New Directors/New Films 2016; Film Comments Selects

[Chris Knipp]

NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2016



FILMLEAF FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD

New Directors/New Films

Links to the reviews

The Apostate/El apóstata (Federico Veiro 2015)
Behemoth/Beixi moshuo (Zhao Liang 2015)
Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson 2015)
Demon (Marcin Wrona 2015)
Donald Cried (Kris Avedisian 2015)
Eldorado XXI (Salomé Lamas 2015)
Evolution/Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović 2015)
The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer 2015)
Happy Hour (Ryusuke Hamaguchi 2015)
In the Last Days of the City/Akher Ayam El Madina (Tamer El Said 2016)
I Promise You Anarchy / Te prometo anarquía (Julio Hernández Cordón 2 2015)
Kaili Blues/Lu bian ye can (Bi Gan 2015)
Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta (Pietro Marcello 2015)
Kill Me Please/Mate-me por favor (Anita Rocha da Silveira 2015)
Life After Life/Zhi fan ye mao (Zhang Hanyi 2015)
Mountain/Ha'har (Yaelle Kayam 2015)
Nakom (T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris 2015)
Neon Bull/Boi neon (Gabriel Mascaro 2015)
Peter and the Farm (Tony Stone 2015)
Remainder (Omer Fast 2015)
Short Stay (Ted Fendt, 2015)
Shorts Program 1
Shorts Program 2
Suite Armoricaine (Pascale Breton 2015)
Thithi (Raam Reddy 2015)
Tikkun (Avishai Sivan 2015)
Under the Shadow (Babak Anvar 2016)
The Wakhan Front/Ni le ciel ni la terre (Clément Cogitore 2015)
Weiner (Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg 2015)
,

New Directors/New Films 45th edition 16-27 March 2016 (Film Comment Selects 17-24 February - see schedule below.)

newdirectors.org/
New Directors/New Films introduces New York audiences to the work of emerging filmmakers from around the world.

Film Society of Lincoln Center press release and blurbs for ND/NF.

New York, NY (January 20, 2016) [Press release from the Film Society of Lincoln Center] – The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art announce the initial eight official selections for the 45th edition of New Directors/New Films (ND/NF), a festival dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent.

The eight announced official selections include:

Behemoth / Beixi moshuo
Zhao Liang, China/France, 2015, 91m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Political documentarian Zhao Liang draws inspiration from The Divine Comedy for this simultaneously intoxicating and terrifying glimpse at the ravages wrought upon Inner Mongolia by its coal and iron industries. A poetic voiceover speaks of the insatiability of desire on top of stunning images of landscapes (and their decimation), machines (and their spectacular functions), and people (and the toll of their labor). Interspersed are sublime tableaux of a prone nude body—asleep? just born? dead?—posed against a refracted horizon. A wholly absorbing guided tour of exploding hillsides, dank mine shafts, cacophonous factories, and vacant cities, Behemoth builds upon Zhao’s previous exposés (2009’s Petition, 2007’s Crime and Punishment) by combining his muckraking streak with a painterly vision of a social and ecological nightmare otherwise unfolding out of sight, out of mind. Winner of the environmental Green Drop Award at the Venice Film Festival. North American Premiere

Demon
Marcin Wrona, Poland/Israel, 2015, 94m
English, Polish, and Yiddish with English subtitles
Newly arrived from England to marry his fiancée Zaneta, Peter has been given a gift of her family’s ramshackle country house in rural Poland. It’s a total fixer-upper, and while inspecting the premises on the eve of the wedding, he falls into a pile of human remains. The ceremony proceeds, but strange things begin to happen... During the wild reception, Peter begins to come undone, and a dybbuk, that iconic ancient figure from Jewish folklore, takes a toehold in this present-day celebration—for a very particular reason, as it turns out. The final work by Marcin Wrona, who died just as Demon was set to premiere in Poland, is an eerie, richly atmospheric film—part absurdist comedy, part love story—that scares, amuses, and charms in equal measure. Winner of Best Horror Feature at Fantastic Fest. An Orchard release.

The Fits
Anna Rose Holmer, USA, 2015, 72m
The transition from girlhood to young womanhood is one that’s nearly invisible in cinema. Enter Anna Rose Holmer, whose complex and absorbing narrative feature debut elegantly depicts a captivating 11-year old's journey of discovery. Toni (played by the majestically named Royalty Hightower) is a budding boxer drawn to a group of dancers training at the same rec center in Cincinnati. She begins aligning herself with one of the two troupes, the Lionesses, becoming immersed in their world, which Holmer conveys with a hypnotic sense of rhythm and a rare gift for rendering physicality—evident most of all when a mysterious, convulsive condition begins to afflict a number of girls. Set entirely within the intimate confines of a few familiar settings (public school, the gym), and pulsating with bodies in motion, The Fits encourages us to recall the confused magic of entering the second decade of life. An Oscilloscope release.

Lost and Beautiful / Bella e perduta
Pietro Marcello, Italy/France, 2015, 87m
Italian with English subtitles
Pietro Marcello continues his intrepid work along the borderline of fiction and documentary with this beautiful and beguiling film, by turns neorealist and fabulist, worthy of Pasolini in its matter-of-fact lyricism and political conviction. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and freely incorporating archival footage and folkloric tropes, it begins as a portrait of the shepherd Tommaso, a local hero in the Campania region of southern Italy, who volunteered to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello despite the state’s apathy and threats from the Mafia. Tommaso suffers a fatal heart attack in the course of shooting, and Marcello’s bold and generous response is to grant his subject’s dying wish: for a Pulcinella straight out of the commedia dell’arte to appear on the scene and rescue a buffalo calf from the palace. With Lost and Beautiful, a documentary that soars into the realm of myth, Marcello has crafted a uniquely multifaceted and enormously moving work of political cine-poetry. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival. U.S. Premiere

Mountain / Ha'har
Yaelle Kayam, Denmark/Israel, 2015, 83m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Atop Jerusalem's Mount of Olives, Zvia, a Jewish Orthodox woman, lives surrounded by an ancient cemetery with her four children and husband, a Yeshiva teacher who pays scant attention to her. Yaelle Kayam's feature debut moves beyond the symbolic landscape of a woman's isolation to offer a subtle and finely paced entryway into the character's surprising inner life. On a nighttime walk through the tombstones, Zvia encounters a group of prostitutes and their handlers and gradually becomes an unlikely bystander to their after-hours activities, trading home-cooked meals for companionship—an usual sort, perhaps, but one that upends her existence as a mother and wife. Shani Klein’s arresting lead performance challenges clichés of female subjectivity in the filmmaker's own society, culminating in Zvia’s dramatic attempt to bring change to her life; throughout, keenly observed frames, by turn luminous and moody, asserts the heroine's volition with intention and finesse.

Neon Bull / Boi neon
Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands, 2015, 101m
Portuguese with English subtitles
A rodeo movie unlike any other, Gabriel Mascaro’s Venice and Toronto prize-winning follow-up to his 2014 fiction debut August Winds tracks handsome cowboy Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) as he travels around to work at vaquejada rodeos, a Brazilian variation on the sport in which two men on horseback attempt to bring a bull down by its tail. Iremar dreams of becoming a fashion designer, creating flamboyant outfits for his co-worker, single mother Galega (Maeve Jinkings). Along with Galega’s daughter Cacá and a bullpen worker named Zé, these complex characters, drawn with tremendous compassion and not an ounce of condescension, make up an unorthodox family, on the move across the northeast Brazilian countryside. Sensitive to matters of gender and class, and culminating in one of the most audacious and memorable sex scenes in recent memory, Neon Bull is a quietly affirming exploration of desire and labor, a humane and sensual study of bodies at work and at play. A Kino Lorber release.

Thithi
Raam Reddy, India/USA/Canada, 2015, 132m
Kannada and Hindi with English subtitles
Raam Reddy’s bold, vibrant first feature is closer to Émile Zola than it is to Bollywood. Filmed in India's southern Karnataka state with mostly nonprofessional actors, the sprawling narrative follows three generations of sons following the death of the family’s patriarch, their 101-year-old grandfather known as “Century Gowda.” The men’s respective vices—ranging from greed to womanizing to cut-and-dry escapism—bring deliciously comedic misadventures to their village in the days leading up to the thithi, a funeral celebration traditionally held 11 days after a death. This incisive portrait of a community in a time of radical change (while some are looking after their sheep, others are lost in their cell phones) yields exemplary humanist comedy. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival, the film equally affirms the advent of a new realism within Indian cinema, as well as an engaging new voice in contemporary world cinema.

