[imagesource: Indie Sales]

It’s that time of the year when lists abound.

Even though Vanity Fair‘s Cassie da Costa doesn’t like lists, she made one featuring the year’s most underrated films.

While most people and publications praise the usual films, those made in and based on American and British stories, she prefers to look a little further afield.

Instead, she argues that our attention and time should be spent on 2021’s more “overlooked or misunderstood masterpieces” out there.

Even though we may not have heard of or been told about these films outright, it doesn’t mean that we should wholly ignore them.

We’ll give you five of the chosen films on the list to open your mind to, starting with one based on a story close to South Africa:

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is from Lesotho, with This Is Not a Burial featuring late South African actor Mary Twala as the main character.

These origins make for a movie showcasing Mosese’s affinity with “narrative storytelling” and “spiritual ushering”:

In This Is Not a Burial, the elder Mantoa (Twala) is making arrangements for her own death in her rural village when she receives news of her son’s untimely passing. At first, the grief seems to bury her, and then—with news of development that will displace the locals’ graves—edify her.

Twala is entrancing as a determined yet complex and sometimes unreadable woman who seems to have lived several lives through the course of one. Mantoa holds a painful yet proud indigenous history with her, and will not let bureaucracy and government corruption erase it. Magical as it is argumentative, This Is Not a Burial fuses art with urgency and memory with survival.

The Woman Who Ran

Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has released three movies in the last few years, with The Woman Who Ran centred on a wife who spends a couple of days separated from her husband:

Hong’s frequent collaborator Kim Min-hee (The Handmaiden) plays Gam-hee, a somewhat mysterious yet expressive young woman who is content in a codependent marriage.

But with her other half on a business trip, she visits two friends at their homes around Seoul, and then unexpectedly runs into a third acquaintance.

If you haven’t seen 2016’s The Handmaiden yet either, a story similar to Bong Joon-ho’s black comedy Parasite, then that’s another one to add to the list.

France

French director Bruno Dumont’s political satire will apparently be among the most uncanny films you’ll ever see:

A pitch-perfect Léa Seydoux [she’s seen in the image up top] is the gleaming white television journalist France de Meurs, an exceedingly shameless careerist who uses her marginalised subjects as props in her elaborate “news” productions.

France’s producer, Lou (comedian Blanche Gardin, making every kind of expression possible), seemingly her only friend, eggs her on at every turn. But then the journalist is somewhat humbled when she hits a young brown-skinned man off his motorbike with her car.

Respect

This Aretha Franklin biopic is a Liesl Tommy creation, starring the ever-talented Jennifer Hudson:

Respect doesn’t limp through the rhythms of the biopic form, but delights in the resonances between Franklin’s artistry and behavior.

The famously enigmatic and often self-destructive Queen of Soul gave everything she had to each and every note, bringing vocal interpretation to new heights.

Respect dares to follow the sound closely, while connecting Franklin’s genius to her evasiveness, and sorrow.

The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

This film from Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is shot in three discreet parts, each centred on close human encounters:

In the first, a makeup artist discloses a recent romantic encounter to her model friend as they return home in a taxi after a shoot. Afterward, we learn a vital piece of information that threatens to rock the friendship. The vignette concludes with a pair of alternate endings.

The rest of Wheel continues with heightened coincidence and interpersonal disruption, leaving the viewer to plumb the wells of meaning left by what goes unsaid. Hamaguchi and his actor-collaborators are masters of absence, giving as much as they omit.

The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was notably released alongside the director’s amazing Haruki Murakami adaptation Drive My Car, a film that featured on many other ‘best movie’ lists this year.

For more on this list of underrated films, you can head here.

[source:vanityfair]