Scaffolding (Pigumim)

SCAFFOLDING (Pigumim)             B                                

Israel  Poland  (90 mi)  2017  d:  Matan Yair

A film that explores a different aspect of Jewish life in Israel, namely a working underclass.  Within that background, the film takes us into a remedial educational high school class where we find 17-year old Asher (Asher Lux) in a literature class with other kids with behavior issues, most of whom joke that they can barely read.  Without ever specifying a medical diagnosis, Asher likely has attention deficit disorder (ADD) issues, where he impulsively blurts out questions without waiting to be called, often viewed as a classroom disturbance, as he has what are called temperament issues, while he’s also prone to violence, but that’s another issue.  The film is directed by Matan Yair, who’s also a novelist, having spent nearly ten years teaching a literature class, where Asher is a non-professional actor who was chosen from his classroom, who’s onscreen nearly the entire film, becoming an extremely compelling character study due to his inherent authenticity, which is really the centerpiece of the film.  Shot on a $400,000 budget, the film is interestingly a joint Israeli and Polish production, using a Polish cinematographer, Bartosz Bieniek, which offers a more expressive look to the film, moving from close-ups and handheld camerawork to recurring outdoor shots of Asher working on a building scaffold at all hours of the day with other laborers, as he’s being groomed to inherit his father’s scaffolding business.  The director’s use of time gaps and jump cuts often feel jarring to viewers, using abrasive moments to emulate the often unpredictable behavior of the central character.  Only one other film like this comes to mind, Sam Fleischner’s Stand Clear of the Closing Doors (2013), which uses an autistic actor in a film that accentuates the heightened sensory aspects of his personality disorder — a really beautiful film, by the way.  But if Asher is a compelling character, so too is his teacher, Rami (Ami Smolarchik), who projects an intelligent calm throughout all the interruptions, showing infinite patience, asking provocative questions, and always having the student’s best interests in mind, knowing they may never advance to college, that this may be the last time most will ever have any contact with poems, short stories, or great literature.  

Surprisingly, Asher’s father, Milo (Yaacov Cohen), shows little interest in his son continuing his education, finding it a waste of time, as instead he’s grooming him to take over the family business and has him regularly working on the scaffolds, believing hard labor is what’s good for him, as it saps his aggression and helps stabilize his behavior issues, though he’s concerned about Asher’s ability to manage other employees, many of whom tend to be older immigrants with complicated backgrounds.  Milo is an ex-con who wants his son to stay out of trouble even after he’s gone, thinking work is the best medicine.  There is no mention of a mother, with women almost entirely absent from his life, surrounding himself exclusively with male friends, like fellow laborers or teammates on the soccer field, where women are typically depicted through negative stereotypes and derogatory language.  So this is largely an examination of male behavior through a prism of a learning disability, where Rami becomes an alternate father figure, offering contradictory views from his own father, suggesting there are other options besides the family business, where education has its advantages, as it builds a healthier society.  But Asher is like a bull in a China shop, belligerent and continually exhibiting inappropriate behavior, where in the eyes of others he’s a troublemaker.  But Rami sees him as an earnest and sincere kid, easily sidetracked and losing concentration, no doubt, but with constant guidance he accepts instructions, as he’s willing to learn.  In class, few do any homework or take actual interest in the material, as they quickly lose focus and go off on tangents, but Rami patiently reels them back in, reading the material himself to make sure they’re acquainted with the classics, where the teacher feels it’s his obligation to help them navigate their way through the material.  It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does, like Asher walking up to him in the hallways afterwards and urgently recalling one of the lessons. 

By chance, Asher overhears Rami ask another class to think of questions they might want to ask their fathers but never would, and write them down for class the next day, which prompts Asher to write his own questions for his overly stern father that he dutifully gives to his teacher.  What’s most intriguing about Asher is there is no filter, as he simply blurts out what’s on his mind, wearing his heart on his sleeve, making it clear what he’s thinking, as he’s totally transparent, with no secrets or ulterior motives.  Rami sees the goodness in this kid, and continually helps steer him on the right path, helping him pass one of his oral final examinations by being flexible enough to ask the same question in another way, as what he was interested in was knowing whether or not he knew the correct answer.  Always told in a naturalistic light, the contrast between father figures is intriguing, as both want what’s best for him, but they pursue it by taking such different paths.  His father grows ill, needing to have an operation, while Rami has his own personal issues that dramatically alter the narrative path of the film in a spellbinding sequence of its own, leaving Asher stranded, as if on an island, at least temporarily, perhaps for the first time in his life, having to navigate his own way through the final exams.  Other teachers are not as helpful as Rami, remaining rigidly authoritative, offering no guidance whatsoever, allowing him simply to sink or swim on his own, where he’s more inclined to fail.  Asher brings a tightly wound intensity to the role, where his confrontational manner, however, feels intimidating to other teachers and administrators, where misbehaving is part of his personality, often veering out of control, where there’s a thin line that separates him from criminal behavior, at times crossing it, as he has no internal mechanism to stop him from going there.  Nonetheless, this film offers extraordinary scrutiny into the examination of a male psyche that is damaged, viewed as throwaway goods, representing a near invisible underclass that is marginalized, suddenly thrust into the mainstream, fully integrated into the fabric of society. 

