CORINNA BELZ, “GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING”

By Damon Smith

Capturing the moment a work of art is born, or rather the arduous process through which a particular masterwork begins to reveal itself to a painter or sculptor, is an old subject for cinema. Hollywood in the classical and postwar era loved biopics, bringing to the screen highly romanticized, larger-than-life portrayals of everyone from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Michelangelo to Toulouse-Lautrec. There are fewer great films that focus single-mindedly on the creative process, however. Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one, a masterful film about a fictional artist whose laborious, continually frustrated efforts to paint his beautiful young muse are rendered in minute documentary detail and large swaths of real-time concentration. On the documentary side, Victor Erice’s Quince Tree of the Sun (aka Dream of Light) is an enthralling depiction of Spanish artist Antonio López’s perennial efforts to faithfully depict the way light hits a tree in his garden every autumn, slyly combined with one or two fictional techniques, as if the impurities in the artist’s work had become the director’s own.

Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter Painting delivers precisely what the title of the film promises: for most of the film, we witness one of the world’s most celebrated and prolific artists at work in his studio, creating a series of large paintings, and the effect is mesmerizing. Richter applies layer after layer of paint to his canvases, first with brushes and then with his redoubtable giant squeegee, continually altering the surface and expression of his spontaneous abstracts, which become richer and more mysterious with each pass. Richter, a laconic, gentle artist who has never allowed anyone to film or observe him while he is at work, is openly discomfited by the camera, telling the director at one point, “We have to talk about the film.” Occasionally, Belz inserts brief cut-outs of interviews with the Dresden-born painter from the late ’60s and early ’70s, after his defection from East Germany, impressing upon us the continuity of his thinking about art as well as his reluctance to expound upon its most secretive inner qualities. Glimpses of Richter navigating the klieg … Read the rest

DAVID GELB, “JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI”

By Brandon Harris

Jiro Ono, the world’s most acclaimed sushi chef, is not one to rest. As hard working an octogenarian as you’re ever likely to encounter on screen, Jiro is a celebrity in Japan, but little known here in the States. That is likely to change thanks to director David Gelb’s portrait of the man, his two sons and the philosophy of diligence, hard work and perfectionism they demonstrate in Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

A hit at last year’s Berlinale and Tribeca Film Festival, it depicts the rigorous work ethic that Jiro, who began making sushi professionally shortly after World War II, insists upon from himself and his staff of apprentices. Captaining an incredibly small restaurant that seats less than a dozen, only serves sushi and requires reservations up to a year in advance, Jiro has passed on his passion for sushi to his two sons, both of whom are budding sushi chefs themselves.

Gelb, who studied film at USC, first became obsessed by sushi as a youngster when his father Peter, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera, would take him on business trips to Japan. The now 28-year-old director co-directed the short Lethargy, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Burns, with Daddy Longlegs co-director Josh Safdie when they were both just 18 years old.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures, opens this Friday in Manhattan.

Filmmaker: You’ve said elsewhere that you initially set out to make a documentary about sushi culture. How did you end up focusing solely on Jiro?

Gelb: I started out shooting little test segments, feeling out the style of the film and also hoping I might be able to raise some money with them. I shot a short on my favorite L.A. sushi chef Nozawa. He actually just retired last week. That was kind of a big deal — I don’t know if you saw the huge piece in the Times about Nozawa?

Filmmaker: I didn’t.

Gelb: He’s one of the most interesting sushi chefs in the United States as well … Read the rest

JUSTIN KURZEL, “THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS”

By Damon Smith

For his harrowing debut feature, Australian director Justin Kurzel (Blue Tongue) took on a sensationalistic serial-murder case that rocked the northern suburbs of Adelaide in the early aughts. Known across the country as the “bodies in barrels” case, the Snowtown murders spurred controversy and launched a lengthy investigation that resulted in the conviction of a charismatic drifter, John Bunting, along with three accomplices, including a teenage boy he had taken under his wing. Attached to the project by Warp Films Australia’s Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and working from a script by Shaun Grant, Kurzel brings psychological verisimilitude and a gritty naturalism to the details of this true-crime story, achieving cinematic truth alongside semi-journalistic accuracy drawn from book accounts, court transcripts, and interviews in the community. The Snowtown Murders won a FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Cannes Critics’ Week, as well as top honors at the Australian Film Institute Awards, for best director, actor, screenplay, and editing.

