Rebuilding

 

Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman

director with Kali Reis and Josh O'Connor

actress Kali Reis

REBUILDING           B+                                                                                                        USA  (96 mi)  2025  d: Max Walker-Silverman

Film is an act of imagination.  It is the bright light in a dark room.  So I made this film because only through imagining a better world can we hope for one.  And only through hoping for a better world can we fight for one.  I made this film because if loss must be an ongoing ingredient of our lives, as it must, then care and healing and rebirth must be, too.                    —Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman, “Rebuilding” Reminds Us to Seek the Balm of Community 

From the maker of 2022 Top Ten List #8 A Love Song, this opens up a window into a rarely seen world in this critically praised, quiet, and empathetic little indie gem starring versatile British actor Josh O’Connor (5 major roles in the last 18 months) as Dusty, a humble Colorado cattle rancher navigating life in a temporary FEMA trailer park (timely in an unfortunate way, coinciding with the real wildfires that devastated parts of Southern California) after his home and extensive ranch territory that have been in his family for generations are completely destroyed by a horrific wildfire that consumes thousands of acres.  Premiering at Sundance in the same year as Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (2025), which this resembles (neither was awarded any prizes), yet that film garnered all the attention, fueled, perhaps by the money from Netflix, causing this film to get lost, flying completely under the radar with no promotional fanfare, though it actually offers greater depth and more profound emotional resiliency.  Delicate and tender, this is the kind of film that only independent American cinema can offer, far more naturalistic than his earlier effort, reminiscent of Chloé Zhao’s 2021 #5 Film of the Year Nomadland (2020) in terms of its depiction of America and its vast panoramic landscapes, accentuating the plight of marginalized people in the wake of tragedy, where sadness and personal struggles are largely overshadowed by the immense presence of the natural world.  O’Connor is excellent in a subdued and understated performance as Dusty, a reserved, overly polite, and grief-stricken man of few words, whose self-reliance and independence seem to have isolated him from others, especially his loved ones, as he’s a man with too much pride to ever ask anyone for help, yet his actions speak loudly, essentially revealing that when you’ve lost everything, what you’ve got left are friends, family, and a surrounding community, who are not to be underestimated, as they mean everything.  Patient and slow-paced, mostly told though Dusty’s perspective, a cowboy who wonders who and what he is if he’s not a rancher, this is a gently humanist story, set in southern Colorado, where it’s times like these that make you revaluate what’s really important in your life, as it may not be the same things that mattered before the fire.  The sheer devastation of losing everything changes things, as you no longer have the comfortable rhythm of your daily support system in place, starting the day milking the cows, bailing hay, feeding the livestock, herding cattle, and mending fences, as the sparse life in a FEMA trailer is totally different, where everything is reduced to the bare essentials.  He thinks he might seek work during the calving season at his cousin’s farm in Montana, 500 miles away, until he realizes how much his daughter is attached to him.  Working with former NYU film school classmates, production designer Juliana Barreto Barreto and co-editor Ramzi Bashour, though his closest collaborator is cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, exquisitely shot in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, the largest alpine valley in the world, where going months without rain make it a tinderbox ready to explode, but we never see the fire, only the aftermath, though we do see an opening abstract montage of floating embers carried by the winds.  Beautifully establishing a not so ordinary sense of place, with a sparse script written by the Telluride native director featuring dialogue that sounds organic, as there are no villains, and there’s not an ounce of melodrama, accentuating the kinds of figures rarely seen in films, as the relationship between humans and nature, between all natural things, must fluctuate, ebb and flow, leaving us open to change, as loss is universal, where sometimes it takes a calamity to realize what we have.  