The Iron Ministry (update)

THE IRON MINISTRY        B+
USA  China  (82 mi)  2014  d:  J.P. Sniadecki

Guest review by Evan Wang

With the perfect Mandarin he speaks, director J.P. Sniadecki doesn’t leave the audience much indication of his existence in this documentary, even though he is apparently involved in most of the conversations with other passengers. His face is never shown, but not deliberately hidden. Quite brilliantly, he managed to become an undistinguished part of the environment; an observer, but not more so than anyone else on the trains.

Being a member of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, where acclaimed documentaries Leviathan and Manakamana were produced, Sniadecki has obviously added a distinctive touch of his own to the lab’s elaborately conceived cinema vérité style. As shown in The Iron Ministry, his films might seem less “sensory” or meditative, but definitely have more to say on the ethnographic part, benefiting from the higher extent of involvement. After all, it is almost an impossible task to be a “fly on the wall” at probably the most packed location in the most populous country of this world.

After an opening that consists of complete darkness and the noise generated by a departing train, the audience is invited on board to start an overnight journey across China, which in fact took the filmmaker 3 years to shoot. Therefore, besides spatial dimensions, we are also travelling through time. In one of the very first eye-catching scenes, a blood-dripping liver just hangs there while someone doing his butcher works in the soiled cart. For me, a train-traveler in China for about 20 years, this is something I have never seen. According to Sniadecki, trains like that have already disappeared from the rails by the time the documentary is finished, and we would find ourselves in the comfy space inside the newest bullet trains toward the end of this film. Between these two points, we hear from all kinds of people from different parts of the country, talking about their stories, political opinions and future plans, including a “miracle kid” improvising a funny parody of the do’s and don’ts announced through the loudspeakers. More importantly, we also see them reading, knitting, dining, and sleeping in every available corner of the carts. Balancing all those are rather abstract shots of sceneries outside the windows, usually blurred by speed, and close-ups of curious mechanical parts on the trains, which reminded me of what I saw earlier this year in an American docudrama, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. Also echoing that film, the sometimes disorganized collage is well unified by the delicate sound design, mixing together broadcasted music and chaotic tumult to an intriguing effect. At certain points, it is pretty much hypnotic, but for anyone who shares the same experience, only in the way that it is supposed to be during such a journey. At the end of it, the camera lingers on piles of discarded packages from instant food, and other trash waiting to be cleaned up. Instead of the most awful place to be trapped in for two days of your time, however, it looks more like the aftermath of a carnival. It is not just what goes on aboard the trains, a temporary respite before they reach their next destination, it is the life of Chinese people transitioning into the future.

Before going back to darkness, the last identifiable image that appears on the screen is an eye, probably from the train operator, once again implying what the film is really about. Theoretically, filming on trains is prohibited in China, but for Sniadecki and the people present in his film, what is not allowed to be documented, is seen.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *    *     *     *     *

Postscript – guest reviewed earlier, The Iron Ministry, previously unseen by this viewer

THE IRON MINISTRY           B+               

USA  China  (82 mi)  2014  d:  J.P. Sniadecki                       film's website 

