Amy Beste Recommends Five Films from 2022

Films can transport the viewer everywhere—which makes this list of recommendations from Senior Lecturer and Director of Public Programs Amy Beste a travel itinerary as much as a watch list. From Memoria's streets of Bogotá, Colombia, to Life on the Caps' fictional Atlantic island, these stories cover a lot of ground.

Beste oversees Conversations at the Edge, a series of screenings, performances, and artists talks the School of the Art Institute of Chicago hosts in collaboration with the School’s Gene Siskel Film Center and the Video Data Bank. Both a film scholar and an avid movie fan, Beste's five picks from 2022 spotlight her wide-ranging taste. Check them all out below.

Life on the Caps

Life on the Caps, by the Rabat-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, is the brilliant final installment in her trilogy of the same name. Set in a speculative future where teleportation is the norm and a fictional island in the Atlantic has become home for generations of detained migrants, the film fuses the languages of social media, 3D animation, and black comedy to skewer contemporary biopolitics. Conversations at the Edge screened the first two parts of the trilogy as part of the film’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society this past spring. You can see it again in upcoming screenings at M+ in Hong Kong and elsewhere. 

Memoria

While Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s (MFA 1998, HON 2011) latest feature was finished in 2021, Memoria didn’t start making the rounds in the United States until 2022, where it is being released in theaters one city at a time. Mysterious and transfixing, the film stars Tilda Swinton as an expat scientist living in Colombia who is suddenly beset by sounds only she can hear. In her quest to find the source of these sonic disturbances, she travels through lush countrysides, busy Bogotá streets, and austere brutalist architecture, chasing ghosts, missing persons, and the reverberating echoes of the past. Find the film’s next screening at memoria.film or look for its return to Chicago and the Gene Siskel Film Center this coming spring.

Tierra en Trance

Since 2012, the Mexican Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, which translates into English as “the weightless,” has been producing dazzling, often trance-like films with an activist sensibility. Their latest work, the mesmerizing Tierra en Trance, reworks images from contemporary, historical, and mythic Mesoamerica to reflect on social and political issues in Mexico, the Americas, and beyond. You can see the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center in February when Conversations at the Edge and the Block Museum at Northwestern University bring Colectivo Los Ingrávidos to Chicago for their first-ever appearance in the city.

Impossible Figures and Other Stories, Part 1

Over the last six years, celebrated Polish animator Marta Pajek has gained international acclaim for her ongoing trilogy Impossible Figures and Other Stories, a series of striking and enigmatic tales of domesticity, sexuality, and political catastrophe. Her final installment, released this past year, is a shape-shifting meditation on authoritarianism and its aftermath, rendered in Pajek’s elegant, minimalist style. It’s now available online at the National Film Board of Canada. You can also see the rest of the trilogy on Vimeo, where it premiered as a Staff Pick.

Remembrance: A Portrait Study

In the mid 1960s, Edward Owens (SAIC 1966–67)—a young, queer, Black artist from the South Side of Chicago—burst onto New York’s underground scene with a series of strikingly beautiful films about heartbreak, desire, and his own family. He studied at SAIC with the legendary filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos. While these works were produced nearly 60 years ago, they were given new life in 2022 when SAIC’s John M. Flaxman library, the Chicago Film Society, and The New American Cinema Group released stunning new restorations of Owens’s body of work, a project supported by National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation. All of Owens’s films are worth seeking out, but my favorite is Remembrance: A Portrait Study, a flickering study of Owens’s mother and friends filled with love and belonging. You can see Owens’s work in April, when the restored films will screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center. ■

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