“My grandmother once told me in Navajo storytelling, symbols mean more than facts. And time means nothing at all.” What follows this declaration in Billy Luther’s narrative debut Frybread Face and Me inches the film away from that promise of experimentation towards a straight-forward coming-of-age story; still, the tension between Luther’s experience as a documentary filmmaker and the fictional story of a Navajo pre-teen’s summer spent on the Rez generates at least the potential for an alternative narratological approach.

By Ally Oman It’s an easy enough mistake: when two brides, Jaya and Phool, board a train wearing identical wedding saris and veils over their faces, there is no way for their new husbands to recognize that each has mistaken the other man’s wife for his own. With jaunty humour, Kiran Rao’s Shakespearean mistaken-identity tale…

By Ally Oman The greatest disservice that could be done to Biosphere would be to sell it on the grounds of the strange direction its plot takes. Set in a near future in which the only two survivors of a global catastrophe are best friends Ray (Sterling K. Brown) and Billy (Mark Duplass), the film…

By Ally Oman  It’s What Each Person Needs (Sophy Romvari, Canada) Finessing what is often at play in Sophy Romvari’s work, It’s What Each Person Needs toes the line between truth and fabrication, documentary and fiction. The film depicts a series of video calls between Torontonian singer Becca Willow Moss and the two distinctive groups…