Putting The Act of Killing: The Director's Cut (2012) on to your radar New Directors New Films 2013

Joshua Oppenheimer's look at the men who committed genocide in Indonesia is a kick in the ass. The audience during Sunday's screening were literally covering their eyes and holding their hands in front of their faces near the end. It's not that there was anything graphic at that moment it's just that there was an emotional gut punch which I think surprised some people.

The film was started by Oppenheimer as a means of recording the stories of the the survivors of the mass killings inflicted on the Communists and undesirables by the rulers of the country. Contrary to most tales of genocide this one was celebrated by the killers. When Oppenheimer found he couldn't film the survivors it was suggested that he film the killers- which he did and then things got weird as he begins to make a family film about mass killing (with musical numbers) with some of them. (yes it gets very strange at times)

An examination of the nature of "evil", the film really looks at how the people who do these bad things are really the same as you and me, they only tell themselves different stories so they can live with the darkness. In looking at these ordinary men Oppenheimer shines a light on how these terrible things keep happening. While it is specifically about what happened in Northern Sumatra, the implications for the rest of the world are apparent (Oppenheimer related how he was filming one man who told stories and posed in a manner similar to the photos that came out of Abu Ghraib)

I'm going to do a fuller review closer to the theatrical release (I want to see the theatrical cut and I want to try and talk to the director), but for now I want to get the film onto your radar. This is a film that really must be seen since you'll find yourself talking about it for hours and days afterward.

To be honest I'm not sure what I think of the film, but it's certainly one of the most important films of the year.

Color of the Chamelon (2012) New Directors New FIims 2013

After the accidental death of his father in the printing press...

Damn near impossible to describe film has a young man recruited by the Bulgarian secret police to spy on people at his school. When the police decide they don’t want his help he continues to do so anyway creating his own bureau… (I'd say more but it's best you discover the twists and turns on you're own)

To say that the film is weird is an understatement. This is an off kilter walk through a fun house hall of mirrors. Nothing and no one is normal, but they are all so compelling that you simply have to keep watching no matter where it goes.

Adapted by Vladislav Todorov from his own novel this film plays exactly like a work of literature taking its time to twist and turn all over the place. No one it seems is on the level and no one is playing anything straight. There is no one anyone can trust except themselves. It’s also so twisted that ten minutes in I gave up trying to figure anything out or what it meant and just let it wash over me.

You're bookish you're thoughts are borrowed...

As to how close this is what it was like in Bulgaria before the fall of communism your guess is as good as mine, but it’s clear the society was designed by his holiness Franz Kafka with an assist by George Orwell. And while I’m very aware of how absolutely cliché that sounds there is no other way to simply explain what it’s like. Saying the film is weird won’t cut it, you’ll want to know weird how. It’s weird like Kafka but only nine or ten degrees weirder.

The film stays the course of compellingly strangeness for most of its running time before going off the rails about 90 minutes in. There is a point where the film jumps ahead two years to after the fall of communism. At this point the film seems to have morphed into another film all together. We don’t fully know how we got from there to here and the result is jarring. The result is the kind of like getting on a train heading toward Boston and then suddenly finding you’re pulling into Chicago. You’ve made the trip safely and pleasantly but you don’t know how you got there.

I really like it a great deal. It’s so unique and out there it’s impossible to be a lover of the offbeat and weird and not love it. It’s a film that forcibly engages you until it’s very last moment which makes it thrilling.

For me the real joy of the film was listening to my fellow reviewers trying to make sense of the film after the screening. No one could get a handle on the film. No one could make heads or tails of it. One person complained about the ending, some people babbled about the whole thing. Most dismissed it because it didn’t fit their idea of what a film should be. One gentleman went around sing songing about how bad a film it was (and yet I could tell during the film he was laughing at many of the jokes). Any film that confuses and confounds a theater full of critics this badly has to be great.

If you want a film that will challenge you, frustrate, amuse and engage you see this film. I doubt you’ll see another film like it this or any other year.

No one can tell you how to live in happiness...

The Emperor Visits Hell (2013) New Directors New Films 2013

This doesn’t resemble a film, so much as a test film for a larger project. Actually what it looks like is a version of a film I submitted in college that almost kept me from getting my BA, but that is another story. It's actually the first time that I ever fell asleep in a festival or press screening (and fell asleep I did, several times during the course of the film)

The film is based on 3 chapters (9,10 and 11) from the Journey to the West in which the whole larger story is set in motion. Here the Emperor is approached by the Dragon King who wants his help in keeping his head with a matter in the heavenly court. The Emperor fails and the Dragon King loses his head. He then haunts the Emperor who dies and goes to hell.