The Wakhan Front / Ni le ciel ni la terre
Clément Cogitore, France/Belgium, 2015, 100m
French and Persian with English subtitles
The ingenious conceit of The Wakhan Front, a critical success at Cannes, is to transform the Afghan battlefield—dust and boredom and jolts of explosive violence—into the backdrop for a metaphysical thriller. Jérémie Renier stars as a French army commander who begins to lose the loyalty of his company, as well as his sanity, when soldiers start mysteriously disappearing one by one. Rarely is the madness of war conveyed on screen with such simmering tension and existential fear. Rarely, too, is the ignorance and mistrust between cultures—are the shepherd villagers innocent civilians or Taliban spies?—limned with such poetic insight. U.S. Premiere

About New Directors/New Films
Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation as the premier festival for works that break or re-cast the cinematic mold. The New Directors/New Films selection committee is made up of members from both presenting organizations: from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Dennis Lim, Florence Almozini, Marian Masone, and Gavin Smith, and from The Museum of Modern Art, Rajendra Roy, Joshua Siegel, and Sophie Cavoulacos. For more information about the festival, visit newdirectors.org and follow the festival on Facebook (facebook.com/newdirectors) and Twitter (@NDNF, #NewDirectors).

[Chris Knipp]

Selects


FILMLEAF FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD

The Film Society of Lincoln Center 16th edition of Film Comment Selects 17-24 February 2016

Opening with the New York premiere of Terence Davies’ long-awaited Sunset Song and closes with tribute to the late Chantal Akerman with revival of Golden Eighties

Spotlighting Charles Bronson and Andrzej Żuławski, with U.S. premiere of Żuławski's latest film, Cosmos

New York, NY (December 21, 2015) –[Press release] The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the lineup for the 16th edition of Film Comment magazine’s annual festival February 17-24.

Opening the festival is the New York premiere of Sunset Song, the long-awaited must-see from Terence Davies, a glorious study in hardship and romantic loss starring Agyness Deyn and Peter Mullan. Closing night is a tribute to the late Chantal Akerman, with a revival of her rare, utterly delightful musical Golden Eighties.

Among the hard-hitters are a pair of wrenching discoveries from Serbia and Iran, No One’s Child by Vuk Rsumovic and The Paternal House by Kianoush Ayyari; Damien Odoul’s The Fear, a harrowing yet serene vision of World War I; plus the latest work from Benoît Jacquot, Alexei German Jr., and Hirokazu Kore-eda.

A sidebar of restored works by the Polish master Andrzej Żuławski features a selection of new digital restorations of his landmark Polish films, including his debut, The Third Part of the Night; his towering film maudit On the Silver Globe; and the U.S. premiere of his new film, Cosmos.

Revivals featured in the 16th edition also include a two-film spotlight on Charles Bronson, taking its cue from Film Comment’s November/December issue, and a rare glimpse of The Kinks singer-songwriter Ray Davies’s 1984 Return to Waterloo (also featured in the magazine’s November/December issue).

Programmed by Gavin Smith. Spotlight on Andrzej Żuławski organized by Florence Almozini.

Tickets go on sale Thursday, February 4, with early access for Film Society members and Film Comment subscribers beginning Tuesday, February 2. Tickets are $14; $11 for students and seniors (62+); and $9 for members and Film Comment subscribers. See more and save with the $99 All Access Pass or 3+ film discount package. Visit filmlinc.org for more information.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
Opening Night
Sunset Song
Terence Davies, UK/Luxembourg, 2015, DCP, 135m
The much-anticipated new film by contemporary British cinema’s reigning master, Sunset Song is the story of Chris (Agyness Deyn), the bright daughter of a brutish farmer (Peter Mullan in top form) who lives with on the family farm in northern Scotland on the cusp of World War I. When her mother commits suicide, Chris sees her educational prospects and hopes of a teaching career evaporate. She faces a bleak future as her father’s housekeeper, but an unexpected turn of events opens up new possibilities. As a study in hardship and romantic loss, Davies returns to territory with which he is intimately familiar. This adaptation of a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon is a long-standing passion project for the director, and showcases a wondrous central performance by Deyn. As deeply felt as The House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes, Sunset Song is an emotionally devastating film that’s nothing short of sublime. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Wednesday, February 17, 7:00pm

Closing Night
Chantal Akerman Tribute:
Golden Eighties
Chantal Akerman, France/Belgium/Switzerland, 1986, 35mm, 96m
French with English subtitles
After her successes in the 1970s, Chantal Akerman turned toward the pleasures of popular cinema with a playful series of comedies and love stories, culminating in this extraordinary multi-character musical, set entirely in a shopping mall. A stylish, bittersweet look at the romantic tribulations of an assortment of shop owners and retail workers, the film evokes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in its charm, but with a distinctly feminist bent. With songs co-written by Akerman and Marc Herouet, the film leads us through the tangled predicaments of clothing-shop owner Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), who finds herself torn when her long-lost G.I. love, Eli (filmmaker John Berry), looks her up after 40 years; her son Robert (Nicolas Tronc), who is infatuated with Lili (Fanny Cottençon), a salon manager who in turn is having an affair with its owner, married gangster Monsieur Jean (Jean-François Balmer); hairdresser Mado (pop singer Lio), who has a crush on Robert; and coffee-bar proprietor Sylvie (Myriam Boyer), who pines for her boyfriend who’s gone to work in America. For this utterly delightful passion project, which she described as a postmodern cross between women’s cinema, Jewish literature, and musicals, Akerman collaborated with an extraordinary/unlikely dream team of writers—Desperately Seeking Susan screenwriter Leora Barish, veteran Truffaut/Rivette/Resnais scenarist Jean Gruault, former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Pascal Bonitzer, and filmmaker Henry Bean (The Believer).
Wednesday, February 24, 8:45pm

Blood of My Blood / Sangue del mio sangue
Marco Bellocchio, Italy/France/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 107m
Italian with English subtitles
From Italian master Marco Bellocchio, FIPRESCI prizewinner Blood of My Blood pairs two haunting stories from the past and the present, bound together by a convent prison in Bobbio (the director’s hometown and setting of his 1965 debut masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket). During the Inquisition period, Federico (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) witnesses the harrowing trial of Benedetta (Lidiya Liberman), an alluring nun accused of seducing and driving his brother to suicide. Centuries later, a vampiric old man (Roberto Herlitzka) hides within the convent’s abandoned walls and faces eviction when a tax investigator and Russian millionaire come to purchase the property. Amid painterly lensing and an expressive score, the film is a gothic, shrewdly comic, and, above all, mystifying tapestry that mines the complexities of Italian life—whether in the cloistered darkness of the 17th century or in the confused, garish revelry of the present.
Wednesday 24, 6:30pm

Diary of a Chambermaid / Journal d’une femme de chambre
Benoît Jacquot, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 96m
French with English subtitles
Léa Sedoux follows in the footsteps of Paulette Goddard and Jeanne Moreau as Célestine, a resentful young Parisian chambermaid who finds herself exiled to a position in the provinces where she immediately chafes against the noxious iron rules and pettiness of her high-handed bourgeois mistress (Clotilde Mollet), must rebuff the groping advances of Monsieur (Hervé Pierre), and reckon with her fascination with the earthy, brooding gardener Joseph (Vincent Lindon). Backtracking past the fetishism and peculiarities of Buñuel’s version to Octave Mirbeau’s original 1900 novel, Benoît Jacquot has one eye on 21st-century France: the sense of social stiflement, Célestine’s humiliating submission to Madame’s onerous terms of employment, Joseph’s virulent anti-Semitism. But he keeps his other on the turn-of-the-century setting, when psychoanalysis, a discipline that he holds dear, burst forth: at all times he strikes a balance between appearances and what lies beneath them, between the sadism of the bourgeois employers and their repression, the social codes and the compulsions they conceal. As class-conscious as ever, Jacquot has found some material he can really sink his teeth into. A Cohen Media Group release. U.S. Premiere
Thursday, February 18, 6:30pm

The Fear / La peur
French with English subtitles
Damien Odoul, France, 2015, DCP, 93m
Summer 1914. Imagining the war to be “a great spectacle not to be missed,” 19-year-old Gabriel (Nino Rocher) volunteers for the French Army—more out of curiosity than the mad, virulent nationalism that consumes the populace. Accompanied by his best friend Bertrand (Eliott Margueron) and young poet Théo (Théo Chazal), he arrives at the battlefront within a few days and is soon engulfed in the horrors of trench warfare. Recounting his experiences in a series of voiceover letters to his sweetheart back home, Gabriel maintains a detached and rational view of the ordeal of war, which is complemented by the anarchic rabble-rousing of the sardonic Sergeant Négre (Pierre Martial Gaillard). Meanwhile, offsetting the film’s emphasis on the inner life and dissent of its protagonist, Damien Odoul’s direction, which earned him the 2015 Prix Jean Vigo, supplies a relentlessly physical depiction of the realities of life and death in the killing fields. Based on Gabriel Chevallier’s 1930 autobiographical novel, The Fear moves at a fast clip, replete with painterly landscape shots and images of startling, surreal horror. Never less than gripping, this is not so much a film about combat than a series of dispatches from a war zone, warts and all. A Wild Bunch release. U.S. Premiere
Thursday, February 18, 8:45pm
Friday, February 19, 4:30pm