One of the better ways to learn about a new city or geographical region is to simply immerse yourself directly into the middle, walk around, and then pay close attention to what you observe.  This unusual film offers a window into the rapidly changing transition taking place in modern China.  Providing a snapshot of various journeys on China’s railway system, American filmmaker and academic J.P. Sniadecki creates an interesting experiment in social realism, using abstract experimental imagery to explore China’s changing place in the world.  Shot over the course of three years between 2011 and 2013 on different railway systems throughout contemporary China, the footage is cleverly edited together to create the impression of a single trip, what the director calls one “cinema-train,” where the resulting film takes place entirely inside the cramped space aboard the trains, and where each train starts and ends remains unclear, but the result is an incredibly intimate portrait of the Chinese population traveling throughout their own country.  A fascinating slice-of-life documentary where Sniadecki writes, shoots, directs, produces, edits, and is a sound recordist in a film that is amazingly ambitious, where the role of the filmmaker is like an unseen guide who may initiate conversations shown onscreen, where passengers may be seen talking directly to the filmmaker.  Sniadecki is an American born on a goat farm in Michigan, who grew up in the rustbelt of Northern Indiana, studied philosophy at Grand Valley State University, flying to Shanghai in May of 1999 to study Chinese philosophy and culture and has lived and worked for several years in China and has learned to speak fluent Chinese, making several earlier films in China including YUMEN (2013), about an abandoned oil town in China’s northwest Gansu Province, and PEOPLE’S PARK (2012), one continuous 78-minute long tracking shot on a summer afternoon through the crowded spaces of the People’s Park in Chengdu, Sichuan, where here as well the man with the movie camera is often stared at out of the corner of people’s eyes, but his identity is never revealed.  Beginning and ending in the pitch black of the train stations, the audience is introduced by means of sound alone, aided by the exquisite sound designer Ernst Karel, one of the key figures of the Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University (SEL), the school where the director pursued his doctorate in media anthropology, creators of an unembellished, starkly realistic style of documentary, where this film bears a close resemblance to Manakamana (2013).  The abstract nature of the initial images can be a bit unsettling, a black screen followed by geometric designs that bear no resemblance whatsoever to a recognizable reality, where it takes awhile before discovering you are actually on a train.  There’s no voiceover to place you where you are, as you’re never anchored to any specific event.  There’s no music track.  All you hear is the sound heard within the train itself.  As Sniadecki explains, from My Cultural Landscape: Planes, Trains, and Musicals:

To capture as many different encounters as possible, I took trains throughout China, striving to be thorough without a need to be exhaustive, compelled more by the desire for movement and encounter than by any documentary notion of coverage. I hopped on trains in many different corners of China, as well as through the major arteries of the railway system. Some rides were 40+ hours, others were 20 minutes. I never had a clear goal for each journey.

Ernst [Karel] is an amazing sound artist. I have informal training in music as well, so we approached the film’s sound design as a sonic composition. Attention to attack, release, resonant frequencies, atmosphere, dynamic range, and tonality all played a part in the design. We were open to and excited about the musicality of the train itself, whether by including songs actually played and recorded on the train, or by using the train sounds themselves to compose something akin to musique concrete.

The West is currently fascinated by China, by just how vast and huge it is, becoming a symbol of transition, where major cities have already built skyscrapers and modernized, offering a dream of prospective job opportunities, while the rural areas have yet to see similar signs of progress, where this film allows unique insight into an often unknown culture by providing such closeness into the everyday experience.  One of the things the film does best is provide insightful observations on personal space, where Sniadecki’s camera moves slowly throughout the economy class sections of overcrowded trains, where every inch of available space is inhabited by humans and their cargo, packed to capacity with exhausted riders sleeping on the floors as well as the aisles, where it’s inconceivable that this meets any safety standard, as should there be a fire or accident, it would be near impossible for anyone to escape.  Nonetheless, this super-confined space on the train provides the director an opportunity to mix himself into the conversations happening around him, where a whole range of conversations may discuss culture, politics, ethnicity or religion mixed together with other people who are just traveling, some are happily engaging in a drinking session, while others can be seen sleeping, reading, playing cards, or listening to music, where you’re forced to ignore or pay particularly close attention to those who are seen nearby.  The camera follows closely behind the train’s official vendor and his food cart as he sidesteps the stragglers on the floor, slowly navigating his way through the myriad of obstacles in the car offering packaged snack food, though he’s out of instant noodles, which is what everyone’s continually asking for.  Another view offers just a glimpse of the floor as someone attempts the futile job of sweeping underneath the seats and the aisles, creating a mass of garbage that is swept throughout the length of the train car.  Perhaps most surprising is seeing an elderly butcher smoking using a bamboo cigar-holder while hanging his freshly cut slabs of meat in an available open space on the train, blood still dripping on the floor, obviously selling his wares, where there’s no conceivable refrigeration, and who knows the length of his journey.  One of the shots is a view of oscillating fans attached to the ceiling which are the only means of ventilation.  At one stop, people are seen boarding the trains loaded up from head to toe with fresh farm produce, which they obviously intend to sell, carrying baskets of vegetables on each end of a pole around their shoulders, making it extremely difficult to get through the door, but when they do, they are easily consuming the space of about three individuals.  It becomes clear that Sniadecki is enamored with Chinese life and culture, where his interest becomes our interest, and his loose narrative allows us to submerge ourselves in his images and eavesdrop on nearby conversations.  By immersing the viewer so completely into the experience of riding a train, the film itself becomes part of the journey.. 

