Leon Lučev stars as a man just trying to get by during the Kosovo war in The Load
THE LOAD (TERET) (Ognjen Glavonić, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, August 30
212-875-5600
grasshopperfilm.com
www.filmlinc.org
Eight years in the making, Ognjen Glavonić’s narrative feature debut, The Load, is a tense, gripping drama set amid the NATO bombings during the Kosovo war in Yugoslavia in 1999. After the factory where he worked closes down, Vlada Stefanovic (Leon Lučev) takes a job driving a truck from the countryside to Belgrade. The mission is reminiscent of the ones in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and William Friedkin’s underrated remake, Sorcerer, except in those films, the drivers, played by Yves Montand and Roy Scheider, respectively, knew they were transporting dangerous cargoes of nitroglycerin and dynamite. Not only won’t his facilitators tell Vlada what’s in the back of the truck, but it’s padlocked so he can’t look inside. He just has to follow two very basic rules: “Once you start driving, there’s no stopping” and “Avoid traffic and don’t attract attention.”
The film, inspired by real events that Glavonić documented in 2016’s Depth Two, opens with a dark, beautiful shot of a vast mountain landscape, bombs going off in the distance while a van slowly moves down a winding path. Vlada is first shown from outside the vehicle, his head leaning against the window, a forest and a burning house reflected in the glass; he appears to be trapped inside, resigned to his fate. This is not the life he has chosen, risking everything so he can bring home money to his wife and son. For much of the movie, he is in the claustrophobic cab of his truck or in corners of small rooms, as if there is no way out. He reluctantly picks up a young hitchhiker, Paja (Pavle Čemerikić), who says he knows the way to Belgrade, avoiding roads and bridges that have been bombed.
Paja (Pavle Čemerikić) hitches a ride in Ognjen Glavonić’s suspenseful road movie
Glavonić occasionally strays from the central narrative, temporarily following the stories of minor, peripheral characters — the director has said that he structured the film like a tree, with many branches representing various aspects of everyday life at that harsh time — but he always returns to Vlada, the tree’s trunk, who smokes cigarette after cigarette, using his father’s lighter, an engraved memento from the 1943 Battle of Sutjeska. He doesn’t say much, rarely smiles, just forges ahead. When he walks into the middle of a party, the first words sung by the band are “like a wounded bird”; he is a victim of war, collateral damage. “Take me away from here,” the song continues, but there is nowhere to go but to his mysterious destination.
A coproduction of Serbia, Croatia, France, Qatar, and Iran, The Load is a masterpiece of suspense, a caustic thriller gorgeously photographed by Tatjana Krstevski, often with a roaming, off-balance handheld camera, with subtly immersive sound design by Jakov Munižaba, making it feel like you’re on the road with Vlada, seeing and hearing what he’s experiencing. Croatian actor Lučev (Silent Sonata, I Can Barely Remember the Day) is magnetic as Vlada, a kind of everyman caught up in a terrible situation that he can do nothing about. The Load opens August 30 at Lincoln Center, with Krstevski and producer Stefan Ivančić introducing the 7:15 screening that night; Ivančić will also introduce the 5:00 show on August 31.
Roberto Minervini follows up his Texas Trilogy – The Passage, Low Tide, and Stop the Pounding Heart – with the powerful sociopolitical call to action, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? The film is shot in sharp, distinctive black-and-white by cinematographer Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos so that it looks like a fictional work from the civil rights era, but it is an all-too-real documentary that shows what’s happening in the US today, even though far too many Americans would deny the inherent realities the movie depicts. Italian-born director Minervini, who is based in the American south, tells four poignant stories steeped in oppression: Judy Hill is struggling to get by, running a bar that has become an important meeting place for the Tremé community while also caring for her elderly mother, Dorothy; Ashlei King hopes that her young sons, fourteen-year-old Ronaldo King and nine-year-old Titus Turner, come back safe after going out to play in a junkyard; Mardi Gras Indian Chief Kevin Goodman melds black and Native American traditions in changing times; and Krystal Muhammad and the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense protest the killings of two African American men at the hands of police.
“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m just looking for guidance in how to be a blind artist,” filmmaker Rodney Evans says in Vision Portraits, his remarkable new documentary opening August 9 at Metrograph. Evans follows three artists as they deal with severe visual impairment but refuse to give up on their dreams as he seeks experimental treatment for his retinitis pigmentosa. Manhattan photographer John Dugdale lost most of his eyesight from CMV retinitis when he was thirty-two but is using his supposed disability to his advantage, taking stunning photos bathed in blue, inspired by the aurora borealis he sees when he closes his eyes. “Proving to myself that I could still function in a way that was not expected of a blind person was really gonna be the thing,” he says. “It’s fun to live in this bliss.” Bronx dancer Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and developed iritis and glaucoma in the other, but she is shown working on a new piece called Nearly Sighted that incorporates the audience into her story. “How can I use my art form as a way of sharing what it is that I’m experiencing?” she asks.
