At a time when we’re mostly cooped up inside, looking longingly out of the window at the first blush of spring, it’s fair to say a streaming service called Tropical on Demand pretty much has us at hello. Before you settle in for a marathon of beachy, pina colada-infused escapism, however, readjust your expectations a little. A small but enticing new service, Tropical on Demand is the VOD offshoot of Cinema Tropical, a leading distributor of independent Latin American cinema in the US – happily made accessible to an international online audience.
Launched at the end of March, it’s one of a surfeit of enterprising “virtual cinemas” set up by arthouse distributors in response to the coronavirus shutdown: while many bigger films have opted to delay until cinemas reopen, others see the advantage of a captive at-home audience rapidly cycling through their viewing options and open to adventurous alternatives. At the glossy end of this market, you have something like Curzon Home Cinema: long prepared for such a crisis, even if they could never have known what that crisis would be, now serving its cinema-starved users with A-list new art films until relative normality resumes.
But at the maverick end, Tropical on Demand offers a devoted online platform – working via the Vimeo site – to films that would still be fighting for visibility in the very best of circumstances: it seems unlikely that many of the films in their curated collection would ever reach British cinemas. New and original Latin American directorial voices are given priority here, plucked from the less spotlight reaches of recent festival programmes. Their first five selections span Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina and the Dominican Republic, flipping between fiction and documentary. Some are more easily approachable than others; all are exciting, illuminating visions.
The programme launched a fortnight ago with Away from Meaning, an achingly intimate personal portrait by Mexican documentary-maker Olivia Luengas, centred on her sister Liliana’s struggle with borderline personality disorder. Luengas explores a lifetime of mistreatment and misdiagnosis by medical authorities, and her family’s own difficulties in supporting and understanding Liliana’s mental health. There’s no way to make this easy viewing, but the acute tenderness of its perspective gives it light and depth. Following its free 24-hour streaming premiere on the Cinema Tropical website, it’s now available to watch for a modest £3.
A second documentary, Still Burn, covers further complicated family matters: director Mauricio Alfredo Ovando is the grandson of the former Bolivian dictator Alfredo Ovando Candía, and his film engages thoughtfully with that thorny legacy. Or for an airy, atmospheric blast of free-form storytelling, try Argentinian director Gastón Solnicki’s 72-minute jewel Kékszakállú, much celebrated at the Venice and Toronto festivals a couple of years ago. Awash in sleekly haunting imagery and very loosely inspired by Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, it’s a study of adolescent women in emotional limbo that has the eerie, cryptic energy of a genuine daydream.
Natalia Almada’s gradually transfixing Everything Else, meanwhile, is unexpectedly a film for the era of self-isolation. A character study of a sixtysomething government bureaucrat – beautifully played by Adriana Barraza, an Oscar nominee 14 years ago for Babel and showcased all too rarely since – attempting to extricate herself from the solitary invisibility of her own life, it’s a piercing reminder that social distancing isn’t a new concept to all. It dovetails thematically with Tú Y Yo, Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada’s perceptive documentary about the temperamental relationship between an elderly widow and her younger, long-suffering domestic servant: an essay on human connection that bristles with unresolved class politics.
It’s a promising, provocative first batch of picks from a streaming initiative that will hopefully last longer than the pandemic that initially necessitated it. The site is further rounded out with a section of daily viewing recommendations from the diverse Latin American pool, including a beguiling Lucrecia Martel short and a past pick from this very column: the smart, eco-minded school bus documentary La Camioneta. Tropical on Demand may not be a sunny escape, but it’s restorative all the same.
Also new on streaming
10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki (NHK) If you’ve gorged on Netflix’s Studio Ghibli haul and are hungry for related viewing, this loving four-part documentary portrait of the animation house’s leading artist – streaming globally free via Japanese broadcaster NHK’s on-demand service – should do the trick.
Jumanji: The Next Level (Sony, 12) Sure to be much in demand through the locked-down spring holidays, this brash new instalment in the goofy fantasy franchise makes few creative claims for itself – but it’s a big sloppy helping of undemanding family fun, so it has found its moment.
Shooting the Mafia (Modern Films, 15) British documentary-maker Kim Longinotto’s latest film has a fascinating subject in the fierce, prickly, Cosa Nostra-documenting Italian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, but it can’t quite get under her thick skin, and loses focus in trying.
The Cranes Are Flying (Sony, 12) A polished Criterion Collection edition of a revered but under-seen Palme d’Or winner: Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov’s searing study of a young woman torn from her lover by the second world war and surviving has held on to its hard, stark beauty.