According to a New York Times interview with Sniadecki, Q. and A.: J. P. Sniadecki on China, Trains and ‘The Iron Ministry’, the term “Ministry” in the title refers specifically to “the Ministry of Railways, which was considered a secretive yet expansive ‘kingdom unto itself’ within a government known for its opacity.  The Chinese Ministry of Railways once had its own schools, courts, housing, factories, and police force.  The three years that I spent shooting this film coincided with the last three years of the Ministry’s reign as a separate world:  In March 2013, after high-level cases of corruption were exposed, the Ministry was officially dissolved and transformed into the state-owned China Railways Corporation.  It is said that control over this corporation is divided between China’s elites, and ongoing privatization and expansion have been easy to see.”  While the initial trains seen are so rickety and antiquated that they’ve already been eliminated by the nation’s new railway system, replaced by faster, more modernized trains.  Sniadecki spends more time in the chaos of the cheaper sections, barely lingering at all in the more upscale areas, which are quieter, considerably less populated, where passengers are seen sitting apart from one another and are usually engaged in solitary activities with their smartphones.  In an 80-minute film, most time is spent observing, while the conversations themselves comprise only about 20 minutes or so, where two women talk about the horrible wages and working conditions in factories, continually having to work longer hours, both yearning for something better.  Several articulate young men speak about the rising costs of housing, making it difficult to buy property, which becomes a demand by the family of the bride in prospective marriages, making it exceedingly difficult to marry young.  All seem to agree that subsidized housing is a joke, only given to those with political connections, a social condition not likely to change anytime soon as there is no democratic means to vote for a change, instead they can only idealistically hope that the Party will listen more and pay attention to those people they are supposed to represent.  If not, they may have to leave the country to seek a better life elsewhere.  This view is not all that different from American citizens losing faith in their government, where politicians often feel disconnected to those more ordinary citizens they were elected to serve.  There is an open discussion on Hui Muslim minorities in China, claiming it’s difficult to find mosques in China, yet whose mere existence allows one overly optimistic Han Chinese passenger to conclude that China treats all minorities well.  But this is countered by an intense intellectual discussion between Sniadecki and Tibetan author and activist Tsering Woeser (unidentified in the film, as she is simply seen as another passenger, who along with fellow Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei published a book documenting Tibetan self-immolations entitled Immolations in Tibet: The Shame of the World, while according to Prominent Tibetan Activist Tsering Woeser Claims ..., the government is suspected in deleting her recent post on Facebook referring to the self-immolation of Tibetan monk Pawo Kalsang Yeshi who was the 142nd monk to set themselves on fire in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet since 2009), one of the few Tibetan authors and poets to write in Chinese, yet who eloquently expresses how China is using trains and their ability to reach hard-to-access regions to literally rape Tibet economically by flooding the Tibet Autonomous Region with Chinese citizens into Tibet, with their primary goal being to create a suffocating economic stranglehold, where their presence is creating an elite, super rich class of Chinese, while previously the wealth was more evenly spread throughout the entire region, comparing Tibetans to American Indians, suggesting the role of the railroad industry in each instance was used for exploitation and genocide.  Because of her intimate familiarity with the subject, she was no ordinary passenger, but felt like a plant in perhaps a scene staged by the filmmaker in order to get this particular message across.  Easily the most amusing part of the film comes from a mischievous young boy perched in an upper bunk, seen making sarcastic train announcements in the beginning that take on a surreal quality, a moment that does not feel staged, but there’s absolutely no doubt that he was “performing” for the camera.  One is left wondering what this imaginative kid would be up to in another ten years or so: 

All passengers, your attention please. The 3838-438 train from the United States to Afghanistan is about to depart. We ask that those who are not aboard please take someone else’s luggage, take someone else’s wife, and hurry aboard. Those who have explosives, bombs, and other inflammable materials with them please hurry aboard and ignite them where there are crowds to contribute to our nation’s population control policy. The train is moving fast, so please extend your hands and head out of the window as far as possible, making it easier to lose them all at once.

