"'Dam, 'Dam, 'Dam!!"

Aurora (Paz Fábrega, 2021)

Essentially a two-hander character study, Aurora reminded me a bit of Nadav Lapid's The Kindergarten Teacher, although the circumstances are rather different. Luisa (Rebecca Woodbridge) is an architect who teaches art classes to kids as a weekend volunteer. By chance, she discovers one of her students, 17 year old Yuliana (Raquel Villalobos) in the bathroom throwing up. She was swallowing a large dose of abortifacients, and when Luisa takes her to an OBGYN, they learn that Yuliana is five months pregnant. For reasons largely left unexplored by the film, Luisa takes the girl under her wing, providing her connections for adoption, as well as letting her hide out in her apartment so her mother (Liliana Biamonte) won't find out about the pregnancy.

Fábrega and Woodbridge do a fine job of presenting Luisa as a woman whose well-meaning demeanor may hide more complicated motives. She crosses boundary after boundary, positioning herself as Yuliana's surrogate mother. There are clear markers of class that separate Luisa from Yuliana and her family, and Aurora signals that the relationship is partly based in liberal elitism. But the film goes out of its way to never discuss this openly, suggesting that Costa Rica (where abortion is illegal) is a space crisscrossed by competing, unconscious ideologies.

Surviving You, Always (Morgan Quaintance, 2021)

This is my first exposure to Quaintance, a British experimental filmmaker of some note. This 18 minute film explores Quaintance's experiences growing up poor and Black in South London, dealing with isolation from his peers and the very real dangers of life in the projects. But the emotional crux of Surviving You, Always is the artist's recollection of a seemingly-platonic romance with a woman who ended up going to prison, presumably for a drug offense. This story is framed by Quaintance's frank discussion of his own drug use, particularly a year he spent using LSD. The text, which describes unpleasant and ultimately pointless acid trips, is juxtaposed with recordings of Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, both extolling the mind-expanding potentials of the drug. In this regard, Surviving is that rare animal, a progressive anti-drug film, although that's only one aspect of Quaintance's agenda here. The psychedelic journey into the self, like so much in our world, is a class- and race-based privilege.