Deeply rooted in the human experience, based on his own personal ordeal of watching his grandmother’s house burn down in a wildfire in 2020, this American cowboy movie is a character and performance-driven film featuring a Greek chorus collection of offbeat characters driven from their homes, “not real neighbors,” as described by Dusty, where these inhabitants from closely assembled trailers could be anybody, where the initial focus is not on them but on Dusty reconnecting with his family, including his firm but fair ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy from Christopher Landon’s Drop, 2025), her strong-willed mother Bess (Amy Madigan), and his estranged 9-year old daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre, an Australian with a perfect American accent), who is mature beyond her years, offering an eye-opening performance, stealing literally every scene she’s in while also winning our hearts in one of the great child performances.  Despite being divorced, they maintain close relations, even though Ruby has moved on to a new husband, Robbie (Sam Engbring), with an openly sensible plan to mutually share raising their daughter.  In a lot of small mountain communities, families are scattered and far away, making it inhospitable for the elderly, and those who move there are often leaving home intentionally, so kids are cared for by a lot of unofficial aunts and uncles.  Natural disasters from floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, tornadoes, and earthquakes are going to be part of our lives forever, where after such staggering loss, things don’t come back as they were, from the places that define us, but are instead reinvented, with this film focusing on the subsequent healing, reminiscent of the much larger scale Amish barn-raising sequence in Peter Weir’s WITNESS (1985), WITNESS Barn Raising Scene MOVIE 1985 YouTube (6:22), which is nothing less than exhilarating.  With no work to keep him busy, this catastrophe opens a window of opportunity for Dusty to reconnect and spend more time with Callie-Rose, bringing her out to the new homesite, where he hasn’t even unpacked the cardboard boxes in his trailer, yet she immediately finds companionship with one of the other kids, as they literally live off a deserted highway in the middle of wide open spaces where no other structure can be seen for miles.  While it’s a primitive environment, with no running water, the closeness of the trailers all huddled together resembles the era of Westerns when wagon trains did the same thing in order to offer protection from Indian attacks.  But here what stands out is that they have no one to rely upon except themselves, responsible for cooking and feeding each other, sharing meals and companionship, helping out with needed home repairs, exploring ideas of home and family, and our memories of both, developing all the attributes of a close-knit community, routinely looking out for one another in a reflection of human decency, discovering deep emotion through simple moments of connection between characters, where authenticity is the film’s greatest strength, a reflection of the prevalent use of non-professionals (everyone but one in the FEMA group).  The initially shy and reticent Dusty seems to hide his eyes under his cowboy hat, bashfully avoiding contact with others, yet still he projects strength, despite everything falling apart underneath him, making a strong impression on his daughter, who has never gotten to spend a lot of time with her Dad and looks up to him perhaps more than she should, REBUILDING I Reborn I Bleecker Street YouTube (2:08), yet she is immediately accepted by the group, no questions asked, making her feel right at home. 

This film is not a disaster movie, but a tender look at humanity’s ability to rebuild through togetherness, a film that is grounded in themes of loss, open skies, and the kinds of people Hollywood often overlooks.  In the minds of this ragtag group of displaced neighbors is just what comes next, as the housing is only temporary, so they’ll have to figure out how to move on to the next step in their lives, which is a concern for everyone, as their lives have been uprooted and placed in limbo, surrounded by the emptiness of a wide-open landscape.  In what resembles the middle of nowhere, completely vulnerable to the elements, they figure out their day-to-day routines, but it’s hard to see beyond that.  Banks refuse to offer loans, as there is nothing left to borrow against, with everything of value destroyed in the fire, where it will be another eight to ten years before his pastureland will again produce enough grass for livestock farming, making it all but impossible to begin again anytime soon.  Needing a phone or computer to process their applications for federal assistance, or for Callie-Rose to do her homework, a library is the only place for these rural residents to access Wi-Fi, with sporadic cars or trucks seen parked nearby, but they close early from funding cuts, so at night Dusty takes Callie-Rose there so she can read books on her tablet while lying in the back of his truck in the parking lot, Rebuilding Exclusive Movie Clip - You Live Here (2025) YouTube (1:01).  Her choice of reading material leans towards the fantastical, allowing her imagination to soar from Scott Emerson’s The Magic Boots, which is beautifully integrated into the social realist aesthetic.  One of the standout scenes is watching the two girls stick the interior walls of the trailer with countless glow-in-the-dark stars, then extinguish the light and sit with an equally astonished Dusty under an endless starry sky, a small gesture that carries enormous emotional weight.  The exquisite acoustic guitar score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, coming from the John Fahey folk roots tradition, figures prominently, like Jake Xerxes Fussell & James Elkington - Mountain Time ... YouTube (2:21), with the John Prine song Kurt Vile - "How Lucky" with John Prine (Official Audio) YouTube (3:23) eloquently infused into the narrative, becoming a sort of theme song for Dusty.  In the end, what matters most are the welcoming personal connections, which only reveal themselves over time, with earth mother Mali (Kali Reis, a mixed Indigenous and Cape Verdean actress, also a former American and World Champion boxer), who lost her husband to the fire, becoming the heart and soul of this new community, taking everyone under her wing, where they’re free to be whoever they choose, including an elderly lesbian couple, a biracial couple, an affable plumber, a barely seen hermit-like man who rarely leaves his trailer, where older men especially drift from self-reliance into solitude, while others are much more socially connected in their day-to-day lives, with Dusty and Callie-Rose not only accepted, but embraced.  The structure of the film slowly builds from an isolated emptiness, seemingly having nothing, to an awareness of why they want to stay, as they feel an inter-generational connection to the land and don’t want to have to start a new life elsewhere, while also exposing recognizable friendships, where they’re all in the same boat, as they come to realize these fragile connections matter.  With no easy answers, this is the kind of film that sneaks up on you, handled with great restraint rather than exploitation, leaving a profound emotional imprint, with a surprising and unexpectedly touching finale that only accentuates the tenuous and fleeting nature of our lives, as healing happens not in isolation, but through shared human connections, where a reimagined future must come from within, becoming a stark meditation on hope and resilience.      