This is a civilized train, so please feel free to piss, shit, and throw trash all over the aisle. Other passengers may spit on your face and you may spit in the mouths of others, which is good for the thorough absorption of protein. As a disposable train, this one has been operating safely for 30 years. If you discover your head over your feet, you’ve arrived at the last stop: Heaven.

The Iron Ministry

THE IRON MINISTRY        B+
USA  China  (82 mi)  2014  d:  J.P. Sniadecki

Guest review by Evan Wang

With the perfect Mandarin he speaks, director J.P. Sniadecki doesn’t leave the audience much indication of his existence in this documentary, even though he is apparently involved in most of the conversations with other passengers. His face is never shown, but not deliberately hidden. Quite brilliantly, he managed to become an undistinguished part of the environment; an observer, but not more so than anyone else on the trains.

Being a member of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, where acclaimed documentaries Leviathan and Manakamana were produced, Sniadecki has obviously added a distinctive touch of his own to the lab’s elaborately conceived cinema vérité style. As shown in The Iron Ministry, his films might seem less “sensory” or meditative, but definitely have more to say on the ethnographic part, benefiting from the higher extent of involvement. After all, it is almost an impossible task to be a “fly on the wall” at probably the most packed location in the most populous country of this world.

After an opening that consists of complete darkness and the noise generated by a departing train, the audience is invited on board to start an overnight journey across China, which in fact took the filmmaker 3 years to shoot. Therefore, besides spatial dimensions, we are also travelling through time. In one of the very first eye-catching scenes, a blood-dripping liver just hangs there while someone doing his butcher works in the soiled cart. For me, a train-traveler in China for about 20 years, this is something I have never seen. According to Sniadecki, trains like that have already disappeared from the rails by the time the documentary is finished, and we would find ourselves in the comfy space inside the newest bullet trains toward the end of this film. Between these two points, we hear from all kinds of people from different parts of the country, talking about their stories, political opinions and future plans, including a “miracle kid” improvising a funny parody of the do’s and don’ts announced through the loudspeakers. More importantly, we also see them reading, knitting, dining, and sleeping in every available corner of the carts. Balancing all those are rather abstract shots of sceneries outside the windows, usually blurred by speed, and close-ups of curious mechanical parts on the trains, which reminded me of what I saw earlier this year in an American docudrama, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. Also echoing that film, the sometimes disorganized collage is well unified by the delicate sound design, mixing together broadcasted music and chaotic tumult to an intriguing effect. At certain points, it is pretty much hypnotic, but for anyone who shares the same experience, only in the way that it is supposed to be during such a journey. At the end of it, the camera lingers on piles of discarded packages from instant food, and other trash waiting to be cleaned up. Instead of the most awful place to be trapped in for two days of your time, however, it looks more like the aftermath of a carnival. It is not just what goes on aboard the trains, a temporary respite before they reach their next destination, it is the life of Chinese people transitioning into the future.

Before going back to darkness, the last identifiable image that appears on the screen is an eye, probably from the train operator, once again implying what the film is really about. Theoretically, filming on trains is prohibited in China, but for Sniadecki and the people present in his film, what is not allowed to be documented, is seen.

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Hurricane Sandy photos of the floodwaters in the NY subway, October 29, 2012

STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS      B+                       

USA  (102 mi)  2013  d:  Sam Fleischner          Official site

While the title doesn’t lend itself to greatness, or even anything out of the ordinary, but this film is anything but ordinary.  Taking a cue from Morris Engel’s groundbreaking film Little Fugitive (1953), which uses a cinéma-vérité documentary style for a fictionalized tale about a 7-year old child who gets lost overnight at Coney Island, seen from the child’s perspective, Fleischner’s naturalistic style accentuates the worldly conditions surrounding a 13-year old Mexican boy Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez, a non-professional actor with Asperger syndrome) on the autism spectrum who gets lost in the city of New York.  What’s particularly interesting is we’re not just seeing the world as a child would see it, but as an autistic child, where the sensory conditions are clearly heightened.  Inspired by the many stories of kids on the autism spectrum who wandered off from school or their homes, the outcome is often tragic, yet they are an inevitable thread of the world around us, largely unseen where they may as well be perceived as invisible, especially a child of color who is all but ignored.  Ricky spends most of his time quietly alone, never uttering a word to anyone, drawing pictures of strange and mysterious creatures, even as he lives with his family near the beach of Far Rockaway, Queens, where his mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) is a house cleaner, his father Ricardo Sr. (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is away from the home on construction jobs, while his 15-year old sister Carla (Azul Zorrilla) shows little understanding for her brother’s problems, feeling overburdened, growing easily irritated and impatient with always having to deal with him, and is more concerned with her own teenage life.  When she decides to go shopping and “forgets” to pick him up from school one day to walk him home, she believes it’s no big deal, that he’s old enough to get home on his own, but when phone attempts fail, his mother freaks out, knowing he’s all alone out there with nobody to help him.  Unfortunately, when Carla doesn’t show up, Ricky curiously follows a man with what he perceives is a magical dragon symbol on the back of his jacket heading into the subway, leading him onto an extended odyssey continuously riding the A-train to Manhattan and back, becoming a treacherous journey of survival. 

