Movshovitz: Denver Film Festival features 188 movies — many wonderful, fascinating and eccentric

The Denver Film Festival opens its 47th edition on Friday. That’s a while. I’ve been to every one of them, but my sense of how to go to the festival hasn’t changed. I still think that if the choice is between a movie with a lot of hoopla surrounding it, that will open in the next month or two — or a picture that may never play in a theater in this area again, take door number two. 

It’s a big festival, with 115 feature-length films scheduled (188 movies overall), and the genius of the Denver Film Festival is that it brings many movies that have little commercial potential, but are wonderful and fascinating, maybe eccentric — and thoroughly worth seeing. And besides spending time with films that have little or no advertising budgets, another favorite thing to do at a film festival is to see something I know absolutely nothing about. It may not be your cup of tea, but it just might surprise you in ways you can’t imagine. Take a flyer; safe and predictable can be overrated.

All that said, there are a few films in the festival that I have seen and think matter, more than a little. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” by the fine Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (“There Is No Evil,” “The White Meadows”) is, simply, a brilliant film and a work of profound courage in a world with a serious need for bravery.

Rasoulof sets the film in the thick of the women’s demonstrations that began in Iran in 2022 after 23-year old Mahsa Amini died in custody of a “heart attack” (quotes are necessary) after she’d been arrested by the religious morality police for refusing to wear a headscarf. A police inspector gets a promotion if he’ll sign a bunch of death warrants without bothering to read them — he has a brief moment of conscience and then takes the new job, which involves “investigating” women in the protests and sending them to prison, or worse.

At the same time, the man’s two daughters grow interested in the demonstrations, and then ever more sympathetic, so he fights his battles both in the streets and in his home, and he turns monstrous.

Rasoulof has done prison time for his filmmaking before, and when he learned that the regime was about to send him back, he fled Iran for Paris, along with his cast and crew. He showed the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and at Telluride over Labor Day. It’s a thrill that the film will show in Denver.

Another magnificent movie is from India — “All We Imagine as Light,” by Payal Kapadia.  The film centers on three women who work in a hospital in Mumbai — Prabha is a teaching nurse, probably in her mid-30s, who’s serious, responsible and pretty much joyless; she’s married to a man who left India to work in Germany and hasn’t called her in over a year.

Parvaty, a cook, is older and about to leave the city for her home village because she’s being evicted from her apartment by a crass construction company. Anu, the youngest of the three, is a junior nurse, bored, careless but deeply in love with a young Muslim man. If discovered, it will go badly for both of them.

The film’s picture of Mumbai differs from most films about India that come our way. No rickety trains packed to the rafters with humanity; no hordes of desperate poor people. The opening shots show huge stacks of fruits and vegetables and sacks of grain about to be loaded into trains and trucks. The trains look clean-ish and urban sterile, like commuter trains around the world. Passengers sit, or even lie down to sleep on the seats. 

“All We Imagine as Light” shows plenty of struggle and disappointment, but also striking intimacy and beauty. The women love and support each other; they have touching conversations, and I’ve never seen hands filmed so beautifully and tenderly. Watching the film feels like a privilege.

The documentary “Daughter of Genghis” is listed as a Danish production — the filmmakers are Danish — but the movie is a portrait of Gerel Byamba, a ferocious Mongolian nationalist activist woman, and it’s filmed in Mongolia. At the start, Byamba confronts women in massage parlors and brothels, trying to force them to understand they’re being corrupted by non-Mongolians, especially the Chinese. Byamba is violent; she’s angry, and she’s driven by her fear that Mongolian culture is disappearing.

It’s a jumpy, disjointed film, but with astonishing images of huge expanses of dry plains with mountains in the background. There’s a section about the history of the swastika, which Byamba shows is an ancient Mongolian symbol pirated by the Nazis. Films like this can be hard to find, and are precious in their eccentric visions.

And a documentary that shows the Russian war on Ukraine for what it is — a vile, bloody attempt to destroy a people and a culture. Much of “Porcelain War” was actually filmed by the three artists at the center of the film. Andrey is mostly a landscape painter; Slava makes small porcelain figures that his wife, Anya, paints in complex, vivid colors and designs. They live in Kharkiv, the Ukrainian city under horrendous attack, and they also are fighters in the war. 

Their art is lovely and beautiful; the footage they’ve shot of the war has terrifying immediacy. Lovely, meditative images from nature clash with shots of bombed-out apartment buildings and bodies in the streets. The three talk about life and death and family. You see in their faces that this is not casual speculation; these are questions that confront them right at the moment, because they could be killed at any moment. They take a harrowing winter drive — in a truck that loses its brakes — to get their daughters into Poland so they can stay with friends in Lithuania. And you wonder, how art and war somehow, in a ghastly way, can co-exist, and how these remarkable human beings maintain their humanity.

But the Denver Film Festival is not all struggle. If you’ve never seen Mel Brooks’ delirious, looney “Young Frankenstein” on a full-sized movie screen, do it. Teri Garr, that lovely comic actor, died just a few days ago. Seeing her is alone worth the price of admission, especially with her priceless line “Put ze candle beck.”