GOOD
NUDES, THERE'S GONNA BE SOME GOOD NUDES!
 Gonzalo
Valenzuela, at left, and Blanca Lewin, below, quickly strip and
get to know each other in the biblical sense in Matias Bize's "In
Bed." Eventually, they introduce themselves to one another,
and maybe even exchange phone numbers.
An international group of budding, far-from-mainstream
filmmakers are currently enjoying the pleasure of playing to paying
audiences. At least to that portion of the movie-going public lucky
enough to be in the vicinity of New York’s Museum of Modern
Art and Lincoln Center. From March 22 through April 2, the 35th
annual New Directors/New Films series, jointly sponsored by the
Film Society of Lincoln Center and MOMA’s Department of Film
and Media, will provide movie lovers with fresh, provocative images
and ideas (as described below by the festival’s programmers).
Not to worry, though, if you can’t make it to New York; films
of this caliber will surely be coming your way soon.
For full details on NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS, click
here.
 HALF
NELSON
Ryan Fleck, USA, 106 min.
A committed and popular teacher and coach
at a public New York City junior high school, Dan’s totally
engaged at school but his private life is a mess, as he spends most
of his time off in a drug haze. He manages to keep his two lives
separate until Drey, one of his students, discovers him in a compromising
situation. Now the two embark on a turbulent journey through the
chaos and temptations of their worlds. Director Ryan Fleck has fleshed
out the characters from his short film Gowanus, Brooklyn (ND/NF
2004) and created a full-bodied drama that explores personal demons
and the friendships that can help us change our lives. Ryan Gosling
plays Dan with an idealistic intensity and Shareeka Epps--who originated
the role of Drey in the short--packs an emotional wallop as a teenager
who struggles to make sense of her world.
THE BLOSSOMING OF MAXIMO
OLIVEROS
Auraeus Solito, Philippines, 100 min.
A remarkable feature film debut, Maximo Oliveros is the irresistibly
endearing tale of a twelve-year-old Filipino boy named Maxi who
lives with his outlaw father and thuggish older brothers in the
teeming slums that ring Manila. A neighborhood favorite despite
his flirty walk and elaborate hair accessories, Maxi cooks, sews,
shops, and brings a note of welcome warmth to the motherless, all-male
household. One night Victor, a kind rookie cop, saves Maxi from
a beating, and a very special friendship blooms. Smitten with the
handsome law enforcer, Maxi is torn between his loyalty to his brutal
yet loving family and his attraction to the young cop. Infused with
warmth, humor, and wisdom, the film is a layered portrait of a different
kind of community. Nathan Lopez as Maxi and JR Valentin as Victor
make an unforgettably odd couple.
OCTOBER 17, 1961
Alain Tasma, France, 106 min.
Over four decades later, the shadows of French
colonialism in Algeria continue to haunt not only French historical
memory but its recent cinema as well. Director Alain Tasma, a former
assistant to François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Barbet
Schroeder, making his feature film debut, meticulously re-creates
a pivotal moment in the Algerian struggle that has surprisingly
remained practically unknown by the French public until recently.
As the fighting in Algeria was winding down, Algerians living in
France became the targets of violence, while the Algerians and their
supporters responded by killing policemen. The FLN-the main Algerian
political group-called for a peaceful demonstration, and thousands
of Algerians took to the Paris streets, setting the stage for a
tragic confrontation. Tasma gives voice to both the Algerians and
the French authorities, carefully detailing the factions, the internal
divisions, and the eventual cover-up of a night whose resonance
can still be felt in France and beyond.
 LOOK
BOTH WAYS
Sarah Watt, Australia, 100 min.
