Formosa Beach (Julia de Simone, 2024)

More than 35 years ago, the late Huub Bals—creator and director of International Film Festival Rotterdam—began setting up what was then known as the Tarkovsky Fund, a body intended to support filmmakers in the developing world.  Following his death, the fund was renamed the Hubert Bals Fund, or HBF, and since its launch it has assisted in the production of countless critical hits, including Memoria, Monos and Japón.  Both IFFR and the HBF are involved in Julia de Simone's long-gestating feature debut Formosa Beach: an HBF grant was awarded to the project way back in 2014, with the finished film premiering at IFFR 2024.

Formosa Beach examines, inter alia, colonial history in Brazil, as seen through the eyes of Brazilian native de Simone, and the resulting film is a languid reflection on the vagaries of both time and memory.  The temporally fragmented narrative of Formosa Beach follows the journey of Muanza (Lucília Raimundo), a woman trafficked from the Kingdom of Kongo to Rio de Janeiro (while the Portuguese influence in Kongo was intricately linked with commerce, religion and politics, it was slavery that left an indelible mark).  In Brazil, Muanza meets fellow slave Kieza (Samira Carvalho), with whom she plots an escape.

The now-defunct Kingdom of Kongo encompassed parts of several present-day countries (Angola, DR Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, and Gabon); established in the late 14th century, the kingdom was a centralised state with a sophisticated governmental structure, and its wealth was mostly founded on nefarious trades (ivory, slaves).  Many Kongolese people like Muanza were forcibly taken to Brazil, where, despite the brutal conditions they had to endure, they contributed significantly to the country's culture; indeed, the influence of the Kongolese can be seen in several aspects of contemporary Brazilian life, including music and cuisine.

Julia de Simone's dedication to examining the legacies of slavery and colonialism—and their impact on current society—is obvious in a film in which the two strong, stoic protagonists are boxed in to both their environment and the film's Academy ratio.  Formosa Beach's back-and-forth narrative and critique of European imperialism combine in a way that recalls Bertrand Bonello's unsettling Zombi Child, an altogether more sophisticated picture.  De Simone's ambitious film is better in idea than execution: it works well enough as an aesthetically pleasing mood piece, yet its story feels both underpowered and undertold.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Regina (Ashley De Grandy, 2025)

Setting aside the mild controversy regarding the nomenclature confusion surrounding Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch's final feature film was the digitally-shot Inland Empire, a byzantine work somewhat reductively billed as "a mystery about a woman in trouble".  This same description could also apply to both Lynch's previous film, Mulholland Drive, and Ashley De Grandy’s debut feature, Regina, a movie for which Inland Empire appears to serve as a key reference point.  It feels oddly apt that the tail end of David Lynch's career in cinema provides a template of sorts for a film that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.

On a superficial level, Regina could be distilled to "a woman searching for her cat", as the title character (Isabella Bobadilla) scours the neighbourhood for the moggy she hasn't seen for quite some time.  Regina is aided in this quest by her good friend Daisy (Loren Swan), and the pair plaster the streets with posters appealing for the return of the missing pet.  So far, so linear, but, as with Inland Empire, Regina eventually reaches a tipping point where the narrative splinters into a cluster of jagged fragments, and Regina, like Laura Dern's Nikki in Lynch's film, finds herself in a terrifying twilight world in which little is recognisable.

Also as with Inland Empire, Regina is a film in which prostitution plays a murky role, and Regina finds herself an unwilling participant in a seedy arrangement presided over by her mother (musician Roxana Frontini).  As Regina's life disintegrates further, the hunt for her cat is largely erased from both her and the viewer's memories; while it's not clear if the feline even existed in the first place, it's pretty obvious that the search for it is nothing more than a MacGuffin that sets up the title character's nightmarish ordeal.  As reality bends and warps, Ashley De Grandy deftly steers this ambitious film through its choppy, elliptical back half.

With its depiction of the horrors that lie beneath the sun-dappled surface, Regina, which premiered at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, is instantly identifiable as being influenced by the work of David Lynch, yet this is no mere pastiche (in terms of homage, another film that debuted at the same festival, Saturnalia, sailed much closer to the wind as it mimicked the work of Dario Argento).  De Grandy has injected enough of her own filmmaking personality into Regina to elevate it beyond an ersatz Lynch, and she's helped by a brave, confident turn from Bobadilla, who glues the film together as Regina's sanity unravels.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

The Treasury of Human Inheritance (A. K. Mitchell, 2024)

Treasury of Human Inheritance, a series published from 1909 to 1958, represents an important milestone in the history of genetics.  This project—co-published as Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, which, even more confusingly, also served as Treasury's parent publication for a time—was overseen by Karl Pearson, a leading biostatistician and eugenicist.  Treasury of Human Inheritance sought to compile and analyse family pedigrees in order to illustrate the inheritance of physical and mental diseases in humans; the initiative sprang from of a need for hard empirical evidence to support studies in heredity.

During the first half of the twentieth century, access to such information was very limited, and Pearson's object was to standardise the data collected.  Treasury's evolution into an independent series reflected the growing emphasis on, and appetite for, genetic research.  However, Treasury—as the title of its sometime sister journal makes clear—is also bound to the murky field of eugenics, a sub-Darwinian belief system that aims to improve the human gene pool via selective breeding.  Nowadays, eugenics is rightly debunked, but the import attached to Treasury is a reminder that this outré theory was once considered a credible one.

For all its experimental form, Alexis Kyle Mitchell's film The Treasury of Human Inheritance—note the subtle use of the definite article, which is very handy when it comes to differentiating the movie from its near-namesake periodical—is an intensely personal work centring on myotonic dystrophy (DM), a hereditary muscle-wasting genetic disorder whose potency increases as it is passed on.  Via a dissonant combination of home movies, Zoom calls, and footage of derelict buildings, Canadian artist Mitchell poignantly depicts the ravages of this disease, which has affected three generations of the filmmaker's family.

The film is propelled along by a throbbing synth soundtrack which, as per Mitchell's stated intention, approximates particular patterns of genetic conditions.  This approach to sound design adds a haptic, visceral element to the work that complements the tactile 16mm cinematography; as much as Mitchell's film provides real insight into life with DM, it is also an experience, and a highly sensorial one at that.  The Treasury of Human Inheritance is a peculiar nexus of art and science, one which confronts the stark realities of disease, death and dying—not as alien concepts, but rather as integral aspects of the human condition.

Darren Arnold

Image: BFI