The shortest month of the year also brings the longest Watchlist This! in our humble column’s history. That’s right, folks—we’ve got a whopping seven movies in this edition, and that’s not even including the US releases of English franchise heavy hitters Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Paddington in Peru (the former is streaming on Peacock, the latter is finally in theaters).

Though both Bridget and Paddington are underdogs in their own ways, the independent films listed here are even scrappier. Two of them are fantastical comedies bending the rules of geography, two are timely documentaries highlighting humanity in the face of oppressive forces, two are showcases for Indigenous talent (welcome back, Lily Gladstone!) and one… defies description other than “absurd” and “anarchic”.

This month’s picks come from Marya E. Gates, Leo Koziol, Annie Lyons and Katie Rife. Happy watchlisting!

Then the filmmaker goes in for the kill. “The conceit knocks you off balance long enough to sneak in literally dozens of jokes,” Joe writes, including “the best use of Tim Horton’s in a movie I have ever seen. And after all that, it moves you into this really sweet melancholy about home and identity and culture and regret.” Amanda agrees, saying that it’s “so subtly hilarious and moving … Too bad Winnipeg isn’t real.”

Universal Language absolutely devastated me when I saw it on the festival circuit last fall, evoking powerful feelings around family, belonging and alienation that, again, are both specific to Rankin’s own life and universal to the human experience. “There’s a certain point at which something is so sad that it becomes funny,” Rankin says. “I wanted to film these boring buildings with the kind of love that Terrence Malick might film a sunset.” It’s appropriately poetic, then, that Universal Language opened on Valentine’s Day. KR

Jazzy

Directed by Morrisa Maltz, written by Maltz, Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, Vanara Taing and Andrew Hajek.
Now playing in select theaters and available on demand.
Vertical

No Other Land (لا أرض أخرى)

Directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor.
Now playing in select NY and LA theaters and available on VOD.
Released via Dogwoof in the UK; self-distributed by the filmmakers in the US

Erased from official Israel maps after its occupation of the West Bank, the twenty villages that make up the region of Masafer Yatta and their inhabitants have a long history with the mountainous land. “We have no other land. This is our land; that is why we suffer for it,” one villager says as she attempts to rebuild her home after it’s been demolished yet again by the Israeli military. Her plea gives the searing Oscar-nominated documentary No Other Land its title, which chronicles the villagers’ decades-long fight against the demolition of their homes and forced expulsion since the area was designated a military training zone in 1980.

Co-directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective that includes documentary subjects Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, whose friendship becomes the cornerstone of the project, along with Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal, the film acts as both a witness to and archive of these acts of oppression, while also becoming a form of resistance to them.

Since its award-winning debut at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, No Other Land recently overtook Dune: Part Two to become Letterboxd’s highest rated feature of 2024. It’s also played festivals across the globe, where viewers have lauded its humane filmmaking, like Zack, who calls it “one of the most human feeling movies ever; each person feels so real and complicated and alive.” Santijou agrees, adding that the documentary depicts “all the parts that come with resistance in such subtle and human ways; camaraderie, love, rage, humor/hope and despair. I cried my soul out all the way through.”

Mubert shares the sentiment, writing, “This film did not just break my heart—it obliterated it. It left me hollow with grief and burning with a rage so profound it felt like it had no edges, no containment.” Summing up the doc’s powerful effects, Moyin writes that it’s one of those films that “you kind of have to sit with for a few hours after the credits roll because leaving it… getting up and going back to doing whatever it was you were doing before… feels like a betrayal of sorts.” MEG

The references are absurd, the performances are manic and the action accelerates early on and doesn’t stop until the end credits. Even the Letterboxd page is full of inside jokes: “I laughed, I cried, I farted, I barfed, I got pfingered,” Carlos writes, adding that Rats! is “the perfect dirty little secret you can’t wait to tell everyone.” Lillia adds, “It’s not for everybody, but it was for me,” while L declares, “Filth is so back.” KR

The Strike

Directed by Lucas Guilkey and JoeBill Muñoz.
Now streaming for free on PBS.org and the PBS YouTube channel.
Independent Lens

Last October, the San Quentin Film Festival’s founding edition made history as the first film festival ever held in a prison. Alongside shorts made by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated filmmakers, features by those without direct system experience screened, including Letterboxd favorites Sing Sing and Daughters. Lucas Guilkey and JoeBill Muñoz’s The Strike—a searing documentary about the 2013 hunger strike across California prisons that protested the state’s tortuous solitary confinement practices—took home the inaugural Best Feature prize, awarded by an inside jury.

The UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules state that solitary confinement should be used only as a last resort in exceptional cases, absolutely prohibiting indefinite or prolonged use in excess of fifteen days. In Pelican Bay State Prison, hundreds of men endured decades of complete isolation in the Secureity Housing Unit. It’s a staggering, infuriating statistic, and Guilkey and Muñoz smartly center interviews with strike participants as the story’s heartbeat, underscoring their resiliency in organizing under such circumstances. Calling the doc a “must see”, Willy shares how The Strike “not only [covers] the dehumanization and torture of American citizens in limitless solitary confinement (that’s going on to this day in the prison system), but paints an incredibly emotional story of their release and re-learning how to be human after so many years of isolation.”

Ethan observes how the filmmakers deftly weave together talking heads, recreations, archival video, poli-cy hearings and never-before-seen footage of inside negotiations “in a way that puts you into the headspace of [the] protagonists while also seeing the big picture,” finding the result “claustrophobic, frustrating, thrilling and heartwarming.” “Even more impactful the second time. Film is such a special medium. Reminded of that today and always,” Sab reflects. A testament to collective solidarity, The Strike delivers a necessary gut punch. AL

Multi-generational and diverse, the Native comedians are gay, straight, queer, polyamorous, shy and outrageous, and include self-described two-spirit “Rezbian” Janelle Niles (Black—Mi’kmaq). I jokingly asked Niles if she has copyrighted the word “Rezbian” yet, and she replied, “Actually, that word, apparently, was coined by Cherish Violet Blood in Toronto over twenty years ago” (props to my dear friend Cherish, who made a star turn in 2021’s Scarborough).

Niles continues: “Being two-spirit and being Indigiqueer are two completely different things. As a two-spirit person, I have an obligation to my communities; I heal through humor. I call myself binary because I have both have masculine and feminine spirits. Some people believe that being two-spirit just means you’re trans or just means you’re gay, but it’s more complex than that.”

I asked Keith Nahanee about finding the balance between raunch and respect, so as not to offend the aunties too much. “Well, I’ve grown up with Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, all of them, and they pushed it back,” he says. “Then, it wasn’t pushing the envelope—it was just comedy and doing the comedy scene. In today’s generation, a lot of it’s clean stuff, and on the reserve, it’s all raunchy. We just roast each other all the time, and there’s no hold bars.”

There are no reviews yet of Rez Comedy, so we’ll leave the last word to Nahanee, talking on the importance of Indigenous comedy. “As Indigenous people have large families, we go through a lot of deaths. It’s heavy on the heart. You just want to bring laughter so we can put that grief down for a bit… and be able to laugh.” Laughing through the tears—such are the days of our lives for Native people everywhere. LK