Sarah Watt, an Australian writer, director,
and producer of prize-winning animations, brings her particular
offbeat sensibility to her feature film debut, an unconventional
and complex story of intersecting lives. For anxiety-ridden and
disaster-prone Meryl (Justine Clarke), life is daunting. Her vivid
imagination invokes scary events that we see as hand-drawn animation
imagery. Still numb after her father’s funeral, Meryl witnesses
a real accident, an event that links her fate to other troubled
souls, particularly Nick (William McInnis), a reporter dealing with
a health crisis, and Andy (Anthony Hayes), a divorced father coping
with his girlfriend’s unwanted pregnancy. Slightly bizarre
and intense yet inexplicably buoyant, this astute examination of
personal mortality in contemporary times may signal a new New Wave
in Australian cinema.
Preceded by
Pia
Javier Andrade, Ecuador, 9 min.
A story of a young girl dealing with two rites of passage as she
turns fifteen-one celebratory, the other life-changing.
ICEBERG
Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy,
Belgium, 84 min.
Not since René Clair and Jacques Tati
have gags been so expertly constructed or characters looked more
mournful than in Iceberg, a tasty concoction with equal measures
of poetic fantasy and slapstick comedy. In a tranquil seaside town
in lower Normandy, life goes through its predictable paces. Fiona,
our sad-sack heroine, lives with her husband and kids and manages
a local restaurant. One day, as she is closing up, she accidentally
gets locked in a cold storage chamber from which she emerges a woman
transformed-and violently obsessed with all things frozen. Before
long, she meets a deaf sailor, embarks on a new adventure aboard
a skiff named “Le Titanique,” and then…. The three
venturesome filmmakers-Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy-are
true cinematic magicians and gifted clowns as well.
Preceded by
Terra Incognita
Peter Volkart, Switzerland, 18 min.
This hilarious “mockumentary” explores one young physicist’s
bizarre experiments and secret expeditions to unknown parts of the
world.
 QUINCEAÑERA
Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 90
min.
This double-prize-winner from the 2006 Sundance
Film Festival is a spirited and well-wrought contemporary comedy/drama-one
that entertains as it performs a reality check on a close-knit community.
Magdalena is obsessed with preparations for her all-important fifteenth
birthday celebration in Echo Park, one of Los Angeles’s traditional
Mexican neighborhoods, until she finds she’s pregnant and
her father sends her packing. She lands at the home of her uncle,
who’s also taken in her cousin who has been thrown out of
his house. Meanwhile, gentrification is disturbing the status quo
in the old neighborhood, and crucial events tear at the fabric of
traditional family life. Quinceañera is an unsentimental
and genuinely unpretentious tale of growing up and taking charge
of one’s future in a rapidly changing reality.
CAVITE
Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Llana. Philippines/USA,
80 min.
In the city of Cavite, Philippines, people
will do just about anything to survive. This is a bitter discovery
for Adam, a young Filipino-American called back to his native country
for his father’s funeral. But on arrival at the airport the
purpose of his visit is dramatically altered by an anonymous phone
call that will change the course of his life. He’s told that
his mother and sister are in the clutches of a terrorist group and
will be murdered unless he cooperates. This first-person verité
nightmare is an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with Adam and his terrorist
caller engaged in a battle of will and wits against the backdrop
of a country rarely represented in such rich detail. Cavite is bare-bones
filmmaking at its finest and a tribute to cinematic inventiveness.
Preceded by
Detail
Kanwal Sethi, Germany, 7 min.
Every day, in the town of Bet Omar in the West Bank, residents must
negotiate a most unusual checkpoint
 SANGRE
Amat Escalante, Mexico/France, 90 min.
Diego and Blanca live out a mundane existence.
Their jobs are menial and life at home consists of eating, watching
television, or having sex in various parts of the house. While the
sex is plentiful (Diego may come home and find Blanca naked on the
floor, waiting for him), it seems to hold the same allure for him
as watching TV. When Diego’s grown daughter from a previous
marriage shows up in need of his help, Blanca’s jealous streak
erupts. Suddenly, Diego can go nowhere and do nothing without her
suspicion being aroused. A minimalist first feature that explores
an arid relationship and its consequences, Sangre’s low-key
approach builds to a horrific climax that takes us by surprise.
