Top 3 Critics’ Picks In Theaters this April: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez’s Manakamana

Manakamana – Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez
NYC Release – April 18th
Distributor: The Cinema Guild
Awards & Fests: Winner of a trio of Locarno Film Fest awards (the Golden Leopard for Special Jury Prize in Filmmakers of the Present, Special Mention for Best First Feature Film and the Independent International Film Critics’ Award for Best First Feature ), this was showcased at TIFF & NYFF.

What the critic’s are saying?: Receiving thumbs up from Variety’s Scott Foundas (“manage to craft a vast and revealing portrait of both their chosen locale and the people who pass through it“) and hailed as an achievement and an audience-testing item via IndieWire’s Eric Kohn (“Manakamana” says as much about the erosion of patience as it does about the value of holding onto it”), decidedly, as Cinema Scope’s Jay Kuehner points out in a lengthy analysis, there is sweet offerings in the “field report from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab—the visual anthropology department headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, co-director of Sweetgrass (2009) and Leviathan (2012)—Manakamana is predicated on close inspection, embodied inquiry, defiance of genre, and an engagement with the real.”

And our third Critics’ Pick: