The Evening Class

PSIFF 2012: BULLHEAD (RUNDSKOP, 2011)—Q&A Session With Michaël R. Roskam

2012-02-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

Michaël R. Roskam's Bullhead (Rundskop, 2011) first came to my attention at its North American premiere at the 2011 edition of the Fantasia Film Festival where Nicolas Archambault characterized it in his program note as "cinema writ large." He added that Roskam's debut feature "capably mixes elements of multiple genres with a sturdily dramatic premise, punctuating it with moments of sarcastic humor. While that streak of disarming self-mockery, centered around a pair of risible Walloon mechanics with a strong dislike of the Flemish, Bullhead remains a dark and dramatic suspense film anchored in reality, revealing the hyper-masculine world of backwoods crime culture and shattering the myths of brute machismo by way of the characters Jacky and Diederik."

Bullhead arrived in Montreal after a huge box office success in Belgium (400,000 tickets sold) and anointed with awards from European film festivals, winning its first prizes at the Beaune Film Festival in France (the Jury Award and the Critics Award) and at the Motovun Film Festival in Croatia (the main "Propeller" Award). It then proceeded to gain critical and popular traction by winning the Audience Award at Fantasia, gathering six Flemish Awards (Best Film, Best Director, Best Debut, Best Main Actor, Best Supporting Role, and Best Photography), being chosen as Belgium's official submission to the 84th Academy Awards®, claiming three awards at its U.S. premiere at Austin's Fantastic Fest (Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor) where it was likewise picked up by Drafthouse Films for U.S. distribution, Best Actor at Moscow's "2inOne" International Film Festival, the New Auteurs Audience Award and New Auteurs Critics Prize for Best Actor at AFI Fest 2011, and nine nominations at the Magritte Industry Awards (coming up on February 4).

Having failed to catch Bullhead at Fantasia, I was determined to catch it in the Awards Buzz program at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival, where director Roskam was likewise being honored as one of Variety's "10 Directors to Watch". Bullhead walked away from PSIFF with the FIPRESCI prize for Best Actor, given to Matthias Schoenaerts for his "superb portrayal of an innocent and sensitive man trapped in a truculent body." There is no question in my mind that this increased attention at PSIFF secured Bullhead's position on the short list for the Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards®, further confirming the vital importance of PSIFF for Oscar® track, especially in that category.

As Peter Debruge has outlined at Variety, however, Bullhead has not won its honors without some controversy: "Belgium's committee raised eyebrows this year after picking Bullhead, the winner of six Flanders Film Awards, over French-language Cannes grand jury winner The Kid With a Bike, directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne." Confiding that their "quasi-celebrity status in other countries" might have made certain people jealous, Luc Dardenne and his brother Jean-Pierre "reportedly attended a recent screening and cornered the star after the film to share their reaction: They loved it" (Eric Kohn, IndieWIRE). Kohn further asserted: "Watching Bullhead, it's easy to imagine that Roskam could inherit the heated world of double-crossers and violent avengers that put Martin Scorsese on the map."

[The following is not for the spoiler-wary!]

Bullhead was introduced at its PSIFF screening by producer Bart Van Langendonck. Roskam—who at an earlier luncheon had been fêted as one of Variety's "10 Directors to Watch"—was missing in action, apparently still celebrating the honor. Anticipating the questions he now expects after each screening, Van Langendonck listed that the film cost a million and a half, was shot in 37 days, and has had a fantastic festival career. Van Langendonck synopsized that Bullhead is set in a real milieu: the existing arena of the so-called Belgian hormone mafia. Hormones are illegal in Belgium as in most of Europe and, as is often the case with illegal matters, crime organizes itself around such illegalities. Twelve years ago, a veterinarian controller was murdered by the hormone mafia because he was on the trail of hormone trafficking and, thus, this has been and continues to be a big issue in Belgium. That is all that is essentially true about the plot of Bullhead, Van Langendonck advised, while the rest is the dramatization by fictional characters created by Roskam.

By film's end, Roskam had found his way to the Palm Regal for his Q&A, where he was asked about Matthias Schoenaerts' preparation for the role's physical requirements. "It's true, yes, he gained about 27 kilograms (almost 60 pounds) for this role. He's normally athletic, though not like this. We knew each other from working together on one of my short films where we became friends and where I first had the idea for making this movie. I talked to him about it and he said, 'Yeah, I want to do this.' I wrote my first version of the script, he read it, and then I said, 'You realize you are going to...?' and he finished my sentence and said, 'I will do what I have to do. Watch me.' " Schoenaerts worked on other movies while Roskam developed the project and then "at a certain moment he started to gain weight", about 10 kilograms at first, to capture the character's basic physical condition. About a year before the financing came through and it was definite the film would be shot, Schoenaerts gained another 15 kilograms. He was eating every three hours and pumping iron, developing special muscle parts. In that respect, Roskam stated, Schoenaerts was a dedicated artist, equally intelligent, as strong mentally as physically, preparing himself psychologically—as well as physically—for the role of Jacky Vanmarsenille a full year before shooting began. After shooting on Bullhead finished, Schoenaerts began losing weight but was then cast as a boxer in Jacques Audiard's upcoming film Rust and Bone (Un goût de rouille et d'os) alongside Marion Cotillard, so now he's physically preparing for that role. Schoenaerts swears that after Rust and Bone he will be done with bodybuilding and will stop eating.

As to whether it was Jacky's childhood abuse or his testosterone abuse that accounted for his violent and unpredictable behavior, Roskam qualified it was both. "Some people can go crazy for less," he explained, noting that Jacky's childhood trauma was something he had to fight his whole life; the implications of which—especially as a child—he couldn't fully understand. The psychological problems from such a childhood trauma could only grow and develop as Jacky physically grew and developed. By that point he was struggling for solutions and, of course, often a person will try to find solutions by themselves instead of going to someone who might be better trained to assist. Those self-medicating solutions are often the worst solutions because they're compensating for behavior, but end up exacerbating behavior. It doubles on itself. One feeds the other. An action / reaction. Emphasizing that hormones are one of the most important elements of the human system, and that it's not completely understood how they work, Roskam argued that it stands to follow that they should not be messed with. It's already been proven that many people abusing testosterone experience problems with identity and personality.

A visual parallel was drawn between Jacky's body, especially his neck and shoulders, and the scene where the cattle were being herded out of the corral. "The thing is that they are artefacts, so to speak," Roskam explained. The animals are a particular breed, the Belgian Blue, nicknamed "Big Butts", a breed of cattle that have been genetically modified over time for the food industry. They're given growth hormones to increase their volume and weight. They're already born with an increased muscle mass and a bull who has been receving hormone treatments would have to be placed next to one who hasn't been in order to see the difference; but, it's an increase of almost 100 kilograms. The herd in this particular scene were not, of course, treated with hormones because, again, that's illegal and he would never be allowed to film them. Still, already, they are huge in mass. Roskam joked that if he tried to film a hormonally-altered herd, he would probably receive a bullet in his mailbox as a warning to desist. The fact that these Belgian Blues have been genetically modified over time to have a sculpted, heavily muscled appearance is known as "double muscling" and accounts for why Caesarean sections are performed on neonatal calves—the calves are so large that they block the birth canal—yet Caesarean section is the normal form of delivery for the Belgian Blue and that's why he included a scene of same in his film.

Since he mentioned the bullet in the mailbox, Roskam was asked if he had experienced any backlash from the hormone mafia? "No," he answered, though while he was doing his research, he was a bit concerned about retaliation; but, a friend of his who had a good position in law enforcement kept track of whether or not his name was showing up anywhere. Further, he announced early on when discussing the project to the Belgian press that Bullhead would be a fictionalized narrative, more of a gangster movie, a thriller, and that his film didn't intend to vilify or expose the meat industry. As Van Langendonck had mentioned in his introduction, the hormone mafia killed a veterinarian inspector back in the '90s who had exposed the industry to the legal authorities. The mafia learned their lesson from that mistake because—though from a moral point of view it's bad to kill people—it's also bad for business to kill people; they expose themselves.

As to whether the illegal use of hormones is ongoing, Roskam affirmed that, yes, it still goes on but the meat industry as a whole is much more careful and sophisticated now in how this is done. The bulls still grow big fast, comparable to the controversy of atheletes using steroids in sports, but the law requires evidence. They need to find and name the kind of product that's in the blood, otherwise it's not a felony or a crime. They can see that there's a disturbance, but they can't name it and—once they have identified it—the hormone mafia have already moved on to a new cocktail. It's changing all the time with the law chasing them and never catching up. They can't do anything about it. Still, Roskam qualified, this is a minority activity. In the past all the farmers were involved because it wasn't seen as much of a crime. At the end, it's just an opinion whether growth hormones are still legal in the United States. In Europe, it's still illegal and it's just a matter of where you draw the line. Some say it's not healthy. Some say there's no proof, which Roskam posed might actually be true. In the long term, it can't yet be proven that beef injected with hormones are dangerous for human consumption; but, without knowing, perhaps it's better not to use them? That being said, Roskam opined that he feels they could be used under controlled conditions, as long as the consumer knows what hormones are being used. He prefers eating a steak in the States from cattle that have been given identified hormones than those in Europe where he doesn't know what's been pumped into the meat.

My question to Roskam was to speak to the tension between the visual style of the film, its physicality, and Raf Keunen's elevated score. Along with the actors and his DoP, Roskam has worked with Keunen before. All of them are close friends and have been part of the project from the very beginning. When Roskam talked about the script to Keunen, he was already playing themes on the piano. They communicated a lot on what music would work for each sequence and decided early on that they wanted to use the music like a character in the film, or more like "an emotional spirit" informing the film and guiding the audience to understand Jacky's emotional torment within an abbreviated period of time. "That's the power of music," Roskam asserted. Though not ordinarily done, Roskam asked his producer for a three-month break after he finished the final cut of the film specifically so Keunen could compose the music. Once he had the music, Roskam then went back to the editing room to shape the film with the use of the music. He termed it "an equal combination of two crafts."

As to why the characters within the film had trouble communicating with each other, Roskam explained that there is no official "Belgian" language, per se, and that instead Belgium has two languages: Flemish—which is similar to Dutch and distinguished by accentuation, much like the distinction between British and American English—and the Walloons, who are French-speaking. For complicated historical reasons, most of the time the Flemish speak French whereas the French don't speak Flemish. This is changing but remains the current reality. Roskam grew up in the same region as Jacky's farm, which is close to what they call "the linguistic border" where one side is Flemish-speaking and the other side (to the South) is French-speaking. When he was growing up, his family lived closer to the big French-speaking city than the Flemish-speaking cities so—when they wanted to shop at an urban shopping mall, for example—they went to the French-speaking city, which accounted for their familiarity with French. This holds especially true for the slaughter industry, which is largely situated at this linguistic border. Thus, it's realistic that Jacky should speak French to conduct business and also explains why his French love interest Lucia (Jeanne Dandoy) doesn't always understand him when he stops speaking French and reverts to Flemish, especially when he gets emotional at the end of the film and starts to speak in his own dialect. This obstacle of communication symbolizes the sensitivity of Belgium's political conflict where—after a recent election—Belgium had no government for nearly 500 days. Roskam decided to portray this lack of communication in his film because it's a real issue in his country. This brave aspect of the film was noted by Variety correspondent Ian Mundell who wrote that the mixing of Flemish- and French-speaking characters made for "a rare example of a story straddling Belgium's main language communities." It was only afterwards, however, that Roskam realized he probably should have distinguished the languages with French subtitles to make this issue less confusing to English-speaking audiences.

