Tendaberry

Watched a screening in Berlin January 6, 2025.

This movie is a fantastic achievement. It creates its own dimension of sadness, which was difficult to bear but for me turned into a cathartic experience for which I am grateful.

As for another user review: Our mistakes and how we deal with them are what interests me in such a work of art. How close narrative, the hybrid form and acting get to real life achieves quite an emotional impact. In comparison, even though it is a masterpiece in its own right, for me "Anora" pales.

Before I saw it, the title and referencing Laura Nyro seemed very self-confident, bordering on presumptuousness. But it does not fail this ambition.

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.

I'm not afraid to watch new, experimental films. But they have to resonate with me. And more importantly, they have to tell a story. Well, this one turned out to be a total waste of time. And I watched over an hour of it. I kept waiting for something to actually happen. It sort of did. But it sure took a long time to tell a story.

I thought the characters were horrible. I couldn't relate to anyone in the film. Especially the lead. She was a sour, nasty person who was going nowhere in life. And all the other characters were equally unlikable.

Then there was the camerawork. Horrible. It was like it was filmed with someone who had ADD. The camera kept jumping around and it almost made me dizzy. Plus the film was filled with annoying jump cuts. And then the filmmaker tried to weave in a bunch of historical footage of Coney Island and Brooklyn. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story.

If you want to waste a couple hours of your time, you'd be better off sitting by a lake or river and just stare into the void. Such a waste of time. Better luck next time guys!

--MovieJunkieMark.

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.

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.