Grasshopper Republic (2023 | USA | 94 minutes | Daniel McCabe)

Opening with traders clutching fistfuls of Ugandan dollars swarming to meet trucks with giant sacks of living grasshoppers, Daniel McCabe’s verité documentary of an unfamiliar harvest beholds its subjects with alien reserve. This is true for both the gangly emerald insects emerging from their chrysalises onto tall blades of grass as well as the men who risk their health to earn great sums of money collecting them. Footage of the life cycle of the bugs is fit for a glossy museum piece; village life and the tools of the trade is shown with a gritty immediacy. Nothing is explained directly or put into context by experts. Instead, overlapping conversations fill in the dangers of working under sodium lights, pushing heavy generators to unstable cliffs, and sleeping outdoors along with biting insects. It’s a slow build to the stunning reveal of the scale of the work, potential for profit, scope of the operation, and impact on other agriculture. There’s a lot of potential here to understand this foreign-to-us cash crop and the people who bring it from forest to markets, although I couldn’t help but wish that we gotten to know anyone in the film a little better.

Streaming MAY 20 – MAY 27

Scala!!! (2023 | United Kingdom | 96 minutes | Jane Giles, Ali Catterall)

Scala, a beloved North London cinema, may have only existed from 1978–93, but its memory and influence of its diverse programming looms large among the cinephiles, freaks, and other patrons who loved it. Former Scala programmer Jane Giles and Ali Catterall assemble many of them to tell stories of the storied venues, the films they saw there, and what it meant to them. While there’s a uniformity to their recollections — a cool thing they saw, a crazy time they had — the documentary showcases the vast array of movies they played that might have never been shown anywhere else. Its final iteration in a grand marble King’s Cross building played host to cutting edge music, rare and transgressive films, and quite a lot of mischief in the toilets. In an age of digital distribution and struggling cinemas, the stories of people who found their community there, a spot to sleep off a hander, or to be inspired, the film becomes an urgent testament to the power of place, the importance of curation, and the magic of showing up and watching something strange in a room full of fellow weirdos, insomniacs, delinquents, druggies, and artists.

No additional SIFF screenings

Critical Zone (2023 | Iran,Germany | 99 minutes | Ali Ahmadzadeh)

A cooly virtuosic introductory shot tracks an ambulance through tunnels deep under Tehran where dozens of young men pick up sacks of drugs before retreating back into the city. From there, we follow along with one of them, Amir, as he returns home to his beloved dog, divides up his haul, and loads into his car to spend the rest of the evening being guided from customer to customer by the unflappable female voice of his GPS. Shot in secret with non-professional actors, his deliveries reveal prismatic facets of society rarely seen in Iranian film. There are prostitutes, street vendors, and a mother desperate for relief for her addict son; we also see palliative elder care, nurses, and flight attendants as links in the opium trade. The vignettes can sometimes try the viewer’s patience, but as viewed from his ever-roving automobile Amir’s interactions with all of them are consistently caring, sometimes romantic, and often illuminating. Perhaps too much so, as director Ali Ahmadzadeh was banned from leaving Iran to attend the premiere at Locarno last year, where he won the festival’s Golden Leopard for best film.

No additional SIFF screenings