Asked to explain why he configured Jacky's childhood friend Diederik (Jeroen Perceval) as a gay character, Roskam detailed that in earlier versions of the script Diederik was not gay. As he developed the story and incorporated the characters of the cops that were interacting with Diederik, he wanted one of the cops to use her charms and seduce Diederik to solicit information; but, that struck him as a cliché that he had seen in movies countless times. It was actually Roskam's wife who suggested that Diederik should be gay so that a male cop would seduce him for information. Suddenly the script gained metaphorical force and weight and the character of Diederik became more interesting and somehow "new" because now, like Jacky, Diederik had his own internal obstacles to fight. Diederik is in an environment that is not gay-friendly so he has to hide who he is and pretend, which makes his character more realistic, complicated, and perhaps important because, clearly, it's still not easy for gay people. But he wanted to add this element in a just-so fashion, to place it in the narrative without making the film be about a gay guy in a gangster environment. "He's just gay; that's it." Further, this makes the relationship between the two boys even more nuanced and poetic. They were friends and then they grew up and drifted apart, not only because of their shared experience of trauma, but because of their orientations.

Roskam was asked if Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo had any influence on the film's final sequence when Jacky, pumped up on testosterone, descends the stairs? Roskam admitted that while they were developing their shots, they named that sequence the Hitchcock shot. Especially after they found the location and saw the stairs. Originally, he had another concept in mind; but, shifted gears when he found the stairwell. Along with the Hitchcock shot, they had a Terrence Mallick shot where grass was waving in the wind, and a Michael Mann shot; all the big guys entered his film, more than he could even name.

With the final image of the film being the close-up of Jacky as a young boy staring at the camera for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, and then the music finally calming down and the screen going to black, Roskam adhered his editing to the music, which decided the prolongation of the shot. He decided to cut the shot at the moment the wind lifted Jacky's hair. His editor Alain Dessauvage argued the shot was too long but Roskam insisted, "No, the wind, the wind." He felt the beats were better if they waited a bit longer and this convinced Dessauvage.

Of Related Interest: Bay Area audiences will have a chance to view Roskam's celebrated debut when Bullhead screens at SF IndieFest. At their press conference, I was surprised that no mention was even made of, perhaps, the most important headliner in their program; a significant omission.

TCM: 31 DAYS OF OSCAR®

2012-02-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

Each year Turner Classic Movies performs calendrical wizardry by transforming the shortest month of the year into 31 days of Oscar®-worthy programming. For their 18th edition, TCM is taking "31 Days of Oscar®" on the road with 348 features organized—Robert Osborne wryly advises in his introduction to Now Playing—"according to where their stories occur, be that movie set in Chicago, China, Colorado, Canada, California, Connecticut or the Caribbean (or perhaps in Boston, Baghdad, Berlin, Belgium or Brigadoon)." It's a geographical conceit worth exploring. This globetrotting lineup features 25 Best Picture honorees and 30 movies appearing on TCM for the very first time. TCM's day-by-day schedule can be found here and the trailer for the program can be found here (impressive for its imaginative segues from one film into another, notably Gene Kelley's Singing in the Rain title sequence washing into From Here to Eternity's passionate seaside embrace and a bewildered Esther Blodgett stumbling into Ben Hur's chariot racetrack).

This year, film critic and historian Leonard Maltin will tweet live from @LeonardMaltin during some of his favorite 31 days of Oscar® prime-time films throughout the month. For more information, visit TCM's Facebook page or follow them on Twitter @TCM.

And to pretty up how battered your suitcase is going to become over the next 31 days, all month long you can check-in to movies using GetGlue to get exclusive 31 Days of Oscar® stickers. Happy Cinematic Travels!

PFA: AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL 2012—Frako Loden Previews the Line-up

2012-02-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

If you're not aware of Pacific Film Archive's African Film Festival, you've missed some of this year's offerings already. The annual selections, occurring around the time Black History Month kicks in, are always fascinating, varied and sometimes astonishingly moving. Regrettably, I missed a second viewing of an example of the latter, the strongest dramatic entry of this year's festival: A Screaming Man (2010), by the Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Daratt; Abouna). Adam, a former swimming champion who sucks in his gut in the mirror, clings to his job as a pool attendant at a resort hotel about to be privatized (by a Chinese owner). When "Champ" loses his job to his adult son Abdel and is himself demoted to gatekeeper with a too-small uniform, an aging man's vanity and resentment begin to rumble like the approaching sounds of the long-running civil war. That larger struggle takes over their lives when Abdel is conscripted into the army, curfew is called in town and Abdel's pregnant girlfriend arrives at the older man's door. Haroun's film is a deeply felt, melancholy meditation on Chad's civil war that rivals Issa Serge Coelo's Daresalam (2000) from a previous African Film Festival.

One Way, a Tuareg Journey (2010) is ostensibly a documentary by an African immigrant boy aided by Italian filmmaker Fabio Caramaschi. The preteen boy is Sidi, a Tuareg from the Saharan country of Niger. The Tuareg are a nomadic desert people whose camel- and goatherding lifestyle can't be more different from life in the northern Italian town of Pordenone, where Sidi's factory-worker father has brought most of his family except for their six-year-old son Alkassoum. Sidi tells the camera, "I dream about him almost every Monday." When behind the camera, he interviews his father asking why his little brother was left behind and goes out in public interrogating the greengrocer and other Italians about immigrants. Either this child has been well-coached or he's incredibly bright: He says he'd like to be a journalist because, "When I'm behind the camera, everyone respects me," and notes that the camera can change the way a person behaves—this last insight borne out in the carefully diplomatic words of his Italian interviewees. At length little brother Alkassoum arrives in Italy, and Sidi shows him the ropes. The cross-cutting between Alka's days in the desert encampment and his new life in Italy forces the viewer to consider what exactly makes for a "better life."

One Way is preceded by the 14-minute-long live-action film Lezare (For Today), directed by Ethiopian filmmaker Zelalem Woldemariam Ezare (The 11th Hour) and based on a fable about short-term hunger threatening long-term sustainability.

One Way is a much more polished and disciplined counterpart to the Spanish-Moroccan You All Are Captains (2010), in which Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe apparently tries to get a bunch of unruly Tangier schoolboys to make a film about "burned" (illegal) immigrants. Translators, other teachers and the hustler on the street are no help: the kids rebel against discipline and procedure and can't agree on what the finished product should be. Finally they're sent off to the country without Laxe and evidently devise their own filmmaking ethos, but by the end a finished film seems completely beside the point. Fun and camaraderie are the important things, and the film's casual black-and-white shooting style brings back the long sunny days and beckoning distances of questing youth. The praise lavished on this film is highly exaggerated ("sublime," "immense artistic reach")—it's a minor childhood romp, a season in the sun before the kids' real encounters with money, crime and the tourist economy turn them into men.

The African country getting the most series attention this year is the Democratic Republic of Congo. An inspirational music documentary, an epic historical documentary and a hiphop-fueled crime saga all turn their genre lenses on this turbulent country. German filmmakers Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer's Kinshasa Symphony (2010) is about classical musicians and singers of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, preparing for an open-air concert celebrating the Congo's independence. Without much money or a classical-music support network, they encounter problems other symphonies don't: frequent power outages, choking billows of smoke, finding the right wood to make a double bass from scratch and hitting a bell in D with the wheel rim of a minibus. On concert day, the entire neighborhood puts on a show that transforms Beethoven's Ninth into an enthralling expression of the Kimbanguistes' own religious fervor and joy in their freedom from colonial rule.

The Belgian TV production Kongo: 50 Years of Independence of Congo (2010) is a rare and engaging look at another country's chronicle of colonialism. The first episode of three (total running time two hours and 36 minutes) wastes no time stating that the earliest white men's plans for Congo were for mining. The first European visit to Congo, by the Portuguese Duarte Lopes in 1579, was in search of slaves to work another broad land mass (America) recently "discovered" by Christopher Columbus. This dream coincided with that of Pope Sixtus V, who envisioned a new Christian empire in Black Africa to beat back the Islamic threat.

Meanwhile the Congolese themselves took the whites for mindeles, or ghosts of their ancestors who lived at the bottom of the sea and returned to the land with pale skin. Lopes encountered a highly organized regime of provincial governors controlled by a centralized, dynastic king. But the first white settlement in Africa shook this regime by the foundations. Between the 16th and 19th centuries a mind-boggling eight million slaves were sent to Brazil and the English, French, Dutch and Danish Caribbean and another two million to Spanish-controlled countries—five of those million from the mouth of the Congo River. Then a new chapter of Congolese history began when the 19th century yielded a new kind of European visitor: the explorer. Allied with the Catholic "White Fathers" and the young Belgian King Leopold II, these parties exploited the Congolese under the cover of the anti-slavery cause, cloaking Leopold's towering colonial ambitions under a philanthropic abolitionist banner. The king's 1878 commissioning of celebrity explorer Henry Morton Stanley to travel the interior was designed to secure commercial posts ahead of other European powers.

The cruelty and brutality of the rubber plantations, and the punishment inflicted for rebellion, is portrayed relentlessly. It's refreshing that there are no Ken Burns-style modern talking heads, but there are voiceover narrations of letters and journals, and I presume imagined monologues, by selected influential players. The stiff, eccentric and sometimes beautiful animation helps the early history come alive. But the overall impression, without a strong Congolese historical point of view, is that the natives were easy pickings and tragically destined to be victimized well into the 21st century—an impression that is visually strengthened by contrasting portraits of well-dressed white men and naked black men with their limbs lopped off in the earlier episodes, then by scenes of civil war and riots as the country struggles for independence in the later episodes. The evolution from the Belgian Congo to the Republic of Congo is a difficult and bloody one, and this series doesn't end with false optimism for a country with a three-century legacy of slavery and annihilation. An imagined monologue by martyred nationalist hero Patrice Lumumba haunts the narration to the end of the series, his spirit living beyond Mobutu and Kabila and other pretenders to his vision.

Finally, the film in this series that will appeal to action and crime-saga fans is Congolese director Djo Tunda Wa Munga's Viva Riva! (2010). Newly back-in-town hustler Riva hopes to make a killing on a truckload of precious black-market gasoline eyed by competitors, and he recklessly pursues the glamorous wife of the reigning crime boss. The world is his, so he thinks. The first film made in the Lingala language, Viva Riva! already had a short run in Bay Area Landmark Theatres in June 2011. However it may aspire to Hollywood adrenaline and genre thrills, its vivid Kinshasa locale and preoccupations make it so much more interesting than a routine American rise-and-fall epic. Although the film has been criticized for being full of gangster and prostitute (and perhaps Angolan?) stereotypes, I was impressed with the depiction of one character—a lesbian army commander—whose fate defies stereotypical expectations.

