Border

Director: Ali Abbasi

Country/Distributor: sweden/Denmark, NEON

Opened: october 26

THE PROTAGONIST OF ALI ABBASI’S second feature, , Tina is somewhat odd-looking: her lumpy face, sunken eyes, and whetted teeth elicit cruel insults from strangers. A customs inspector in a remote, woodsy part of Sweden, she has an -esque ability to smell people’s intentions—a gift that makes her invaluable to port security but, is more invested in the particular, felt experience of being adrift between social boundaries and categories—and in the thrill of reclaiming one’s identity from those lost spaces. Itself a hard-to-categorize blend of mytho-fantasy, romance, and crime drama, is perhaps most resonant as a kind of queer cinema—especially in the way that it locates desire as the cosmic force that awakens Tina to her own self.