Heartland International Film Festival 2023: ANATOMY OF A FALL, ASOG, THE SECRET ART OF HUMAN FLIGHT, & LIMINAL – INDIANA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

The Heartland International Film Festival returns for its 32nd year, bringing a mix of headlining films and delightful, small discoveries. For this report, I cover two films dealing with the aftermath of death, the Palm d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall and The Secret Art of Human Flight, and two films exploring human’s effect on the environment, Asog and Liminal – Indiana in the Anthropocene.

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)

Crime thrillers are a sturdy film genre, which is why you see many and forget most of them. There’s no risk of forgetting Anatomy of a Fall, a meticulous crime thriller that follows the sudden death of Samuel and the subsequent trial of his wife, Sandra.

Samuel’s death is very suspicious. He’s found in the snow outside his home, having either fallen, been pushed, or leaped from the attic where he was working. The location is remote, and the only people in the vicinity at the time were Sandra and their 11-year-old son, Daniel. Daniel’s age and partial blindness from a previous injury rule him out quickly. That narrows the suspects down to Sandra or suicide.

Director and co-writer Justine Triet makes the interesting choice to stay with Sandra and Daniel throughout, making the film less a crime procedural and more an unnerving dive into subjectivity. We are not seeing events through their eyes. Instead, we are asked to observe them closely and puzzle things out for ourselves. Sandra is a smart, strong-willed, difficult person, as was Samuel, which leaves plausible scenarios wide open.

The slow, methodical unraveling of Sandra, Samuel, and Daniel provides meaty roles for the main trio, but especially Sandra Hüller as the accused, who balances her character’s complications into an unnerving portrait. All the information we get about her comes from a skewed angle: she is presenting herself as innocent, the police are presenting her as guilty, and even hard facts are run through these filters. There’s a sense of distance from her, yes, but also a sense of too-intimate knowledge. We learn things about Sandra we aren’t entitled to know, and watching Hüller’s stumbling, trembling reactions to others’ gazes makes it feel like the audience is complicit in the personal invasion as well.

Young Milo Machado Graner as Daniel is equally astounding for the gamut he must run, as is Samuel Theis in the flashbacks to a living but struggling Samuel. It must also be noted that Messi, the border collie who took home the Palm Dog, delivers a key and outstanding performance as well. It’s mostly a casting win: the eyes of a border collie tend to jump out, and in a film all about gazing intensely, Messi’s attentive presence makes the themes of the film present onscreen.

You never feel a minute of Anatomy of a Fall’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime because Triet and company use every moment to twist their dreadful knife. The snowy chalet where the death occurred and where Sandra and Daniel are forced to stay feels appropriately enveloped and claustrophobic, and their attempts to continue living under impossible circumstances rattle everyone who comes into their small orbit. Once the movie moves to the courtroom, the faux documentary-style cinematography becomes more pronounced, enhancing the sensation that you’re puzzling out a horrifying, complicated scenario in real-time.

You’re working through the death, of course. Samuel’s body fell and was found lifeless in the snow, and that must be sorted out. But you’re also analyzing everything that crumbled in the lead-up to that fall, and everything that crumbled as a result. The title is a red herring, in a way. You are not sorting out the details of a single fall. A lot crashed down, built up like an avalanche, and it left much more than a single body in its wake.

Agog (Sean Devlin)

Most films mix the real with the fantastic, but few blur the line as much as director Sean Devlin’s Asog. With a cast of actors playing versions of themselves, actors playing just themselves, and real-life scenarios peppering the film’s fictional road trip, classifying the film is a bit of a nightmare. Essentially, you should think of it like Nomadland, but much funnier and much more queer.

The road trip begins as a quest for Jaya (Rey Aclao) to reclaim their entertainment dreams. They had a TV show before Typhoon Haiyan decimated the Philippines, and while making ends meet in the low-paying, high-stress job of teaching, they grow tired of the rebuilding grind. They give up the modicum of stability they’ve scraped together to compete in a drag competition on Sicogon Island, but the journey there takes them through a country and people forever altered by the typhoon and its political aftermath.

Jaya’s situation, along with that of everyone they encounter, are dour examples of the effects of climate change and colonization, but nothing about Asog is dour. The film reflects the personality of Jaya, and in turn the personality of Aclao, who co-wrote the film and kept their character close to their reality. As often as they encounter rickety boats and transphobia, they also encounter loose farts and a frog smoking a cigarette. The world of Asog is as eclectic as the real one: silly, strange, and rooted in reality with necessary escapes to the fantastical.

The variety makes for a joyously off-kilter tone, but it inhibits the narrative from running smoothly. It’s clear that Devlin is more comfortable with the documentary elements, as these pop with purpose and urgency. The tacked-on road trip, on the other hand, feels aimless and lacks punch. Granted, road trips naturally meander, but transitions between scenarios are unnaturally clipped, which takes away a sense of sprawl that would’ve added to the heft of its cultural examination.

The moments of reality he finds, though, are much more punchy. The introduction of a former student (Arnel Pablo, playing a version of himself) provides a meek contrast to Jaya’s confident navigation of the world and highlights how easy it is to get swallowed up by the huge forces at play. With this backbone, every person they encounter, from shady restaurant owners to farmers eking out a living, are cast in an understandable and sympathetic light, including the times Jaya goes a little too far in pursuit of their dreams.

