This is america

Faced with a moral dilemma that adds to his many problems: he was sent to prison for setting fire to a hipster in conditions that we will not reveal as it is the heart as funny as improbable film … His virtuoso director attains to create a tension that he defuses through comedy. And as soon as we honestly laugh, he plunges the viewer into the violence of Oakland: old ghetto facing San Francisco and not far from Silicon Valley during accelerated gentrification …

Since his release, Collin is working as a mover with his white friend Miles (Rafael Casal), a privileged witness of the current transition. The opportunity to bite slices of life, as when a young executive sends a negative comment to the moving box that employs rather than answer him verbally. This hilarious and yet profound first film was awarded a critically-deserved Critic Award at the American Film Festival.

Another feature film screened in Deauville, Monster and Men, tackles the same subject through the eyes of three witnesses of a police blunder (including a cop). More documentary in its approach and drier in its form, the movie of New Yorker Renaldo Marcus Green does not convince as much.

Unlike Night Comes On, the first film directed by American comedian Jordana Spiro (seen in the Ozark series on Netflix). Angel (Dominique Fishback) is released on parole on the eve of his 18th birthday. The young African-American has just spent a year in a juvenile prison in the Philadelphia area after being arrested for carrying of weapons. In a quest for revenge, she makes a first stop at a home dealer weapons. A second will be for his younger sister Abby (Tatum Marilyn Hall), placed in host family since the death of their mother. But the real goal of Angel is to find his father who turns out to be the murderer of their mother. Will empathy for her younger sister detract from her purpose ? Night Comes We won the Jury Prize at the Deauville Festival (equal with the American Animals cop comedy).

While Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals (already awarded at the Sundance Film Festival) won The Louis Roederer Fondation Revelation Prize. The film takes us into the intimacy of three brothers whom their parents leave to themselves forced to work at night, and busy with their passionate relationship. The film is told by the youngest son who also draws their daily lives (drawings that come to life before our eyes). Despite a poetic look at the precariousness experienced by its protagonists, the film struggles to convince completely.

Finally, there is Dead WomanWalking, which attaches to 9 women on death row. Whether white or black, the film shows that extenuating circumstances remain a rather abstract notion in deep America when you are poor. Strong, oppressive but too willingly draws tears, the film of the Israeli Hagar Ben-Asher, completes to draw a portrait of an America that has great difficulty in proposing an enviable destiny to its popular classes.