Actors Cirilo Recio and Laura Saldaña, as the couple that
can only communicate through their flesh, take us to the limits
of a ritualized passion.
Preceded by
The Last Farm
Runar Runarsson, Iceland, 13 min.
A perfectly constructed tale of the last day on the last farm in
an isolated part of Iceland.
MAN PUSH CART
Ramin Bahrani, USA, 87 min.
In the indigo of a Manhattan dawn, Ahmad wheels,
pushes, and coaxes a vending cart across town to Madison Avenue,
where he sells coffee and donuts. He has his customers, some regular,
some not, but he is alone; his life is one of solitary work on a
particularly social corner of New York City. One day he meets a
successful and outgoing businessman from Pakistan, who, much to
Ahmad’s discomfort, recognizes him as a former pop star back
home. Written and directed by North Carolinian Ramin Bahrani, who
made his first film Strangers (2000) in Iran, and starring first-time
actor Ahmad Razvi as a man fleeing his past among the urban multitudes,
Man Push Cart captures the siren beauty of midtown Manhattan and
the multicultural, multiethnic complexity of life in a city that
suddenly reneges on its comforting promise of anonymity.
A SOAP
Pernille Fischer Christensen, Denmark, 104
min.
This unconventional love story about two neighbors’
offbeat search for love and lust-and their panic when they find
both-is also a serious look at the nature of contemporary relationships
and gender roles. Using the enticing conventions of soap opera,
newcomer Fischer Christensen deftly directs Kim Fupz Aakeson’s
script as a new kind of romance. Ill-tempered Charlotte has just
split from her husband and finds herself living above the promiscuous
Ulrik (a.k.a. Veronica) who awaits a sex-change operation-and has
his own family problems to contend with. All the while a friendly
narrator keeps us updated on the latest wrinkles in our characters’
lives and their quest for a happy ending. The raw physicality of
Trine Dyrholm’s fearless performance as Charlotte is beautifully
contrasted with David Dencik’s reserved yet determined Ulrik/Veronica.
ELEVEN MEN OUT
Róbert I. Douglas, Iceland/Finland/United
Kingdom, 90 min.
Óttar Thor is a champion soccer star,
handsome and arrogant, who after winning a game casually tells a
journalist he’s gay. Imagine the surprise to his wife, a former
Miss Iceland, his teenage son, already sullen and troubled, and
his father, Thor’s macho coach. A breezy and feisty dramatic
comedy directed by Róbert I. Douglas, this is a story about
a man who, much to the chagrin of his family, exchanges one sort
of domesticity for another. After choosing a same-sex partner, he
is kicked off the championship team where players are presumably
straight. But once a player, always a player, and Óttar is
offered a spot on a team in a basement soccer league that gay sportsmen
from all over Iceland soon insist on joining. The ensemble cast
is pitch perfect, as is the tone in this lively account of the surprising
accommodations people are capable of making.
JOHN & JANE TOLL-FREE
Ashim Ahluwalia, India, 86 min.
A vast fluorescent-lit room in an anonymous
compound in India-welcome to the world of overseas call centers.
Indian by day, American by night-so they can accommodate U.S. business
hours-the young men and women profiled here struggle to have their
share of the American Dream as they sell products and troubleshoot
for consumers. These 1-800 workers learn to identify completely
with their American aliases-meet Glen, Sydney, and Naomi-and to
reject their traditional values (until they return to their Indian
homes and to mothers urging them to eat). Ahluwalia’s revealing
documentary plays like science fiction and shows a consequence of
globalization to be the outsourcing of souls as well as of goods.
Cultural imperialism has never looked scarier or more complete in
this ferocious, funny, and ingeniously constructed film.
OLD JOY
Kelly Reichardt, USA, 76 min.
Can an old friendship rekindle its spark?
