“Xoftex” is a reputation you may look forward to finding on a pharmacy shelf, to be taken solely after session together with your doctor. In Noaz Deshe‘s heady second feature, however, the title refers to an imagined refugee camp in Greece: a vast, purgatorial compound that has as numbing and disorienting an effect on its residents as the strongest prescription medication. Following a pair of Syrian brothers as they wait out the agonizing process of asylum application — passing the time by bickering, fantasizing about a better life in northern Europe, and shooting amateur movies — Deshe’s movie strikingly captures a way of passing time and private stasis battling one another to a fraught draw, constructing to a freeform surrealism that offers “Xoftex” its personal identification amid the current wave of cinema centered on the migrant disaster.
The movie’s stylistic singularity gained’t come as a shock to those that noticed Deshe’s 2013 debut characteristic “White Shadow,” a kinetic research of albino persecution in Central Africa that gained him one of the best first movie prize at Venice. A multi-hyphenate who additionally works as an artist, composer and cinematographer — and duly takes writing, lensing, enhancing and music credit on his sophomore characteristic — Deshe picks up his filmmaking very a lot the place he left off 11 years in the past, once more merging hard-edged realism with dreamily stylized mood-building, and addressing a tricky, topical topic whereas avoiding issue-movie messaging. Audiences could also be divided by the movie’s arrhythmic storytelling and third-act plunge into outright, impressionistic dysfunction — however adventurous distributors ought to see its talking-point potential, whereas a predominant competitors berth at Karlovy Range will kick off a protracted pageant run.
“Xoftex” could also be formally and structurally imposing, however it’s not a punishing watch, sliced by means of as it’s with sharp, generally raucous gallows humor. Each the movie’s script — by Deshe with Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali (“Fremont”) — and ensemble have been constructed from drama workshops and volunteer work carried out in Greek refugee camps between 2016 and 2019, thus feeling suitably genuine however not blandly generalized. A witty opening sequence introduces a collective of largely Syrian and Palestinian asylum seekers in dialog, as they ponder which European nations they is likely to be despatched to, for higher or worse. “I need Paris, what will I do in Poland?” asks one. Requested why he’s so eager on Paris, he admits he has solely the Eiffel Tower to go on. Because the discuss turns to which nations are inclined to a surge in far-right, anti-migrant sentiment, younger Syrian Nasser (Abdulrahman Diab, excellent) factors out that they’re weak wherever they find yourself: “You hear Europe and you think human rights,” he says scornfully — a line that, given some current political shifts on the Continent, cuts near the bone.
Nasser has cause to be jaded. A gap title card informs us that, on common, asylum seekers in Greece have to attend between 12 and 18 months for a choice on their declare. Nasser and his older brother Yassin (Osama Hafiry) are on the excessive finish of that scale, with no end result instantly in sight, and their temporal sense is beginning to fray. Particular person days turn out to be as indistinguishable from one another because the quite a few white prefab containers that make up the camp, giving Xoftex the air of an industrial container yard moderately than a human settlement. Marita Götz and Lea Walloschke’s manufacturing design makes frequently impressed use of restricted assets.
The identical is likely to be mentioned for the brief movies that Nasser shoots on his cellphone, each to doc the fact of life within the camp — the place some residents have misplaced their minds, and others have entered a long-term, trauma-induced coma — and to supply some proof of his personal existence, which to him feels largely erased by the skin world. The movies vary from vérité on a regular basis recordings to parody frontline newscasts from the battle again residence, however all of them precede his most bold plan: to shoot a zombie horror movie set completely in Xoftex, stressing the purpose that unsettled refugee standing is its personal type of living-dead liminality. Yassin contributes to the movies too, although as his head-down pragmatism clashes with Nasser’s offended righteousness, the brothers spar as a rule. Yassin mockingly labels Nasser a “camp influencer,” whereas Nasser complains, “It should be illegal for relatives to collaborate in the arts.”
Certain sufficient, Nasser’s artistry progressively spins into his personal personal world — fantastical installations of uprooted timber and shattered mirrors — as Deshe’s filmmaking, too, takes depart of grounded realism. His mercurial cinematography, thrashing and stressed for a lot of the movie, arrives at a type of floating serenity, augmented by gleaming digital results. “Xoftex” doesn’t flee actuality, nonetheless. Its flights of fancy jut towards harsh intrusions of real-world absurdism, the place human lives are coldly compressed by means of the intricacies of E.U. asylum regulation, whereas refugee smugglers cost their victims 20 euros further for a sprinkling of pepper to keep off assault canines. Decide your poison, or stick to Xoftex.