A modern dress minimalist version of the story where some of the story is told via photos and text, this is 15 minutes of screen material padded with an hour of static shots and non-performances. Do we need to watch the calligraphy being done silently for five minutes? No do we need the long ride in the country at night? No. Do we need the news footage of the flood?No. Do they translate any of the on screen calligraphy and text? no.

There is a film here, just not a 70 minute one. I mean the film does work in bits and pieces, the modern dress is a cool idea and the dead pan humor is often very funny, but almost nothing happens.

One of the things I wrote in my notes was the line: This is the sort of film that could set back interest in Chinese films for decades. While it’s not that bad, it is the sort of independent film (from anywhere) that could set back interest in independent film for decades.

Avoid this one

Blue Caprice (2012) New Directors New Films 2013

Based on the Beltway shootings this film follows a young man named Lee who is meet father on the run John in Antigua. John brings Lee to the US. John in showing Lee some attention is the father Lee never knew (John actually literally saves Lee from drowning). As a result Lee willingly follows his father as he spirals down the dark path toward serial murder.

Positing that we can never know or understand why even if we are told the reasons (Lee says as much in one of his very few lines of dialog at the end) the film simply shows the two men wandering around , at first doing nothing but fuming about past wrongs and how women are no good (well John fumes, Lee remains deadly silent throughout-he says almost nothing for the entire film) before they take their act on the road.

This is a good looking film that has some good performances and little else. Confusing silence for deep meanings this is film where nothing much really happens but the director wants you to think it does. Any and all emotion is driven by the over bearing score which tells you exactly what you are supposed to feel. As I’ve said our main character never says a word and remains a complete cypher. John simply talks about all that is wrong with the world. These aren’t characters they are voids. This may be the intention but it makes for far from compelling filmmaking. It’s all one note.  Frankly if the film wasn’t so good technically, thus allowing it to seem better and more important than it is, this film would never have been noticed by anyone. Personally I don’t know why New Directors noticed it because not only isn’t it all that remarkable, and far from deserving of the opening film slot.

I’d take a pass

New Directors New Films announces the first 7 films plus other notes

As the Jewish Film Festival winds down and I try to write up my final reviews from it a couple of up coming notes regarding upcoming series

Thursday starts The Last New Wave: Celebrating The Australian Film Revival. This is going to have screenings of great films from Australia including Mad Max, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Newsfront, the Odd Angry Shot and a Michael Powell film I've never seen They're a Weird Mob Not sure what We'll get to but here's the link if you want to so see some great films.

After that is the Dance on Film Series which I want to get to but may not because of conflicts.

New Directors New Films has announced seven titles for their series. The series runs March 20-31 and it's the place to see lots of films that are going to be BIG next year are playing. Want proof? 5 Broken Cameras, How To Survive a Plague and Beasts of the Southern Wild all started there. There are a ton more coming, but for now this is what we have:

The seven official selections are:

THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (2012) 114min
Director: Emil Christov
Country: Bulgaria
Unfolding in the years immediately before and after the fall of communism, this blackly comic, implacably deadpan, all but unclassifiable puzzler delves into the manipulation and intimidation that underwrites the transactions between the secret police and their informants, going down a rabbit hole into a realm of twisted absurdity. The scenario by Vladislav Todorov, adapting his 2010 novel, Zincograph, centers on misfit youth turned engraving plant employee Batko Stamenov (codename: Marzipan), who is recruited by the secret police to infiltrate…a book reading group. Shades of Borges, the book being studied is “a subversive pseudo-philosophical novel” by the name of Zincograph about… an engraver who creates his own secret off-books network of informants. Going rogue after being dropped for his strange ideas, Batko targets another group, the so-called Club For New Thinking, invents a fictitious branch of the Ministry of Information known as ‘Department Sex’ and hatches a scheme that, as Todorov puts it, exposes the “very nature of secret policing under communism.” With this, its first film to appear in ND/NF in 35 years, Bulgaria is back!

A HIJACKING (Kapringen) (2012) 99min
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Country: Denmark
On its way to harbor, the cargo ship MV Rozen is boarded and seized by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Moving between the claustrophobic and intensely fraught day-to-day life of the crew and their captors and the physically removed negotiations by the freight company in Denmark, Lindholm creates a climate of almost unbearable tension with an unexpected climax. As in his previous work (the prison drama ‘R’ and the television series ‘Borgen’) Lindholm’s narrative is based on a true event and his use of actual locations—the film was shot under exceedingly difficult circumstances in the Indian Ocean-- and people who has been involved in similar situations (the negotiation team include a real-life hostage negotiator), provide the film with palpable authenticity and a lived-in feel. Augmented by a terrific cast, especially the amazing Pilou Asbæk as the ship’s cook Mikkel who becomes the pirates primary conduit for communication, Lindholm has created a suspenseful drama whose essential subject matter is the innate danger of an overwhelming disparity between impoverished nations and the developed world. A HIJACKING is a Magnolia Films release.

