Making movies is hard. This is not a revelatory observation, though a film like The Legend of Ochi underlines how much most of us take the art of filmmaking for granted. There is so much impossible skill involved in creating worlds and indelible stories told within those worlds.

As I said in my review, “The Legend of Ochi, written and directed by Isaiah Saxon, is a lovely adventure built on imagination and skill. It certainly feels like the kind of film that will last a good long while. Short on dialogue and long on style, it tells of the small population in a village on the island of Carpathia: they live in fear of the Ochi, an apparently vicious form of primate haunting the nearby forest. Willem Dafoe plays Maxim, a warrior elder who’s been gifted the village’s children and will train them to fight the dreaded beasts.