Malgré la nuit / Despite the Night
Philippe Grandrieux, France, 2015, DCP, 154m
French with English subtitles
The director of Sombre, La Vie nouvelle, and Un lac returns with his latest investigation of extreme experience, a darkly erotic psychodrama. English musician Lenz (Kristian Marr) searches for his lover Madeleine, aka Lena (Roxane Mesquida), who has mysteriously disappeared, but tumbles into an amour fou with troubled, self-destructive Héléne (French indie It-Girl Ariane Labed). Grieving the loss of her infant son, Héléne seeks oblivion in the murky subterranean world of a brutal sex ring, followed by Lenz. A stark, elliptical, hauntingly spectral narrative co-written by Grand Central director Rebecca Zlotowski, in which Grandrieux continues his exploration of the body initiated with White Epilepsy in scenes of sensual abandon and raw carnality.
Saturday, February 20, 8:45pm

No One’s Child / Nicije dete
Vuk Rsumovic, Serbia/Croatia, 2014, DCP, 95m
Serbian with English subtitles
Vuk Rsumovic’s debut film begins in late-’80s Yugoslavia with the discovery of a feral boy running on all fours in the woods of central Bosnia—abandoned years before to survive or perish, unable to walk or talk. Sent to an orphanage in Belgrade, with the help of a teacher and another boy he slowly acquires the trappings of civilized behavior. But as war breaks out between Serbia and Bosnia, his future suddenly becomes uncertain as he’s assumed to be a Bosnian Muslim. No One’s Child is unabashedly pro the former Yugoslavia—a state that maintained a civil society and took care of its citizens. With its discreet, muscular, no-nonsense style, Rsumovic’s film gives us an update of Truffaut’s The Wild Child for a grim new era. (Olaf Möller, Film Comment,May/June 2014)
Monday, February 22, 6:30pm

Notfilm
Ross Lipman, USA/UK, 2015, DCP, 130m
In 1964, playwright Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton, cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and director Alan Schneider came together to make a short, dialogue-free work simply titled Film. An investigation of both the cinematic medium and the nature of human consciousness, it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and screened at the 2nd New York Film Festival to mixed critical response. In Beckett’s scenario, Keaton plays “O,” who tries desperately to evade the reality of the maxim esse est percipi (to be is to be seen) but finds his every effort futile. Beckett judged the final result “an interesting failure”—interesting enough for Ross Lipman to devote two-plus hours to this remarkable exploration of the making of a 22-minute film. Featuring audio recordings of Beckett in discussion with Schneider, Kaufman, and producer and Grove Press head Barney Rosset, this fascinating and unprecedented “making-of” also gives us interviews with Rosset and actress and Beckett muse Billie Whitelaw. As Scott Eyman puts it in a soon-to-be-published Film Comment piece: “As we witness Rossett and Whitelaw struggling beneath the oppressive weight of age, the documentary becomes about memory and its fading. In other words, the obliteration that waits for us all—the foundation of Beckett’s art.” A Milestone Films release.
Screening with:
Film
Alan Schneider, USA, 1964, 22m
Tuesday, February 23, 6:30pm

Our Little Sister
Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2015, DCP, 128m
Japanese with English subtitles
Based on Umimachi Diary, a manga by Akimi Yoshida, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest subtle and moving exploration of family ties centers on three twentysomething sisters, Sachi (Haruka Ayase), Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa), and Chika (Kaho), who live together in their grandmother’s house. Traveling to the countryside to attend the funeral of their estranged father, they discover that they have a teenage half-sister, Suzu (Suzu Hirose). Quickly sizing up their stepmother as someone unfit to take care of the young girl, the trio impulsively invite their newfound sibling to come and live with them. Suzu soon settles in and her elder sisters’ placid but quietly discontented lives continue as before, but her presence—and the unexpected arrival of their long-absent mother Miyako (Shinobu Otake), who departed 15 years ago leaving Sachi to raise her younger sisters—finally bring into the open the three women’s unresolved feelings about being abandoned by their parents and the frustrations that burden their unfulfilled lives. As ever with Kore-eda, the performances are beautifully understated and down to earth and the filmmaking is delicate and graceful. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Sunday, February 21, 7:00pm

The Paternal House / Khanéh Pedari
Kianoush Ayyari, Iran, 2012, DCP, 97m
Farsi with English subtitles
Beginning in 1929 and ending in the present day, Kianoush Ayyari’s powerful drama is about so-called honor killing, a taboo subject in modern Iran. The action, which is confined to the closed-off world of a family house and its grounds, with outside reality only impinging in the form of sounds and rumors, starts with a father murdering his daughter in an act of honor killing. With the complicity of his wife and son, he buries her corpse in the cellar. Family life continues, haunted by the shared knowledge of the murder across several generations. This conspiracy of silence and the film’s exploration of the nature of complicity make for a powerful commentary on life in Iran, but Ayyari constructs his fable in such a fashion that ultimately it transcends nationality, culture, and religion and comes to depict the structure and inner workings of totalitarianism itself. (Olaf Möller, Film Comment,November/December 2012) An Iranian Independents release. U.S. Premiere
Saturday, February 20, 6:45pm

Return to Waterloo
Ray Davies, UK, 1984, 35mm, 58m
The little-seen first and only film by Ray Davies, songwriter and lead singer of The Kinks, is an offbeat musical that takes off from and expands the possibilities of the then-newly emergent music-video format while revisiting many of the themes of Davies’s songs of modern discontent and nostalgia. The reverie of a middle-aged man (Kenneth Colley) over the course of his train commute plays out memories of tarnished dreams, regrets, and unsettling imaginings and intimations of dark impulses, accompanied by nine Davies compositions that together encapsulate a life of quiet desperation. Modestly mounted but made with great assurance, with camerawork by Roger Deakins, it’s a time capsule of 1980s London that could almost be a rebuke to the bombast of Pink Floyd The Wall and its more overblown vision of modern discontent. Bonus early appearance by Tim Roth.
Sunday, February 21, 5:30pm

Under Electric Clouds
Aleksei German Jr., Russia/Ukraine/Poland, 2015, DCP, 138m
Russian with English subtitles
A work of epic ambition, this vision of near-future Russia consists of seven vignettes centered on an unfinished building whose architect perhaps went mad. In some of the segments the building is seen, in others merely mentioned. Its ensemble of characters mainly represent Russia’s “superfluous” people (artists, intellectuals). Many voices are heard, ranging from Kyrgyz migrant workers to the children of a deceased oligarch; some sections are only loosely connected to the story of the ruin, one turns out to be a flashback, and others recapitulate events seen earlier from slightly different angles. Of course Under Electric Clouds is a meditation on today’s Russia: a country torn to shreds by delusions of grandeur, corruption, an unquestioning belief in authority, and a fatal passion for the past that goes hand in hand with an outrageous obsession with the future—making for an empty present. Like his late father, German Jr. favors wildly meandering plan-séquences, expansive choreographies of actors milling in and out of scenes, blasted landscapes, and dialogue delivered with fierce panache, but in place of German Sr.’s fury, there’s a playful, lighthearted, dreamy and almost earnest quality here that’s a joy to behold. (Olaf Möller, Film Comment May/June 2015)
Monday, February 22, 8:30pm

Spotlight on Andrzej Żuławski:
On the occasion of the U.S. premiere of his latest feature, Cosmos, we’re pleased to spotlight the work of legendary maverick director Andrzej Żuławski, featuring a selection of new digital restorations of his landmark Polish films, including his debut, The Third Part of the Night, and his towering film maudit On the Silver Globe. Presented in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, with additional support from the Polish Film Institute. Organized by Florence Almozini. Restorations courtesy of the Polish Film Institute.

