THE WHITE OLD MAID by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1935) (link) - tw: death
"Away!" cried the lofty one. "Thou hadst him living! The dead is mine!"
LIYANA by Zen Cho (2021) (link) - tw: death
"It had been so long I almost didn’t recognize you when I saw you. I came so close to plucking you out from the sheltering leaves— but God must have been watching me. I touched you, and the tips of my fingers felt the vibration of your beating heart."
A captivating story, featuring the great Mam' @gcinamasiko_arts_heritage, @liyanafilm did an amazing job in making story heard. Thank you. #liyanafilm #liyana #mandelauniversity (at Nelson Mandela University) https://www.instagram.com/p/B9jSi-IH2dE/?igshid=1wl8uhet6aqcs
October 2018 U.S. Theatrical Film Releases Directed By Women
October 3
Over the Limit dir. Marta Prus (LIMITED)
October 5
Living in the Future’s Past dir. Susan Kucera (LIMITED)
Private Life dir. Tamara Jenkins (LIMITED + NETFLIX)
October 10
Liyana dir. Aaron Kopp & Amanda Kopp (LIMITED)
October 12
After Everything dir. Hannah Marks & Joey Power (LIMITED)
Stella’s Last Weekend dir. Polly Draper (LIMITED)
October 19
Can You Ever Forgive Me? dir. Marielle Heller (LIMITED)
What They Had dir. Elizabeth Chomko (LIMITED)
October 26
Shirkers dir. Sandi Tan (LIMITED + NETFLIX)
Viper Club dir. Maryam Keshavarz (LIMITED)
You may have missed Liyana, a documentary that blends animated artwork and live action, and its impressive film festival run. ...
Part movie, part documentary, part comic book, and all heart.
You may have missed Liyana, a documentary that blends animated artwork and live action, and its impressive film festival run. I certainly did. Fortunately for all of us, films like this one have a lifespan born in word of mouth that, while it may take some time, will inevitably hit your ears when you’re ready for it.
For this writer, Liyana caught my attention after returning to New York to play at one of my favorites, the Museum of the Moving Image. And now it’s only proper that I write this review from Africa, where I see the faces of the five young storytellers in each smiling child I see. Like I said, these films have a way of finding you late but also right on time.
Liyana is set in an orphanage in Swaziland where five children are led by South African storyteller, Gcina Mhlophe, to create a story of their own. A Russian doll of a movie, the story of Liyana becomes their movie — complete with animated artwork — inside a documentary. Theirs is about a girl they named Liyana who lives in a small home made of sticks and mud, along with her small family. The children then collaboratively add pieces to her story as viewers watch it play out like a comic book, panel by beautiful panel.
The young girl quickly becomes an outlet for their personal experiences with alcoholism, abuse, neglect, disease, and violence. The children are told in the beginning that this is their story, that they choose how it will end, and the fictional story of Liyana is quickly juxtaposed against the documented lives of the orphan storytellers and the real-life events that shape their collective childhoods.
It’s that collective experience that carries the emotional heft of Liyana as she becomes a kaleidoscopic mirror of the storytellers’ experiences with challenges that make them unsafe. It’s hard to wrap your head around the trauma these kids have known, but as their story goes on you get an unsettling idea of its depth, one you will feel in the pit of your stomach as the children narrate. With a short runtime of just over an hour and told by children, you may expect the story itself to be simplistic, and in some ways it is. In other ways though, they will surprise you with their ability to braid their themes into their stories, and with the help of documentarians Aaron and Amanda Kopp those themes land on their target, simplistic or not .
As for the character herself, Liyana’s journey is more reactive than active as most plot points are external factors propelling themselves on her, an unfortunate reflection of the children’s lives themselves. And like the children themselves, the one thing they can control is the choice to keep going, to hold onto hope. That’s the message Liyana’s grandmother gives her through the children who have internalized the message. What makes Liyana so interesting is not the story itself — although it has more than its share of moments — but what each step of the tale says about the people telling it. It’s a confessional, a therapy session, a veiled means of healing through the fundamental purpose of storytelling: to make a connection. You will be right there, cheering for Liyana and her bull, begging the kids for it to turn out well because then, by proxy, you can believe it will turn out well for them, too.