FANTASIA 2011—THE WICKER TREE (2010)

2012-01-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

It's perpetual catch-up here at The Evening Class as I chip away at the monolithic backlog created by the disruption to routine caused by last year's move from San Francisco to Boise, Idaho. But, as they say, time waits for no man, especially for a film journalist with more in queue to transcribe than he can barely handle. But every now and then the boy gets a break.

First, film cohort Kurt Halfyard brilliantly tackled transcription duties for our conversation with Robin Hardy, with whom we shared breakfast in Montreal during the 2011 edition of the Fantasia Film Festival where Hardy's latest—The Wicker Tree (2010)—boasted its world premiere. Kurt's transcript "Wolves in Sheep Clothing (Genre as Sartorial Satire): Robin Hardy talks the Legacy of The Wicker Man the Timing of The Wicker Tree, and 40 years of History" is up at my old stomping grounds Twitch, along with his review of the film. Our conversation with Hardy was certainly one of the highlights of my Fantasia experience, to which I must shout-out to Twitch editor Todd Brown for providing same.

Further, I was spared transcription of the keynote conversation between Robin Hardy and Richard Stanley, thanks to the expert administrations of Svenson Brothers Films who recently posted their recording of same at Vimeo, along with an introduction by Mitch Davis, Co-Director of Fantasia (replicated here for easy reference):

"The 15th annual Fantasia Film Festival enveloped the city of Montreal in July of 2011. Among its 114-film lineup were gala world premieres of Robin Hardy's long-awaited The Wicker Tree—a darkly humorous follow-up to his seminal 1974 Pagan masterwork The Wicker Man—and the Grand Guignol omnibus horror film The Theatre Bizarre, featuring segments by Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Tom Savini and Richard Stanley, with flamboyant wraparound material directed by Jeremy Kasten.

"As with Robin Hardy and The Wicker Tree, Richard Stanley's segment in The Theatre Bizarre, entitled Mother of Toads, marked the filmmaker's return to fiction filmmaking after a years-long absence—in his case, 15 years, in Robin's, a full 22.

"While decades apart in age, both filmmakers share numerous distinctive qualities. An astute understanding of the occult, an encyclopedic knowledge of history and religion and a profoundly biting ability for dark satire and ironic poetry. Both are also master raconteurs, captivating speakers who can have any crowd hanging on their every word. Their films, usually made years apart from one to the other, are wholly singular visions, unique, unconventional and uncompromising works that challenge, amuse and startle. A conversation with either is no different, let alone one held between them.

"To celebrate the dual return to filmmaking from two of Great Britain's most inspired genre minds, Fantasia held a one-hour event that saw Hardy and Stanley sit down for a fascinating discussion of faith, filmmaking and the occult. The event was held on the 20th of July, 2011.

"What you will see here is the first 30-minutes of this conversation. Note: the event was shot with a 2-camera setup, but has yet to be fully edited. As we wanted to get this video online in time for the US theatrical releases of both The Wicker Tree and The Theatre Bizarre (which, as fate would have it, are opening against each other on the same forthcoming weekend!), we are presenting the raw footage from Camera One (Eric S. Boisvert), which framed the entire event in a master shot. In other words, expect to see a later version of this with close-ups. Enjoy, and blessed be."

SFFS CINEMA: Ryan Lattanzio Reviews SLEEPING BEAUTY (2011)

2012-01-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

Ryan Lattanzio has been writing about movies since 2009 for publications like The Daily Californian (where he has served as their lead film critic), the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the SF Appeal. It's with great pleasure that we announce his internship with The Evening Class. A fourth-year English major, Ryan is currently in the trenches of his final semester at UC Berkeley. When he's not panicking about his imminent graduation this May—a day he calls "the execution date"—Ryan is working on a senior thesis project on the modern horror film. If he had to describe himself in three words, they would be: cinephile, oenophile and X-Phile. A lover of art cinema and midnight movies, Ryan has a special place in his heart for films about hysterical, repressed women descending into erotic underworlds. For this reason, Sleeping Beauty is exactly his kind of film and he does The Evening Class honors by offering his perspective. Sleeping Beauty plays January 27 - February 2 at SF Film Society Cinema (1746 Post Street).

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Sleeping Beauty [official site / Facebook] is a surreal film about a young woman's descent into an erotic underworld. It has been endorsed by Jane Campion, a filmmaker who has made female sexuality her thesis statement. This information alone is probably enough to alienate certain camps, but the intrepid and curious will find much to savor in Australian writer / director Julia Leigh's debut feature, a cinematic striptease that is Buñuel-lite and Breillat-done-right.

With the stiffness of a Victorian femme-hysterique and the froth of a liberated Modern Woman, 23-year-old Aussie Emily Browning plays Lucy, a college-aged woman who spends her extra-curricular hours working a sterile office job where all she ever seems to do is make photocopies. In the film's first scene, set in an all-white laboratory, Lucy participates in the sort of dubious paid survey you'd find posted on Craigslist. A dapper young medical student has Lucy swallow a long tube that fills with air pressure. As this abstruse apparatus is fed down her throat, Lucy gags but remains calm and poised, preserving an emotional ambivalence on her face. Right from the get-go, Julia Leigh's film establishes the kind of degrading (albeit chic) wringer through which Lucy will be wrung.

Strapped for cash and unable to pay her rent, Lucy responds to a classified ad in the student paper. Over the phone, she describes herself as "slim" and "pert." In an anonymous, lavishly decorated room, she meets with Clara (Rachael Blake). We understand that Lucy will become some sort of prostitute. Details are elided, but Clara assures Lucy that her vagina will not be penetrated. "My vagina is not a temple," Lucy says. Leigh's screenplay is filled with these kinds of quippy epigrams that recall the dialogue of Lars von Trier, as when Justine of Melancholia (2011) says "The Earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it," or She in Antichrist (2009) tells her husband, "Nature is Satan's church." I especially like when Lucy tells her roommate, "There's no virtue in being born." No doubt, both Leigh and Browning know the work of Lars von Trier, as they eagerly plumb the bottomless depths of female sexuality and its darkness. Clara tells Lucy that there will be "heavy penalties" for any breaches of trust. This is one of many red herrings hatched by Leigh. We think the film could go one way, that the drama of Sleeping Beauty could be something about these mysterious "penalties," but it always goes the other way. Lucy is no heart-of-gold hooker. She's not even conscious during her assignments. Clara puts her to sleep with a nondescript potion so that Lucy slumbers while a queue of wealthy, geriatric men essentially do whatever they want to her (except penetrate). Lucy grows increasingly curious about what goes on while she sleeps, and this curiosity is what engenders the film's dramatic payoff. Like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl (2001), Sleeping Beauty takes on an abrupt shift of tone in its final moments. Always willing to be dosed with libations she can't identify, Lucy takes drugs from a friend, and her world changes.

For her first day on the job, Lucy stands scantly clad for a dinner party of old, rich guys. As her co-cavorters serve wine and caviar, a cavalcade of contortioned naked bodies surrounds the men. Lucy is not prepared for the sadist maneuvers her clients will employ. This scene's orgiastic politics brings to mind Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), another film about psychosexual netherworlds. Throughout Sleeping Beauty, Leigh will continue to invoke the master's sense of form in her clinical, starkly realized mise-en-scène, recalling the quiet architecture in the last sequence of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Perfectionist symmetry informs each shot, as crisp and tightly made as a hotel bed. Every frame contains the inhuman cleanliness of a hospital, or the burlesque kitsch of a life-sized dollhouse of the depraved. Leigh's austere aesthetic affords suffocating thematic nihilism, a rejection of traditional hermeneutic codes that is hard to swallow, so to speak. Yet unlike Steve McQueen's Shame, another 2011 release about sad sex, these blank narrative spaces brim with titillating question marks rather than the broad strokes of browbeating moralism.

Lucy also has an oblique relationship with a handsome guy she calls Birdman (Ewen Leslie), a depressed alcoholic in whom she appears to find her only pleasure. In one of the film's most farcical moments, she brings him a bottle of vodka and pours it over his cereal. In the grand scheme of Sleeping Beauty, it's unclear what this all means, but such a scene elevates the film to the level of curious oddity. Julia Leigh has a sense of humor, and what a relief for a film whose challenges could easily be construed as emptiness; hers is a Beauty full of ideas.

On the surface, Leigh's film has little to do with Charles Perrault's late-17th-century fairytale "La Belle au bois dormant". But this is a kind of postmodern fairytale iteration. Browning as the titular belle de jour possesses a certain idealism, and even an ignorance, that is awakened in the film's last act. Like its folkloric forebear, Sleeping Beauty toys with the lore of popular mythology. Here it is an unstable, antiseptic view of sex in an age where detachment and irony are the fashion, and visceral human connection is paltry and even derided. And like Perrault's tale, there is a kind of awakening-by-kiss in this film, though it is something quite unorthodox and uneasy.
Leigh is not the least bit shy about making the human body the subject of her uncanny gaze. Often we see the wan Emily Browning completely naked. As a scavenger of sick cinema, little these days seems to shock me, but I was, in fact, shocked when I saw Browning's barely nubile flesh get plucked by her carnivorous clients. For a film that is so coy about its ideas—enough to blue-ball even the hardiest minimalist—Leigh is not the least bit coy in her expression. Unheard of in most American films, there's a lot of deeply unsexy male nudity here. You have to applaud any film willing to show sex for what it really is.

For a young actress, Browning displays uncommon derring-do. She maintains her icy indifference and whitewashed poker face through every shot—she's in nearly all of them—and Leigh does not simply degrade her for degradation's sake: at all times, Lucy is a woman in control of her own destiny. Like the misunderstood heroines of von Trier and Dreyer, she has the power. She relinquishes that power in the form of sex, but it is sex for which she need not be conscious. This aspect of Sleeping Beauty is difficult to metabolize, as the film seems to have trouble metabolizing its own fetishes. It's tough to talk about a film like Sleeping Beauty, which insists on Ambiguity in favor of easy exposition. But this is the right kind of Ambiguity. Rather than a cover-up for inane, undercooked ideas—or lack thereof—it fashions the film a most tantalizing mystery, one that lingers beyond the end credits, even if I don't know exactly what it is that's haunting me. Photos courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

FILM INTERNATIONAL (VOL. 9, NO. 5)—When Movie Reviews Mattered: a conversation with Dave Kehr

2012-01-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce the publication of my interview with Dave Kehr in the current issue of Film International (Vol. 9, No. 5), on the occasion of the University of Chicago's publication of When Movies Mattered: Reviews From A Transformative Decade (2011).

NOIR CITY X: THE KILLERS (1964)—Movie Poster Gallery

2012-01-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

NOIR CITY X: AUTOGRAPH HOUND

2012-01-05T04:40:00.001-08:00

NOIR CITY X: ANGIE!

2012-01-05T04:15:00.000-08:00

It's clearly time to start brushing up on Angie Dickinson's career in anticipation of her on-stage appearance with the "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller at the upcoming 10th edition of Noir City where 35mm prints of two of Dickinson's finest—The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967)—will be screened at the world's most popular film noir festival. Where best to start than with David Thomson's entry in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, wherein he pointedly quips that one thousand words of analysis won't carry more weight than a well-chosen still. Good advice from an ardent admirer.

