Fernanda Valadez's Identifying Features re-contextualizes the border-crossing humanist drama with a vitality rooted more in immersive horror than introspective social realism. Attempting to construct and personify dread-induction through synthesizing the spiritual with the material world, Identifying Features is a film that manages to encapsulate the tenets of trauma through an expressivity typically seen only in genre filmmaking. Juxtaposing the vast, barren spatiality of the Mexican terrain south of the US border with tight, constraining compositions from man-made structures, Identifying Feature's formal stylings are impressively realized. Such attention to detail beautifully enunciates the film's underlying theme - how abstractions such as national borders lead to material denigration which isn't often so easily seen from an outside perspective. The narrative and characterizations engage heavily with mystery and thriller sensibilities - focused on a mother's unwavering attempt to track down her son who fled to the border and subsequently disappeared. Identifying Features could have easily fallen into heavy-handed thematic navel-gazing and yet it wisely remembers that expounding commentary is never as strong as sculpting it around the powerful visualizations that cinema allows. The dramatic elements are more not less poignant because of this approach, and in this story of grief in which the metaphysical and material coalesce, the border-crossing drama is given real teeth. It's an immersive examination of abstract social/political conceptions and the far-reaching externalities that denigrate so many and through its carefully crafted formal designs and narrative schematics, Identifying Features encapsulates the unnecessary dissolution of morality brought by state & legal abstraction
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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