Premiering in the documentary competition at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, Alex Mar’s American Mystic is a poem of a film, following three young people in America who have chosen to make their spiritual practice the center of their lives. A pagan priestess who proudly defines herself as a witch, Morpheus has moved to the outskirts of rural California to create a pagan sanctuary on a small plot of land. Kublai, a Spiritualist medium, works on a farm in upstate New York but spends his off hours with his head in the hands of elderly women, learning to channel spirits. Chuck, a Lakota Sioux, barely scrapes by at his day job in the city, but he and his wife are raising their child with their ancestors’ way of life as their guide, taking long trips to the reservation to participate in the traditions that are still alive.
Like the 2008 Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, Elijah Drenner’s smart, affectionate but clear-eyed history of American exploitation films combines talking heads and well-chosen clips from movies that range from now-quaint 1913 white-slavery “exposé” Traffic in Souls to the still-scurrilous Nazi sexploitation classic Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS.
Do dreams, especially the portentous kind that you cannot easily shake off, predict the future? That question is investigated in “The Edge of Dreaming,” a deeply personal film by Amy Hardie, a Scottish science documentarian whose world was shaken after she experienced a series of related nightmares.
From The Wall Street Journal: "An experimental narrative... this curious film requires a contemplative mood to really take in. The premise is grim: A man decides to go into the woods, where he will stay until he starves himself to death. Swiss director Peter Liechti adapted the film a novel by Japanese writer Shimada Masahiko. The original work is based on a real-life incident, and the diary kept by a man who followed through with this unusual form of suicide. Observations mundane and profound are related in a low-key narration. For instance: The man lacks a huge appetite for his last unremarkable meal, so he spends his last coins on pinball. Yet, he knows his death will be drawn out, so he stocks his tent with grooming supplies. This ambient meditation certainly isn't for every viewer, but its philosophical tone and embrace of nature make it distinct."
Very insightful review from Slant Magazine of The Sound of Insects by Diego Costa:
Surprisingly not macabre, this fictionalized record of self-aggrandizement through self-destruction reminds one of Derek Jarman's Blue in its epistolary delivery and its displacement of meaning to that which is never really shown. One can also think of writer Yukio Mishima's seppuku, performance artist Fred Herko's jeté out the window (Andy Warhol was bummed for not having caught the moment of the plunge in a photograph), and the HIV-chasing politics of Guillaume Dustan, who also turned the courting of death into literature through barebacking. But the anonymous suicidal performer mummy in The Sound of Insects is less interested in the grand finale, more focused on his very shriveling. Still it is death as spectacle, even if a quietly murmured one, that links all of these performers.