Because he doesn’t know the name of his subway stop, Ricky remains stuck in a kind of Sisyphean purgatory that takes on a life of its own, endlessly repeating his journey for days on end, where the sounds and sights of this subterranean existence are all too familiar to those that ride the subway, often swarming with people seemingly smashed together on subway platforms, while the screeching noise can be overwhelming at times.  As he sits alone connected to ear plugs, we never know what, if anything, he’s listening to while impromptu jazz music echoes through the corridors of the subway station.  While a hip-hop dance routine is performed inside a subway car, the overall mood is one of utter indifference, as a train ride is transitory, a means of getting from one place to another, a temporary inconvenience in terms of a loss of time, where people routinely avoid eye contact or speaking to strangers.  Lost in thought, the film takes on an abstract mosaic of impressionist images, where seen out the window of the front car, upcoming lights are continually changing shape, becoming energy fields that tap into the subconscious, while above ground buildings and roads whiz by instantaneously.  As time goes on, Ricky’s disassociation only grows, becoming positively heartbreaking when we realize he has no means to eat or drink, and each time he attempts to use the subway rest rooms they are chain locked at night, leaving him in a perilous predicament where he’s forced to urinate on himself, one of the few times fellow passengers actually acknowledge his existence, as they further taunt and humiliate him.  While you’d think a train employee would notice him, as the smell alone ought to attract attention, but he is surprisingly never rescued by anyone and instead completely ignored.  He is able to find an unused, half-empty water bottle, and even some small change enough to purchase a bag of potato chips, but after more than a week his state of mind deteriorates and he grows delusional from hunger and thirst, where he begins hallucinating, seeing fellow passengers turn into monsters, where reality shifts into another dimension with sights and sounds routinely altered.  This mental dilemma forces him to fear almost everyone, often seen scurrying away from perceived signs of trouble.     

The only distraction from Ricky’s harrowing journey is a strange fascination with odd shapes and designs, where he can be seen staring at mysterious patterns on the subway walls.  While Ricky’s dilemma is a purely subjective experience, so is that of his family, as his mother searches endlessly for him in all the nearby locations, gaining help from a shoe store saleswoman, Carmen (Marsha Stephanie Blake), where Ricky likes to spend time in the store staring at the different color designs of the shoes.  She helps put up signs with Ricky’s picture on it in the neighborhood and encourages the family to make a police report, despite their undocumented status, but the police are little help, continually finding missing kids that bear no resemblance to Ricky.  By the time Ricardo Sr. shows up, Mariana already thinks the worst, that Ricky may never return home alive.  Their search through the neighborhood is another impressionistic montage of wordless images, while Mariana also reports that he’s missing to his school, where she receives a lecture about how underfunded the school is to help special needs children, suggesting there are schools with specially trained staff that would be a better fit, which is an infuriorating insult under normal circumstances, but emphasizes the indifference Ricky faces, where even his school has little interest in helping him, and now he’s lost and utterly on his own.  Adding to the growing dilemma are reports that Hurricane Sandy is fast approaching, with amazing footage of a ferocious ocean with gigantic waves crashing onto the beach, where an ominous announcement is made over a loudspeaker that no trains will be running after 7 pm due to the anticipated flooding of the subway tunnels.  Once more finding himself abandoned and alone, he sees the fleeting image of the man with the dragon symbol on his jacket, following him to the edge of the platform and into the darkness of the tunnel, even as the audience hears disturbing sounds of onrushing water.  The next day, naturalistic shots of the storm’s aftermath are devastating, like the remnants of a tornado, leaving a path of washed up destruction in its wake.  The actual storm appeared during the final days of shooting, where the dramatic footage adds an apocalyptic edge of doom to the finale, where so much was lost in the destruction, where Ricky’s world comes to resemble the shadowy eye of the storm, a murky existence where real and unreal merge, an oasis of perceived calmness surrounded by indescribable wreckage.