A MAKER’S DOZEN: NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS

Don’t be fooled: Paranoia, alienation, and irrepressible ghosts of the past are some of the common threads among the features in the 41st edition of New Directors/New Films. No one could mistake it for a series of frothy comedies or unchallenging genre fare: feel-good is hardly an operative term. What is unmistakable is that, to my mind, it remains the finest, most original film festival in New York. These mostly first and second films from around the world are edgy but accessible, fresh but polished. A combination of fiction, docs, and animation, they are not intended to soothe but rather to throw you off balance in a positive way. I’m not sure why, but this is the most impressive New Directors I have seen in my 30 years of following it. The quality is high, the films diverse, and, to be blunt, for the most part the dogs seem to have vanished.

I watched 15 features and missed 12, so my observations lack statistical validity. So I decided not to make sweeping generalizations about the choices, and force the titles into sub-categories that may help the author keep his head screwed on but are just not valid. I will review the 12 I found impressive. That leaves three additional titles that I did see but with which I could not engage, try as I might. After much thought I decided not to address them: These are new films, possibly offering something that I am not ready for. We all know how subjective our responses to cinema can be. I hope you see something in them I did not, but I do feel it only fair to name them: The Ambassador, Hemel, and An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. I hope to be proven off base.

The order of the 12 reviews is very loosely based on the strength of the film, number one being the best, for example. But this is such an exceptional group that you could scramble the titles and their ranking would still ring true. What is unquestionable is the value of New Directors. … Read the rest

TRUE/FALSE DISPATCH, PART 2

In its ninth year, the True/False Film Festival sold over 37,000 tickets. This is my third year attending, but no serious growing pains have been felt with the increasing numbers of first-time attendees: screenings start on time, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult to get into anything if you have an advance ticket, and the programming is unusually trustworthy. (If anything, True/False has a terrific track record of exhuming gems lost in the festival cycle; it’s a good doc fest-of-fests, but a great festival for discovery.) The festival encourages/lubricates sociability without distracting from daily film-watching.

This year seemed special even by the standards set in previous years. The main reason I attend is to see major films that won’t get their due in New York, and True/False keeps delivering in optimal environments. One of last year’s discoveries was At The Edge Of Russia, a equally formally-accomplished counterpart to Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer with a slier sense of humor. It’s great filmmaking that only received outdoor exhibition in New York. True/False’s commitment to stellar, bright projection and loud, clear sound in all of its (indoor!) venues (most of them non-theaters converted for the fest, all within close walking distance of each other) presents its curated line-up in the best possible conditions. On Sunday, I came out of an auditorium from a movie that ended at 5:13 and went right back in for a 5:30 show, and both films could have been part of a conventionally “major” festival’s competition slate. The True/False Weekend is, invariably, one of the year’s highlights; this installment was no exception.

A “sneak preview” is a premiere that declines the term, allowing other festivals to pounce on the distinction. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet’s Only The Young is a major feature debut, an unostentiously accomplished teen not-really-coming-of-age tale that’s great to find unveiled in such relaxed circumstances.

No shot composition is repeated even in the most returned-to houses and bedrooms; the whole film wears its formal deftness lightly, disposing of any portentousness in quick cuts. Teens Garrison and Kevin are skateboarders introduced slo-mo tunnel action, bathed … Read the rest

THE 18TH ANNUAL SEDONA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Although in the winter most Stateside independent filmmakers set their sites on Sundance and SXSW, while international directors target Rotterdam and Berlin, the cold hard reality is that the majority of cinema’s craftspeople aren’t going to have their labors of love accepted into even one of these fests. (Forget about being wined and dined by the Weinsteins.) That’s the bad news. The good news is that as indie fests increasingly become less populist and more Miramax-ish, regional festivals around the globe are looking to step up to the plate.

I’ve covered a number of these homegrown events, many times basing my choices on recommendations from friends and colleagues. Such was the case with the Sedona International Film Festival, which takes place in Arizona’s famous – and infamously kooky – red rock country. Surrounded by majestic mountains seemingly sprung from Middle-earth, and boasting a population for whom “Vortex” is a household word (the local chamber of commerce’s website even has a link to the Sedona Metaphysical Spiritual Association), this high-desert destination seemed as good a place as any to make some unique discoveries.