Universal Language (Une Langue Universelle)

 

Québec premier François Legault

Director Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin as Groucho Marx in 1988

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (Une Langue Universelle)      B                                             Canada  (89 mi)  2024  d: Matthew Rankin

We were looking for ourselves in each other.                                                                                —a line from Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) that was crucial for this film’s creation according to the press notes, where Matthew Rankin also hilariously interviews himself, A Film by Matthew Rankin PRESSKIT 

Among the more original films you can see, described by the director as a “surrealist comedy” and an “autobiographical hallucination,” raising questions of identity, displacement, and cultural intersections, where anyone who can appreciate the absurdity of Guy Maddin’s MY WINNIPEG (2007) can appreciate the hilarious irreverence of this film.  Existing in a netherworld between Winnipeg, Tehran, and the social realist aesthetic of Iranian films, yet also Montreal after the 1995 Quebec referendum, when the French-speaking province attempted to break away from the rest of Canada, but  lost, refusing to let it go, still immersed in a hotbed of Québécois nationalism, exacerbating a continual dispute between Anglo and Francophone culture, so it’s hard to tell just exactly where we are at any given moment, as this appears to be more of a state of mind film, a somewhat demented adaptation of the director’s own life, where he plays the central character Matthew, a rather passive, melancholic, absurdly Kafkaesque Josef K figure who leaves the cultural comforts of Montreal for the wintry wasteland that is Winnipeg.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the entire film is filtered through the Iranian Farsi language, supposedly “in the name of friendship,” as an early title card reads, inspired by Iranian films of the 1970’s, which were largely humanistic children’s fables, with an opening dedication to a fictional Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, otherwise known as Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & ...), a real-life Iranian entity associated with the early works of Abbas Kiarostami, an open tribute to the first installment of his famous Koker trilogy, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE (1987), with its blending of fiction with reality/documentary, exactly as Rankin did in an early short from 2008, Self-Portrait M.Rankin YouTube (2:56), yet somehow it’s all transferred into Canada of the present, reimagined where Persian and French are the two official languages, and English is non-existent.  Something of a mishmash of recurring vignettes and set pieces, with the director acknowledging “Iranian cinema emerges from 1000 years of poetry, while Canadian cinema emerges from 40 years of discounted furniture ads,” the film is full of sight gags, deadpan Tatiesque humor, weirdly eccentric characters, like a man dressed as a Christmas tree, and plenty of wild turkeys!  Premiering in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes where it won the first ever Audience Choice Award, this breezy, light-hearted film is easy to like, shot in a beautifully grainy 16mm look from Isabelle Stachtchenko, using almost entirely non-professionals, while shot on a shoestring budget, where despite the whimsical spirit, there’s a deep sense of loneliness embedded beneath the surface.  The director was present during the screening, and he’s extremely witty in person, filled with hilarious rants and caustic observations, where he’s especially critical of the Québec film industry, believing they make dreadfully anguishing existential films that plunge us into the depths of despair and simply exist in their own soulless purgatory.  This parallel universe appears to be an uplifting remedy, supposedly drawn from the director’s own “meaningless” life, with no real main character, but several stories told in parallel, taking us into a world of omnipresent snow with a Stalinist landscape of colorless brick and concrete buildings (the director’s favorite) or highway overpasses with trucks rolling by and endless traffic noise, where somewhere in this labyrinthean maze of dead ends exists the human soul.    