Acknowledgments:
Andrzej Żuławski; Paolo Branco, Alfama Films; Polish Cultural Institute New York; Polish Film Institute

Cosmos
Andrzej Żuławski, France/Portugal, 2015, DCP, 97m
French with English subtitles
Andrzej Żuławski’s first film in 15 years, a literary adaptation suffused with his trademark freneticism, transforms Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s novel of the same name into an ominous and manic exploration of desire. Witold (Jonathan Genet), who has just failed the bar, and his companion Fuchs (Johan Libéreau), who has recently quit his fashion job, are staying at a guesthouse run by the intermittently paralytic Madame Woytis (Sabine Azéma). Upon discovering a sparrow hanged in the woods near the house, Witold’s reality mutates into a whirlwind of tension, histrionics, foreboding omens, and surrealistic logic as he becomes obsessed with Madame Woytis’s daughter Lena (Victoria Guerra), newly married to Lucien (Andy Gillet)—in other words, he finds himself starring in a Żuławski film. The Polish master’s auspicious return bears his imprimatur at all times. Winner of the Best Director prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. U.S. Premiere
Friday, February 19, 6:30pm

The Devil / Diabeł
Andrzej Żuławski, Poland, 1972, DCP, 112m
Polish with English subtitles
This thoroughly unhinged period film by Andrzej Żuławski is a hellish tour of late 18th-century Poland that more than makes good on the demonic promise of its title. A murderous nobleman who has just escaped from prison returns to his family’s home, which has become a desiccated, barbaric realm in his absence. It’s not long before a black-clad Satanic proxy appears on the scene, roping the nobleman into a series of political intrigues that rapidly assumes the form of a frenzied, vengeful killing spree. Deservedly controversial for its violence (rendered via Żuławski’s customary wild, free-ranging cinematography), The Devil winds up as a fascinating meditation on the soul in the crucible of madness. New digital restoration courtesy of the Polish Film Institute.
Saturday, February 20, 1:00pm

On the Silver Globe / Na srebrnym globie
Andrzej Żuławski, Poland, 1988, DCP, 166m
Polish with English subtitles
After a 16-year absence, Andrzej Żuławski returned to Polish cinema with On the Silver Globe, which proved to be the most ambitious and difficult project of his career. The largest Polish production of all time when shooting began in 1976, it was halted by the Ministry of Culture for two years due to it its alleged subversiveness, before finally being reconstituted and completed after the fall of communism over a decade later. The resulting sci-fi epic follows a group of astronauts who, after crash-landing on the moon, forge a new society. As the first generation dies off, their children devise new rituals and mythologies to structure the emergent civilization, until a politician from Earth arrives and is hailed as the Messiah… An inexhaustibly inventive and absorbing film maudit that quite literally creates a new cinematic world, On the Silver Globe is perhaps the grandest expression of Żuławski’s visionary artistry. New digital restoration courtesy of the Polish Film Institute.
Saturday, February 20, 3:30pm

The Third Part of the Night / Trzecia część nocy
Andrzej Żuławski, Poland, 1972, DCP, 105m
Polish with English subtitles
The first feature by Andrzej Żuławski immediately established his emotionally charged, fast-and-furious style. Drawing from the biography of his father, particularly his experiences in Nazi German-occupied Poland, the film follows a fugitive whose reality implodes when he witnesses the murders of his family, propelling him into a nightmarish world filled with doppelgängers, fluid identities, pervasive dread, and an enigmatic Nazi vaccine laboratory. In all its fantastic and macabre glory, The Third Part of the Night is a delirious portrayal of the chaos wrought upon the psyche by the horrors of war, and one of the most remarkable directorial debuts of all time. New digital restoration courtesy of the Polish Film Institute.
Friday, February 19, 9:15pm

Spotlight on Charles Bronson:
Breakout
Tom Gries, USA, 1974, 35mm, 96m
An underrated thriller from journeyman director Tom Gries, Breakout ranks among the highlights of Charles Bronson’s ’70s superstardom phase. Bronson plays pilot Nick Colton, bankrolled by a tycoon (John Huston) to rescue his son Jay Wagner (Robert Duvall) who’s been imprisoned in Mexico on trumped-up charges. Aided by Wagner’s wife Ann (Jill Ireland) and an assortment of cohorts (Randy Quaid, Sheree North, Alan Vint), Colton soon discovers that it’s a tough proposition in part due to a phony escape-route scheme run by corrupt warders in which escapees wind up dead. Featuring top-notch action sequences and superior technical credits (cinematography by Lucien Ballard, music by Jerry Goldsmith).
Sunday, February 21, 1:00pm

Rider on the Rain / Le Passager de la pluie
René Clément, France/Italy, 1969, 35mm, 119m
Smack in the middle of Charles Bronson’s four-year, 10-film stint starring in European productions of variable quality came this stylish, small-scale Hitchcockian thriller from French director René Clément, who demonstrated his flair for tense drama with 1960’s Purple Noon. In the South of France, Mellie (Marlène Jobert) is stalked and then raped by a stranger while her husband is away, and then kills her attacker and disposes of his body. Soon after, a mysterious American (Bronson) who seems to know everything begins a game of cat and mouse with the young woman.
Sunday, February 21, 3:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

New Directors/New Films full 2016 lineup (and FSLC blurbs).

I expect to be on hand for the press screenings of these and publish reviews of them in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section.--CK.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films are digitally projected unless otherwise noted.


Opening Night
Under the Shadow
Babak Anvari, UK/Jordan/Qatar, 2016, 84m
Farsi with English subtitles
It’s eight years into the Iran-Iraq War, but the troubles of wife and mother in Tehran have only just begun. Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is thwarted in her attempts to return to medical school because of past political activities. And as Iraqi bombs close in, her husband is sent off to serve in the military, neighbors begin to flee, and she is left alone with her young daughter, Dorsa, who refuses to be separated from her favorite doll. At first, Dorsa’s tantrums seem to simply be the complaints of a cranky child. But soon she’s in conversation with an invisible woman—no imaginary friend, this one—and the cracks in the walls and ceilings of their apartment could just be the result of something more than air raids. And what is that she sees down the hall, from the corner of her eye? Though Shideh is a woman of science, she begins to suspect that a malevolent spirit, a djinn, is stalking them. A political horror story that rises up from the rubble of war, Babak Anvari’s feature debut boasts a terrific performance by Rashidi as a woman with more than one war going on in her home and in her head, who must save her daughter from dangers both physical and supernatural.

Closing Night
Cameraperson
Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2015, 102m
How much of one’s self can be captured in the images shot of and for others? Kirsten Johnson may be a first-time (solo) feature-film director, but her work as a director of photography and camera operator has helped earn her documentary collaborators (Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, Barbara Kopple) nearly every accolade and award possible. Recontextualizing the stunning images inside, around, and beyond the works she has shot, Johnson constructs a visceral and vibrant self-portrait of an artist who has traveled the globe, venturing into landscapes and lives that bear the scars of trauma both active and historic. Rigorous yet nimble in its ability to move from heartache to humor, Cameraperson provides an essential lens on the things that make us human.

The Apostate / El apóstata
Federico Veiroj, Spain/France/Uruguay, 2015, 80m
Spanish with English subtitles
With wry humor and deep conviction, Uruguayan filmmaker Federico Veiroj (A Useful Life, ND/NF 2010) observes a young Spaniard’s maddening efforts to abandon the Catholic Church. Petitioning the local bishop in Madrid to hand over his baptismal records, the philosophy student is soon confronted with a stubborn bureaucracy and comically agonized tests of his fidelity and patience. Scenes of pithy theological discussion (performed by the film’s excellent ensemble cast) are interspersed with oneiric flights of imagination, cohering to produce a work that is by turns seriously philosophical and irreverently funny. While Veiroj’s tone may be more gently ironic than that of Luis Buñuel (his spiritual forebear), The Apostate nonetheless traces in bracing fashion the competing forces of conformity and rebellion, spiritual yearning and carnal desire, at war within us all.

Screening with:
Concerning the Bodyguard
Kasra Farahani, USA, 2015, 10m
This stylish adaptation of Donald Barthelme’s story, narrated by Salman Rushdie, takes on the power structures of a dictatorship with brio.

Behemoth / Beixi moshuo
Zhao Liang, China/France, 2015, 91m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Political documentarian Zhao Liang draws inspiration from The Divine Comedy for this simultaneously intoxicating and terrifying glimpse at the ravages wrought upon Inner Mongolia by its coal and iron industries. A poetic voiceover speaks of the insatiability of desire on top of stunning images of landscapes (and their decimation), machines (and their spectacular functions), and people (and the toll of their labor). Interspersed are sublime tableaux of a prone nude body—asleep? just born? dead?—posed against a refracted horizon. A wholly absorbing guided tour of exploding hillsides, dank mine shafts, cacophonous factories, and vacant cities, Behemoth builds upon Zhao’s previous exposés (2009’s Petition, 2007’s Crime and Punishment) by combining his muckraking streak with a painterly vision of a social and ecological nightmare otherwise unfolding out of sight, out of mind. Winner of the environmental Green Drop Award at the Venice Film Festival. North American Premiere

Demon
Marcin Wrona, Poland/Israel, 2015, 94m
English, Polish, and Yiddish with English subtitles
Newly arrived from England to marry his fiancée Zaneta, Peter has been given a gift of her family’s ramshackle country house in rural Poland. It’s a total fixer-upper, and while inspecting the premises on the eve of the wedding, he falls into a pile of human remains. The ceremony proceeds, but strange things begin to happen... During the wild reception, Peter begins to come undone, and a dybbuk, that iconic ancient figure from Jewish folklore, takes a toehold in this present-day celebration—for a very particular reason, as it turns out. The final work by Marcin Wrona, who died just as Demon was set to premiere in Poland, is an eerie, richly atmospheric film—part absurdist comedy, part love story—that scares, amuses, and charms in equal measure. Winner of Best Horror Feature at Fantastic Fest. An Orchard release.