It was actually one of my non-blood relatives, a longtime shorts programmer, who alerted me to Sedona’s “It’s the accommodations, stupid” factor – i.e., that SIFF is one of the very few festivals to offer the same stellar lodging to all attendees regardless of a movie’s running time. (How many short film directors get a golf course attached to their comped hotel? Seriously.) Another friend, who happens to be the local beat reporter, mesmerized me with tales from last year’s edition, which not only featured invitees Nicolas Cage, Jonathan Winters and Gary Sinise, but a rip-roaring drunk Rip Torn showing up to every party. (What I wouldn’t have given to see Nic and Rip chowing down together at all the free buffets. Alas, instead I spent my time strenuously avoiding Peter Bogdanovich and the Sorvino clan for fear that a publicist would try to rope me into conducting an interview.) Then there was the lure of visiting ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts, founded by Sacred Sexual … Read the rest

TRUE/FALSE 2012, PART ONE

Film festivals encourage connecting dots that don’t necessarily exist, a logical by-product of seeing four films a day. In covering this year’s installment of Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival (a lovely documentary festival whose actual atmosphere I’ll discuss in the next post), I’d like to accordingly divide the films into two broad categories. In the second post, I’ll talk about (very loosely/speciously categorized) personal, dewy stories of love; in this initial dispatch, I’d like to discuss films which look at lives regulated by top-down political decisions and climates.

The most obvious example is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s staggeringly well-controlled Abendland (“evening land”), a nighttime excursion (though it’s so often indoors this isn’t obvious) across the sick European continent. Like fellow Austrian moralist Ulrich Seidl, Geyrhalter despairs morally and politically, and he isn’t afraid to film ugly situations with a clear, static eye. As in his last two films — Our Daily Bread and 7915 km — people’s daily routines are dictated by corporate concerns beyond their control. Bread was about mass-scale food production, 7915 examined a trans-African racing event’s unpleasant foot print on the villages it passes through.

Abendland’s subject is nothing less than every possible situation in which large numbers of people are sorted, organized and supervised. The situation can be as intimate and laudable as the labor of nurses in nursing units for premature/damaged babies (an incredibly hard-to-watch sequence full of seared red flesh and bodily deformations), or as infuriating as watching London’s supervisors idly use their CCTV cameras to spy at-will on anyone on the street.

In the opening scene, a camera awkwardly lurches 360 degrees on top of a van, a seemingly uncontrolled technological element in entropic action. It’s controlled inside by a man wielding a slightly awkward joystick: he’s looking for people, though all the pristine night-vision brings up is a rabbit. The gap between the man’s micro-hand movements and the massive implications of what he’s doing reminded me of Harun Farocki’s Serious Games I-IV., split-screen installations of American soldiers recounting their war experiences to help built PC-ish simulations for training and other examples of … Read the rest

“UNA NOCHE” AT THE BERLINALE

Two weeks ago I was on the phone to a lab in Canada, who were holding our film, telling them that 6 lab rolls of Una Noche were missing. The movie was supposed to premiere in Berlin in a matter of days. I proceeded to go through every frame of footage in the NYC lab double-checking to see if the shots were there. They were not. I did not tell anybody. I did not want to believe it myself. When the colorist, Martin, told me that we might have to use black slates with “missing shot” written on them, my breathing spontaneously accelerated and I felt my blood rush to my head. The Berlinale was starting in a couple of days. I did not have the movie, never mind my flight to get me there. I put another call in, this time to the head of the film lab in Canada. The reels were suddenly found in a storage box and rushed down to NYC.

I met the people who had been organizing the Generation section and who selected Una Noche. I am so thankful. Ela Beume fought to get the actors’ visas. We were, at this stage, eighty percent sure the actors would be coming from Havana. There was still one permit missing for them to leave the country. We didn’t know whether they made it onto a flight until they … Read the rest

FESTIVAL CINEMATOGRAPHY NOTES: OF SUNDANCE, BERLIN AND THE CANON 5D

Blogging from last year’s Sundance I wrote that “if I could give an award to the camera delivering the most impact on screen at Sundance 2011, it would go to RED One.”

That was then. In the 12 months since, ARRI’s Alexa has all but conquered TV series production in the U.S., and now you can add a dozen low-budget indie films at Sundance too, like the bittersweet romcom Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg and photographed by David Lanzenberg.