Thomson likewise wrote a piece on Angie for GQ magazine back in October 2005 profiling Dickinson's career, confirming once and for all that it isn't just Nicole Kidman he has a "thing" for. ‎"It wasn't that I necessarily thought she was a great actress," Thomson writes in his GQ piece, "just my favorite. You see, I had this notion that, as the years went by and you saw most of the movies that came along, you could enjoy the difference between someone who was plainly a Great Actress and someone you were simply glad to see, a woman you thought of as a pal—always effective, a reliable doll." His overview ends up being, admittedly, "not an essay on celebrity, so much as a reflection on fondness and how it can last." Thomson concludes: "No, she wasn't the greatest actress ever, just my favorite—which means that for a certain kind of movie dream, in the role of a woman as brave as she is gorgeous, as smart as she is funny, I never saw anyone better." (GQ, October 2005, pp. 126-134.)

Of the two films screening at Noir City X, Thomson situates them within "a trio of terrific performances from the mid-Sixties", which includes The Chase (1966). Angie plays "the treacherous romantic lead in The Killers, a film where she is torn between John Cassavetes and Ronald Reagan, and in which Reagan slaps her in the face very hard." In the "extraordinary" Point Blank, Angie "is the ambivalent woman who elects to help Lee Marvin in his implacable attempt to recover $93,000 from the Mob. There are scenes in that film where she offers herself as bait to the villainous John Vernon that are hauntingly sexy. There's also a scene where she beats on the impassive Marvin and collapses in frustration as he hardly notices her."

Then, of course, there is—perhaps—the "definitive" overview: Sam Kashner's piece for Vanity Fair ("A Legend With Legs"). If that isn't enough for you, revisit Dennis Cozzalio's April 2006 Angie Dickinson blogathon at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

But enough words. Time to follow Thomson's advice.

TIFF 2011 / PSIFF 2012: MICHAEL (2011)—The Evening Class Interview With Markus Schleinzer

2012-01-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer's truly disturbing directorial debut Michael (2011)—not to be confused with Ribhu Dasgupta's Hindi feature of the same name (also released in 2011)—exerts a morbid fascination on the viewer, compelling attention to its unpleasant yet undeniably suspenseful narrative of a pederast (Michael Fuith) who keeps a 10-year-old boy imprisoned in his cellar. Not for the righteous and hardly for anybody else, Michael nonetheless deserves its audience and ranks with Baran bo Odar's The Silence (Das letzte Schweigen, 2010) as a memorable examination of the dark suffering of the perverse soul. Despite its provocative subject and the mixed critical reaction when the film premiered at Cannes, Michael was nominated for a European Film Award and indieWIRE recently included Schleinzer as one of the 40 New Faces of Indie Film in 2011, affirming "there's no doubt that Schleinzer has established himself." Likewise at indieWIRE, Eric Kohn praised the film as "a triumph of uneasy cinema."

I caught Michael at its North American premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) where several of my colleagues with children of their own made it adamantly clear to me that they refused to watch this film and were somewhat surprised by my intention to do so. Judging by their reactions, Schleinzer was more offensive than brave for broaching such an unseemly subject. In some ways, Michael could be classified as the same kind of crime horror film as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), which likewise left me put off and disturbed. So many movies claim to stare into the heart of evil—and usually do so through stylized effects that help to distance the spectator from the film—but, Michael downplays the shock and spectacle to achieve a naturalistic and amazingly non-judgmental document that feels all the more uncomfortable for leaving no room to hide behind more customary genre conventions. I wasn't sure at all if Michael would traffic after TIFF, but it appears to be gaining traction, and has been scheduled in the World Cinema sidebar at the upcoming Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF), where I predict some outraged walkouts.

My thanks to Marcus Hu of Strand Releasing for arranging time for me to sit down at TIFF with Schleinzer to wrestle with the controversy of his film. Schleinzer carries the stigmatization of that controversy squarely on his shoulders and it was a delight to find him so pleasant and well-spoken. Unfortunately, due to a technical issue with my recorder, our recorded conversation was corrupted and I was only able to save the first half of our conversation. Hopefully, down the line, Schleinzer and I will have the opportunity to complete this discussion. Until then, I offer what I have.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Markus, as you can imagine I was profoundly challenged and disturbed by your film and wanted to have the chance to speak with you. It's my understanding that you are primarily an actor but have served as a casting director for some of the films of Michael Haneke, notably The White Ribbon (2009). What motivated you to approach directing and to start off with such a difficult subject?

Markus Schleinzer: It's actually the other way around. I've been a casting director for 17 years and sometimes—when I've been asked—I've played some parts in movies. During my work as a casting director, I have often been told by other directors to think about doing a movie myself. When Haneke and I were working on The White Ribbon, he was the one who said, "It's time. Go and make your own movie."

This was at the end of 2008 and—at that period of time—you couldn't pick up a newspaper or watch television without facing the issue of child abuse. It was everywhere. We had this huge case in Austria regarding Natascha Kampusch, you have probably heard of her? Then there was this big case as well about Josef Fritzl who kept an entire family in his cellar for 26 years. There had been an infamous incident in America as well, so the phenomenon was world-wide.

What disturbed me the most, at least in Austria and Europe, was that this issue was handled so sensationally by the press. I couldn't find another view. This was when I sat down and thought about what this different view on the subject, on this issue, might look like. How could one do a movie about such a subject without being provocative or scandalous or trying to earn quick money off the issue?

Guillén: So the media coverage inspired you to write a script that would present this issue from a less salacious perspective....

Schleinzer: It took me five days to write the script.

Guillén: Five days? So it had clearly been playing in your mind? How difficult was it, then, to sell this script and to secure the financing to film the story?

Schleinzer: It was not difficult at all, otherwise I would not have done it. The story was easily sold and we got all the money we needed immediately. There were no problems at all.

Guillén: Michael strikes me as a contemporary horror film presented as almost a documentary. As you went into production, I'm curious how you negotiated casting and working with your child actor David Rauchenberger? How did you explain to him what would be required of him in the role? How much of a context were you required to provide him in order for him to participate in such a grisly narrative?

Schleinzer: With the child it was very important from the beginning to be as honest with him as possible and not to hide anything. That started in the casting process. I brought a short synopsis with me when I started the casting process, in which I didn't hide anything at all. It wasn't the whole script, of course—it was just 10-15 sentences—but, it laid out the whole story. I didn't want the parents of children coming to the casting not knowing what the story was going to be about. I couldn't make a movie about child abuse and then abuse the people involved by not letting them know in advance what the movie was about, what would be shown and what would not be shown. We had four or five casting rounds from a pool of about 700-750 children. With every round I gave more and more and more information. By the last round there were still four boys I was considering and who interested me and I met with all their parents and gave them the complete script. I told them to take the script home, to read it thoroughly, and then we would meet again to discuss it. Finally, with David's parents, I explained again what would be seen, what would not be seen, and we drafted up a contract. Even after the movie was completed, I showed the footage to David's parents and asked them, "Is there anything you want me to cut out?"

I dealt the same way with David himself, speaking honestly to him about the film's issue of child abuse, and I have to say that his generation has a certain gift that our generation did not. David was 10 when we shot the movie, he's now 11, but when he was 9 there was a psychiatrist who came to his school and attended his class and taught the children not to go with the man who said,"I have a puppet in my car. Would you like to touch it?" So children of David's generation are already aware of certain dangers, which I knew nothing about as a child. When I was 10, I was told that adults were in complete control and to never doubt them. I would have gone with anyone.

I think it's possible to tell the truth on one hand and on the other hand to watch your language as you tell the truth. I have to say, I often felt ashamed talking to David about certain parts of the story, but—on the other hand—I think it's best for adults to be open-hearted and open-minded with children. Just because a parent is ashamed to talk about certain issues doesn't mean they disappear.

Guillén: Since you clearly have a talent for casting, what were the qualities you were looking for in your actors when you were seeking to cast not only the role of the boy but the leading role of Michael, the pederast, to achieve the dynamic you were hoping for in this film?

Schleinzer: That wasn't easy with the boy but with the adult role it was clear to me that I wanted a complete unknown actor, which is easy world-wide; but, I wanted to focus first, of course, on Austrian talent. I was shocked when the film was chosen for Cannes because I had thought of it as a small Austrian movie which might gain some following in Austria. So my thought was to use an unknown Austrian actor. Of course the people financing the film wanted me to use a known actor like Christoph Waltz so they could sell the movie better; but, I doubted that strategy because I knew that putting a star in this role meant the character would have more of a possibility for salvation, which isn't what I wanted. If people saw Christoph Waltz in this role, they would recognize him from his character in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, they would know him already as a person, and could thus draw a certain distance from the role in this film.

I'm very glad that I found Michael Fuith. At first, I wrote the script and then became depressed because I didn't know who to ask to play the role. But by a lucky chance, I was on a jury for the Austrian Filmmaking University and I had to watch about 80 short films and Fuith was in two of them. He hadn't acted before and these were his first feature parts. I thought he was perfect so I gave him the script, he read it, and then he called me and said, "I don't want to do it."

Guillén: Understandable. It would take a courageous actor to take on such a role.

Schleinzer: Yes, it demands a courageous actor. So then I said, "Okay, what's it going to take?" He asked for two more weeks to think about it and then he decided to do it.

Portrait of Markus Schleinzer courtesy of Viktor Bradzil, NGF.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK / LA MARIÉE ÉTAIT EN NOIR (1968)—On-stage Conversation With Laura Truffaut and Eddie Muller

2012-01-01T08:30:00.000-08:00

"For to kill is the great law set by nature in the heart of existence! There is nothing more beautiful and honorable than killing!"—Guy de Maupassant.

At MUBI, Adrian Curry has curated a stunning gallery of posters for François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (La mariée était en noir, 1968) on the occasion of the film's re-release at New York's Film Forum. Also at MUBI, Daniel Kasman offers an object lesson in visual acuity by astutely comparing an Econolite train motion lamp (with "General" engine) as it appears in both The Bride Wore Black and Wim Wender's The American Friend (1977). Then, of course, David Hudson has rounded up a few key reviews from the Forum run, most notably my San Francisco Film Critics Circle colleague Fernando Croce's burnished piece for Slant.

Here on the West Coast, The Bride Wore Black showed up in the Pacific Film Archive's Enduring Allure retrospective of the films of Jeanne Moreau, which is where I caught up with Truffaut's adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's 1940 novel. PFA characterized The Bride Wore Black as Truffaut's alleged homage to Alfred Hitchcock "treated in the manner of Renoir." The San Francisco Film Society followed suit less than a week later with a brief run of a new 35mm print of The Bride Wore Black at New People Cinema, where I attended their first screening on Friday, December 16, 2011, specifically to hear Eddie Muller engage Laura Truffaut in an onstage conversation before her father's film.

Laura Truffaut, who has lived in the Bay Area for 30+ years, has now and again offered distinct insight into her father's films at various Bay Area presentations. I heard her introduce Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) at PFA in January 2008, and L'Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) at a Landmark screening in March 2009, and so I welcomed the opportunity to hear her a third time, which I knew would be a charm.