Cast almost entirely with local nonprofessional actors, Kurzel’s film drops in on the benighted community of Salisbury North, where downcast youth Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) lives with his chain-smoking mother Elizabeth (Lousie Harris) and two half brothers in a squalid estate home. When infectiously charming John (Daniel Henshall) rides into town and begins to date Elizabeth, he takes an interest in cleaning up the area of ostensible predators, drug addicts, and perverts, beginning with a neighbor who has taken naked photos of Jamie and his siblings. John recruits Jamie in harassing the man, first with light vandalism, then eventually dumping a bucket of crushed kangaroo parts on his porch until he moves out in a panic. John’s energetic confidence and zeal for justice mobilizes the community, who gather for alcohol-fueled watch meetings to vent their frustrations and identify morally suspect individuals. Into this maelstrom of prejudice floats laconic Jamie, who has found a dubious role model in a man whose demonic influence on him escalates. Forced to shoot a dog execution-style, Jamie is then recruited to witness the protracted killing of his half brother, who John learns has been raping his young charge.… Read the rest

RUARIDH ARROW, “HOW TO START A REVOLUTION”

By Brandon Harris

Although you’ve probably never heard of him, writer and professor Gene Sharp is one of the foremost scholars on grassroots, non-violent protest movements. The son of an itinerant preacher, the Ohio-born octogenarian, whose writings have informed the tactics of protest movement leaders from Serbia to Iran and the Ukraine to Syria, teaches at UMass Dartmouth. He lives a life of relative quiet and solitude, at least when revolutionaries from around the globe aren’t clamoring for his advice. In Ruaridh Arrow’s documentary How to Start a Revolution we get up close and personal with Sharp, who has drawn the direct ire of dictators and plutocrats on the far left and far right, from Hugo Chavez to the late Slobodan Milosevic.

Arrow’s film takes us from the quaint Boston offices that Sharp maintains with his assistant, Jamila Raqib, to various conflict points across the globe, where Arrow profiles the very people who put Sharp’s formula of unrelenting non-violent civil disobedience into action. In so doing, he links a broad cross-section of social and political movements together under the rubric of Sharp’s techniques. At the same time, he reveals to us a man of seemingly impeccable moral rigor, who, from the time he was jailed for protesting Korean War conscription (long before the anti-war movement in the States gained steam over a decade later), has been committed to non-violent political struggle.

Trained as a newspaper journalist, Arrow got his start in broadcasting producing news segments for the U.K.’s SkyNews, before he moved on to Channel 4′s Frontline-esque Dispatches series. He has produced documentary programs for the The Financial Times and the BBC. During the Egyptian Revolution, he reported regularly from Tahrir Square. His feature debut, How to Start a Revolution premiered at last fall’s Boston Film Festival, where it won a prize for best documentary. It opens at the ReRun Gastropub Theater on Friday.

Filmmaker: How did you first learn about Gene Sharp’s work and how did your interest in his work evolve into the desire to make this film?

Arrow: I’m originally a newspaper journalist. … Read the rest

ANDREW OKPEAHA MACLEAN, “ON THE ICE”

By Damon Smith

Back in 2008, Alaskan director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean was awarded Best Short at the Sundance Film Festival for his period film Sikumi, about a murder and its aftermath in an Inuit community. MacLean, one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” that year, had set the buzzed-about tale in his frozen Arctic hometown of Barrow, the historical seat of the Iñupiaq people, casting locals and shooting out on the ice in subzero temperatures. (Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Fukunaga lensed the film.) Last year at Sundance, MacLean unveiled On the Ice, a feature-length movie loosely based on the short film; while the basic set-up remained the same, the story had a contemporary setting where hoodie-wearing Inupiat youth striving to emulate their hip-hop icons gambol about town on snowmobiles instead of dog sleds. MacLean shifted gears to jittery suspense as well in order to explore the moral complexities of guilt and responsibility within a traditional culture. The film, gorgeously shot by DP Lol Crawley (Ballast), went on to win the Best First Feature Award at the 2011 Berlinale.

Teenage pals Qalli (Josiah Patkotak) and Aivaaq (Frank Qutuq Irelan) come from a close-knit community in northern Alaska, balancing the expectations of their elders with the natural rebelliousness of youth. Qalli’s family is stable and supportive of his efforts to head off to college; Aivaaq, who has an edgier vibe, lives with his alcoholic mother and is contemplating finding a job so he can take care of his pregnant girlfriend. Though such circumstances differentiate them, they maintain a tight relationship. As an all-night house party gets underway one evening, they agree to meet mutual friend James (John Miller)—a rival of Aivaaq’s—for a seal-hunting trip the next morning. When Qalli arrives at the meeting point, the meth-high boys are already locked in a fistfight, and he intervenes, an incident that leads to James’ violent death. Everyone back in town grieves for the missing teen, buying Aivaaq and Qalli’s claim that James fell through the ice, leaving the friends to quietly agonize over their decision to abandon the body … Read the rest