Sony’s new budget-friendly F3 made a splash at Sundance as well, responsible for Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, shot by Kerwin Devonish, and Colin Trevorrow’s puckish Safety Not Guaranteed, shot by Benjamin Kasulke, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Trevorrow said his 2.40 aspect ratio was the result of vintage Panavision lenses used to achieve what the director called “a 1970′s Hal Ashby look.”

For me, however, the camera that cast the longest shadow at this year’s Sundance was the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, whether or not it was actually used. Let me explain.

Nearly all large single-sensor motion picture cameras today, including those responsible for Sundance 2012 premieres, use Super 35-sized sensors, including Alexas, RED Ones, Sony F35s, F3s, FS-100s, and Canon 7Ds. The major exception is the Canon 5D, which uses a significantly larger sensor.

Super 35 matches the original 18 x 24 mm “full” camera aperture used to expose 4-perf 35mm film in the silent era. As it happens, the APS-C sensor found in some DSLRs is also a match—why Canon’s 7D makes the list.

This original 35mm motion picture format devised by Eastman and Edison 120 years ago is the classic one around which most motion picture camera and lens technology developed, as well as technique and cinematic language.

35mm motion picture film also gave rise to two still formats: a 4-perf frame (same as motion pictures) and a larger 8-perf frame that traveled sideways. The Simplex still camera of 1914, for example, snapped both formats.

8-perf eventually prevailed for stills because … Read the rest

2012 PALM SPRINGS FILM FESTIVAL

There’s no better time of year to be in Palm Springs than early January. The air is rejuvenating, the desert landscape alluring, and amidst all the easy living, PS kicks annually kicks off film festival season.  Now in its 23rd year, the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) prides itself on appealing to both the first-time moviegoer and the seasoned connoisseur. For the former, there were easily digestible films like Lasse Halstrom’s Salmon Fishing In The Yemen, which opened the Festival, and the Tilda Swinton-starrer We Need To Talk About Kevin; for the latter, the 276-minute Taiwanese film, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. For those looking to kill an entire weekend watching one documentary, the festival obliged with Mark Cousins’s 15-hour epic, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey.

In the last couple of years, the Festival has pared down the number of foreign film Oscar submissions. According to Festival director Darryl Macdonald, “It was becoming clear that some of these films weren’t measuring up to the quality of programming we wanted to present.” Altogether, 188 films from 73 countries ran during the 10-day Festival, including 40 of the 63 foreign language Oscar entries. Macdonald declared that “The balance of programming was stronger than ever.” With more than 130,000 filmgoers and 220 filmmakers (writers, directors, and actors) in attendance, the PSIFF remains a movie lover’s paradise.

Given its proximity to L.A., the Golden Globe Awards, and Sundance, the Festival has never been shy about courting Hollywood glamour, with the Convention Center hosting its annual Black Tie Awards Gala honoring notable films, stars, and directors from the previous year’s films. This year, the star wattage was hotter than usual, with Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Michelle Williams, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, and the ensemble cast from Young Adult, among others, walking the red carpet.  For some, the excitement proved too much: a 65 year-old man collapsed and died while watching the red carpet festivities. Inside, the sight of Brangelina turned the normally blasé PS crowd into giggly autograph hounds; they besieged the couple’s table with cameras … Read the rest

2011 ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL

A few years back, the Zurich Film Festival burst onto the map, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2009, Roman Polanski, en route to the festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, was apprehended shortly after landing on Swiss soil. He was never extradited to the United States to stand trial for his mid ’70s sexual escapades with the then underaged Samatha Geimer in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood Hills home, and now he’s free, having returned for the seventh edition of Zurich’s increasingly important film festival. He screened his “film memoir,” which I simply loathed for its canned, staged quality, its lack of genuine insight into the man and his times. Made by ex-Polanski producer Andrew Braunsberg, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir had its “secret” world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival. Hot off the heels of Polanski’s lukewarm Yesmina Reza adaptation Carnage, it is the lesser of these decidedly less than stellar Polanski related productions, but enough with that, I’ve already said enough about it on these pages.

Boasting a record number of significant premieres “within the German-speaking realm” of hot international titles in Cannes, Toronto and Venice, Zurich featured both narrative and doc competitions for international and German-language films, although the size of those sections was dwarfed by its rampant Gala premieres and Special Screenings, which make up a more than sizable chunk of the programming. Is that smart? I’m not sure.