By way of introduction, Muller had mentioned earlier to Laura Truffaut that her father's book on Hitchcock was the very first film book he ever owned and read. As a kid, he had mentioned that he really liked Hitchcock's movies and a family friend gifted him the book, thereby changing his life. Shortly thereafter, he saw François Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine (Day For Night, 1973) and—smitten by the romance for moviemaking in that film—the die was cast. He said to himself, "That's the life for me. It has to somehow involve the movies."

Inviting Truffaut to the stage, Muller prefaced their conversation by confirming that he considers The Bride Wore Black to be a film noir, partly because it was based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich who, as a writer, was one of the key figures in the development of noir as literature in the United States. Woolrich's books translated very well to France, many of them appearing in the Série noire that was, in turn, influential on the French New Wave. Certain themes in Woolrich's work—i.e., the cruel indifference of fate—appealed to a French sensibility.

Not only that, Truffaut agreed, but Woolrich's themes of shifting personality, of one person turning out to be someone else, was an equally influential theme. Perhaps not as present in The Bride Wore Black as in La sirène du Mississipi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969), another Woolrich adaptation of her father's made shortly after The Bride Wore Black.

Muller suggested that—by the time the film was made in 1968—a lot of people perceived it as a somewhat revisionist take on Woolrich's novel because it focused on the femme fatale figure as the protagonist. What Truffaut did with the character of Julie Kohler (Moreau) and his depiction of the men in the film who become her victims was markedly different than how Woolrich treated these characters in his novel. However, Truffaut stuck close to the structure of the book, replicating the novel's five episodes. Truffaut's adaptation was about the cruel indifference of fate, a protagonist bent on self-destruction, and encouraged the audience to empathize with a person who was doing something very wrong, who knew she was doing something wrong, but who went ahead and did it anyway. For Muller, those are three essentials for a film noir.

Though in the case of her father's film, Truffaut differentiated—unsure if this would apply generally to film noir—that there was also an attempt not to psychologize at all. There was something quite stylized about the story. Likening it a bit to a dark fairytale, Truffaut explained her father's challenge was indeed to gain the audience's empathy for Julie Kohler, but also to keep them involved and interested in the linear logic of the story, a creative challenge that was of considerable interest to her father. Later in his career in the late '70s he went on to film L'Histoire d'Adèle H (The Story of Adele H, 1975), L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977) and La chambre verte (The Green Room, 1978), wherein he focused on stories where the main characters follow an implacable logic. It remained a challenge for him to keep the audience interested in one character in a narrative limited by directions in which the story could go. He thought about it in musical terms: to follow a line, what he called an "ascending straight line." Not all of his movies were following that pattern, but The Bride Wore Black was probably the first film where he started doing that.

One way he addressed this challenge was to rely on strong acting. Her father had loved working with Jeanne Moreau on Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962) and he knew that having her as the central character in The Bride Wore Black would carry the movie; but, he also knew that the actors who played the men she encountered had to be equally good and compellingly hold their own. He found a number of them in the theater, which he attended frequently, often casting for actors for his films. A number of the actors in The Bride Wore Black subsequently appeared in his later movies.

The one character he was, perhaps, most attached to in The Bride Wore Black was Fergus, the artist, played by Charles Denner. She was seven when her father made this movie and it was the first film of his she was allowed to see in the theaters when it opened. She recalled her father sometimes liked to work on Sunday mornings going over dailies with his editor at a nearby screening room and he would let her and her sister come with him. There were scenes from the movie that she had easily seen 10 times over before the movie was finished, including a scene or two that were eventually cut, but which she recalled vividly; scenes that involved the character Fergus. Her father probably decided the scenes were too long and would throw off the balance of the film, so they were deleted; but, 10 years later, he revisited a similar character and used the same actor in The Man Who Loved Women. So The Bride Wore Black is both an adaptation of a novel but also something very personal for her father that he was able to return to later on in subsequent films.

It was Muller's understanding that François Truffaut was dissatisfied with the finished film and Laura confirmed her father had difficulty with the color. It was only his second time to use color in a film. His first films were all small budget black and white New Wave movies and then he went to England to make Farenheit 451 (1966), which was a British production with a lot more money that required color for many reasons. When he came back to France to do The Bride Wore Black, it became clear the film was also going to be in color. Later on as her father progressed in his career, he laid down rules for himself, including how to use color—how to use color in his period movies and how to use color in his more contemporary pieces—but, at the time of The Bride Wore Black, he hadn't quite figured it out. She suspects it was frustrating for him to figure out how to create atmosphere with color. If you think of what are considered to be the great adaptations of Cornell Woolrich, they're primarily in black and white. Femme fatales seem to be more fatale in black and white. That could have been an issue creating tension. For her, The Bride Wore Black is visually distinct from her father's other movies, probably because of those issues.

It was also Muller's understanding that her father had creative differences with his cinematographer Raoul Coutard who was working at the same time with Godard? In that regard, one of her father's challenges was that the protagonist was supposed to be traveling between one man and the other, as the story moves forward, but unfortunately for budgetary reasons most of the film had to be filmed in one geographic area. So her father and Coutard had to modify the storyline visually, made all the more trickier by the movie being in color, and create the illusion of different landscapes. There was definitely differences of opinion and approach between Coutard and her father.

Muller noted that The Bride Wore Black was the first Woolrich novel written in what is considered his "black period." Woolrich was a fascinating man. He was a closeted homosexual who lived at the Hotel Marseilles in New York with his mother virtually his whole life and he had absolutely no real experience of the outside world. He was the most socially inept human being imaginable. Despite Woolrich's extraordinary imagination, Muller couldn't imagine a person less like François Truffaut than Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich started writing his noir novels cooped up in his hotel room with The Bride Wore Black being the first of a series. Its structure was extraordinary innovative. Woolrich didn't reveal the motivations of the protagonist until the very end of the book so the reader was going through this whole story—as audiences did with the film—wondering why Julie Kohler was doing what she was doing.

Truffaut thinks her father decided to move it up a little bit, partly influenced by Hitchcock's understanding of how to manipulate audiences with suspense. When do you bring a flashback into a movie like The Bride Wore Black? A flashback or two was going to be necessary so her father gave much thought to when he would bring them in. Her father eventually agreed that Hitchcock's precept of letting the audience "in on it" early on actually created more suspense than a big revelation at the end. Another Hitchcock touch was that you never saw Jeanne Moreau's character knock on a door or enter a room. A couple of times in the movie she's suddenly just there, without explanation. Truffaut was fairly certain her father stole that from the character of Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). Hitchcock made a point of not letting the audience hear Mrs. Danvers' footsteps so that they would be as startled as the protagonist Joan Fontaine when she lifted her glance and Mrs. Danvers was standing there observing her. Obviously, for the character of Mrs. Danvers, this was meant to be spooky. With Julie Kohler, it's meant to be more magical perhaps? She's suddenly in the middle of the scene and there isn't a whole lot of logic to it; the audience needs to accept it as a given.

Muller agreed that her father brought an element of magical realism to the film that compensated for a huge flaw in the original novel, which—not to spoil the plot—but you do wonder at one point how she knows who these men are? That's a crucial point in the story that's never explained. The way her father presented this as a given in the film eliminated the incongruency from the audience's mind. Julie just appears, almost like a supernatural force. There's no realism involved in it.

Muller asked Truffaut if she had ever met Hitchcock as a child? She hadn't. He wondered because—she may not have noticed as a young girl—but the relationship Hitchcock and her father shared was an intense bond between their two artistries. It fascinated Muller that—while her dad was making this film—his closest confidante was really Hitchcock, who was included in all the correspondence. Her dad was asking him questions all the time. She did attend Hitchcock's funeral under a peculiar set of circumstances.

Truffaut wanted to point out the unsung actor Serge Rousseau who plays David the groom (who the audience sees for only 10 seconds). He was one of her father's best friends. He was a casting agent, an actors' agent, and often played crucial small roles in her father's movies. Rousseau was actually an excellent actor who had given up on acting himself. He played the character at the end of Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) who the audience has seen follow Claude Jade throughout the movie. At the very end he comes up to her sitting on the park bench and declares his love and proposes. He tells her, "Every other relationship is temporary but with me it will be forever." In The Green Room he plays the nemesis of the hero. We only see him in photographs but we hear his name mentioned constantly. So Rousseau played a big role in her father's life by pointing out to him interesting young actors who Truffaut would then watch perform in the theater and often hire for his films.

There was a story behind the name of the protagonist: Julie Kohler. Julie is a name that her father was fond of, though she never found out why. Kohler was a brand of chocolate that her father liked a lot as a child. He liked that name so much that he used it again in Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) where he named his protagonist Charlie Kohler. Of course, Kohler is also a homonym for colère, which means anger.

Everything Muller has read on this film indicates that it was made at a difficult time in her father's life, which undoubtedly colors his conflicted recollections of the film itself; but, Muller finds the film extraordinary. He's reached a point where he thinks of film noir in thematic terms and for him The Bride Wore Black is a classic thematic example of a film noir. He's impressed with her father's sensitivity to these types of stories, to the work of American writers like Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis (whose novel Down There Truffaut adapted into Shoot the Piano Player, "another classic noir"). The American narrative style tended to be tough, hard-edged and coldhearted; but, her father wasn't like that at all. No one would ever say that François Truffaut was a coldhearted filmmaker. Quite the opposite. He was probably the most humanistic filmmaker of his era. To see him adapt these kinds of stories made them doubly fascinating.

Laura Truffaut concluded by recalling that her father was keen on quoting Jean Renoir: every man has his reasons, which applies to any character in a movie. Muller identified the quote from La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939) where, more to the point, the full quote specifies that "the most terrifying thing is that every man has his reasons."

Of related interest: John Goodman's interview with Laura Truffaut for the North Shore News.

NOIR CITY XMAS—Eddie Muller Intro to Deanna Durbin Doublebill

2011-12-31T14:41:00.000-08:00

The Film Noir Foundation's second annual Noir City Xmas was held December 14, 2011 at San Francisco's historic Castro Theatre, offering a double-feature of rare noir-stained yuletide classics "to darken our spirits this holiday season." The evening also featured the unveiling of the full schedule for Noir City X, the 10th anniversary of the world's most popular film noir festival, coming to the Castro Theatre January 20-29, 2012.

Bill Arney—the now legendary disembodied "Voice of Film Noir"—hesitated to welcome the audience to the second "annual" Noir City Xmas because "just how many Noir City Xmas movies can there be?" Asking if the audience had been good this year, Arney was met with a resounding, "NO!" to which he responded, "What the hell is wrong with you? There's still a little over a week," he added "to get over yourself and make some trouble. Santa will be sorely disappointed if he doesn't get to fill every stocking in Noir City with coal this year. In some places this holiday is a winter wonderland, but here in Noir City it's just cold." Varney then introduced his boss, the "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller: "The guy who only puts goodies in your cinematic stocking."

