Berlinale
Thursday, February 9th, 2012
Monsanto, the agriculture biotech company maligned in such docs as Food, Inc. and King Corn, found renewed opposition this month with the launch of an online petition gone viral called “Tell Obama to Cease FDA Ties to Monsanto.” The petition protests the president’s 2009 appointment of the company’s former VP, Michael Taylor, to the position of senior advisor to the FDA. That this years-late call to action has inspired more than 380,000 signatures attests to the toxicity of this particular marriage between government and a multinational corporation.
If you’ll remember, Monsanto is the company that brought us DDT and Agent Orange, both of which were banned at some point for their harmful effects on people and the environment. As the world’s largest producer of genetically modified (GM) crops, the company has achieved its position through a means of strong-arm tactics, ambitious mergers, and, as the petition points out, collusions with the U.S. government.
If these points don’t spark your indignation, then Bitter Seeds will. The documentary, directed by Micha X. Peled, traces Monsanto’s sizable footprint on an agrarian community in central India. The film has been traveling the festival circuit since last year, winning the “Green Screen Competition” Award at the 2011 IDFA (in a jury presided over by Joe Berlinger). After garnering acclaim at last month’s Palm Springs International Film Festival (PIFF), it is featured in the “Meet the Docs” series at the Berlin Film Festival.
Bitter Seeds sets down in remote village in the state of Maharashtra, where locally grown, renewable seeds have been phased out by genetically-modified, non-renewable seeds. In a region where the majority of farmers are rain-dependent and unable to pay for the fertilizers that GM seeds require, the influx of the new product into the marketplace has caused extreme indebtedness, leading as many as 25,000 farmers to take their lives since 1997. Bitter Seeds asks the question of whether a cotton farmer, Ram Krishna, will “be next.”
If that sounds sensational, it’s because it partly is. Contrary to the film’s conspicuous marketing, however, the documentary is among … Read the rest
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Stunningly shot and formally audacious, Bombay Beach, the first feature of Israeli-born music-video director and cinematographer Alma Har’el, is a rare bird, the type of film that seems to be building its own cinematic language from the ground up. Sure, it embraces some stylistic and thematic similarities with a whole host of filmmaking luminaries, but it is dancing to its very own tune, both literally and figuratively.
Har’el, as we discuss below, quickly entered the lives of various people living around the California hamlet of Bombay Beach, a derelict precinct that was once a haven for zealous developers in the ’60s, after scouting the place for a music video shoot. She found undocumented lives of great wonder and choose to make artwork out of their struggles and eccentricities, their dreams and failures, their prejudices and their grace. Dispatching the term “subjects” for “collaborators,” Har’el creates a visual, highly narrative tone poem concerning a number of snake-bitten but essentially decent and partially victimized people living on the margins of the California desert. With characters that include bi-polar, overmedicated child and his explosives-addicted parents, a mildly racist, trailer-dwelling octogenarian with an ear for poetry and a lovesick football prospect who seeks to escape the ghettos of the Salton Sea through an athletic scholarship, Har’el casts a warm but unforgiving eye on a forgotten corner of America.
Bob Dylan and Beirut both contributed music to the highly atmospheric, oddly touching film, which premiered in Berlin’s Panorama section before making its North American Premiere at Tribeca, where it won the International Documentary Competition’s top prize. While it wears the influence of Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, Lynne Ramsay, David Gordon Green, Charles Burnett and Gus Van Sant (just to name a few), it announces a major new directorial talent in Har’el who is working in a key all her own.
Bombay Beach opens at the IFC Center on Friday.
Filmmaker: Watching your film again I was struck by the notion that this film was made by someone who had an intense connection to this place. How did you first discover Bombay Beach and … Read the rest
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
For Claudia Llosa, director of the Berlinale-winning and Academy Award-nominated Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow, magical realism isn’t a literary genre or filmic device, it’s an element of national identity and consciousness. Her film, easily the most critically-lauded film to emerge from Peru, is set in the rough-hewn mountain settlements on the outskirts of Lima. It concerns a young Peruvian woman (the captivating Magaly Solier) who, having contracted a mysterious disease that is passed on via breast milk to the daughters of rape victims taken by soliders serving Peru’s deposed terrorist regime, sets out to bury her newly deceased mother. Her uncle, with whom she lives, is about to marry off his rather bone-headed, carefree daughter and wants no part of paying for a burial. He suggests she simply bury her mother in his backyard. Aware of her mysterious disease, he accepts it matter of factly. In one of the single most unsettling scenes you may see in a cinema this year, he tries to explain to a doctor the folkloric disease which afflicts his daughter. The young woman, who is prone to nose bleeds, muteness and bouts of fainting from the disease, begins to work for a wealthy, blonde classical pianist in Lima who treats her dismissively. However, as she receives a rude introduction to the world of elite Peruvian musicianship, the movie toys with the notion that something may come of her hauntingly beautiful and profanely lyrical singing, the only coping mechanism that the victims of the state-sponsored sexual torture have to rely on.
While she draws upon influences ranging from the high European modernism of Antonioni to the short filmography of Barbara Loden, her film most clearly suggests a clever re-imagining of Todd Haynes’ Safe set amidst an altogether more violent and troubled South American milieu. Never failing to worm its way under your skin, The Milk of Sorrow is a potent and unforgettable film, one which challenges you to engage with it on its own terms and, like the very best cinema, seems to build its visual language from the ground up; you’ve never … Read the rest
