Movie Diary 12/29/2022

More movies watched for a film-festival jury, thus diary-listed here without much comment.

You Won’t Be Alone (Goran Stolevski, 2022). Witches in a rural area in 19th-century Macedonia, shape-shifting and mostly fleeing the ur-witch who rules the area. Sometimes the cursed protagonist mutates into people played by Noomi Rapace and Alice Englert.

World War III (Houman Seyyedi, 2022). An Iranian film – initially black-comic, eventually melodramatic – about a sad-sack day laborer who finds himself in an extremely unlikely position on a film crew shooting a Nazi picture.

Beautiful Beings (Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson, 2022). By the seaside in Iceland, a lost, weird adolescent kid finds himself befriended by a trio of wised-up peers, their lives soon overwhelmed by various kinds of toxicity.

Mars One (Gabriel Martins, 2022). The four members of a working-class Brazilian family endure a series of cruel bumps – which are not exactly caused by the recent election of Bolsonaro, but perhaps not entirely unrelated, either.

Cinema Sabaya (Orit Fouks Rotem, 2022). A small group of Israeli and Arab women take part in an adult-education class in filmmaking; their go-getter instructor encourages them to use their own lives as subject matter for their experiments. But there may be something else going on, too.