Muller took to the Castro stage and wished everyone a "cruel Yule." "You learn to expect the unexpected at Noir City," he offered. "Hence, a film noir double-bill starring Deanna Durbin. Here's the reality of film programming in 2011. As Bill said in his introduction, how many film noir Christmas movies can there be, right? So we have to parcel these out very intelligently. The plan originally was to show Christmas Holiday (1944) and Holiday Affair (1949) as our double-bill this year and next year we would have Lady On a Train (1945) and The Lady in the Lake (1947), which was set at Christmas, right? But, could we get Holiday Affair in a 35mm print? No. Because it no longer exists. This is a major problem. And that is why—when someone asked me earlier, 'What's the theme of this year's Noir City festival?'—I said, 'The theme is you better see it in 35mm while you can.' That is actually the theme of the festival and I'm very happy to say and proud to say that everything we will be screening at Noir City X will be in 35mm."

"I will not be on the soapbox tonight," Muller assured us, "but, I will be stationed on that soapbox during January because this has really become a serious issue. We cannot actually fight the tide forever—we are going to be living in a digital future—but, we have to do everything we possibly can to insure that films that do not exist digitally or on 35mm are preserved as films, or they will never be able to be shown in the future digitally or any other way."

Excited that his audience had been given a peek at the upcoming line-up for Noir City X, Muller emphasized he was especially excited because of his super special guest who would be appearing on the first Saturday night with The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967): Angie Dickinson! "I've already been warned to lay off the stuff about the White House and Jack Kennedy and all of that—I'm not going there—so I'll get it all out right now: they say she went in Police Girl and she came out Police Woman."

Among the marvelous preservations that will be shown at Noir City X is a brand new print of Naked Alibi (1954) starring Gloria Grahame, struck by Universal specifically for Noir City. "All you need to know," Muller insisted, "is that it's called Naked Alibi." Further, in light of the upcoming Baz Luhrmann adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic The Great Gatsby (featuring Leonardo DiCaprio), Noir City has rescued from obscurity the 1949 film noir version of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby starring Alan Ladd, which has not been shown theatrically since 1974 when it was put into deep storage to make way for the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow vehicle. Thanks to Noir City's good friends at Universal Studios, the 1949 version will finally be seen again. The Great Gatsby will be shown with Three Strangers (1946), whose preservation has been funded by the Film Noir Foundation. Finally, last but not least, The Film Noir Foundation vied with Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation to restore The Breaking Point (1950). Scorsese won that particular competition but Muller bears no regrets since it's one of his favorite films, one he has shown at other film noir festivals, thereby singlehandedly destroying the only existing good print left of the film. Muller is delighted that the film has been completely restored and that Scorsese and the Film Foundation have graciously allowed Noir City to be the first venue to show that brand-new print.

To celebrate Noir City's 10th anniversary in style, on Saturday night, January 28, Noir City will be hosting its first-ever Noir City Nightclub called—appropriately enough—"Everyone Comes to Eddie's". Noir City is converting the Swedish American Hall into a sexy and sinister 1940s nightclub with live entertainment "for your edification."

Another highlight of Noir City X will be the all-day Dashiell Hammett marathon, featuring films based on Hammett's stories, including such rareties as Roadhouse Nights (1930) and Mister Dynamite (1935). Richard Laymann, the world's foremost scholar on Dashiell Hammett (Shadowman: The Life of Dashiell Hammett, 1981), will be flying in to Noir City because he has never seen Mister Dynamite, that's how rarely it's shown.

Finally, with regard to "the super sexy poster" for Noir City X, the photograph was actually taken in Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco apartment where he lived and wrote The Dain Curse (1929), Red Harvest (1929) and The Maltese Falcon (1930). Bill Arney, the "Voice of Noir City" resided in Hammett's apartment for many years and—looking at this poster—Muller had to ask Arney why he ever left? "Well," Arney responded, "the last one of those dames that came over there told me that the Murphy bed was very comfortable. I told her not to get too comfortable. And then I married her."

Turning to the evening's double-bill, Muller recalled that Deanna Durbin was once one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood and, as a girl, was credited with rescuing Universal Studios from bankruptcy in the 1930s when she became, by far, the most popular female performer in the United States. She had an outstanding singing voice and an amazing on-screen charisma and was everybody's favorite "girl next door" and the Great American Gal. But, of course, as she grew older, she chafed at being typecast in such roles. As she grew up into a woman, she wanted to stretch out and do other things.

In Lady on a Train, Nikki Collins (Durbin) witnesses a murder while waiting for a train, but can't get the police to believe her when no body is discovered. While they dismiss her as daft, she enlists the help of a mystery writer to sleuth out the culprits on her own. Based on a story by veteran mystery writer Leslie Charteris (The Saint), this is a wildly entertaining mix of comedy, musical, and suspense, rendered in evocative noir style by cameraman Woody Bredell (Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, The Killers), and featuring a superb cast of sinister and suspicious supporting players swirling ominously around "America's Sweetheart."

Muller promised his audience that they would love Lady On A Train. "You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll tap your feet to this charming film that is, unfortunately, not very well known." Lady On a Train was one of only two films directed by Charles Henri David who would—after this film—become Mr. Deanna Durbin. In 1948 when Durbin decided that her string had played out in Hollywood, she married David and smartly moved to France where, Muller was happy to say, she lives to this day, having recently turned 90 years old on December 4.

Watching Lady On a Train with me was my friend Mike Black who reminded me of an anecdote from Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest: "Deanna Durbin [was] a child soprano and competitor of Judy Garland, whose imitations of her rival were marvelously cruel, invoking a crooked arm and a radiant mad smile to match luminous crossed eyes. But Garland could be equally mordant about herself. When she had made her triumphant comeback at the Palladium in London, inspired by merry schadenfreude, she rang her now-forgotten rival. After many delays and false starts, Garland got the sleepy, ill-tempered Durbin at home in the French countryside. 'Tonight I had the greatest audience of my life!' At length, Judy recounted her triumph. Finally, out of breath, she stopped. There was a long silence. Then a pitying voice said: 'Are you still in that asshole business?' "

In Christmas Holiday, a young soldier gets more than he bargained for on a holiday stopover in New Orleans when he is introduced to a young "singer" (prostitute) and a local "nightclub" (brothel) and he learns the tale of her descent into degradation. Venerable scribe Herman Mankiewicz hews Somerset Maugham's novel into a brilliant script, directed with delirious intensity by Siodmak. Deanna Durbin is memorable in her first adult role, and Gene Kelly is unforgettable as the murderous cad with whom she tragically falls in love. Unquestionably the most romantically soul-crushing Christmas movie ever made.

Muller considers Siodmak to be the greatest director of film noir there ever was and describes Christmas Holiday as a strange and mesmerizing film. "Why it's called Christmas Holiday, who the hell knows," Muller laughed but assured his audience that by the end of the film they would leave the Castro Theater thoroughly depressed. "That's our mission. Happy to fulfill it."

Muller dedicated the evening to Deanna Durbin, as well as to an old friend of his who passed away this year—one he recalls watching Christmas Holiday with in the Castro Theater—his great pal and mentor George Kuchar.

Of related interest: At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee responds to Noir City Xmas with a write-up on the Durbin films plus a lovely gallery.

DARK COUNTRY (2009)—On-stage Conversation With Thomas Jane and Eddie Muller

2011-12-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

As dreadful and terrifying as Dark Country (2009) became by film's end, Eddie Muller insisted this horror-noir thriller was his type of a fun movie. With director-actor Thomas Jane joining him on-stage at the Castro Theatre for the film's one-off theatrical screening on November 18, 2011, and with their conversation being filmed (in 3D) for inclusion in the deluxe DVD release, Muller wasted no time eliciting Jane's commentary on the making of the film and tracing Dark Country's inspirations. "Was it obvious," Muller asked, "when you were finally going to direct the film that it was going to be a film like this?"

Jane responded that—for his first-time directorial effort—he had been looking for a project small enough to contain, which even then turned out to have its own set of incredible problems. A huge film noir fan, Jane had grown up reading EC comic books and watching The Twilight Zone: all influences on Dark Country. The project kicked off when a good friend of his sent him a dark and twisted short story by Tab Murphy—known more for writing screenplays for Disney's animated films The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Tarzan (1999)—and Jane knew right off that it would make a good film. Since after doing The Punisher (2004) Jane had a deal with Lionsgate, they bought the idea for Dark Country for $3,000,000 and hired Murphy to draft a script. But when at their first production meeting Jane proposed to Lionsgate that the film should be shot in 3D, they balked and backed out. No one was doing 3D at that time. Jane's suggestion was at least a full year ahead of the 3D curve.

But Jane was committed to the idea, having already met Ray "3D" Zone, who was known for his pioneering methods of converting flat images (in particular, comic books) into 3D images. Jane had grown up reading 3D comics like The Rocketeer and Twisted Tales that featured Zone's stereoscopic effects and so—when they met at a meeting of the Stereo Club of Southern California (SCSC), an organization formed in 1950—Jane took the opportunity to express his admiration of Zone's 3D comics and mentioned that he wanted to work with him. Jane joked that the SCSC gets together in a church basement once a month to show each other nudie pictures in 3D; but, the bottom line was that SCSC members are the leading experts in their craft. They encouraged Jane to consider making a film in 3D and were already creating work on their own jerryrigged 3D cameras back when people were first starting to make their own movies on the RED and DSLRs. It was at the SCSC meetings that Jane learned about how technological advancements were affecting the way 3D movies were being made and how the seeds of the 3D movement were being planted.

Once Lionsgate backed away from the concept, wishing him good luck, Jane arranged for a meeting with Sony Home Video, who agreed to the project because they were hoping for homegrown content to support the 3D televisions they knew they would be placing in people's homes in the near future. Unfortunately there were no cameras to shoot a 3D film and no experienced 3D cinematographers so Jane hunted down Paradise FX who had done all the 3D effects for amusement park rides and convinced them to jump on board to engineer a 3D movie. They broke new ground. They rigged up huge cameras out in the desert with operators connected to cables, cables running all along the ground, and often the weather was so cold that the static electricity froze the cables up so that they couldn't shoot. A simple story with four characters that Jane thought would be a great way to "pop his cherry" as a director turned into a little bit more than he could chew.

Nonetheless, Jane persevered because he wanted the film to look like Edward Ulmer's Detour (1945), one of his favorite noirs. Paying homage to films from the '30s and the '40s, Jane utilized rear screen projections to create effects Muller described as "fabulous artificiality." Muller praised that Jane sought to create "a complete non-existent netherworld out there in the desert where anything can happen. How many claps of lightning can you have in one shot? I mean, it's fantastic." The film was shot quickly over two weeks and Jane pursued the feel of "hand-made set pieces" characteristic of noirs-made-on-the-cheap-and-dirty. When Jane cast Lauren German as Gina, he gave her a copy of Detour as homework for her part. Other direct influences on Dark Country besides Detour were Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), from which Jane cribbed. A few ideas were also lifted from David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997).

Muller singled out the shot where Jane comes out of the diner and the camera circles 360° around his car at the gaspump. "I could almost feel Tom Neal and Ann Savage hitchhiking on the side of the road," Muller evoked. "I could almost feel the black and white creeping in." Jane had, in fact, tried to convince Sony to shoot the film in black and white—an idea that didn't go over well—even though he was convinced it would be "cool." Muller was wondering what gave Jane "the stones" to go into Sony and ask for 3D and B&W? Jane admitted: "I was just excited by the possibility of breaking new ground and doing something that hadn't been done before on a budget where no risk was involved."

