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.      

Still Life (Sanxia haoren)

 

Director Jia Zhang-ke in Venice

 

 

 

STILL LIFE (Sanxia haoren)         A                                                                                      China  Hong Kong  (111 mi)  2006  d: Jia Zhang-ke

A very slow, languorous film shot entirely in high definition digital video and blown up to 35mm by Yu Lik-wai, who also shot Jia’s earlier features, that hypnotically captures the rich colors of the region along with a solemn, funereal feel throughout, sort of the exact opposite of Kiarostami’s AND LIFE GOES ON (1992), another fictionalized film that was shot in the middle of devastating destruction, the aftereffects of a deadly Iranian earthquake.  But while Kiarostami’s film searched through the ruins of destruction for any semblance of life, finding rebuilding, restoration projects everywhere that upliftingly reaffirmed one’s faith in man, Jia’s film seems to be set in the tombs, revealing instead a people in the process of demolishing an entire civilization, evicting all the residents from Fengjie, an ancient 2000 year old city, relocating them (1.5 million and still counting, while dismantling thirteen major cities) without really keeping track of where they’re heading, creating an unprecedented government-imposed upheaval on a massive scale, something that might be expected during wartime, but certainly not due to a modernization project of building the world’s largest hydroelectric dam that will eventually leave the entire city underwater.  The film resembles, to some degree, the deeply felt, existential alienation in the face of technological modernization in Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), as both are profound sensory experiences where mood takes precedence over any narrative, yet like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), also made in the 60’s, Jia scripts his fictional film in the middle of this already partially submerged, real-life demolition project introducing two characters searching for missing spouses who they haven’t seen in years, a recording of memory as it is happening, with humorous references to John Woo’s A BETTER TOMORROW (1986).  In a film like this, locations are everything, as nearly every frame of the film captures the stunning mountainous beauty of the vicinity, called the Three Gorges region due to gorges spectacularly coming together along the Yangtze River, a scene depicted on the back of a ten yuan note in Chinese currency, but every frame is also a time capsule for a lost civilization, which is hauntingly still thriving before extinction as we see the people scrambling about the city streets in a bustle of activity, but there are horizontal lines affixed to tall buildings ominously showing where the water line will be in the next phase of construction, where everything under that line will be submerged in water.  In eerie fashion, everything below that line is being destroyed, while everything above that line has a tenuous hold on life, a metaphor for upward mobility in modern China, as everyone is scrambling to reach higher ground, shown in a flurry of feverish activity which may as well separate the rich from the poor, accentuating the vulnerability of impoverished residents of the region, as the poor continue to inhabit the low lying regions.   

Winner of the Golden Lion (1st place) at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, arriving in the U.S. two years later, what makes this film so unusual is the ponderous nature of the way it is filmed, full of curiosity and questions in the slow observational pans that combine intimate portraits of ordinary citizens set against this continual destruction of what used to be a vital city, literally tearing it apart brick by brick while looming off in the distance is the omnipresent stillness of this extraordinary natural landscape which is nothing short of breathtaking.   Without ever offering details or statistics, which can easily be provided by journalists, there is instead an enveloping sadness permeating through every image, as sweaty, shirtless men are paid meager wages to use sledgehammers to reduce a city to dust and rubble reminiscent of Rossellini’s post-war GERMANY YEAR ZERO (1948), an industrial wasteland of epic proportions causing the region to be perpetually enveloped in low-lying clouds, but also men whose idle time is spent smoking cigarettes or eating noodles, chatting feverishly while playing mahjong as the camera slowly shifts its attention and gazes at any number of barges floating down the river carrying commercial goods, all shown with a poetic detachment that objectively offers no point of view, yet it’s clear the collective is valued over the individual.  The implementation of market reforms from the late 70’s and early 80’s led to an ascension of capitalist entrepreneurs with political ties and nearly unlimited power to seize land for private and state projects, leading to a massive influx of migrant laborers to help fuel China’s industrial and construction boom, as reflected in Jia’s earlier film THE WORLD (2004).  Listed at #2 from Cahiers du Cinéma’s Top 10 list of the Best Pictures of 2007, using chapter headings of cigarettes, liquor, tea, and toffee, items associated with New Year’s celebrations, all perishable goods that symbolize quickly disappearing happiness to ordinary people, where there is a very calm and meditative aspect to this film, like the passing of time happening right before our eyes, representing the enormous space that exists between the two protagonists who visit Three Gorges, a space that remains throughout the film, seemingly unbridgeable, like the people lost in the landscape.  The characters inhabiting the film are all morally ambiguous, with some fueled with a chaotic energy, where they may be both victimized and also perpetrators of violence, as extorting newcomers to the region and taking advantage of their unfamiliarity appears to be a common practice.  Using diegetic sound as part of the score, the incessant pounding of hammers demolishing brick buildings is a continual backdrop, mixed with a nostalgic feel from interjected pop songs that also fade away over time, where past and present intertwine throughout the film, suggesting we are living in transient times, where what we see today will be gone tomorrow.  Jia’s film showcases his ability to provoke a re-examination of the relationship between real and fictional narratives, and also between personal memories and the collective historical record.