Donald Cried
Kris Avedisian, USA, 2016, 85m
Trust me, you can’t go home again. Kris Avedisian’s unhinged first feature is a brilliant twist on the family-reunion melodrama and the classic buddy comedy. Returning after 20 years to Warwick, Rhode Island, for his grandmother’s funeral, Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman), now a slick city financier, has to endure a blast from the past and relive some very cringeworthy moments when hanging out with his former high-school bestie, the obnoxious Donald Treebeck (Avedisian). By turns depressing and funny while subtly shifting our sympathies thanks to sharp dialogue and extremely well-written characters, Donald Cried can perhaps best be summed up as The Color Wheel meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Eldorado XXI
Salomé Lamas, Portugal/France, 2016, 125m
Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara with English subtitles
Salomé Lamas’s Eldorado XXI immerses the viewer in the breathtaking views and extreme conditions of La Rinconada in the Peruvian Andes, the highest-elevation permanent human settlement in the world. Here, some 17,000 feet above sea level, miners face misery and lawlessness in the hopes of striking gold, chewing coca leaves to stave off exhaustion. They toil for weeks without pay under the inhumane lottery system known as cachorreo, gambling on an eventual fortune if they can survive the despoiled landscape long enough. Life in this remotest outpost of civilization seems to unfold in the grip of an illusion, and the film itself frequently resembles a hallucination, not least in an extended tour-de-force shot that reveals an endless stream of miners trekking up and down the mountain as we hear radio reports and stories of their daily lives. Full of unforgettable images and sounds, Eldorado XXI is a transporting, fundamentally mysterious experience that renews the possibilities of the ethnographic film. North American Premiere

Evolution / Évolution
Lucile Hadžihalilović, France, 2015, 81m
French with English subtitles
On a remote island, populated solely by women and young boys, 10-year-old Nicolas plays with other children, but not in a carefree manner. And while the women may have maternal instincts, something is awry: they gather on the beach at night for a strange ritual that Nicolas struggles to understand, and the boys are taken to a hospital regularly for mysterious treatments. And water is everywhere. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, and Nicolas appears to be living out one of his own. In the follow-up to her directorial debut, Innocence, Lucile Hadžihalilović continues her exploration of growing up—where we’re going and what we’re leaving behind. As Nicolas discovers more, feelings of fear, melancholy, and also eroticism bubble to the surface. Hadžihalilović has created a dark fantasy that we are invited to explore and make our own discoveries, however macabre they may be. An Alchemy release.

The Fits
Anna Rose Holmer, USA, 2015, 72m
The transition from girlhood to young womanhood is one that’s nearly invisible in cinema. Enter Anna Rose Holmer, whose complex and absorbing narrative feature debut elegantly depicts a captivating 11-year-old’s journey of discovery. Toni (played by the majestically named Royalty Hightower) is a budding boxer drawn to a group of dancers training at the same rec center in Cincinnati. She begins aligning herself with one of the two troupes, the Lionesses, becoming immersed in their world, which Holmer conveys with a hypnotic sense of rhythm and a rare gift for rendering physicality—evident most of all when a mysterious, convulsive condition begins to afflict a number of girls. Set entirely within the intimate confines of a few familiar settings (public school, the gym), and pulsating with bodies in motion, The Fits encourages us to recall the confused magic of entering the second decade of life. An Oscilloscope release.

Happy Hour
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2015, 317m
Japanese with English subtitles
Four thirtysomething female friends in the misty seaside city of Kobe navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives. They speak solace in one another’s company, but a sudden revelation creates a rift, and rouses each woman to take stock. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s wise, precisely observed, compulsively watchable drama of friendship and midlife awakening runs over five hours, yet the leisurely duration is not an indulgence but a careful strategy—to show what other films leave out, to create a space for everyday moments that is nonetheless charged with possibility, and to yield an emotional density rarely available to a feature-length movie. Developed through workshops with a cast of mostly newcomers (the extraordinary lead quartet shared the Best Actress award at the Locarno Film Festival), and filled with absorbing sequences that flow almost in real time, Happy Hour has a novelistic depth and texture. But it’s also the kind of immersive, intensely moving experience that remains unique to cinema.

In the Last Days of the City / Akher Ayam El Madina
Tamer El Said, Egypt/Germany/Great Britain/United Arab Emirates, 2016, 118m
Arabic with English subtitles
This film within a film is a haunting yet lyric chronicle of recent years in the Arab world, where revolutions seemed to spark hope for change and yield further instability in one stroke. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, The Square) plays the protagonist of Tamer El Said’s ambitious feature debut, a filmmaker in Cairo attempting to capture the zeitgeist of his city as the world changes around him—from personal love and loss to the fall of the Mubarak regime. Throughout, friends send footage and stories from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut, creating a powerful, multilayered meditation on togetherness, the tactile hold of cities, and the meaning of homeland. Shot in 2008 and completed this year, the film explores the weight of cinematic images as record and storytelling in an ongoing time of change. North American Premiere

I Promise You Anarchy / Te prometo anarquía
Julio Hernández Cordón, Mexico/Germany, 2015, 100m
Spanish with English subtitles
Miguel (Diego Calva) and Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martinez) are in deep. Badass skater-bros, crazy-in-love blood hustlers, they’re flowing inevitably toward a sea swimming with narco-sharks. This is Mexico City today, and for two boys from different worlds but the same house—Johnny is the son of Miguel’s family maid—there is no future. On the days they do have at their disposal, they will live as hard as they can, even if it means total destruction for everyone around them. A harrowing vision of the 21st century replete with garishly lit sex scenes, inebriated slow motion, and an exhilarating, eclectic pop soundtrack, and winner of numerous prizes at festivals in Latin America, Julio Hernández Cordón’s film is exploding with beats, sweat, and pain—an ecstatic and anguished portrait of youth teetering on the brink of nihilism. U.S. Premiere

Kaili Blues / Lu bian ye can
Bi Gan, China, 2015, 113m
Mandarin with English subtitles
A multiple prizewinner at the Locarno Film Festival and one of the most audacious and innovative debuts of recent years, Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future. Chen Sheng, a country doctor in the Guizhou province who has served time in prison, is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother Crazy Face intends to sell. Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him, embarking on a mystical quest that takes him to the riverside city of Kaili and the town of Dang Mai. Through a remarkable arsenal of stylistic techniques, the film develops into a one-of-a-kind road movie, at once magical and materialist, traversing both space and time. U.S. Premiere

Kill Me Please / Mate-me por favor
Anita Rocha da Silveira, Brazil/Argentina, 2015, 101m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Anita Rocha da Silveira’s vibrantly morbid debut feature is a coming-of-age story in which passive aggression on the handball court, jealousy among friends, and teenage angst unfold in the foreground of a slasher flick. In Rio de Janeiro’s Barra da Tijuca—a newly formed upper-middle-class neighborhood of car-lined thoroughfares, gigantic malls, and monolithic white condos—a clique of teenage girls become fearfully captivated by a string of gruesome murders. The most fascinated is Bia (Valentina Herszage), whose own sexual discoveries evolve alongside the mounting deaths in this skewed world of wild colors and transformative desires. With nods to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, and the atmospheres of David Lynch, Rocha da Silveira’s contribution to the genre is nonetheless entirely her own.

Life After Life / Zhi fan ye mao
Zhang Hanyi, China, 2016, 80m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Zhang Hanyi’s exquisitely restrained ghost story combines the gentle supernaturalism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul with the clear-eyed social realism of Jia Zhangke (one of the film’s executive producers). A young boy, Leilei, becomes possessed by his late mother, Xiuying, whose spirit has wandered the Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. With the help of Leilei’s father (who receives his late wife’s return with matter-of-fact equanimity), they set out to move a tree from her family’s courtyard before she departs again. In ethereal, beautifully composed sequences of a barren rural-industrial village on the edge of collapse, itself a kind of purgatorial space, Zhang captures the spectral gap between life and oblivion. North American Premiere

Lost and Beautiful / Bella e perduta
Pietro Marcello, Italy/France, 2015, 87m
Italian with English subtitles
Pietro Marcello continues his intrepid work along the borderline of fiction and documentary with this beautiful and beguiling film, by turns neorealist and fabulist, worthy of Pasolini in its matter-of-fact lyricism and political conviction. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and freely incorporating archival footage and folkloric tropes, it begins as a portrait of the shepherd Tommaso, a local hero in the Campania region of southern Italy, who volunteered to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello despite the state’s apathy and threats from the Mafia. Tommaso suffers a fatal heart attack in the course of shooting, and Marcello’s bold and generous response is to grant his subject’s dying wish: for a Pulcinella straight out of the commedia dell’arte to appear on the scene and rescue a buffalo calf from the palace. With Lost and Beautiful, a documentary that soars into the realm of myth, Marcello has crafted a uniquely multifaceted and enormously moving work of political cine-poetry. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival. U.S. Premiere

Mountain / Ha'har
Yaelle Kayam, Denmark/Israel, 2015, 83m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Atop Jerusalem's Mount of Olives, Zvia, a Jewish Orthodox woman, lives surrounded by an ancient cemetery with her four children and husband, a Yeshiva teacher who pays scant attention to her. Yaelle Kayam's feature debut moves beyond the symbolic landscape of a woman's isolation to offer a subtle and finely paced entryway into the character's surprising inner life. On a nighttime walk through the tombstones, Zvia encounters a group of prostitutes and their handlers and gradually becomes an unlikely bystander to their after-hours activities, trading home-cooked meals for companionship—an usual sort, perhaps, but one that upends her existence as a mother and wife. Shani Klein’s arresting lead performance challenges clichés of female subjectivity in the filmmaker's own society, culminating in Zvia’s dramatic attempt to bring change to her life; throughout, keenly observed frames, by turn luminous and moody, asserts the heroine's volition with intention and finesse.