Jane's ideal version of Dark Country would have been 79 minutes long and that was the way he planned it because it was the way he'd always wanted it. As a further homage to Detour (which Ulmer pared down to a concise 68 minutes), Jane wanted his film short. He fantasized that—with Eddie Muller doing commentary on his 79-minute film—it would become the noir of his dreams. But when Sony saw the film they gave him a note that the film needed to be at least five minutes longer. "Are you kidding me?" he thought. "This is a note from the studio? They want me to add something back in? Seriously?" Sony insisted because—in order for certain of their territories to buy and distribute the DVD—the film had to be 84 minutes long. That's why, Jane apologized, some of the scenes in the car are desultory and a bit talky. Originally, those scenes had fallen to the editing room floor on day one.

How tough was it, Muller queried, to not only come up with all these technological advances and direct the film but to also perform in front of the camera? Overwhelmed, Jane phoned up Mel Gibson. "The first guy to go to for advice, right?" Muller quipped. Jane told Gibson he was making this little movie over at Sony that was going straight to video but that he was also directing it, as well as acting in it, and how would one go about that? Gibson sympathized, "Yup. Yup. My first film was this little film Man Without A Face (1993) and it occurred to me that I had never directed so I nervously phoned up Clint Eastwood." Eastwood told Gibson he had experienced the same problem. "Don't tell me Clint called up Kevin Costner?" Muller laughingly interjected. No, Jane rallied, Eastwood didn't call Kevin Costner; but, he did call his buddy Don Siegel who told Eastwood not to shortchange himself as an actor just because he was directing as well. He told him to treat himself like he treated any other actor. "The tendency would be to shoot yourself and get on with it," Siegel warned, "but don't do that. Take the time and do what you would do acting with anyone else. Watch playback and treat it like a job. Take it seriously." Gibson talked to Jane for over an hour, offered all kinds of advice, and after their conversation Jane felt he might be able to pull the film off after all.

To make sure, Jane strategized that it would help to have extra eyes around on set so he hired Ray Zone as his 3D consultant. [Zone speaks to the experience on his own website.] Jane had already overprepared for the film by storyboarding every shot of the movie with storyboard artist Dave Allcock. They used a little toy car to set up the shots, which was a lot of fun. ( Dave, incidentally, has a cameo in Dark Country. He and his girlfriend are on the missing poster.)

Then Ray Zone and Jane sat down at Jane's kitchen table and worked on the storyboard Jane had developed with Allcock. They developed a fun, color-coded system where they used magic markers to color every storyboard frame with different colors to indicate where they wanted the 3D to sit. Blue was in the frame, red was outside the frame and yellow was somewhere in the middle. That was their method for constructing the 3D in such a way that there would be continuity to the shots and they wouldn't be jarring or out of focus. But most importantly, learning from and building upon the mistakes that were made with 3D in the 1950s, Jane challenged himself by questioning how 3D effects could be used as part of the storytelling rather than mere spectacle? In Dark Country Jane tried to harness 3D to create a psychological landscape within the interior of the car. Muller riffed: "It's interesting you cite Detour. All the times that I've introduced Detour at film noir festivals, I always say, 'This movie is so cheap. It's so simple. It goes to show you that all you need to make film noir is a man, a woman, and a locked hotel room. And so you now prove that all you need is a man, a woman and a car in the desert. That's it!"

Jane qualified it should be a sexy car, which led Muller to mention that he originally thought Jane had removed the rear view mirror from the window of the car and placed it on the dashboard as a way to get around issues with the 3D filming, but Jane advised him that, no, the 1960-1961 Dodge Phoenix came with the rear view mirror on the dashboard; but, the real challenge was that they had to find three cars: two for use on the road and one in the studio. Thus, the initial 360° shot of the car confirmed it was a major character in the film.

Muller offered that Jane had created what had now become one of his favorite noir scenes of all time. "You have to love it when you and Gina are in the parking lot of the rest stop and she complains, 'We've run over a guy. I've seen you murder somebody. We buried the body in the desert. All on our wedding day. It's not supposed to be like this!"

When Muller added that Dark Country was like "a comic book come to life", Jane was visibly pleased and admitted he loved hearing that because that was exactly what he wanted to create. He wanted the film to have that alternate reality comic book look without aping other comic adaptations like Dick Tracy (1990) or Sin City (2005). Though so many great comic book artists go unsung, they've influenced such well-known directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, among others, who have recognized the great shots to be gleaned from these graphics. "I stole as much as I possibly could," Jane confessed.

Pointing out that most people probably didn't know that Jane owned Raw Studios and was publishing comic books, he wondered who some of the unsung heroes were who influenced Jane? Jane recalled that his Dad bought him an issue of Mad Magazine when he was eight years old "and that was it." From there he made the leap to EC Comics. In the town where he grew up in Maryland there was a bookstore called Barbarian Books that was, in effect, his "home away from home". He had to walk sideways to make his way through overstuffed aisles. That was where he found all his EC reprints and Gladstone stuff and really got into "the joy and the art of the illustrated story." He fell in love with "the great beautiful world" of illustrators: Johnny Craig, Bernie Krigstein, Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, among so many others. Jane's concern is keeping this culture alive for upcoming generations. He fears we're losing this "great beautiful world" to video games but believes there's still room for inspiring people and "doing work that lives in your brain and affects the way you see the world." When he got turned on to Berni Wrightson, for example, he saw the whole world through Bernie's eyes for months. He would see a girl and wonder how Bernie would draw the seams and creases in her skirt or the veins in her hands.

The greatest influence on the film, however, was Thomas Ott's graphic novels, from which Jane admittedly lifted specific shots. Ott draws black and white stories without dialogue and his work resembles woodcuts or etchings. His framing in a story called Dead End in particular—which includes a long sequence of a guy driving through the desert—was a direct influence on Dark Country. To bring it full circle, Thomas Ott saw Dark Country and really liked it and—without knowing he was the inspiration—mentioned to Jane that he saw a lot of his own work in the movie. Jane asked him what he would think of doing a graphic novel adaptation of the film? Ott agreed to the suggestion, which Jane will put out through Raw Studios. On a recent trip to London Jane got together with Ott to take a look at the first pages and the experience was way too cool for him: he had envisioned Dark Country as a Thomas Ott novel and was now seeing it come to life through Ott's pen.

Before he discovered acting, Jane had drawn a lot in high school. He had wanted to be an illustrator but decided he'd get laid a lot more if he acted. Though he was good, he didn't have the necessary discipline, that "thing" that allows an illustrator to zone in and get lost in the work, which is what separates the men from the boys: that ability to "sit down, roll up your sleeves, and knock it out." Because he didn't have that, he knew he would never really be a great artist. Jane mollifed himself by considering he might paint when he becomes an old man.

Muller then invited Ray Zone to the stage and explained that Ray was responsible for setting the Castro screening of Dark Country into motion. Ray had attended some of the Noir City screenings in Los Angeles, met Muller, and they had talked about Inferno (1953) and I, the Jury (1953), early film noirs that experimented with 3D. Then Zone asked Muller if he had seen Jane's 3D neo-noir Dark Country? They came up with the idea of screening Dark Country at the Castro and filming the on-stage conversation in 3D as a DVD extra and—as if to prove the point—Zone arrived on stage with paddle balls so that he, Jane and Muller could bounce paddle balls at the 3D camera set up off stage. Of course this was in homage to another 3D movie from 1953, Andre de Toth's House of Wax, wherein a paddleball man offered one of the best examples of the 3D experience at the time. Andre de Toth didn't want to include the scene, felt it distracted from the main narrative, but was forced to include it by Jack Warner and other studio execs. Some consider House of Wax the best 3D movie of all time, Muller reminded, even though it was made by a filmmaker with one eye who had no depth perception whatsoever.

Jane quoted John Ford as saying that it's the mistakes that are often the most interesting parts of a movie. Ron Perlman's line about leaving "no turn unstoned" was an adlib. Ron—sloughing 90 pounds of make-up—had flown directly to New Mexico from the set of Hellboy 2 to shoot Dark Country.

Although Dark Country was set on a hot summer night in the desert, in reality they were shooting in November in New Mexico and it was "butt ugly cold." The ground was frozen rock hard. The actors had to use tricks like sucking on ice cubes before delivering lines so that their breath wouldn't vaporize. (Sucking on ice cubes gives an actor about 30 seconds where their breath doesn't show in cold air.) Hearing this made Muller appreciate the scene where Lauren German hangs her head out the window and moans, "It's soooooo hot." Jane recalled that German wore a tiny shift as thin as tissue paper during those cold night shoots. She was the smallest, thinnest person on the crew and was freezing. They had to to give her vitamin shots and fly her home to Los Angeles on the weekends to warm her up.

As for whether Jane would take on directing another 3D film? Absolutely. In the spirit of John Wayne's 3D western Hondo (1953), Jane would like to film a 3D gothic western, perhaps even a noir western. Ray Zone brought up that Raoul Walsh, another great noir director, also directed westerns that had dark tones. Wrapping up, Jane said that screening Dark Country in 3D on the Castro Theater's large screen was the pinnacle of his whole experience of making the film because it was the way the film was meant to be seen, by an audience who "got" it. He never thought the day would come. "I literally built this film for this audience in this theater," he beamed.

Muller admitted that hosting the Dark Country event was a crossroads for him in his career as the "Czar of Noir" because the entire event was digital. Earlier in the day, he had a conversation with a friend in the Castro about the future of 35mm film projection and how difficult it's becoming to get the studios to continue shipping 35mm prints. Three major studios—Warner Brothers, Paramount and Fox—are completely shutting down shipment of 35mm prints. Within the year, these studios will no longer allow Noir City to show their slate in 35mm. Noir City X (January 20-29, 2012) might possibly be the Film Noir Foundation's final 35mm-exclusive festival. It might certainly be the last time some of the films on the Noir City X program will be shown to the public in 35mm. "There's nothing anyone can do to stop this," Muller sighed. "The future is happening right now."

Muller qualified that—as long as they preserve a film somehow on film—then he can live with the changes to come. They can digitize the prints and make film trafficking wonderful and easy and all that but he insists they mustn't lose the film in the process while converting inventory over to new digital formats. There are certain titles that are becoming extinct because they are being ignored in the rush to digital. It's well-known that film remains the best medium for preserving film and that digital copies are too volatile, requiring migration from one form of storage to the next as hardware and storage systems change.

SFIFF 2011 / PSIFF 2012: THE TINIEST PLACE—The Evening Class Interview With Tatiana Huezo

2011-12-30T13:27:00.000-08:00

I caught Tatiana Huezo's remarkable documentary The Tiniest Place (El lugar mas pequeño, 2011) at the 54th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) and had the welcome opportunity to sit down to speak with her. The timing couldn't have been worse, however, for transcribing our conversation as I was in the middle of relocating from California to Idaho where—almost immediately—I was caught up tending to family emergencies. Several months later, I guiltily agonized over missing my initial window of opportunity; but, now, with The Tiniest Place continuing to gather accolades on its festival trajectory, and with its arrival at the 23rd edition of the Palm Springs International Film Festival in their True Stories sidebar, I welcomed the chance to revisit our conversation.