Kelly Reichardt’s luminous new film explores this theme with
subtlety and insight. Mark (Will Oldham) and Kurt (Daniel London),
whose lives have gone in different directions, reunite for one carefree
weekend camping trip to the Oregon mountains. Kurt is still a free
spirit, seemingly unattached. Mark has a partner and a baby on the
way. But these pals are in a ruminative mood, trying to get hold
of a common memory. As the terrain changes from urban to wilderness,
so they do, registering a range of emotions that define and redefine
their relationship. Reichardt’s second film after her well-received
River of Grass (1994) is a Whitmanesque exploration of nature, both
human and elemental, and the idea that old joy can have new connotations.
The musical score by Yo La Tengo is just right for the structure
and mood of this affecting study of male bonding.
Preceded by
The Wraith Of Cobble Hill
Adam Parrish King, USA, 15 min.
Young Felix gets an object lesson in responsibility as he grows
up fast in this lovely animated fable.
IN BED
Matías Bize, Chile/Germany, 85 min.
A man and a woman meet and immediately fall
into bed. They are intimate strangers, so unknown to each other
that they introduce themselves only after they’ve made love.
Thus begins an emotional pas de deux that takes place over the course
of an entire night. As they get to know one another, they tell truths
and lies, explore loyalty and betrayal, come together and withdraw,
all within the confines of a seedy motel room. Matías Bize
directs this close encounter as an erotic chamber piece, and also
a study in voyeurism-just try looking away. His choice of a cold
setting for steamy romance affirms the complex nature of mutual
attraction. As brand new lovers who test the boundaries of trust,
actors Blanca Lewin and Gonzalo Valenzuela bare their souls and
their bodies in two masterfully uninhibited performances. They spend
their time literally and figuratively naked, leaving us nowhere
to go but into their deepest desires and fears.
IRON ISLAND
Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 90 min.
In a deserted stretch of ocean sits an enormous,
rusting oil tanker, an “iron island” on which dozens
of families, some with their livestock, have taken up residence.
The ship is their home, their school, their mosque; some of the
youngest residents have never lived anywhere else. Presiding over
this behemoth is the enigmatic Captain Nemat (well played by veteran
actor Ali Nasirian), a stern but kindly, paternalist yet absolute
ruler who doesn’t hesitate to resort to cruelty if it suits
his purposes. Supplies are bought by selling off the barrels of
oil still stored in the ship’s hull, or stripping parts of
the ship itself for scrap. Yet despite Nemat’s best efforts
and hard work, there’s no negating a simple fact: the ship
is sinking, and some kind of plan has to be devised to move somewhere.
Writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof’s immensely suggestive tale
is at its heart a tale of survival, a look at a group of people
learning to live in even the most unlikely of circumstances-and
refusing to give up.
PAVEE LACKEEN
Perry Ogden, Ireland, 87 min.
Every country has its own itinerant population,
those who live in a society, but are not really of it. Photographer
Perry Ogden’s feature film debut is a moving portrayal of
the “Travellers” of Ireland. This is neither a documentary
nor a fictional film, but a hybrid that brilliantly plays with the
fine line that exists between the two; the work has, simply put,
a core truthfulness to it. Using nonprofessional actors from the
Irish Traveller community, Ogden explores their lives through the
eyes of ten-year-old Winnie, who lives with her family on the industrialized
outskirts of Dublin. Their home is a ramshackle trailer, and Winnie’s
mother spends much of her time jockeying between the possibility
of buying a better mobile home or moving into a house that social
services is trying to foist on her. Winnie has her own troubles
at school and has to deal with a bureaucracy that doesn’t
know how to deal with her. Ogden collaborated with his cast to create
the characters and the narrative that give cinematic life to the
Travellers’ own stories.
FIRST ON THE MOON
Alexey Fedorchenko, Russia, 75 min.
Think it was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin?
