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Antal told us of his upbringing in Southern California, where he always felt slightly out of place; this may explain his affinity for the outsiders who populate Kontroll. He later moved back to Hungary and attended the state film school. Kontroll was his first feature film, and he never expected anyone to see, let alone appreciate, it outside of Budapest. He was stunned that it attracted attention from film festivals around the world, and delighted when it even won a U.S. distributor.

Despite critical acclaim, Kontroll never found its rightful audience. This film is one of a kind, just waiting to be discovered.

66. LA CIUDAD/THE CITY

(1999)

Directed by David Riker

Screenplay by David Riker

Actors:

JOSEPH RIGANO

MATEO GÓMEZ

FERNANDO REYES

MARCOS MARTÍNEZ GARCÍA

MOISÉS GARCÍA

ANTHONY RIVERA

CIPRIANO GARCÍA

LETICIA HERRERA

JOSÉ RABELO

I see a great many films every year. For one to linger in my mind for days is unusual; when a movie stays in my consciousness for years it’s downright amazing. Yet I still think about the images and the melancholy mood of La Ciudad a decade after seeing it. With no stars in its cast, an unknown director working in black and white, and a foreign language on its sound track, its chances of succeeding in U.S. release were slim, but it did win rave reviews and remains one of the most striking American films of the 1990s.

Writer-director David Riker, a graduate of New York University, had already won a student film award from the Directors Guild of America and a prestigious Student Academy Award when this debut feature reached the public. He and cinematographer Harlan Bosmajian worked together for six years to realize their vision: an omnibus film consisting of four vignettes about the lives of Hispanic immigrants in New York City. They mostly sought out nonprofessionals to fill their cast and worked hard, I’m sure, to put them at ease in front of the camera.

Each segment stands alone, yet they have a cumulative impact as the filmmaker brings heartrending empathy to each character’s story. In “Bricks” we enter the world of day laborers where immigrants are subject to the whims and casual cruelty of a stranger whose truck they board in search of work—no questions asked. A man who has no place to leave his son brings him along for the day to clean and load bricks. It seems fairly mundane but, as we discover, that routine can be fraught with drama when something goes wrong on the job.

Concern for a child is the focus of another story about a puppeteer who lives in a station wagon with his young daughter. He knows she is bright and wants to send her to school—but in order to register her he must show a permanent address.

Love—or the dream of love—propels a newcomer from Mexico, a stranger in the concrete jungle, who chances to meet a girl from his hometown. She represents a personification of home…if he can only locate her a second time.

Finally, we meet a seamstress who labors in a sweatshop for the sole purpose of sending money home to her child, who is sick. Like the other women at her workplace, she is at the mercy of her uncaring employers, and when a conflict arises she turns to her fellow workers—who, like her, are paralyzed with fear over losing their jobs. Will they stand with her or will she become just another faceless victim?

La Ciudad is not a polemic or a political tract—far from it. It is an eloquent, even poetic, slice of life that finds true drama in the most ordinary lives imaginable, and that is the source of its extraordinary power. That, and the haunting black-and-white images that evoke the great Italian neorealist films of the 1940s and ’50s. (One might also draw a comparison to Dianne Arbus’s urban photographs.)

I wish I could say that this extraordinary film launched David Riker on a great filmmaking career, but the only credit I can find for him since this feature’s release is as screenwriter of the 2009 release Sleep Dealer.

Cinematographer Harlan Bosmajian, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped working. He photographed