Taking a page out of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne) (2023), the film opens under a blanket of snow with a French immersion teacher Mr. Bilodeau (Mani Soleymanlou) arriving late before berating his primary school classroom for numerous offenses, such as the noisy outbursts they were making before he arrived, “Please, would you at least have the decency to misbehave in French?,” yet when he asks what their future careers will look like in a Woody Allen Annie Hall (1977) moment, where we discover a student dressed like Groucho Marx (the director reports he did this as a child), or a budding donkey breeder, he concludes that “all of you will fail,” offering little hope for human survival before having them read a sentence on the blackboard, “We are lost forever in this world.”  That is our introductory moment into this film, where the name of the Robert H. Smith school is written in Persian lettering, a theme that continues for the duration of the film, with all the men referred to as “agha,” a Farsi term of endearment, like addressing someone as sir.  On their way home from school, two young female grade school students, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and her sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), happen upon a 500 riel bill (a play on Iranian rial currency) frozen under the ice, asking a nearby man in purple earmuffs, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), if he can help, but he steers them to a friend in a nearby turkey store to borrow an axe to chip away the ice, steadfastly deferring their requests that he go borrow the axe, since it’s his friend, but the man insists that he stay, sending them on a wild goose chase through Winnipeg’s shopping neighborhoods, named appropriately beige, brown, and grey districts, each looking eerily the same, the washed out colors blending indistinctly into the other, where it’s hard to tell the difference.  The kids are turned away at every turn, with no one offering a hint of interest, leaving them to navigate this maze of corridors and barren alleyways that all seem to lead to nowhere.  By the time they actually have success, it has grown dark outside and the riel note has already been chipped out of the ice, where the kids are thwarted in their quest, with a deceiving Massoud the likely suspect in outwitting these kids.  A continuously surprising meditation on being away from home and then being unable to find one’s way back, as nothing is remotely the same, having been transformed in our absence, this outrageously eccentric satire hits buttons we’ve never even imagined until brought to light in this outlandish manner.  The origin of this film may be the director’s early fascination with foreign films, as they spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had, and even traveled to Iran at one point, where the beauty of the experience was seeing the world differently, where we recognize ourselves in each other, sharing common interests, becoming a wacky, off-kilter exploration of cultural identity, where there’s even an appearance of a memorable song from the 60’s, These eyes - The Guess Who (1969) YouTube (3:58), but the object of affection here is a prized turkey!  Placing an emphasis on human connections and intercultural coexistence, a recurring motif is misdirection and random miscommunication, as characters continually seek ways to connect to each other, becoming part of a larger human collective, but when they lose that interconnectedness and sense of community, they can become lost and disoriented in a baffling mix of muddled confusion.  In a strange twist of fate, Omid (Sobhan Javadi), the son of Massoud loses his glasses, but when one of the girls retrieves them and he puts them back on near the end, the roles of Matthew and Massoud mysteriously switch, signaling how easily we misinterpret the world around us because we lack the correct perspective.     

In a parallel story of alienation and a longing for identity, we see Matthew playing a version of himself as he resigns his menial civil servant position in the Québec government to move back home to Winnipeg to visit his ailing mother.  Taking place in a giant room under a large portrait of Québec premier François Legault, a lone table sits off to the side in the corner where a government official steers Matthew away from making any criticisms of the Québec government, indicating he may make positive or neutral remarks, but nothing negative, causing him to utter with the utmost sincerity, “My time here was by far the most neutral experience of my life.”  Ironically, in a nearby cubicle, a man can be heard and occasionally seen sobbing profusely, obviously a sign of extreme unhappiness, yet the cause remains a mystery.  On the bus to Manitoba a woman passenger complains bitterly that a prized live turkey is given its own seat next to her, yet the driver informs her that this special bird has won avian beauty contests and is a paying customer.  Throughout this film various people contend they clearly supported Quebec’s right to independence in the referendum vote, where it’s likely more people say that after the vote, as if in hindsight that’s politically correct, at least in Québec, though it’s hardly an indicator of how they actually voted.  Once back in Winnipeg, Matthew is forced to idle his afternoon time away at a Tim Horton’s (Always Fresh! transformed into an Arabic teahouse with donuts) while awaiting a designated appointment with someone after work, as he’s blindsided by the discovery that his mother has moved to a different address and is now living with a total stranger that she mistakenly believes is him, no longer recognizing him anymore.  In a bemused portrait of an alternative universe, we see a series of strange and mysterious happenings, among which include a barrage of cheesy television ads from Hafez Ghamghosar (Bahram Nabatian), a singing turkey expert in a pink cowboy hat, claiming he has the best turkeys anywhere, anytime, with a look that’s right out of the VHS era of the 1970’s, a surreal glimpse into a Kleenex repository, a lavish all-hours bingo parlor, a shop that sells only birthday cakes, or a billboard bearing Justin Trudeau’s face and the slogan “a strong economy helps to prevent feelings of worthlessness.”  Yet we also follow the baffling exploits of Massoud in the purple earmuffs as a self-appointed Winnipeg tour guide, where he leads a small following who gripe their way through an endless cold and windswept journey to some of the most unglamorous and drably uninteresting sites imaginable, like tall windowless buildings, parking lots, and abandoned shopping centers, where they discover “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958,” a memorial to Métis leader Louis Riel, founder of the province of Manitoba (executed by the government for his role in the North-West Rebellion), which is basically a snow pile located between a freeway and an exit ramp, a deserted shopping mall fountain with no running water, meaning “All wishes are canceled,” suggesting residents are hoping for the water to someday return, or a “Forgotten Briefcase” left behind decades ago on a bus stop bench that no one has touched, thinking the owner may still come to retrieve it, becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site and “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal,” where a sense of Canadian mediocrity exists around every corner.  Written by Ila Firouzabadi (who plays a bus driver), Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin, nothing ordinary happens here, as it’s all simply imagined from the deranged mind of Rankin who clearly has a thing for movies, as this will take you on an amusement park roller coaster ride the likes of which you’ve never seen.  And in case you didn’t know it before, laughter is a universal language.