HIFF's Competition Selections Showcase Emerging Filmmakers

While high-profile films and well-known actors and directors are an important part the Hamptons International Film Festival, the work of film artists who will define the future of the medium is likely to be found in the festival’s competition section, a category distinguished by its focus on emerging, often first-time, filmmakers who take risks and challenge cinematic conventions.

Of the 126 films in this year’s festival, 10 features and 10 shorts have been selected for that section. None of the five narrative features is from the United States, while four of the five documentaries are by American filmmakers. 

David Nugent, the festival’s artistic director, pointed out that, while the country of origin doesn’t factor into the selection process, there are more documentaries than narrative features being made by emerging American filmmakers. 

“For narrative films on this scale,” he said, “our country — which I’m not excited to impugn, because I love our country — doesn’t really support artists the way other countries do. For example, this year we have films from Norway and France, and if you’re in one of those countries, you can find a lot more support from the government for art in general and filmmaking in particular than you can if you’re an American.” 

He added that there are more funding entities for documentaries in this country, such as HBO and some of the television networks. “To make a narrative film that doesn’t have a social-angle issue to it, you have to go out and find private investors.”

The competition category puts its money where its mouth is, so to speak, by awarding the director of its best narrative feature award a film production package of in-kind goods and services worth more than $125,000 and a cash prize of $3,000. For best documentary feature, the award is a $30,000 production package and $3,000 in cash. Prizes of $500 are awarded to the directors of the best short narrative and best short documentary.

Australia’s entry in the narrative feature category is Simon Stone’s “The Daughter,” an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” Set in a present-day logging town, the film explores the kind of long-buried family conflicts that haunt Ibsen’s characters. 

From France and Qatar comes “Divines” by Houda Benyamina, winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a sometimes funny, often suspenseful drama about two young Arab women in France, one of whom draws her more cautious friend into the world of crime.

“Glory” by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov is the story of a poor, solitary railway worker whose life is turned upside down when he finds a pile of cash on the tracks and decides to return it to the authorities. The corruption and bureaucracy of contemporary Bulgaria frame the tragicomedy. 

Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s “Late Summer” is a psychological thriller about an elderly Norwegian writer who, battling cancer, withdraws to her remote country home, where a Norwegian couple mysteriously intrudes on her solitude.

The final narrative feature is “The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis,” an Argentinian production by Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez set in 1977, when a junta is in control. It follows an apolitical middle-class office worker who is given a choice between ignoring the risky request of an old friend or acting on information that could endanger his life.

The sole foreign documentary feature is “Those Who Jump,” a Danish film by Estephan Wagner, Mortiz Siebert, and Abou Bakar Sidibe, about African migrants hoping to cross into Europe by scaling a barrier between Morocco and the outlying Spanish city of Melilla. 

“American Anarchist” is Charlie Siskel’s portrait, structured around interviews, of William Powell, who at the age of 19 published “The Anarchist Cookbook.” Powell, who died in obscurity this year at the age of 65, reluctantly revisits his book, which is said to have influenced homegrown terrorists such as the Timothy McVeigh.

 “The Eagle Huntress” follows a 13-year-old Kazakh girl as she trains to be the first female eagle hunter in 12 generations of her family. Director Otto Bell was inspired to travel to Mongolia by photographs of the girl that appeared in National Geographic magazine.

Found footage sourced from YouTube forms the core of Dean Fleischer-Camp’s “Fraud,” which follows a lower-middle-class family whose father obsessively documents their consumption and mounting debt. The director and editor recontextualized the raw footage, pushing the boundaries of documentary and “truth.”

“Tower” by Keith Maitland transforms archival footage, interviews, and mostly black-and-white rotoscoped animation into a meditation on and reconstruction of America’s first mass school shooting, carried out by Charles Whitman in 1966 from the top floor of the University of Texas tower in Austin.

The narrative shorts are Ena Sendijarevic’s “Import,” about Bosnian refugees adjusting to a new life in the Netherlands; “In the Hills,” whose director, Hamid Ahmadi, an Iranian, feels isolated in his English countryside community; “The Itching,” a 15-minute clay animation by Hamid Ahmadi starring a shy wolf; “The Silence” by Ali Asgari and Farnoosh Samadi, about a girl who accompanies her mother to translate a doctor’s appointment, and Mounia Akl’s “Submarine,” in which Lebanon’s garbage crisis threatens one woman’s home.

The documentary shorts include Leonor Teles’s “Batrachian’s Ballad,” a fable that won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival; “Clinica de Migrantes” by Maxim Pozdorovkin, a look at one of the few American health clinics serving undocumented immigrants; Fabio Palmieri’s “Irregulars,” in which a migrant recounts his odyssey across the Mediterranean; Todd Doublas Miller’s “The Last Steps,” a collection of never-before-seen footage of the last human expedition to the moon, and “Whatever the Weather” by Remo Scherrer, about a girl’s struggle to survive her mother’s destructive alcoholism.