Well, think again, because as Alexey Fedorchenko’s unsettling
new film reveals, a Soviet cosmopilot, Ivan Kharlamov, actually
went there and back in 1938, piloting his experimental (and highly
secretive) craft back to Chile, from where he undertook an arduous
journey across the Pacific, through China and Mongolia and finally
into Mother Russia itself. Due to the sensitive nature of his mission,
Kharlamov disguised his true identity under a series of aliases,
including Prince Alexander Nevsky-the hero of a then-popular Soviet
film-while his exploits were being filmed by the NKVD (Communist
Secret Police). Beyond being a kind of record of a sort of historical
event, Fedorchenko’s film is a touching expression of an unfettered
utopian spirit-a sense of the limitless possibilities of human ingenuity
and imagination-that characterized many people’s vision of
the Soviet experiment before its grim realities settled in.
Preceded by
Still World
Elbert van Strien, The Netherlands, 30 min.
Sometimes stopping the world doesn’t make it any more manageable.
TEXAS
Fausto Paravidino, Italy, 104 min.
The hills of Piemonte aren’t precisely
the rolling plains of the Lone Star state, yet the twenty-somethings
who populate Fausto Paravidino’s impressive debut feature
would feel right at home in The Last Picture Show. Underemployed,
looking for a new thrill or just a way to get out, they gather on
Saturdays, flirting, drinking and occasionally threatening each
other, but mainly getting whatever solace they can from feeling
they’re not alone. Yet cracks in the group are starting to
emerge, especially when the handsome slacker Gianluca begins cheating
on his longtime girlfriend Cinzia with a married schoolteacher,
Maria (Valeria Golino, in a heartfelt performance). Assembling a
cast of some of the most talented young actors in Italian cinema
today, Paravidino-who also appears in the film-creates in Texas
a revealing portrait of a generation’s troubled passage to
an adulthood that seems to offer only limited horizons.
INTO GREAT SILENCE
Philip Gröning, Germany, 162 min.
As a novice filmmaker, Philip Gröning
asked the Carthusian monks of the Grand Chartreuse, a monastery
in the French Alps, for permission to make a documentary about them.
They said they would get back to him. They telephoned Gröning
sixteen years and three dramatic features later. Gröning was
invited, without crew or artificial lighting, to record their daily
lives, prayers, rituals, and rare outdoor excursions. Into Great
Silence is a delicate chronicle, impressionistic, meditative, and
beautiful, of a year in and around the monastery, where gardening,
cooking, barbering, tailoring, and other monastic activities reveal
the monks’ silent communion with God. A tranquil contemplation
about the possibility of transcendence for all.
TWELVE AND HOLDING
Michael Cuesta, USA; 90 min.
Michael Cuesta (L.I.E., ND/NF 2001) offers
a powerful look into an adolescent world in which his characters’
still-growing bodies disguise the complexity of the emotional lives
raging within them. Jacob and Rudy Carges are 12-year-old twin brothers
(both played by Conor Donovan, an exceptional young actor) who couldn’t
be more different-Rudy is athletic and outgoing, while Jacob hides
behind a hockey mask. Malee, daughter of a detached psychotherapist
mother, develops a heart-breaking emotional attachment to one of
her mother’s patients. And overweight Leonard decides it’s
time for his equally overweight mother to start slimming-by any
means necessary. Avoiding sensationalism or grand guignol theatrics,
Cuesta never lets us lose sight of the youth of his subjects-in
the end they’re just kids trying to make their way in the
world while discovering their ability to affect that world and the
lives of those around them.
13 TZAMETI
Gela Babluani, France, 93 min.
An extraordinarily assured debut feature,
13 Tzameti was warmly received at both Venice and Sundance, where
it won the top prize in the International Dramatic Competition.
Owed money, and lacking any real sense of direction in life, Sébastien
(Georges Babluani, brother of director Gela) decides to take the
place of a dead man on a mysterious mission. Sébastien doesn’t
know what the man did, but he does know that it was awfully lucrative.
