This year we're running down highlights from the festival on a rolling basis, so check back for our writers' latest takes. Markus Schleinzer. New York premiere. After seeing Markus Schleinzer's Angelo , an understated biopic of an African child brought to Austria in the 18th century and raised as a courtier, I'm curious whether his fate was unique or whether this kind of thing was common among European elites eager to civilize the children of their newly colonized subjects.
The film's tone flips from one scene to the next, from Angelo and his wife's cute early-morning pillow fight to the macabre clandestine retrieval of the deceased Angelo's remains and their taxidermized preservation in a Viennese museum of natural history. True story! Like if The Wild Child were given the Haneke treatmentβnot surprisingly, since Schleinzer worked with him several times as casting director. Angelo can be read as a revisionist history a la The Favorite with similarly abrasive harpsicord , or as a parable about black talent in a white-owned entertainment industry.
His captivity is a double-edged sword: he enjoys privileges reserved for the nobility but also has to dress up and perform for bored aristocrats, narrating a fabricated myth of his wild origins as a warrior king's son. It's a rags-to-riches story that will be told again and again over the coming centuries by blacks who have made it in a white man's world, its contemporaneity underlined by the abrupt appearance of distinctly present-day set design elements.
A question for Schleinzer: why wasn't Angelo's apocryphal meeting with Mozart included? Cosmo Bjorkenheim. A NEON release. Honeyland fills an important void in the recent influx of films about bees, beekeping, and the worldwide honeybee crisis.
Whereas most issue-driven docs have a tendency to tell, not show, this one sets itself apart by focusing instead on the emotional journey of an often overlooked human player in the story of the bees: a wild honey hunter, whose life is inextricably tied to the health and vitality of her bees.
