Popula Film Club: Back to the Sofa

As it becomes more and more obvious that we are hunkering down again, a greater diversity of independent venues and cinema has ramped up for streaming. Everyone needs a break from the terrible ongoings of the world. This week, we offer a range of selections—an African satire, an internet documentary, an experimental film, a video art film, and a relatively mainstream Hollywood “theatrical” release.

Please keep safe out there.

—Soham Gadre

---

Keteke (Peter Sedufia, 2017)

via IFCinema (free)

A sizeable selection of French and African films is currently streaming now via the Institut Français’s website. Among them is Peter Sedufia’s Keteke. After missing the only train, a couple about to give birth to a child must find an alternative route to their hometown. Sedufia uses this simple mistake to give his audience a cultural, economic, and historical tour of his home country, in a satirical but affectionate portrayal of modern Ghana.

IFCinema is a film portal of the Institut Français streaming French-produced cinema.

TFW No GF (Alex Lee Moyer, 2020)

via Static Vision (Hyperlinks Fest) (free – scheduled screenings, check time and date)

Static Vision presents the Hyperlinks Film Festival this weekend only (until July 12^th) featuring documentaries and features on interesting, off-the-beaten-path subjects. One of the films, being screened on July 11^th at 2:15 AEST, is Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary TFW No GF (That Feel When No Girlfriend), an examination of the lives of modern men who grew up on the internet through meme culture.

Static Vision describes itself this way:“We screen films.”

The Last Land (Pablo Lamar, 2020)

via KinoScope ($5/month membership – 14-day free trial offered)

Pablo Lamar’s The Last Land might not be for some, especially in a world that has trained us to expect instant gratification. But if our quarantined lives have taught us anything, its that sometimes its okay to wait it out and appreciate each tick of the clock. While The Last Stand has the foundations of a ‘story’ (it’s about preparations for a cremation ceremony), it is ‘slow-cinema’ intercut with beautiful imagery of the Earth and its people.

KinoScope offers a streaming service with a concentration in off-the-beaten-path cinema, as well as an editorial publication with essays by film writers.

I Was/I Am (Barbara Hammer, 1973)

via Julia Stoschek Collection (free)

Though greatly influenced by experimental pioneer Maya Deren, the late Barbara Hammer carved her own path with disorienting and visually lyrical and haunting films. Instilled with feminist vigor and making deliberately confrontational use of montage—i.e. a woman yelling “I am tired of men putting me up against the wall” overlaid on a visual of a gun—Hammer sought to use her cinema as a means of inspiring the breaking of social and cultural norms in visual arts. I Was/I Am is a perfect introduction to this filmmaker’s legacy.

The Julia Stoschek Collection is an ever-expanding online collection of over 860 works by more than 255 artists.

Miss Juneteenth (Channing Godfrey Peoples, 2020)

via BAM ($6.99 rental)

A former beauty queen and now struggling single mom is eager to have her daughter follow in her footsteps as Miss Juneteenth, a beauty pageant named after the day the last Confederate slaves were freed in 1865. Her daughter, though, has other ideas. Channing Godfrey Peoples deftly examines the legacy of the pageant’s name and the generational rift between mom and daughter to ask what exactly ‘freedom’ means for black women in today’s America.

BAM, or the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is a multi-arts venue in Brooklyn, NY.

---

The Popula Film Club brings you worthwhile options to stream, chosen with a view to quality, and to withholding as much money as possible from the oligarchs and monopolists of Amazon, Netflix, YouTube and the like.

Please send your recommendations to submissions@popula.com with the subject line, POPULA FILM CLUB.