***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.
When Khadija Sabriye, a Somali refugee, begins cataloguing the invasive questions she’s gotten from strangers (everything from, “Do Black women tan?” to, Jesus, “Were you circumcised?”), I thought about all the creepy things I’ve been asked or told while minding my own business in public because my disability entitles and emboldens a certain cishet genus of white adult. Most recently, a man approached me in a grocery store to say, “I saw one like you on the train once.” It’s as if they’re on safari and I’m the wildlife. And, you know, what am I supposed to do with that? Spit a little acid back in their direction and risk reinforcing whatever mindless resentment they already harbour towards you for being different, causing untold harm to your kind in turn. Risk real physical violence, too. Sabriye says something else that hits home: that she doesn’t complain about all the bullshit she puts up with–something I myself have been complimented for–not because she’s Zen calm personified, but because if she starts complaining, she’ll never stop (ditto).
Granted, I have no business drawing an equals sign between myself and the emotionally scarred Sabriye, who, in a moment of pitch-black humour one recognizes as a coping mechanism, notes that seeing half her family beheaded in front of her made it to difficult to sympathize with colleagues mourning a pet ferret. But Padidar seems to have made All You See in search of communion, and that’s what her movie facilitates. (It has the potential to show the ruling class that they all have the same issues, too.) As for the youngsters, Ukranian Hanna and English Sofia, they may not be as articulate as Sabriye, but they’re achingly sincere–and their ellipses leave Padidar room to wax lyrical in experimental tableaux, such as the indelible, complicated image of children soaring above the earth in a simulator ride. If her autobiographical framing story feels comparatively gratuitous, giving the film a shape as well as a bittersweet uplift that both feel like a concession to conventional narrative thinking, even there Padidar develops visual motifs that lend a veritable line drawing some vital shading. In many ways, All You See is about using cinema to knock down the Tower of Babel.