Nakom
T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris, Ghana/USA, 2016, 90m
Kusaal with English subtitles
When his father dies suddenly, medical-student Iddrisu (Jacob Ayanaba) leaves the good life in the city and returns home to Nakom, a remote farming village. He’s now the head of the family, and he finds he must repay a debt that could destroy them all. Over the course of a growing season, Iddrisu confronts both the tragedy and the beauty of village life and must choose between a future for himself in the city or one for his family and the entire village. Filming in the village of Nakom in northern Ghana, directors T.W. Pittman and Kelly Daniela Norris capture in exquisite detail the lives of people steeped in rural tradition but who yearn to be a part of a new world. Along with writer Isaac Adakudugu and a nonprofessional cast—many of whom are revelations—they have created in Nakom an intimate yet universal story about the search for independence while feeling the pull of tradition. North American Premiere

Neon Bull / Boi neon
Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands, 2015, 101m
Portuguese with English subtitles
A rodeo movie unlike any other, Gabriel Mascaro’s Venice and Toronto prize-winning follow-up to his 2014 fiction debut August Winds tracks handsome cowboy Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) as he travels around to work at vaquejada rodeos, a Brazilian variation on the sport in which two men on horseback attempt to bring a bull down by its tail. Iremar dreams of becoming a fashion designer, creating flamboyant outfits for his co-worker, single mother Galega (Maeve Jinkings). Along with Galega’s daughter Cacá and a bullpen worker named Zé, these complex characters, drawn with tremendous compassion and not an ounce of condescension, make up an unorthodox family, on the move across the northeast Brazilian countryside. Sensitive to matters of gender and class, and culminating in one of the most audacious and memorable sex scenes in recent memory, Neon Bull is a quietly affirming exploration of desire and labor, a humane and sensual study of bodies at work and at play. A Kino Lorber release.

Peter and the Farm
Tony Stone, USA, 2016, 92m
Peter Dunning is a rugged individualist in the extreme, a hard-drinking loner and former artist who has burned bridges with his wives and children and whose only company, even on harsh winter nights, are the sheep, cows, and pigs he tends on his Vermont farm. Peter is also one of the most complicated, sympathetic documentary subjects to come along in some time, a product of the 1960s counterculture whose poetic idealism has since soured. For all his candor, he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing. Imbued with an aching tenderness, Tony Stone’s documentary is both haunting and heartbreaking, a mosaic of its singular subject’s transitory memories and reflections—however funny, tragic, or angry they may be.

Remainder
Omer Fast, UK/Germany, 2015, 97m
The feature debut by celebrated video artist Omer Fast is a striking, stylish adaptation of English novelist Tom McCarthy’s landmark 2005 novel. Set in London, the narrative kicks off when the anonymous protagonist (Tom Sturridge) is struck by a large object plummeting from the sky. When he comes to, he has no recollection of what happened, and a reparations settlement nets him millions of pounds. The man channels these resources toward creating preposterously ambitious reconstructions of his own dim memories, in the process raising a host of questions about the relationship between reality and simulation, the minute details essential to our perception of places and events, and the limits of artistic monomania. Fast, who has explored similar themes in his own work, adapts McCarthy’s idea-packed novel with lucidity and wit, and Sturridge is mesmerizing as an existential hero searching the void for a trace of meaning. North American Premiere

Short Stay
Ted Fendt, USA, 2016, 35mm, 61m
Multi-hyphenate Ted Fendt delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor. Shooting on 16mm (blown up to 35mm), the writer-director-editor here focuses on Mike (Mike MacCherone), an ambitionless resident of Haddonfield, New Jersey, who finds himself subletting a friend’s room in Philadelphia and (ineptly) covering his shifts at a by-donation walking-tour company. Mike floats, as if in a trance, from one low-key comic folly to another, each one a strange and subtle moral tale. Fendt’s economy of expression, expert handling of his nonprofessional cast, and incomparable nose for the tragicomic dimension of the everyday distinguishes Short Stay as a truly anomalous work in contemporary American cinema: a film made entirely on its maker’s terms. North American Premiere

Suite Armoricaine
Pascale Breton, France, 2015, 148m
French with English subtitles
In her first feature since her distinctive 2004 debut, Illumination, Pascale Breton returns to her native region of Brittany for this rapturous ensemble film about the persistence of the past in the present. Françoise (Valérie Dréville), an accomplished art historian, leaves Paris to teach at her alma mater in Rennes. Most of her former schoolmates never left town, it turns out, and are curiously eyeing her return. Meanwhile, Ion (Kaou Langoët), a sensitive geography student, falls in love with the blind Lydie (Manon Evenat), and clashes with his estranged, now-homeless mother, Moon (Elina Löwensohn), one of Françoise’s closest friends from the old punk-rock days… As these idiosyncratic, richly drawn characters intersect, their points of view overlap and the tricks of time and memory become apparent. Bursting with ideas and emotion, Suite Armoricaine is a work of symphonic scope and grand themes (love and death, art and beauty, language and music) that finds deep wells of meaning in the smallest and most surprising details and gestures. North American Premiere

Thithi
Raam Reddy, India/USA, 2015, 120m
Hindi with English subtitles
Raam Reddy’s bold, vibrant first feature is closer to Émile Zola than it is to Bollywood. Filmed in India’s southern Karnataka state with all nonprofessional actors, the sprawling narrative follows three generations of sons following the death of the family’s patriarch, their 101-year-old grandfather known as “Century Gowda.” The men’s respective vices—ranging from greed to womanizing to cut-and-dry escapism—bring deliciously comedic misadventures to their village in the days leading up to the thithi, a funeral celebration traditionally held 11 days after a death. This incisive portrait of a community in a time of radical change (while some are looking after their sheep, others are lost in their cell phones) yields exemplary humanist comedy. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival, the film equally affirms the advent of a new realism within Indian cinema, as well as an engaging new voice in contemporary world cinema.

Tikkun
Avishai Sivan, Israel, 2015, 120m
Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles
In Avishai Sivan’s intense and provocative Tikkun, a prizewinner at the Jerusalem and Locarno Film Festivals, an ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva student experiences a crisis of faith—and visions of earthly delights—when his father brings him back from the brink of death. Was the young man’s improbable survival a violation of God’s will, or was it “tikkun,” a way toward enlightenment and redemption? Sivan imbues the narrative with an indeterminate, hypnotic blend of black comedy and alienated modernism, effecting a singularly uncanny atmosphere. Nonprofessional actor Aharon Traitel, himself a former Hasidic Jew, gives a nuanced, knowing performance as the anguished prodigy, and the black-and-white chiaroscuro photography casts the devoutly private, regimented Hasidic community of old Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim in a morally shaded light. A Kino Lorber release.

The Wakhan Front / Ni le ciel ni la terre
Clément Cogitore, France/Belgium, 2015, 100m
French and Persian with English subtitles
The ingenious conceit of The Wakhan Front, a critical success at Cannes, is to transform the Afghan battlefield—dust and boredom and jolts of explosive violence—into the backdrop for a metaphysical thriller. Jérémie Renier stars as a French army commander who begins to lose the loyalty of his company, as well as his sanity, when soldiers start mysteriously disappearing one by one. Rarely is the madness of war conveyed on screen with such simmering tension and existential fear. Rarely, too, is the ignorance and mistrust between cultures—are the shepherd villagers innocent civilians or Taliban spies?—limned with such poetic insight. U.S. Premiere

Weiner
Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg, USA, 2016, 100m
Truly compelling vérité filmmaking requires several key factors to coalesce: intimate access, cinematographic acumen, genuine inquisitiveness, and fascinating subjects. Directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg brilliantly meld these elements to create one of the most engaging and entertaining works of nonfiction film in recent years. A truly 21st-century hybrid of classic documentary techniques and reality-based dramatic storytelling, Weiner follows the mayoral election bid of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner in 2013, an attempted comeback that, as we all know now, was doomed to failure. By turns Shakespearean in its tragedy (it’s clear that Weiner and his inner circle have real political talent) and Christopher Guest-ian in its comedic portrayal of what devolves into a Waiting for Guffman–esque campaign, this is the perfect political film for our time. A Sundance Selects release.