The magnificent opening handheld shot is a long circular pan of densely packed bodies on a ferry boat that is both meandering and meditative, slowly observing the passengers traveling down a river in a collective group collage, fusing landscape and portrait imagery, where the frenetic energy of their conversations is a stark contrast to the serenity of the water, as the camera lingers on long shots of the river and the stillness of the passing landscapes.  At the very front of the boat, isolated from the rest, sits Sanming (Han Sanming, the director’s actual coal mining cousin), a working class coal miner who comes to the city searching for his missing wife of 16 years, also a daughter that he’s never seen.  When he realizes the street where she used to live is submerged underwater, he enlists the aid of fellow citizens, eventually joining one of the demolition crews himself, just one of many shirtless low paid workers swinging sledge-hammers.  His lower class pattern of living routinely includes bartering and sharing, offering bottles of liquor to express gratitude to officials or handing out individual cigarettes to friends, where living in such claustrophobic close quarters means the concept of privacy is non-existent.  His personal business becomes the business of everyone around him, as he has to be accepted by the group before he can ever hope of succeeding in his mission.  Whether he succeeds or not remains ambiguous to the viewers, but the unusual way his story comes together is handled beautifully, with a calm understatement and a potent underlying emotional reserve, pushing specific aspects of cinematic realism, the long take, deep focus, non-professional actors, the use of real time, while offering a subjective perspective on the conditions of life.  Zhao Tao, who would become the director’s wife (married in 2012), doesn’t appear until an hour into the film, a recurring character in all Jia features since PLATFORM (2000), playing Shen Hong, a nurse, an educated, independent-minded, middle-aged women who hasn’t seen her husband in two years, meeting one of his old friends, archaeologist Dongming (Wang Hongwei, one of Jia’s classmates from the Beijing Film Academy, and the star of Jia’s XIAO WU in 1997) to ask him for help in finding her husband, whose slowly developing offscreen profile is an unusual way to introduce a character, as we discover Guo Bin (Li Zhubin) is a corrupt, hot-shot official who is actively involved in the forced eviction of stubborn residents, while his boss Ding Ya-ling is a wealthy female investor, where both have become rich through their participation of the demolition of the Three Gorges cities. Maintaining a great deal of power in the region, his hesitancy to meet with Shen Hong is understandable, as he finally comes out of hiding and meets with her against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam, the only time it’s shown in the film, suggesting the dam itself is the cause of the couple’s strife, a subtle hint that it is not yet fully operational, yet it is a testimony to China’s remarkable economic growth.  She discovers he’s likely having an affair with Ding, but Shen Hong’s motive for being there remains a mystery through most of the film.  Despite his elevated economic status, her manner of classic stoicism keeps him continually off guard, never knowing what to expect, as she retains the upper hand, a fact that may well explain why he left in the first place. 