LIZA JOHNSON, “RETURN”

By Brandon Harris

A low-key drama that articulates the ennui of a returning servicewoman after a tour in the Middle East, Liza Johnson’s Return strikes a delicate balance between familial melodrama and suffering vet pic. Light on exposition and heavy on expert thesping, it features a striking performance by Linda Cardellini, once the most sly and attractive of the awkward high schoolers on Freaks and Geeks, and now a fully mature screen actress making the most of her copious talents. We meet her character Kelly at the airport, freshly arrived in Ohio after a stint in an unnamed theater of war, and only slowly begin to understand the broad disconnect she has with her plumber husband (Michael Shannon) and two young girls.

Unable to adjust to life at home, she doesn’t exhibit the classic PSTD symptoms, but an underlying sense of purposelessness and dissatisfaction overcome her in their modest house and at her job in a warehouse. As her indulgences in swearing, drinking and loud rap music grow into a larger inability to maintain social affability in nearly any context and her awareness of her husband’s activities in the year she’s been away comes to fruition, Cardellini’s Kelly must figure out whether there is any longer a home to be salvaged, or simply a place as alien as the desert she may secretly yearn to get back to.

Helmer Johnson is a multi-dimensional artist who has worked as a professor and curator while making a series of acclaimed short films. Her short film South of Ten was the opening night short at the 2006 New York Film Festival, and her gallery work and installations have been exhibited at MoMA, the Walker Arts Center and the Centre Pompidou as well as major European film festivals such as the Berlinale and Rotterdam. Her feature debut Return, which had its world premiere at last year’s Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, opens this Friday.

Filmmaker: A lot of your short work features non-actors. How did the experience of working with trained performers alter your working methods?

Johnson: For the last five years … Read the rest

BEN WHEATLEY, “THE KILL LIST”

By Damon Smith

A rising star of the under-40 British indie director set, Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace) may not yet be a recognizable name in the States, but years from now his latest film, the brain-bending, spookily enigmatic The Kill List may well be regarded as a milestone in the horror genre. It isn’t just that Wheatley has concocted an ingenious new way of frightening audiences—the film’s ending shocked and thrilled viewers at South by Southwest, who flocked to the Internet to praise its unholy attributes—but that his free blending of seemingly incompatible genre conventions seems so natural as we enter the psychic landscape of his characters. The Kill List opens in an aggressive domestic mode not too distant from the dreary kitchen-sink realism of the late ’60s: edgy thirty-something Jay (Neil Maskell) and his outspoken wife Shel (MyAnna Buring), who have a young son too often present for their marital squabbles, are having a ferocious row about their finances. He’s incredulous that she has spent 40,000 pounds he had stowed away in their home; she assails him for being out of work the past eight months. Moments later, they are snuggling; their relationship is tight and loving, we come to understand, if  turbulent. When they are joined for dinner by Jay’s best friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his raven-haired companion, Fiona (Emma Fryer), we learn that the two fellows are professional hit men, and that something went traumatically awry for Jay on his last assignment in Kiev. With some prompting from Shel, who is close enough to Gal to confide her anxieties, Jay agrees to meet with a powerful and intimidating new client who assigns the duo a list of people to knock off.

Obviously old hands at the dirty-deeds business, Jay and Gal have a relationship every bit as intimate and volatile as Shel does with her husband; he’s a coiled spring who unleashes his obscure fury on a smut peddler and harmless merrymaking Bible thumpers alike. With a few deft moves, Wheatley subtly shifts the film from gut-punch domestic drama to heady thriller. But it’s when his killers … Read the rest

“SCALENE” WRITER/DIRECTOR ZACK PARKER

By Brandon Harris

Zack Parker’s Scalene is a small midwestern gem of a psychological thriller, with several moments that are as shocking as any that will find their way to commercial movie screens all year. Parker and his co-writer, longtime collaborator Brandon Owens use two storytelling devices that have gone in and out of vogue — out-of-sequence and multiple-perspective recounting of events — to marvelous effect. Shot in the filmmaker’s home state of Indiana, it is a heady and tragic mind bender, one that has been unduly overlooked by the major American fests while having had a long run on the regional circuit.

The film opens with Janice, expertly played by Margo Martindale, character actress extraordinaire, in her first starring turn after winning an Emmy for her role in FX’s Justified, arriving at the suburban home of Paige (Hanna Hall, who once played Forrest Gump’s daughter) and brutally assaulting her. The film then jumps back in time to the past, where we slowly learn what caused this horrific event. As we learn over the course of the next hour-and-a-half, it is Janice’s disabled son Jakob (Adam Scarimbolo) whom Paige had been hired to watch over, who is the source of the trouble. Parker coaxes fantastic performances out of Scarimbolo and especially Martindale, whose anger and heartbreak are palpable from the film’s earliest moments.

