Katie Rife’s Overlooked Films of 2022 | Features

“Mija”

The best music documentaries harness the emotional power of the art form to convey an essential truth, either about the people making the music or the people who listen to it. “Mija” adds a third group to this equation: The people who make the music possible. “Mija” director Isabel Castro has a lot in common with her primary subject, Doris Muñoz: Both are young Mexican-American women, and both are making their own way in creative fields—Castro as a filmmaker, and Muñoz as an independent (i.e., self-employed) manager of alternative Latinx musicians. Muñoz feels a complicated mix of guilt, resentment, loyalty, and gratitude towards her immigrant parents, and the artists she represents have similarly complex feelings about family, home, ambition, and creativity. 

Perhaps because of its director’s familiarity with the particulars of her subjects’ lives and relationships, “Mija” paints a more nuanced portrait of the immigrant experience in America than many documentaries on the subject. Too often, immigrants, particularly undocumented ones, abstracted into “issues” to be debated rather than recognized as complicated, contradictory people living real human lives. “Mija” is the antidote to that, both in terms of content and storytelling. Castro is a silent, offscreen presence in “Mija,” but her affection for these young people bleeds through into the film. Castro’s pacing is laid back, like her subjects’ attitudes towards life; her compositions are colorful, like their culture. Add in the universal language of music, and you have a wonderful example of Roger Ebert’s famous quote about cinema as an “empathy machine.” 

“Catch the Fair One”

I could tell you to watch “Catch the Fair One” because it raises awareness about an urgent issue—the epidemic of violence, particularly sexual violence, against Indigenous women in North America. And that would be true: Star Kali Reis co-wrote the script, which incorporates both Reis’ experience as a professional fighter and her Indigenous background into the story, about a washed-up boxer named Kaylee (Reis) who risks it all in a dangerous one-woman mission to save her little sister from sex traffickers. But this isn’t just an important movie. It’s also a brutal, uncompromising, dark, propulsive one. This is the kind of movie that leaves a mark.