A preponderance of Galas seems to lessen the impact of those events, making them less noteworthy and eye catching, while limiting how much attention the competition films get. Sure, they get some big stars to show up (There’s Laurence Fishburne! Look, Sean Penn) and there were some interesting performances in some mostly flawed films by major filmmakers (Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman’s somewhat unfocused, fascinating Rampart, Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’ moody, but unfulfilling The Deep Blue Sea, everyone involved in the minor Cronenberg that was A Dangerous Method, all of which made their way to Zurich after finding splashy premieres elsewhere) and a few genuinely … Read the rest

PAIRING FILMS AT IDFA 2011

The Jack the Ripper weather that blanketed part of the 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam this year seemed poetically apropos. Rushing from P&I screenings, to public showings, to private viewing booths I often felt like I was lost in a heavy fog of docs. In addition I took great advantage of the many behind-the-scenes and inside-scoop events — most free to the public — that gives this biggest doc fest in Europe its accessible community vibe. I watched a Talk Show with tabloid-deep Nick Broomfield discussing his Sarah Palin: You Betcha! over a live Internet feed. I attended in person a much more fascinating Meet the Makers with Steve James (ironically, the very same morning I learned that The Interrupters — which I’d predicted would nab this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary — shamefully got booted from the Oscar shortlist), who was being honored with a retrospective on top of presenting his own Top 10 compilation. I caught another Talk Show at the Escape Club with Joe Berlinger — who announced that it was the first time out of the country for his accompanying invitee and longtime Paradise Lost series subject, the recently freed Jason Baldwin. (Berlinger and Baldwin were followed by guest Vikram Gandhi, whose Kumaré was my top pick at DOC NYC.)

I also stopped by the young and vibrant Flemish Arts Centre De Brakke Grond to check out Exhibition: Expanding Documentary 2011. Although I wasn’t able to take a virtual walk through Brussels courtesy of CREW, a Belgium-based collective of artists and scientists, I did manage to engage with Condition One, Danfung Dennis and Patrick Chauvel’s DocLab Competition entry. Their immersive project allows the viewer to take a choose-your-own-field-of-vision adventure through confrontations in Libya, New Orleans, Thailand or NYC (specifically the Occupy Wall Street protest) via headphones and an iPad suspended from the ceiling.

Later on I hit another Talk Show jam-packed with globally diverse guests, including the director of a love letter to Holland’s most famous music venue (Paradiso, An Amsterdam Stage Affair); the creator of a very personal Doc U … Read the rest

HAWAII AWARD WINNERS AND A STANDOUT WORK

The Hawaii International Film Festival fittingly wrapped up its 31^st edition last week with Alexander Payne’s Hawaii-set-and-shot comedy/drama The Descendants, with a gracious Payne in town for the screening (no George Clooney, alas, though a life-sized Clooney cardboard cut-out was certainly a massive hit in the lobby). “Wine always tastes the best in the region it was grown and made,” noted Payne to an appreciative audience. “I hope that this film plays best in Hawaii.”

Judging from audience response, Payne got his wish; the film (to be released nationally November 15) won the festival’s Audience Award for Narrative Feature, with many viewers praising its respectful take on author Kaui Hart Hemming’s source novel, as well as its catchy all-Hawaiian soundtrack. Taking the Audience Award for Documentary Feature was Aloha Buddha, Bill Ferehawk and Dylan Robertson’s fascinating look at the complicated history and unique present of Japanese Buddhism in Hawaii, while the Audience Award for Best Short went to Mitsuyo Miyazaki’s slick Tsuyako, involving a love affair between two women in post-war Japan.

Earlier that week, in the restored 19^th-century glamour of the Hawaii’s Governor’s Mansion, festival staff, guests, and press gathered for the announcement of the jury awards. Prashant Bhargava’s Patang (The Kite), a tale of family secrets revealed and denied during the extraordinary kite festival of Ahmedabad, India, took the “Halekulani Golden Orchid Award” for Narrative Feature; its vibrant Super-8 footage of the festival and its organic feel for the city itself turned what could have been a familiar melodrama into a rich exploration of place and spectacle.

Earning the award for Documentary Feature was Adam Pesce’s Splinters (pictured above), deceptively clad as a surfing film about the sport’s rise in Papua New Guineau but more pointedly an engrossing, endlessly surprising examination of social hierarchies, clan rivalries, and economic and cultural change within the region. In recent years a wave of sports films set in unusual locations have appeared at festivals—Skateistan, about skaters in Kabul, for instance, or God Went Surfing With the … Read the rest