Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Ahead of its U.S. premiere at SXSW, “The Queen of My Dreams” has been sold to a flurry of international markets, including in the U.K. and Ireland to Peccadillo Pictures.
17.02.2024 - 00:01 / variety.com
Siddhant Adlakha There’s a slim overlap in the Venn diagram of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Patti Smith. Into that nearly infinitesimal space fits Abel Ferrara’s obliquely reflective, geopolitical documentary “Turn in the Wound.” For that alone it deserves attention, though the Ukrainian president and the American poet/punk rocker aren’t Ferrara’s subjects so much as they are his featured co-authors — fellow painters of a portrait depicting the feeble but essential human instinct to chronicle the horrors of war.
Filled with shocking footage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with first-person recollections of atrocities, Ferrara’s unconventional film heavily features poetic performance art by Smith throughout its runtime. It’s the glue that binds the film, until it no longer can.
Languid despite its brevity, the movie occasionally loses its wider perspective beneath a one-track focus on individual lives. Still, it maintains a magnetic allure for lengthy stretches, thanks to its use of noisy, low-rent digital video in both its recovered archival footage and its newly filmed interviews with Zelenskyy and various Ukrainian soldiers.
The project’s chronicling of recent history ends up elevated by Ferrara — who enlists longtime collaborators Sean Price Williams (“The Sweet East”) and Emmanuel Gras (“Makala”) to serve as camera operators — from mere reflection on violent events to digital self-reflection on the way their images transform viewers through sight and sound. Ferrara’s de facto framing device features Smith, backed by projections of abstract images like shifting landscapes, delivering an impassioned spoken-word performance set to heavy, intoxicating strings.
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Ahead of its U.S. premiere at SXSW, “The Queen of My Dreams” has been sold to a flurry of international markets, including in the U.K. and Ireland to Peccadillo Pictures.
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