SHORTS PROGRAMS


Shorts Program One
Under the Sun / Ri Guang Zhi Xia
Yang Qiu, China, 2015, 19m
Chinese with English subtitles
An incident of random nature entangles two families and brings their plights into sharp focus.

Dirt
Darius Clark Monroe, USA, 2014, 7m
With an unsettling lyricism all his own, Darius Clark Monroe traces an evocative and elliptical portrait of a dirty deed.

Totem
Marte Vold, Norway, 2015, 20m
Norwegian with English subtitles
In seemingly idyllic Oslo, a couple demonstrates the discontents of intimacy with wit and biting honesty. U.S. Premiere

Reluctantly Queer
Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana/USA, 2016, 8m
In a letter home to his beloved mother, a young Ghanaian man attempts to unpack his queerness in light of her love. North American Premiere

Isabella Morra
Isabel Pagliai, France, 2015, 22m
French with English subtitles
The courtyards of a housing project become a de facto stage on which unsupervised children perform, spreading rumors and shouting insults in an imitation of adulthood. North American Premiere

Shorts Program Two
The Digger
Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France/UAE, 2015, 24m
Arabic and Pashto with English subtitles
With ritualistic serenity, a lone caretaker maintains ancient graves in the Sharjah Desert long after the bodies are gone. North American Premiere

We All Love the Seashore / Tout le Monde Aime le Bord de la Mer
Keina Espiñeira, Spain, 2016, 16m
French and Pulaar with English subtitles
A poetic distillation of the liminal space of refugees and migrants, developed collaboratively through encounters on the African coast of the Mediterranean. North American Premiere

Of a Few Days
Timothy Fryett, USA, 2016, 14m
On the South Side of Chicago, final touches on one’s journey on Earth are meticulously made in a decades-old community funeral home. North American Premiere

The Park / Le Park
Randa Maroufi, France, 2015, 14m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
A series of tableaux vivants mesmerizingly locate the intersection of public space, inner lives, and social media within an abandoned Casablanca amusement park. U.S. Premiere

[Chris Knipp]

Upcoming ND/NF coverage on Filmleaf.

Reports and reviews from the FSLC Lincoln Center + MoMA series will begin next week. Some of the first films I'll cover are Under the Shadow, The Apostate, Thithi, Behemoth, Neither Heaen Nor Earth, Nakom, Remainder, and Kill Me please.

[Chris Knipp]

2016 New Directors/New Films so far.

Click on the titles for links to the reviews.


UNDER THE SHADOW (Babak Anvar 2015) (83m)

Another Iranian horror film from Sundance, this one set in Teheran during the 1980's Iraq-Iran war. I could not see the importance of possessions by djinns when the mother and daughter could get fried by an Iranian missile at any minute. So the premise seems misguided, and it's all not very scary after all; but the acting is quite good, far beyond the telenovela quality of the outset, when the focus is on the wife's career disappointments under the mullahs, and her conflicts with her doctor husband. When the focus shifts to the daughter and her doll things grow more intense.


CONCERNING THE BODYGUARD (Kasra Farahani 2015) (10m)

A Donald Barthalme short story read by Salmon Rusdie (for whom the experience of having a bodyguard has painful resonance), this is an elegant and highly concentrated short film that brilliantly imagines every phrase, every word, of the story.

THE APOSTATE/EL APÓSTATA (Federico Veiroj 2015) (80m)

By the Uruguayan filmmaker of A Useful Life, but set in Spain (Madrid) this time. Usually an apostate is one who turns against all his believes or rejects the tenets of religion he has formerly espoused: it has a passionate ring to it. But this is the story of an inconsequential but interesting young man who is merely seeking to detach himself officially from the pervasive bureaucratic control Catholic Church. As he does so he has troubling, surreal, Bunuelian dreams full of nude people. In real life, women are attracted to him. Not as strong as Veiroj's first film, but it still has charm. But "what's an apostate?" my friend asked after watching this with me, and if the film didn't make that clear to him, something may be lacking.


THITHI (Raam Redy 2015) (132m)

Busy, engaging, if somewhat crude ethnographic/neorealist filmmaking set in a rural part of India, with a somewhat complicated (but easy to follow) plot involving crotchety old men, a land deal, a memorial service, and young lovers. This isn't Ray's Apu Trilogy by a long sight, but he would understand.


BEHEMOTH/BEIXI MOSHUO (Zhao Liang 2015) (91m)

An art film/documentary that constitutes an aesthetic wallowing in the beauty of ugliness and a meditative but nonetheless passionate outcry against Chinese exploitation of mine workers and the land. I was not able to keep focused throughout, but the power and beauty of the images was unmistakable.


NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH/NI LE CIEL NI LA TERRE (Clément Cogitore 2015) ] (100m) [Formerly titled in English The Wakhan Front

A French film about malaise among NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, led by Jérémie Renier, who run amok when some of their members start to disappear. This has a strong supporting cast and authentic-feeling settings and accoutrements, but though very well done in its way, as with Under the Shadow one wondered why the real and present dangers weren't focused on instead of imaginary ones.

SHORTS PROGRAM 1 (74m)

A Chinese film made by Yang Qiu through an Australian film school program and sponsored by Jia Zhank-ke was the most sophisticated and substantial; several others were promising, several not.


NAKOM (T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris 2015) (91m)

A talented young Ghanan medical student is called back to his village at the death of his father and is forced to suspend studies for a while to help out his family. He is begged to stay, and must decide. A thoroughly engaging and polished film full of atmosphere and charm.


REMAINDER (Omer Fast 2015) (102m)

A witty and ultimately exciting film from Tom McCarthy's initially almost not published cult film, about a young man nearly destroyed by a falling object in a London street who uses his enormous compensation payment to try to recreate episodes from his damaged memory. Perhaps too high-concept for some; and the novel-to-film compression may make details harder to follow than they are in the book. But Tom Sturridge is a terrifically watchable young actor and the prolific Israeli-born music video filmmaker Omer Fast is a skillful manipulator of action and mise-en-scène. He makes his finale, the recreation of a bank robbery, build to a deliciously unbearable intensity.

KILL ME PLEASE/MATA-ME POR FAVOR (Anita Rocha da Silveira 2015)(80m)

From the title you think this is going to be a crude hip slasher movie but it's an in-your-face pretty trifle. The first film of a Brazilian woman director, it's a gorgeous, but vapid, hymn to adolescent beauty and the fascination with rape and murder. A little clan of schoolgirls in a posh if rather soulless new suburb of Rio with vast malls, highways, and big apartment buildings spend most of their time talking about an ongoing series of killings of (mostly) young women in their region, and kissing boys, and listening to music, and looking pretty. Lots of bright images and loud music and lots of couples kissing.

LIFE AFTER LIFE/ZHI FAN YE MAO (Zhang Hanyi 2016)

A woman dead for years returns to possess the body of her young son and persuade her husband, and the boy, both of them as deadpan as Buster Keaton ever was, to move a tree on her family property to a safer location. We are back contemplating the desolation of rural China in the face of rampaging industrialization, through the filter of Buddhist transmigration of souls. Sponsored by Jia Zhang-ke, and we can see why: this has his ironic, bitter take on modern China, and his sometimes chilly camera eye. And your nerves and hope will freeze away, watching this grim, plodding film.


THE FITS (Anna Rose Holmer 2015)(72m)

We are in Cincinnati, at an all-black rec center near the projects, where a small, energetic girl called Toni (Royalty Hightower) is pursuing a boxing program with her older brother, but switches to an all-girl dance program across the way - perhaps a sign she's moved to become more social and more feminine, but Toni remains rather opaque as a character, though the physicality and warmth of the action and cast are striking. Holmer shows promise but more story might be in order next time. This seems as much an art piece, a meditation, as a narrative film, and the people are too vivid and interesting not to learn their stories. Produced through a Venice program. That's Venice in Italy.

[Chris Knipp]

There was finally a very exciting film today Bi Gan's KAILI BLUES. The other was garbage, but the a second set of Shorts better than the first set, but with no real narrative content. Mike D'Angelo's Twitter comment that "The extent to which New Directors/New Films has become Locarno New York is really quite remarkable" became more evident but if KAILI BLUES got a big Locarno prize, best new filmmaker, this is not all bad. Hong Sang-so's new RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN got the top prize and I think D'Angelo likes Hong.