The centerpiece of the film is the goings on at Sicogon Island, where a few residents cling to their land and fight international developers. Everything the film has to say about the destruction of the typhoon, the exploitation that followed, and the warmth of people banding together is found in this real-life scenario. This is where Jaya and Arnel finish their single-minded journey, and as they pause they’re forced to take in what’s happening around them. That is the ultimate purpose of Asog as a film, to take you down a funny road but also make you really see it, potholes and all. In this regard, it’s a rousing success.

The Secret Art of Human Flight (H.P. Mendoza)

How quirky can you go? It’s a question constantly being asked in The Secret Art of Human Flight, which turns a very silly eye on a very serious subject.

The film follows Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer), who is engulfed by grief. His wife, Sarah, just passed away unexpectedly, and to make matters worse the two hadn’t been doing well. Their self-published books weren’t selling like they used to, bills were piling up, and Ben had been overly reliant on Sarah’s abundant creativity to get them through. With Sarah’s death, he lost not just his partner, but his work and sense of stability. Without much left, the world seems to be crashing around him.

That is, until he sees a video of a man flying. There’s a book explaining how to do it, and Ben dives into the training with an ardor only someone who’s very unwell could. Those around him are plenty concerned about his behavior, but when the flying man turns up to train him, everyone fears a grift. Even Ben recognizes the danger, but he must decide how far he’s willing to go to work through his grief.

The bizarre turn of the film is well supported by the tone set by director H.P. Mendoza, which puts a c*ckeyed spin on even the most serious moments. Early scenes of the funeral and the immediate aftermath are just off, as they would be for Ben, and the continued sense of the uncanny makes its meditation on grief’s deeply rooted, unshakeable qualities easily digestible.

The all-encompassing nature of grief, though, means that tone has to be all-encompassing as well. That means The Secret Art of Human Flight is an extremely quirky movie, and your mileage on that will vary. This comes through mostly in absurdity of situation, like Ben’s quest to capture a bird, but these scenarios aren’t always mined for the raucous humor at their edges.

Some of this was surely intentional. After all, a completely off-the-wall take would get in the way of its serious elements. But instances of sub-par filmmaking, like clunky edits and poor sound design, indicate that some of Human Flight’s more reserved moments are self-inflicted wounds and not intentional balancing of tone.

The mismatch between Paul Raci’s performance as the eccentric flying man and Rosenmeyer’s as the aggrieved widower is another key giveaway to the film’s underlying problems. Rosenmeyer is, understandably, playing the straight man, which he does with an appropriately sadsack energy. Raci, though, feels unmoored. He should be bigger, bolder, and really bounce off Rosenmeyer. A few scenes allow him to do this, but for the most part he hews too close to Rosenmeyer’s energy level, and this keeps him from feeling as threatening as he should.

But despite the lingering sense of missed opportunities, enough of Human Flight reflects the bizarre process of grieving that it achieves catharsis. Grieving is a messy endeavor, one that seems as impossible as human flight, and it’s this astute anchoring point that keeps its faults from sending it into a tailspin.

Liminal – Indiana in the Anthropocene (Zach Schrank)

Your average message documentary can be preachy and didactic in ways that limit its accessibility. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the message will likely avoid it like the plague, which begs the question: what’s the purpose of preaching to the choir?

Liminal – Indiana in the Anthropocene avoids such pitfalls by taking a hands-off, observant style. Relying on only aerial drone footage, title cards, and a propulsive score by Hoosier composer Nate Utesch (Metavari), it puts a removed eye on the landscape of Indiana. What’s revealed is a more varied environment, and one more marred by human influence, than most people see when they soar over our little Midwestern flyover state.

Like director Zach Schrank and most of the people behind Liminal, I’m a Hoosier boy myself, intimately familiar with the state’s complexities and its complicated relationship with the environment. From above and beyond, it’s easy to imagine the state as much greener than it is. This greenery is where the first two sections of Liminal begin, in our old growth forests and massive swaths of cropland. As the joke goes: there’s more than corn in Indiana. There’s beans, too.

This makes Indiana one of the last places people think of when collecting evidence of indelible human change on the environment, a concept that makes some argue we are in a geological epoch called the Anthropocene. But even those green fields are evidence of change. Schrank introduces them by soaring from forest to field, the stark difference emphasized by a road bisecting the areas. Wilderness gives way to society, diversity to uniformity. 

The film cycles through the laundry list of industrial, manufacturing, mining, agricultural, business, and amusement industries that dot the state, all exceptionally different from the old growth forests where the film began. There’s some obvious shots that emphasize this, sure, like factories spewing smoke into the air, but had you thought of the endless parking lot of an auto plant? Or the skyscrapers of downtown Indianapolis as intrusions on the sky itself?

There’s only so much variety you can bring to this concept, so there are times when the endless sweep of gently moving drone shots becomes repetitive. And perhaps if you aren’t prone to zoning out to electronic music like I am, you may find Metavari’s attempts to keep the wordless documentary moving lacking.

Those attuned to observational and experimental documentaries, though, will pick up on the narrative Schrank applies before the final image makes it stark. It’s reminiscent of another recent Hoosier documentary, Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, in this technique. And like that film, hints of where it’s going are sprinkled throughout. The endless expanse the drone footage captures it. We humans are, quite literally, everywhere. The rapaciousness of our reach is undeniable. And with our boots on the ground, it’s all too easy to miss it.

The approach makes Liminal an unassailable document of human influence on the environment. That seems to be the aim of everyone involved, but it also reduces the audience to those willing and capable of sitting through a non-narrative documentary. Viewership may be small, but that’s far from the only way to measure the value of a film.

All films screened at the 32nd Heartland International Film Festival.