Fellipe Barbosa's hybrid docu-drama GABRIEL AND THE MOUNTAIN opens in NY and L.A.

Not quite like any movie I've seen previously and yet not so different in content and style as to seem at all "strange," GABRIEL AND THE MOUNTAIN is a kind of memorial to Gabriel Buchmann, a long-time friend of the filmmaker -- Fellipe Barbosa --  as well as an exploration of the last period of Gabriel's too-short life and a possible, though not-particularly-tidy explanation of his untimely death.

To his great credit, Barbosa decided to make his movie as narrative film, rather than a documentary, casting actors both professional and not and then mixing them so well, while using a story format that appears to follow real life closely enough, that a kind of vérité is quickly achieved.

The filmmaker, shown at right, seems clearly "invested" in this movie-- not just financially and artistically but emotionally, too.

And yet, instead of allowing himself to be either overly constrained or, conversely, undisciplined by his closeness to the material, Barbosa has used his understanding of what docu-drama can achieve to produce something nearly sui generis and very much worth experiencing.

His movie is too long -- it could have lost 15 to 20 minutes and been much stronger -- but it is still, despite this, memorable. Once seen, neither it nor its main character, Gabriel, will easily be forgotten.

As played by the remarkable young actor, João Pedro Zappa (shown above), Gabriel is at once full of life, energy, wit, smarts and attitude -- occasionally, so much of the latter that he begins to annoy. Yet he's kind and caring and always bounces back into your (and his girlfriend's) good graces.

Initially we see Gabriel with the various folk he's encountered along the way on his African adventure. He's come there as a kind of educational project to study poverty from the viewpoint of the people who are living through it and who, not coincidentally, seem to have embraced Gabriel fully and lovingly. In documentary style, each of these people tell us a bit about their own encounter with the young man. One of the side attractions of the film is that it makes the countries of African that we visit seem like the kindest and most welcoming places on earth.

Once Gabriel's girlfriend (played equally well by Caroline Abras, above and at bottom) joins him midway along, the movie becomes a kind of love duet that's also full of spice and ginger, politics and economics, and some quarreling, too, in which we view a bit of Gabriel's not-so-nice side -- which makes his character register all the more strongly and fully.

Gabriel is so full of life, in fact, that this gives the movie an odd and moving melancholy, since we have seen from its onset that he is now dead. And yet he lives. Boy, does he live! Along the way we visit the Masai people, see Mount Kilimanjaro, spend some time at the sea and finally return to Mount Mulanje in Malawi, Gabriel's final destination.

As the movie grows longer, it loses some stream because during the final 30-40 minutes we learn little more about Gabriel's character, even though the film itself continues and becomes somewhat repetitive. (The heavily accented English of the Africans is also sometimes difficult to decipher; English subtitles would have helped.) Still, the need to learn what happened to this young man, and why, is strong. The result -- in which we somewhat know and yet don't fully know -- is very well-handled by the filmmaker.

From Strand Releasing and running two hours and eleven minutes, Gabriel and the Mountain opens this Friday, June 15, in New York City (at the Quad Cinema) and Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal). In the coming weeks the movie will expand to at least another half dozen cities across the country. Here in South Florida it opens, Friday, July 13, at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Click here, and then click Screenings on the task bar midway down, to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters. 

Native-American teens today fill Chloé Zhao's do-we-stay-or-leave-the-reservation movie, SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME

When you are "breaking" a horse, explains our Native-American hero, Johnny, at the beginning of the new independent film, SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME, you should "leave some 'bad' in it. They'll need it to survive out here." Initially intimate but spacious, with breath-taking vistas of the badlands of South Dakota, and extremely low-key, this new movie from Chloé Zhao (born in China, now living in the U.S.) is her first full-length piece, one that took four years to complete, as she lived & worked on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Those four years evidently helped give the movie the kind of authenticity that is not easily faked, as Ms Zhao (shown at right) shows us in leisurely, slow-moving fashion, the world of the kids who are "stuck on the res." The movie shows us their lives -- with their family and friends, at school, in church, at work and play, in love and sex -- without any expository or narrative comment, and we see how they must fit into a hugely downsized and circumscribed culture.

The filmmaker never stoops to proselytizing or special pleading. She doesn't have to. The lives we see on display make their point lucidly enough. She uses non-actors who pretty much appear to be playing themselves (or a reasonable facsimile). While this makes them seem authentic, it also diminishes the drama and much of the specificity that a good actor might bring to the role. (That's John Reddy, above on horseback, who plays our hero, Johnny.) Johnny's younger sister, Jashaun (Jashaun St. John, below) is the other character we learn most about, along with his girlfriend, who's soon to leave the res for college.

Perhaps the most unusual character is the tattoo artist/clothing designer who befriends Jashaun and is partial to the number 7. The movie generally avoids melodrama (except for one revenge-of-a-rival-gang scene), sticking to its low-key, slow pace. Once the film, around the halfway point, begin to lose any edge at all, it seems to turn generic in both its dialog and situations. At this point, the slow pace simply sinks things. (I can't remem-ber another film during which I consulted my watch as often as here.)

Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a well-intentioned movie that achieves its goals well enough to be successful on the "intentions" front. Visually, too, the movie succeeds (the framing is quite good: cinematography by Joshua James Richards). Sound-wise, perhaps not. It may have been the quality of the screener disc I watched, the lack of enunciation by the actors, or the sound design itself, but I missed a certain amount of the dialog along the way and felt periodically frustrated.

Another odd thing: our lead character's narration at both the beginning and end of the film sounds far too intelligent, poetic and writerly to be coming of this young man's mind or mouth. The rest of the dialog we hear from him is on a completely different level. But that, too, I suspect, is part of the "well-intentioned-ness" of this not uninteresting but likely to be overpraised film. Songs My Brothers Taught Me, from Kino Lorber and running 94 minutes, has its U.S. theatrical premiere this coming Wednesday, March 2, at Film Forum in New York City. Click here then scroll down to see all upcoming playdates, with cities and theaters listed.