El Planeta

Playful and meditative in equal turns, El Planeta is a unique feature film debut - a re-invention of auteur cinema for the Internet age, and the arrival of a Amalia Ulman as a visionary director. It is a timely story about an unconventional millennial family, aspirational consumer culture, capitalism and failure. It feels relevant, fresh and non-conformist in both its content and execution, yet never confrontational.

Amalia's impact in shaping contemporary art and culture is already undeniable. In 2014, Amalia Ulman crossed over from a small community of young "post-Internet" artists to international fame with her project, "Excellences and Perfections." Google the project or Amalia's name and you'll find plenty of documentation. I've followed her artwork since then, and when I saw Amalia was going to make a feature film, of course I was interested in knowing more and got a ticket to see it at Sundance 2021.

I'm not sure exactly what I expected when I started the film, but needless to say I was very impressed. The film is deliberate, slow, punctuated by memorable scenes. You find yourself drawn more and more into the lives of the characters María and Leonor, a mother and daughter facing eviction in Gijón, Asturias. Their everyday lives are rendered timelessly, yet with an eye to contemporary detail - seeing an Odwalla1221 sweater in a movie I almost did a double take, as it was like seeing something from my social media timeline materialize into a cinematic universe.

I don't want to give too much of the film away as it has not been widely released yet, but what I loved most about the film - what inspired me the most - is that the film is made with a profound amount of respect for storytelling and the audience, rather than forcing her way of seeing the world onto us. In this way, El Planeta rewards the viewer with a generosity of spirit. It's a testimony to Amalia's incredible ability to inhabit and work from within different media forms that she was able to take independent cinema on its terms and craft a well-paced, stylish drama as her feature debut. I look forward to seeing what she'll make next!

Clever, stylish and subtle, El Planeta made me wish more indie movies got made today! We need such vantages into the world

I can appreciate quirky cinema but this attempt did not work for me. I see the influences of Jarmusch's Down by Law and Herzog's Stroszek but those are much better films. A mother and daughter team of shoplifters who grift their way through life appear in disconnected scenes with supposed humor is a depressing black and white journey. The high scores are a case of the emperor has no clothes; much like the "music" of Yoko Ono, just pretentious nonsense. Miss Ulman made a real life home movie.

A mother and daughter each do their best to fail upwards after being abandoned by the family patriarch. They do so with humor and grace. Beautifully shot in digital black and white, the washed-up backgrounds of post-recession Gijon, Spain tell their own story through a dry, saline sense of time and warmth. For fans of nouvelle-vague, Miranda July. The fullest expression of director/star Ulman's artistic vision to date.

This is a very good film. I haven't looked up the background of the filmmaker but i really do hope she makes more movies. There is a lot of depth and sweetness here, edged gently by the grittiness of tough living and struggles in our world today. But mainly there are many delicate touches of an idiosyncratic, personal vision that reaches your heart and goes about playfully but also doesn't lie about hard things.