Continuing in Jia’s contemplative quest to intermix the personal with the historical, he integrates a mixture of traditional Chinese painting and poetry, Cultural Revolution imagery, Canto-pop songs, as well as 1980’s and 90’s television, revealing an intersection of the real and the imagined, also the past, present, and future, which represents an evolving realist style.  His first three films took place in Shanxi province where the director was born (his parents were sent there during the Cultural Revolution, with dislocation becoming a key ingredient to his films), made without official government approval and were banned in China, described as underground projects, yet all show the shattering impact of China’s attempts to modernize in rural interior regions.  Both characters in this film are traveling from Shanxi, shown in parallel stories as each is attempting to repair broken relationships, where the future seen through differing class perspectives offers diverging possibilities, as Jia examines the disparities of class, with both protagonists representing opposite ends of the economic ladder, as Shen Hong’s husband heads the construction project, while Sanming toils in the bottom rung of the day-to-day demolition.  Accordingly, it’s easier for Shen Hong to adapt to the rapid transformations, while Sanming is more culturally isolated and completely uncomfortable with modernity, finding it easier to cling to the past than to adjust.  Through the sheer mastery of what the filmmaker is able to compress into each shot, we are constantly reminded of what’s at stake building such a mammoth project in the middle of such overwhelming, magisterial beauty, and what utter gall it takes to intentionally displace so many people from their homes and their history as a matter of public policy, literally reducing 2000 years of history to rubble before it disappears from sight altogether, taking a tremendous human gamble by betting it all on the future.  Over the past three decades, China has been transforming itself from an agricultural economy to an increasingly industrialized and urbanized country.  The film is not so much about the existential malaise of THE WORLD as it is a way to frame progress in real time, where it’s an open question whether this can stand the test of time.  Initially proposed almost 90 years ago by Sun Yat-sen in 1919, part of his “Plan to Develop Industry,” which aimed to address flooding and harness the Yangtze River’s power for national development, supported by Chinese leaders like Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, actual construction began in 1994 and was finally completed in 2012.  Shot in 2006 with work still in progress, Jia was able to film midway through the largest public works project in human history.  The consequences are enormous, both pro and con, and the idea that China, normally not known for their progressive views, would allow this most brilliantly independent of Chinese filmmakers into the region knowing the unpredictability of his artistic and political views, at least through their point of view, and yet it happened, approved by the Chinese Film Bureau and co-produced by the state-operated Shanghai Film Studio, where the result is this quietly probing, utterly realistic, yet near surreal, non-narrative essay that explores the region through visual imagery and broken marriages, where the challenge to viewers is that they will also have to decide what is worth salvaging in their own lives and what they may need to let go. 

One of the more modern images of the film is seen at an evening penthouse party on an outdoor balcony directly overlooking a giant suspension bridge that spans the river.  As it caters to the rich and powerful, Zhao Tao believes her husband could be there.  Instead another powerbroker arrives on the scene and expresses dismay that the bridge is not lit up for his VIP’s.  A quick cell phone call obtains instant results and the bridge lights up like a birthday cake, emblematic of state-of-the-art technology.  Another somewhat surreal image is an empty, gigantic structure which may have once housed building occupants, but it has long been abandoned and is left standing alone towering over a barren field where kids play.  At one point, this monstrosity of a structure simply fires up burners at the bottom and takes off, like some kind of mysterious UFO and vanishes from view, defying all known concepts of space and time.  Given the quasi-documentary aesthetic of the filmmaker, this is nothing less than shocking, while there is also an image that is almost identical to Kiarostami’s AND LIFE GOES ON, where a beautiful green landscape can be seen through a broken-down window of the earthquake rubble that reveals sheep grazing peacefully in the fields, where signs of hope can literally be seen through the ruins, with haunting Arabic music providing a profound sense of something sacred.  Jia, on the other hand, shows a married couple in a crumbling structure of a half-demolished building with a missing wall several stories high, embracing near a similar broken-down window in the ruins that overlooks the skyline of this city, when one of the tallest buildings seen off in the distance suddenly collapses.  As this is the place where Han and his ex-wife (Ma Lizhen) finally meet, he is unable to answer her queries about why he waited so long to look for her, becoming a metaphor for Han’s powerlessness in the face of China’s transformation.  Unlike Jia’s earlier films, which are about fringe characters who are aimless and adrift, defined by their nonchalance, these are stronger and more mature protagonists who are well integrated into Chinese society.  What’s unique about this filmmaker is that he makes films about ordinary people cast adrift by China’s social and economic changes, people whose lives are disrupted and have no choice but to adjust, change, and literally move on with their lives.  Over the course of five fiction films and some documentaries, Jia has risen from the initial position of chronicler of a Chinese youth without a future to a historian with a look not only at the present, but to the future.  Shot in parallel with Jia’s documentary DONG (2006), both touching on common elements and themes, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, yet in scope and depth they venture into unchartered territory, where this is more impressionistic and elusively mysterious than any feature Jia has made to date.  One must mention the otherworldly musical score by Lim Giong on his second Jia film, formerly working with Hou Hsiao-hsien, including some irresistible sequences scored to romantic pop music songs.  The supreme image is left for the finale, however, where off in the distance a man inexplicably performs a high-wire act walking between two tall buildings that are likely targeted for demolition, another improbable balance between high and low or the sacred and the profane.