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CANNES 2021 Special Screenings

Review: Mariner of the Mountains

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- CANNES 2021: Karim Aïnouz takes us on an enthralling visual journey into his thoughts and feelings as he ventures to Algeria, his father's birthplace, for the first time

Review: Mariner of the Mountains

Anyone who has ever experienced growing up in a country different from the one where one or both of their parents were born, and then visiting that parental land for the first time, will find much to connect with in Mariner of the Mountains, playing as a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. It's an enthralling, inventive and deeply moving personal essay directed by Karim Aïnouz, whose The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Karim Aïnouz
film profile
]
won the Un Certain Regard Prize in 2019.

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Mariner of the Mountains sees a 54-year-old Aïnouz going to Algeria for the first time in January 2019. It is the place where the father he never met is from, and where – high up in the Atlas Mountains, in Kabylia – some of his extended family live. It's a journey where the director is unsure of what he will find, but he believes there will be answers. His mother and father split when she was pregnant. His dad went off to fight in the revolution in Algeria, and son would never meet father. What would his life have been like had he grown up in Algeria? What was his father like? Is he like him? What is Algeria like? Is it similar to Brazil, where he grew up? These and many other questions concerning alienation, place and identity swirl in his brain. Here, we know what is on Aïnouz's mind, as the voice-over is mainly in the form of an imaginary letter he is writing to his recently deceased mother.

He carries his camera with him everywhere, and when he's not shooting video, he's taking photographs; these images also make it onto the screen. This memoir is a window into his mind and thought process, which occasionally goes off at tangents. The film's opening segment reveals the meaning of the title before he jumps on a boat as part of his journey home. When he meets a young girl, who reminds him of his mother, there is a sequence where he imagines that he will make a film with this member of his extended family, which would see her become the star of a sci-fi movie. He even meets a man named Karim Aïnouz, born the same year that he was born, his doppelgänger. Is this how his life would have turned out? Is the director lucky to have grown up in Brazil and ended up a filmmaker?

The director’s sense of displacement and disorientation is reflected in the film’s audio and visual style. There are constant changes in the colour palette and the grain of the images. Filters, especially red ones, alter the feeling of the frame, so it stops having the realism of documentary and becomes more like a fever dream, a sci-fi. It adds to the sense that we are watching a poem. Archive material appears, enabling the director to look back at the history of Algeria, briefly telling us of the battle for independence and democracy without going into too much detail about the ravages and outrage of French colonial rule.

The feelings that the movie evokes, of nostalgia, yearning and loss, and the comforting tones of the voice-over, are reminiscent of Petra Costa's IDFA-winning The Edge of Democracy. Two Brazilian directors at the top of their game, both inspired by the essay work of Jean-Luc Godard. In the digital age, the cinematic essay has become our new diary, an inventive and safe place to reveal our inner selves.

Mariner of the Mountains is a Brazilian-French-German co-production staged by VideoFilmes, MPM Film and Big Sister. The Match Factory is responsible for its international sales.

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