The Black Sea (2024 | Bulgaria,United States | 93 minutes | Crystal Moselle, Derrick B. Harden)

Yearning to create something during last summer’s writers and actors strike, Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack, Skate Kitchen) and Derrick B. Harden (rapper, creator, multi-hyphenate) packed their gear and headed to a small seaside town in Bulgaria. There, under the quickly discarded conceit of an ailing woman heeding her fortuneteller’s advice to be saved by a Black man, they loosely improvised a story of a man finding himself abroad. Harden immerses himself in the role of a cash-strapped tourist, stuck in a foreign land without a passport or means of going home. The only Black guy for miles, he immediately stands out from the crowd. As he wanders through town, interactions from strangers shape the course of the sixteen-day experiment. It’s his first lead role, but his charismatic personality and magnetic onscreen presence suggests that it won’t be his last. Moselle’s camerawork is his unobtrusive but perpetually curious companion, capturing the smallest details and the dusky magic hour beauty of waterfront village life. Deft editing and a jazz-inspired original soundtrack contribute to the sense that anything could happen. Working with only a few professional actors and the loosest outline of plot, the metamorphic result is an improvised triumph of not-quite documentary, not-quite scripted filmmaking.

• FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2024 – SIFF Cinema Uptown – 3:00 PM

Seagrass (2023 | Canada | 115 minutes | Meredith Hama-Brown)

With gorgeous Pacific Northwest cinematography on Vancouver Island and a talented cast of adult and kid actors, Seagrass has so much going for it (especially by a standout leading performance from Ally Maki). The story follows a Canadian family who spend a week on the island at some sort of retreat for troubled marriages. The adults do group therapy to unravel their emotions by day while the kids are very loosely supervised in a summer camp like setting. At night they have sad dinners in their cottages, occasionally sneaking out to party with other kids or parents. The film is teeming with so many ideas — maternal loss, marital dissatisfaction, second-generation immigrant identity, coming of age, shyness, haunted seaside caves — many which linger below the surface. The measured pace of storytelling, quiet oddness of the resort, and remove of the camerawork hints at something supernatural that never quite pays off.

Streaming MAY 20 – MAY 27