Siberia

Abel Ferrara’s career in cinema has been defined by a continual flouting of the rules – of narrative, of representation, and sometimes of good taste. (Nicole Brenez famously compared him to Joe Strummer of The Clash, “a poet who justifies the existence of popular forms.”) But even accounting for this artist’s unstoppable iconoclasm, nothing he has done could have prepared us for Siberia, his latest, and arguably greatest, collaboration with Willem Dafoe. It begins as a glacially-paced East-meets-Western, with Dafoe as Clint, the proprietor of a lonely watering hole in the middle of the frozen wasteland, receiving the occasional visitor on dogsled. But before long, this locale falls away, leading our putative hero to embark upon a complex journey of the mind and spirit, one that will take him across time and space, past and present, possibly even Heaven and Hell. Siberia is Ferrara at his most metaphysical, and while the film suggests influences as a diverse as Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Matthew Barney, it is Dafoe’s mesmerizing performance that holds the film together. His Clint is the Western male subject of rationality, who experiences himself “under erasure.” (Michael Sicinski)

In the presence of Abel Ferrara.

Abel Ferrara: THE DRILLER KILLER (1979), MS .45 (1981), FEAR CITY (1984), KING OF NEW YORK (1990), BAD LIEUTENANT (1992), SNAKE EYES (1993), THE ADDICTION (1995), THE FUNERAL (1996), NAPOLI, NAPOLI, NAPOLI (2009), PASOLINI (2014), PIAZZA VITTORIO (2017), HANS (V’17- Trailer), TOMMASO (2019)