SHORT STAY (Ted Fendt 2016)

This is like the worst of the early mumblecore films, so how can it be a transition by Fendt (blurb) "delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor." That person lives on another planet.


KAILI BLUES (Bi Gan 2015)

This won the BEST EMERGING DIRECTOR award at Locarno. ("Miglior Regista Emergente," since the official language of Locarno is Italian.) This film is full of the sheer joy of filmmaking, dense scenario, multiple levels, brilliant cinematography. Links with best young generation Chinese directors and Hou Hsiau-hsien. A dreamy road trip with a 40-minute continuous tracking shot like Sokurov's Russian Ark's but set in Bi Gan's sub tropical south China homeland, and that's only the beginning. Everything is visually rich and remarkably, it's cinematographer Wang Tianxing's debut too.

SHORTS PROGRAM 2

These were more rich and original than the first set, and the first one, about desert tombs, was quite beautiful, but there was no narrative content here in any of them really; these were more like art films you'd find shown in a museum room.

[Chris Knipp]

EVOLUTION/ÉVOLUTION (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2015)

Her first feature since 2004 (she collaborated with husband Gaspard Noë on Into the Void). Innocence based on a book was about young girls. Here she's on her own and it's young boys, being strangely transformed by near-identical "mothers" or nurses. She works in the realm of the beautifully, elegantly creepy.

LOST AND BEAUTIFUL/BELLA E PERDUTA (Pietro Marcello)

Marcello takes real people and makes fantasies out of them. The "angel of the Carditello" was a shepherd, Tommaso Cestrone, who strove on his own against mafia threat and government indifference to preserve the grand buildings of the 18-century Bourbon rulers of the region, Campania. He died while Marcello was documenting him, and out of this was spun a fable about a Commmedia dell'Arte figure, Pulcinello, saving Tommaso's pet baby buffalo. Italian journalists have hailed this as an allegory about the current state of Italy, and the Locardo festival gave it a big prize. It's sweet but also tedious.

I PROMISE YOU ANARCHY/TE PROMETO ANARQUIA (Julio Harnández Cordón 2015)

This slapdash movie about two (gay?) skateboard slackers in Mexico City squabbling and in trouble over a terribly failed blood brokering deal with narcos doesn't deliver on the promise of raciness and hipness. The Hollywood Reporter critic calls it "a hot mess at best." Locarno again -- which was a good source for 2016's ND/NF in the cases of Thithi and Kail Blues,, not so much here or with Lost and Beautiful.

[Chris Knipp]

SUITE AMORICAINE (Pascale Breton 2015)

This semi-autobiographical, richly layered film focused on the University of Rennes, in Brittany, explores a troubled youth and an art history prof whose lives connect. Despite its nearly two-and--half-hour length, I found it a continual pleasure for its handsome use of digital imagery, its intelligent screenplay, and its interesting characters. "Amoricaine" refers to an ancient geographical region roughly corresponding to the filmmaker's native Brittany.

MOUNTAIN (Yaelle Kayam 2015)

Orthodox Jewish mother of four leads a life of confinement at the edge of a Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Her Yeshiva teacher husband has little time or affection for her, and doesn't support her in disciplining the most uncooperative daughter. She begins spending more and more time out in the cemetery at night, where there are prostitutes, or in the daytime, when she can talk to the Arab maintenance man, and smoke with him. Eventually she's led to a violent act whose outcome is left unclear. I found it hard to warm to this stiff, limited film, but it has a strong subject and is a promising debut both for director and actress.

ELDORADO XX1 (Salomé Lamas 2015)

The Inferno of life in Peruvian goldmines is a subject that has been richly explored in the photographs of Sebastiño Delgado. Looking at them is painfully enlightening -- but not a grueling punishment, like this film, which begins with a 50-minute static shot of hundreds of men walking up and down the mountain of the La Rinconada mines all geared up for their work, while interviews and a local radio show are broadcast at the hapless viewer. An effort based on the assumption that festival juries reward filmmakers for harassing and battering them.

[Chris Knipp]

DONALD CRIED (Kris Avidisian 2015)

A hilarious homecoming film that turns this common indie trope on its head. It's an opportunity for Mr. Avidisian, in the main role, to play the returning yuppie's still unvarnished stoner slacker best friend of two decades before, a friend in need he can't shake off.

TIKKUN (Avishai Siwan 2015)

Back to ultra-Orthodox Jews in this Israeli film with a puzzler theme. Young Yeshiva student is revived from death by his kosher butcher dad. Is it a tikkun, a chance to do good, or a sin against God Who wanted him dead? Comic, surreal, stylish black and white. I didn't quite like it, but it has style, and scenes between Haim-Aaron and his young er brother are very sweet.

PETER AND THE FARM (Tony Stone 2015)

Documentary portrait back-to-the-land organic farmer in New Hampshire. But this is no PC lesson but a free ranging monologue from a suicide alcoholic artist hippie whose two wives and children have abandoned him, yet who maintains the 187 acre farm with devotion. I found this the most engaging film of the day's screenings because you learn all about a man and a lot about farming.

[Chris Knipp]

NEON BULL/BOI NEON (Gabriel Mascaro 2015)

One of the most unique looking and feeling films of recent memory, it has a soft visual beauty and gritty sensuality, feels like a documentary but uses professional actors doing real things -- pissing, fighting, wrangling bulls, having sex. Not much plot. Focused on marginal "family" traveling with Northeast Brazil rodeo troop. In Portuguese.

WEINER (Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg 2016)

A fairly generic, jittery-camera "fly on the wall" doc about the New York politician who resigned from Congress due to a "sexting" scandal, then a year or so later entered the NYC mayoral race (won handily by Bill De Blasio) to freshen up his image. Turned out the dysfunctional sexless sex play (online, live on the phone) had gone on after his resignation. We watch the gradual meltdown. But he never withdrew. Will be shown on TV.

DEMON (Marcin Wrona 2015)

An ambitious, atmospheric Polish film about a big wedding in a large dilapidated house that goes horribly wrong when the groom is invaded by a dybbuk, the demon spirit of a long-lost Jewish girl. The mise-en-scène is even better than this description makes it sound, but some elements don't quite work from the start. Tragically enough, the up-and-coming filmmaker committed suicide at 42 when this film was still being shown at festivals.

[Chris Knipp]

The penultimate screening day's only film, for obvious reasons.

HAPPY HOUR (Ryusuke Hamaguchi 2015)

Hamaguchi's unusually long film, five hours and 17 minutes, about four 37-year-old women in Kobe, Japan, was produced on a shoestring $50,000 budget developing an large ensemble cast of first-time actors through workshops. The long early almost real-time sequences have a soothing epic quietude almost worthy of Ozu and are really quite wonderful. Then the director's inability to edit his work and tie things off effectively becomes evident in a disastrously boring real time manuscript reading and its melodramatic aftermath. Well received at Locarno, which seems to favor marathon lengh and the sixth film (at least) in ND/NF from that festival.

[Chris Knipp]

IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY/AKHAR AYAM EL MADINA (Tamar El Said 2016)

The city is Cairo. The protagonist is a filmmaker. The time is a little vague, though Tamer El Said's beautiful, skillfully wrought (at times quite gorgeous and canny technically), but frustratingly stagnant feature film debut, In the Last Days of the City, is meant as a requiem and an elegy for a Cairo that's gone or perpetually crumbling. Hasn't it always been so?

CAMERAPERSON (Kirsten Johnson 2016)

The collage memoir of photojournalist/cinematographer Johnson is made up of a series of short clips, mostly outtakes, from hotspots and from home, to illustrate her globetrotting life. It is difficult to carry away any distinctive impression from what seems such a random assemblage, without autobiographical information or narration. The closing film of New Directors/New Films 2016, and pretty anticlimactic. But we'll have to go back and point to some of the highlights of the series in a bit.

[Chris Knipp]

NEON BULL (Gabriel Marscaro)


Opens on Friday, April 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (beginning a Kno Lorber commercial release).

[Chris Knipp]

THE FITS (Anne Rose Holmer 2015)

US Theatrical release today, 3 June 2016. (Well received: Metacritic rating 88%.) I could not at first see where it was playing, but among others, At Metrograph, NYC, Laemmle Monica Film Center, L.A., Landmark Opera Plaza, San Francisco.

My sympathies are more with the low end review on Metacritic:

There's vision here, clearly, and through the use of eye-catching frames and a standout score, "The Fits" works like magic as an experimental performance piece. As an engaging work of well-rounded cinema, however, there are more than a few missteps.
--The Playlist - Nikola Grozdanovic

I think they've gone overboard, but it's nice to encourage a new filmmaker of color.

[Chris Knipp]

NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH/NI LE CIEL NI LA TERRE (Clément Cogitore 2015)

This "metaphysical thriller" opens on Friday, August 5, 2016 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.