Mariner of the Mountains
Directed by Karim Aïnouz
Running time: 1hr38 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Mariner of the Mountains, reviewed at the 74th Cannes Film Festival
The first-person documentary is fraught territory: it’s usually easy enough to see why a filmmaker needs to complete a personal journey with the aid of their camera, but sometimes harder to say why anyone else should want to watch it. The best of them, however, unlock some universal truth or feeling in the course of that self-exploration: Mariner of the Mountains, Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s attempt to probe the blank spaces of his family history and Algerian heritage, is a searching, shimmering example. At 54 years of age, Aïnouz had never previously visited Algeria — the country from which his estranged father Majid came, and to which he returned while Aïnouz was still in his mother Iracema’s womb. By voyaging in later life to North Africa, the filmmaker hopes to gain a sense of the parent he never knew growing up, only to find that everything on his travels reminds him of the late Iracema. It’s to her that Aïnouz’s droll, wistful voiceover is directly addressed — as he traces the phantom outline of a family life that the three of them, in different circumstances, could have had together, and understands why it was never to be. (It works as a kind of companion piece to the heart-filling, fate-driven family melodrama of Aïnouz’s last film Invisible Life, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes two years ago.)
Mariner of the Mountains thus takes the shape of a particularly artful, intimate travel diary, rhythmically cutting together phone snaps, candid video and family photos into an evocation of his own stateless drift. As he’s demonstrated before in his fiction and nonfiction work alike, Ainouz has a keen eye for faces, and an extraordinary command of everyday light and colour. His images, while frequently beautiful, aren’t touristic; his camera scrutinises passersby with kind, earnest curiosity, as if looking for any reflection of himself in their features. They in turn ask who he is and where he’s from, over and over: “How do they know I’m a foreigner?” he wonders. The film muses extensively on the sometimes invisible divide between belonging and not belonging: anyone whose upbringing and identity has been split across countries and continents will relate to his search for some elusive, self-completing element. Perhaps, it concludes, our gaps and fractures are what make us whole in the first place.
MARINER OF THE MOUNTAINS (O MARINHEIRO DAS MONTANHAS) (2021) Written by Karim Aïnouz and Murilo Hauser | Shot by Juan Sarmiento | Edited by Ricardo Saraiva
Selected for Special Screenings at the 74th Cannes Film Festival
