Tendaberry

Watched this at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Themes of loneliness and isolation have been explored in stories of NYC and Tendaberry does have issues on feeling scattered and dry but as a whole, the core emotions, the direction, and a strong lead performance from Kota Johan.

Filmmaker Haley Elizabeth Anderson direction on capturing the themes and atmosphere was pretty good as Anderson's approach to the writing felt realistic and nature. The dialogue between the characters and so forth felt poetic and nature to what is happening in the scene which creates a nature yet realistic vibe to the setting. The camerawork and presentation is pretty good but personally, there were some shots that were a little off-putting and there were too many close-up shots.

The performances are solid as many of the performances, while might not be perfect, are good on capturing the essence of loneliness and reality. The narrative has strong elements which I liked but I think it does get a little stuck and too scattered through it's second act as if it feels a little lost. The characters were okay to observe but I wasn't fully able to connect with them emotionally as if I would like to.

As a whole, despite it's flaws, it still remains strong.

Haley Elizabeth Anderson's Tendaberry is a stunning, emotionally raw portrait of a young woman's life in contemporary New York City, crafted with a documentary-like intimacy that blurs fiction and reality.

Kota Johan delivers a heartbreaking and deeply authentic performance as Dakota, a 20-something singer-songwriter navigating love, loss, and survival after her boyfriend Yuri is forced to return to war-torn Ukraine. Through Dakota's small triumphs and devastating setbacks, Anderson captures the chaos, beauty, and melancholy of everyday existence, using handheld cinematography and archival footage to weave a sensory, time-collapsing tapestry that feels both ephemeral and timeless.

What makes Tendaberry extraordinary is its fearless embrace of imperfection, flowing through seasons and emotions with poetic fluidity, as Dakota's voiceover and found footage bridge past, present, and future. Anderson's lyrical structure, unforced progression, and grounding in urban transience evoke the spirit of works like Beba and American Honey, yet the film carves its own identity with raw immediacy and tactile emotion. As Dakota dances, sings, struggles, and dreams, Tendaberry becomes not just a story of personal growth but a cosmic reflection on memory, place, and existence-one that lingers long after the final frame.

What this films lacks in plot, it makes up for with a shaky camera and rapid editing between shots trying to make the mundane into an unwatchable art house film. This was a 2 minute short film that was dragged out to two hours. The plot can be summarized as a girl given many choices in life and she chooses the wrong one at every opportunity. The lack of character development makes the lead female Dakota an unsympathetic lead and as she stumbles through her year of mistakes it makes the viewer unclear why we should be rooting for this person. There is no definable hero's journey so the final third of the movie leaves the watcher wondering when and how will this finally end.

In an ideal world, one that values visual imagination, spontaneity of expression, tracking close to youthful life, this would have won at the Oscars this year over the incidentally also youth- and New York-centric Anora.

In an ideal world, it would be playing in every screen now; twenty-somethings who have no clue who Jonas Mekas, Malick or Akerman are (the filmmaker does) but are deeply visual creatures would be rapt to receive this depiction of them, non-Netflix.

It's very much a studied work. The diaristic stream of consciousness is after Jonas Mekas, the poetic swirl of bodies after Malick. Chantal Akerman once made a marvelous little film called News from Home, in the form of visual letters from New York, which this one recalls in its tone of intimate, uncertain confession. I would bet the filmmaker knows them all too well from film school, which is where she came up from. There is an air of precocious emulation of favorites.

But this is a first work, and as old masters leave us, I eagerly expect new voices to aspire to take up the mantle. What is this bizarre, ephemeral firework of being here in this moment? Knowing myself in the light of all the other things.

She falls for a boy, twentysomethings in post-pandemic Brooklyn, who is whisked away from her (incidentally to Ukraine as the war starts) but leaves behind in his place a son.

Friends, acquaintances come together for a brief winter and spring, then disperse again, maybe for now. How was it different for you? What does it amount to? Coney Island in the 1910s, sparkling lights, the same today as not. Coyotes maybe will roam. A dreamlike dance that reunites her with her mother. Kids playing in the hallway, the building slated for demolition soon.

Thi is fine work for a first time. Anxious, messy, tenderly reaching youth is and will always be one of our pre-eminent modes of discovering wild music in the stars.

Moody, hanging out, docufiction kind of vibe with some very nice-looking parts here and there, in contrast to others that were very jarring. The only problem was I could not resonate at all to the main character. Dakota is immature, naive and rude. Which makes sense given her age and her generation, but I have nothing in common with the culture, the lifestyle or the thinking so I found a lot of her choices, beliefs and attitudes either uncomfortable, unpleasant or just plain ridiculous. I was willing to make allowances in the beginning cause she seemed like a sweet kid with big dreams in a very harsh environment. But things go awry after she loses Yuri and she never seemed to have any close female friends. Even those she calls friends are not and she does not really bond with them or truly care. So might be a me problem although I am not so sure. I thought this was aiming or going towards the Anora kind of vibe or at least reaching out to the Anoras of the world, only I liked Anora and I even sympathized with her, but this did not happen with Dakota. Basically Kota is not my vibe.