MUBI: Notebook Festival Berlinale Dispatch: Size Doesn’t Matter
The festival is shrinking, and that may be a good thing.

Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum’s Houses is close kin to Spring Night in its portrait of a forlorn life tended to with compassion. Sasha (Yael Eisenberg) is living out of their car while on a personal quest to visit the homes of their youth in the Israeli city of Safed. Why their family moved so often is ambiguously ascribed to the social alienation of having immigrated from the Soviet Union. Some of the houses are now abandoned and others variously inhabited, giving the ruminative tour a haunted quality. The black-and-white photography is interrupted by color home-video footage of Sasha’s troubled memories, and we find that the present is inhospitable to their nonbinary gender. With emotionally charged cinematography that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1920s of F. W. Murnau and John Ford, and an empathetic narrative of an outsider reminiscent of the films of Kelly Reichardt, Houses is a lean but piercing mood piece of dislocation. Tetelbaum’s poetic and heartfelt debut confronts the past while looking for a safe haven for the future.

https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/berlinale-dispatch-size-doesn-t-matter