Thus begins Sébastien’s journey towards a contemporary
vision of hell, a world in which anything, even one’s life,
is simply another commodity to be bought, sold, or wagered on. With
several extraordinary scenes definitely not for the faint-hearted,
13 Tzameti is less shocking for what it shows than for its portrait
of a bleak, completely amoral world. The son of a major Georgian
director, Gela Babluani, now based in France, is a talent to watch.
THINGS THAT HANG FROM
TREES
Ido Mizrahy, USA, 98 min.
Twenty-four-year-old Ido Mizrahy’s haunting
debut film, based on Aaron Louis Tordini’s novella, is set
in 1969 in America’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida,
in a neighborhood that has seen better days. But since this insular
community is imaginatively situated in Southern Gothic territory
somewhere between hope and desire, those days could be anywhere
a live oak tree sends out its branches to engulf or devour. Tommy
(the extraordinary Cooper Musgrove) is an unusual boy, somewhat
inured to misfortune, whose family is downright peculiar. His dreamy
mother, marvelously played by Deborah Kara Unger, tries to care
for her son but is often seen sitting as a mannequin in her own
store window; Tom Sr. (Ray McKinnon), the absent father, is a wild
cowboy who could have been invented by Sam Shepard. The townspeople
are a bunch of oddballs and bullies, and Tommy has to navigate the
terrain in his own ingenious way.
MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY
Laura Poitras, USA, 90 min.
Working alone in Iraq over eight months, filmmaker
Laura Poitras created an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis
living under U.S. occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh,
an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six, and Sunni political candidate.
An outspoken critic of the occupation, Riyadh is equally passionate
about the need to establish democracy in Iraq; despite the misgivings
of members of his family and his community, he argues that Sunni
participation in the elections is essential. Yet all around him,
Dr. Riyadh sees only chaos, as his waiting room fills each day with
ordinary Iraqis showing the physical and mental effects of the ever-increasing
violence. The remarkable access that Poitras was able to gain into
the Sunni community is matched by her great skill as a filmmaker;
never forcing an issue nor making cheap political points, Poitras
carefully assembles the images and sounds collected during her stay
into a powerful mosaic of daily life in Iraq that the mainstream
media never come close to capturing.
WILD TIGERS I HAVE
KNOWN
Cam Archer, USA, 93 min.
Archer’s explosive debut feature (executive
produced by Gus Van Sant and Scott Rudin) may be the millennium’s
first example of a neo-American Underground film, ferocious, passionate,
somewhat taboo in its subject, and likely to divide contemporary
audiences. A young boy and a loner, Logan develops a crush on an
older one, Rodeo, but must compete with the attention Rodeo gives
his girlfriend. After school Logan spends time in suggestive phone
conversations, taking walks in the forest (where mountain lions
roam) and hanging out with his only friend who, like him, knows
that he’s different. Made with a ragged inventiveness on a
miniscule budget, Wild Tigers is a fearless and original portrait
of adolescent foolishness and ache.
TOI ET MOI
Julie Lopes-Curval, France, 94 min.
Ah, the complications of romance! Sisters
Ariane and Lena both have beaus, but new men are piquing their interest.
Lena’s in love with François, but has now met Mark,
who tries his best to sweep her off her feet. Ariane’s been
dating Farid for two years, but he won’t commit, and she finds
the charms of a Spanish construction worker hard to resist. All
these predicaments mirror the dilemmas of the characters in the
“photo-novels” that Ariane creates for a popular magazine.
While Lena is serious and confused, Ariane is the loopy one, walking
into doors and playing out her desires, as well as her sister’s,
in her writing. Director Julie Lopes-Curval creates a delightful
narrative of close encounters and near misses in a charming romance
with a playful style that perfectly suits the photo-novel genre.
Winning performances by Marion Cotillard and Julie Depardieu, as
the siblings yearning for just the right match, grace this witty
film in which fantasy and reality commingle.
Preceded by
Phantom Canyon
Stacey Steers, USA, 2006; 10 min.
Meticulous handmade collages explore a woman’s fantastical
journey through memories.
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