HOLD BACK (Rengaine) (2012) 75min
Director: Rachid Djaïdani
Country: France
The French title translates as “refrain,” and musical repetition is what this no-budget urban contemporary Romeo and Juliet embodies: in this case of the eternal conflict between true love and tribal loyalties, as real in 21st-century Paris as it was in the age of Shakespeare. The film’s two basic conditions are immediately established: Sabrina (Sabrina Hamida) accepts the marriage proposal of struggling actor Dorcy (Stéphane Soo Mongo) and then she and her eldest brother Slimane (Slimane Dazi) count off the names of the 40 “brothers” in her extended family clan. Dorcy is a black Christian and Sabrina is a Muslim Arab: de facto patriarch Slimane will enlist his brothers in an all-out effort to do whatever it takes to track down Dorcy and prevent this “taboo” union. Made on the run in the streets (“I film like a boxer” says director Rachid Djaïdani), this film is part love letter to the irresistible energy and creative street life of Paris, and part call for interracial tolerance.

PEOPLES PARK (2012) 78min
Directors: JP Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn
Countries: USA/China
An immersive, inquisitive visit to the People's Park in Chengdu, China created with a single virtuouso tracking shot. The joys of communal play, exercise and leisure time come under intense scrutiny through the relentless gaze of the directors' lens, and create alternating states of unease and exhilaration.

STORIES WE TELL (2012) 108min
Director: Sarah Polley
Country: Canada
What is real? What is true? What do we remember, and how do we remember it? Actor/director Sarah Polley (AWAY FROM HER, TAKE THIS WALTZ) turns from fiction to non-fiction and in the process cracks open family secrets in this powerful examination of personal history and remembrance. Using home movies, still photographs and interviews, Polley delves into the life of her mother, shown as a creative yet secretive woman. What parents and siblings have to say and what they remember about events that occurred years ago, show the pitfalls of making the past present and cast a sharp light on the complicated paths of relationships. But while she is talking to her own relatives, Polley’s interest lies in the bigger picture of what families hold onto as truth. In an intimate setting, she shows us the process by which she tries to pluck information from family and friends: she interviews them but also delicately interrogates them as well as bringing them in as writers and collaborators in her own story. More than documentary, STORIES WE TELL is a delicately crafted personal essay about memory, loss and understanding.

UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)
Director: Shane Carruth
Country: USA
Ever since he created a wave of excitement with his 2004 debut, PRIMER, filmmaker of all trades Shane Carruth has prompted curiosity over what he would come up with next. For certain, it would likely contain a strain of science fact tilting into science fiction; almost probably, whatever would happen would happen in a reasonably recognizable America of the near-present moment, populated with a combination of confused and brilliant citizens of the Republic stumbling through as best they could toward something terrifyingly brilliant. UPSTREAM COLOR certainly checks all those boxes, but it can’t be overstated how starkly different and markedly advanced a work this is over the first one. It represents something new in American cinema, close cousin to Alain Resnais’ great films thematically and formally exploring the surprising jumps and shocks of life’s passages and science’s strange effects. A love story embedded in a horrifying kidnap plot whose full import isn’t revealed until the final, poignant moments, UPSTREAM COLOR doesn’t so much move as leap with great audacity through its moments and across sequences, a cinematic simulacrum of the ways we think back on our own lives, astonished at, as in the title of Grace Paley’s fiction collection, our “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.”

VIOLA (2012) 65min
Director: Matías Piñeiro
Country: Argentina
Matías Piñeiro is one of contemporary Argentine cinema’s most sensuous and sophisticated new voices. In his latest film, Viola, he ingeniously fashions out of Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night a seductive roundelay among young actors and lovers in present-day Buenos Aires. Mixing melodrama with sentimental comedy, philosophical conundrum with matters of the heart, VIOLA bears all the signature traits of a Piñeiro film: serpentine camera movements and slippages of language, an elliptical narrative and a playful confusion of reality and artifice. VIOLA is a Cinema Guild release.


More details will follow when we get them.

And even though it's three months off we've started looking toward Tribeca... and we're awaiting word on the New York International Children's Film Festival titles and tickets which I'm told will be announced next week. Plus we're very curious about the additional titles of the Film Comment Selects series.... so look for reports as stuff appears