Scalene is Parker’s third feature, following the 33-year-old director’s Inexchange (2006) and Quench (2007). It finishes its run at the Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater this week.

Filmmaker: What provoked you to tell this brutal and bleak story in such an unusual, structurally sophisticated way?

Parker: The idea came about on two fronts. This is my third feature. It came about because of the response to my other two, which were quite polarizing among critics and audiences. There were people who really responded favorably to the films, and then there were some who truly hated them. On Netflix and IMDb you would see people saying these are the worst movies ever made. I was just sort of taken aback by how polarized and drastic the reaction to them … Read the rest

GERARDO NARANJO, “MISS BALA”

By Howard Feinstein

A model hybrid of seemingly effortless form and true-to-life action is the astonishing Miss Bala, by 42-year-old Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo. His earlier, teen-focused works, Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode, while they are expertly crafted (and especially alluring for those with a penchant for handheld camera and super-8), were a tad heavy-fisted for the subject matter, as if they were laden with an extra injection of  testosterone. Could it be that in making Miss Bala (bala means bullet, and is a pun on Baja) about grown-ups and placing a 23-year-old woman (and her POV) front and center, he has, in the best way, both softened and retooled his creative hand?

The play of light and dark pushed beyond the usual boundaries, frequent panning and reframing that respect characters and their dilemmas, and long, sometimes baroque takes testify to his growth as a filmmaker with a more subtle yet ultimately stronger aesthetic. Hungarian cinematographer Matyas Elderly, who worked in his home country with the smooth, unhurried Kornel Mundruczo (Delta, Tender Son), aided in the transformation.

Naranjo has a strong feel for architecture, his characters dramatically shot against structures and interior detailing. He knows how to move them efficiently and dramatically through the spaces in between, whether inside a huge auditorium (a marvelous scene full of confetti and mariachi music, when the protagonist wins the Miss Baja California title), a claustrophobic bedroom, the patio of a grand hotel, or the inside of a car. At the same time, he captures the the right, and generally most striking, angles of her elongated ex-model’s torso and face with planes worthy of Picasso. 

At the drama’s center is Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a reserved, poor, but naturally glam 23-year-old who lives outside Tijuana, functioning as mother for her father and beloved younger brother in their shack of a home. She hopes that winning the pageant will help her earn money. Her noble goal is to pay for the kid’s education.

In a chi-chi nightclub where her pushy best friend and fellow contestant takes her to meet important people, she becomes the only witness to a massacre of police and American … Read the rest

ROBERT GREENE, “FAKE IT SO REAL”

By Brandon Harris

Big-time professional wrestling has long been a lucrative business, but for the men of Lincolnton, North Carolina’s Millenium Wrestling Federation, the social cohesion and outlet for their imagination the sport provides is their primary compensation. As chronicled in director Robert Greene’s fantastic new documentary Fake It So Real, wrestling has never seemed as intense and physically costly. Yet Greene is not interested in mining the sport for tales of snake-bitten men reaching for a glory that will never come; this isn’t a doc version of The Wrestler. Woebegone men are few and far between in this world, despite the fact that Lincolnton seemingly doesn’t provide much in terms of career prospects. A sense of community and mutually-appreciated craft pervades the scene.

Fake It So Real is Greene’s second festival hit in as many years. His debut film Kati with an I was nominated for the Gotham Award‘s Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You in 2010 after premiering at the True/False Film Festival. Fake It So Real premiered there in 2011 before going on to play many of the circuit’s most well-regarded doc and regional fests, including Sarasota and CPH:DOX. The film opens this coming Friday at Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater.

Filmmaker: Did your interest in wrestling, like so many adult males in their twenties and thirties, begin in your childhood in the ’80s, as the popularity of the sport was expanding?

Greene: I am a huge wrestling fan through and through. I was born in ’76. My dad still calls it “wrasslin.’” He still wants to think about it as being real! I’m a wrestling nerd. I surf websites about wrestling. The first wrestling I recall watching was Wrestlemania II, because of the whole Mr. T appearance; I was somehow AWOL during Wrestlemania III, which featured the famous match between Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. For Wrestlemania IV, V and on and on, I was hooked. I was a huge Ultimate Warrior fan. My enthusiasm dropped off as the ’90s wore on. I knew about the great Bret Hart/Sean … Read the rest