It is the sixth feature film collaboration between Scorsese and DiCaprio, the tenth between Scorsese and De Niro. (wiki)
imdb // rt // William King Hale
spacetime coordinates: 1996. Christmas season at a truck stop in Montana
A seemingly naïve and devout young woman finds her way in the underground world of truck stop sex workers a.k.a. “lot lizards.”
Candy Land is a 2021 americana horror film directed by John Swab. The film stars Sam Quartin, Eden Brolin, Virginia Rand, Owen Campbell, Guinevere Turner, Olivia Luccardi and William Baldwin.
spacetime coordinates: 1980s US (Illinois Indiana Kentucky Maryland Michigan Minnesota Nebraska Columbus, Ohio Virginia)
Bones and All is a 2022 Italian-American romantic horror road film directed by Luca Guadagnino based on the 2015 novel Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis. The film stars Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as a pair of young cannibals who flee together on a road trip across the country and develop feelings for each other. Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper and Mark Rylance appear in supporting roles. (wiki)
The film’s score was composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. In an interview with TheWrap, Reznor and Ross explained that they had extensive discussions with Guadagnino regarding the score, who stated that he wanted it to be “a melancholic elegy, an unending longing. It needs to be a character in the film, a part of the landscape” and requested the use of acoustic guitars to complement the Americana visuals.
spacetime coordinates: 1937 rural Mississippi during the Great Depression
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 crime comedy-drama film written, produced, co-edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson, with Chris Thomas King, John Goodman, Holly Hunter, and Charles Durning in supporting roles.
The film is a modern satire loosely based on Homer‘s epic Greek poem The Odyssey that incorporates social features of the American South. The title of the film is a reference to the Preston Sturges 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels, in which the protagonist is a director who wants to film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a fictitious book about the Great Depression. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 