Born in 1972 in El Salvador, Tatiana Huezo moved to Mexico City at age five. A graduate of the prestigious Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC), she's the recipient of the Gucci / Ambulante award, a grant established in 2007 to support new and established Mexican documentarians. Huezo has taught documentary films at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. The Tiniest Place is her first feature-length documentary. Winner of awards at numerous festivals, including Visions du Reel (Best Feature Film), Documenta Madrid (Audience Award), Lima International (Best Documentary), Monterrey International (Best Mexican Film), DOCSDF (Best Mexican Documentary, Best Cinematography), Abu Dhabi (Jury's Special Award), and DOK Leipzig (Best Documentary), The Tiniest Place continues to astound audiences with its message of perseverance and hope.

At Variety, Robert Koehler has championed the film, naming Huezo "one of the bright new talents of Latin American cinema" and proclaiming that the "film's beauty would be more than enough to recommend it, but Huezo's work, supported by Ernesto Pardo's incandescent cinematography, is more than simply gorgeous. It manages a highly unusual synthesis of personal human stories . . . ."

At The Hollywood Reporter, Sheri Linden describes the film as "impressionistic and precise" and "a beautifully rendered memory piece that insists on the necessity of memory" honoring the "will to live and the way unquenchable grief informs . . . joy."

Huezo follows in a longstanding Latin American tradition of equating the diminutive—the "tiniest"—with that which is most intimate and human and (ultimately) the best in mankind. My thanks to SFIFF publicist Julieta Esteban for setting up the interview and to Claudia Prado of the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica for her translative assistance.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Tatiana, tell me about your educational background and how you came to work with the Centro to produce The Tiniest Place?

Tatiana Huezo: I studied at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) where I specialized in cinematography and film direction. After that, I pursued a Masters degree in documentary production at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

Guillén: By any chance, when you were studying in Spain did you meet José Luis Guerín?

Huezo: Yes, he was my professor. I only had two classes with him but I admire his work immensely. He has had a profound influence on my own work.

Guillén: Having spoken with several Mexican filmmakers, it strikes me that a current trend in Mexican filmmaking is to have collectives of artisans working together. Are you involved in a similar collective at the Centro?

Huezo: I'm not working within a Mexican collective, no, partly because I have been away from Mexico for a while living in Madrid for several years pursuing my studies; but, I'll be returning to Mexico soon.

Guillén: One of my continuing interests is in the evolving nature of national cinemas and whether or not that is a category that can be effectively used anymore. You're Mexican, studying in Spain, and producing a documentary about El Salvador. How, then, would you define yourself within the context of a national cinema?

Huezo: I define myself more as a Mexican because I grew up in Mexico and that's where I received most of my education—it's my culture and it is the spirit informing my work and what I do—but my origin is Salvadorian, that remains inside me, and that's what gave origin to this particular project. I left Mexico to continue my studies because there was no place in Mexico for me to go for post-graduate studies in documentary filmmaking. In fact, there are no post-graduate programs for filmmaking in Mexico, which is why I went to Barcelona to pursue my Masters. Despite the fact that the core of my education was in Mexico—and I had marvelous teachers!—what determined my true documentary training was the education I received in Barcelona. It was the encounter between these two cultures—my Latin American roots and the European vision—that was important in my formation as a filmmaker. It was important for me to encounter and see these different ways of telling stories.

Guillén: Fascinating. It confirms for me my sense that many young filmmakers are coming out of these cross-cultural encounters. In my estimation, this is true world cinema that is neither defined nor delimited by national cinema(s). You're a classic case.

At the Q&A after your screening at the Pacific Film Archive the other night, I was intrigued by your story about how—once your arrived at Cinquera, El Salvador, your grandmother's birthplace—a woman approached you, thinking you were someone else who had disappeared during the war. Can you speak to what you felt from that experience?

Huezo: It was a disconcerting moment because it was my first time to visit Cinquera and my first walk through the village by myself. There are only four to five streets in Cinquera and I was walking near the town plaza. I was looking around with profound curiosity because there were traces of the war everywhere, in every part of the town, on the walls, on the street, and suddenly while I was walking down one of these streets an old woman threw herself at me, hugged me and wouldn't let me go. She kept saying, "You haven't changed. You haven't changed." I felt ashamed because I wasn't the person she thought I was. I felt like I couldn't live up to her expectations. In that moment, I wanted to be the person she thought I was and to be able to hug her back with the same intensity and affirm, "Yes, I am that person." But, instead, I had to tell her that she was making a mistake and that I wasn't that person . She insisted, "But, yes, you are! You are her! You came back!"

Guillén: A bit scary, but sad?

Huezo: Yes, it was both scary and sad. Right now, speaking to you about this, I'm also remembering an image of an older woman sitting inside a house that had no roof but that had bars across the door. She was just sitting there combing her hair. It was a surreal image because it was just these four walls, the door with bars, and no roof. I think this old woman was not quite right in the head and I suspect her son had left her locked up there so he could go out to work.

On one of the days after we were done shooting, we saw an old man walking with a cane who kept hitting the pavement with his cane as if he were still fighting, cursing out loud against the army that had invaded Cinquera. It's clear to me that there are many people who lost their minds during the war, especially the older people. Don Pablo Alvarenga, who is in my film, told me that when the people get to a certain age, when they're really old, it seems like they disconnect from reality and return to the time of the war. They spend their last years in a delirium of the war.

I don't want to place the woman who hugged me so intensely in exactly the same category as these older mentally-troubled people, but she did have a bit of that quality in the way she recognized in my face the face of another from that time.

Guillén: Which reminds me of the important statement made in your film that these survivors are living in two worlds at once. Let alone your assertion that you made this film about war because you have never experienced war. What is it you hope audiences will take away from this film?

Huezo: It was Don Pablo who made that statement that the survivors of Cinquera are living in two worlds at once and Don Pablo is a poet. Describing how the survivors experience the past and the present at once is his poetry. He is always able to make images out of his words to communicate what he is going through. When Don Pablo said that to me, I knew this would stay in the film and that, in fact, it was the exact metaphor that this film needed because this is an experience shared by all of the people in that town. The people of Cinquera live among ghosts. This is their reality.

Guillén: It spoke to me. As someone who lived in San Francisco through the AIDS pandemic in the '80s when I lost so many friends and loved ones, I can attest to living in a comparable state where the past and the present are irrefutably fused. I survived and currently live a healthy life; but, I constantly walk among ghosts in a zone where the living and the dead are caught in the grip of a death horizon.

Your film's strength lies in its respect for Don Pablo's poetic insight, expressed—interestingly enough—in the film's structure, which replicates this notion of two worlds existing at the same time through the relationship between your visuals and your voiceovers.

Huezo: You're right. There are those two structural elements of the visual and the oral; but, I hadn't thought of them in the way you're expressing them.

Guillén: Yet this is how it seems to me. You've caught your subjects in moments of visual repose where they're either quiet, thoughtful, even happy, but the voiceovers speak to a more horrible world of witnessed atrocities. You've structured the film so that they're both going on at the same time.

Huezo: I knew when we made the film that there would be these two discourses—the oral and the visual—and that they would be independent of each other; but, I also knew that by putting them together it would create a third discourse.

Guillén: That third discourse is the film's healing property; the documentary's remedy, if you will. As someone who lives, as I mentioned before, in two worlds caught in the grip of the death horizon, it's exactly by living in that way that I am able to honor the past and keep living. I honor the past by carrying it with me at all times.

Huezo: I have to be honest and say that all of this process was somewhat unconscious for me when I was making the film and something of an experiment; but, what I learned the most from making the film was how people learn to live with their pain. This has to do with those two elements combining into a third discourse which you've called healing. Healing is not about forgetting or about stopping suffering over what has happened. Healing is about learning to live with it.

Guillén: Or what my mentor Joseph Campbell once termed: "Joyfully participating in the sorrows of the world." Another intriguing theme in your film, both subtle and controversial, is that—normally in such beleaguered situations as this—people would turn to religion; but, I got the sense in your film that established religion had been replaced by the religiosity of personal memories, which is to say spiritual insight.

Huezo: Religion was, in fact, the origin of the uprising of these people and at the core of their rebellion. Many of the priests who arrived in this town practiced liberation theology. They helped open the people's eyes.

Guillén: Ah. I'm familiar with liberation theology as practiced among indigenous people in Central America, specifically Guatemala, and its role in populist uprisings against oppressive forces. Ironically enough, one of those oppressive forces was the authoritative hierarchy of the Catholic Church itself so it's always been a bit of a conundrum for me to associate liberation theology with the Catholic Church, even though it is without question one of its most important ministries, albeit controversial. Controversial, precisely, for opening eyes.

Huezo: Once a week the townspeople meet on Thursday nights and Pablo reads to them from a Latin American Bible; one I've never seen before. They cling to every word that was taught to them by the priests who practiced liberation theology. They read fragments of this Bible and try to relate its message to the lives they are living. They translate those fragments to the injustices of the present and to their needs in the present. Their minds are strong!

Guillén: Which explains why liberation theology and its teachings among the marginalized people of El Salvador proved such a threat to the military.

Huezo: Totally.

Guillén: Along with Pablo's voiceover, the voice of Elba Escalante, the woman who had lost her daughter, was simply amazing, which leads me to ask how you gained the trust of the five main voices used in your film? How did you single them out from the town's inhabitants? Why were they willing to tell you their intimate stories?

Huezo: Pablo is a friend of my grandmother's. He's something of a grandfather to me as well. Elba—who is nicknamed "La Sirena" (The Mermaid)—is the mother who had lost her daughter and I first saw her at the same time the audience first sees her: lying there on her side. After the trip I took to Cinquera with my grandmother, I returned and lived there for two months and it was during that time that I encountered and got to know the personalities who became a part of my film. In my first encounter with Elba, she started telling me stories about how her daughter was killed. It was almost as if I were someone who lived in Cinquera and she was just filling me in about what had happened since last we met.

Guillén: Elba is an amazing personality. She radiates life in the way she takes care of her plants and broods over her chicken eggs. Despite what had happened to her—perhaps because of what had happened to her?—life pours out of her.

Huezo: Elba is incredible. She's a woman who lives with much passion, full of life, but when she talks about her daughter it's like she breaks in half, transforms, and becomes dark. These two extreme sides of her, all of her light and all of her darkness, quickly made her one of the main "characters" of the movie.

Guillén: It stands to follow that those who are caught in the grip of the death horizon are often the best storytellers.

Huezo: Definitely, yes.

Guillén: Let's talk a bit about your immaculate sound design, right down to the final cock's crow in the closing credits, which somehow makes the audience feel good or hopeful as they're getting up to leave the theater. My main complaint about investigative documentaries is that they often take you to the heart of difficult issues without either offering remedy or guiding you back out. Something about that cock's crow brought us back out of the film into our everyday lives.

Huezo: For me it was important to tell the story of Cinquera as if it were a fairy tale that had monsters. Not only was it important for me to capture the dignity of these people but I wanted to close the story with that because this town in the end was not trapped in darkness. They continued to work their land and to take care of their animals. They continued to educate their children. This is their light.

Guillén: I respect that you portrayed that dignity in alignment with nature.

Huezo: They have a special connection and consciousness and love of the land, which accounts for why they returned to lift Cinquera from the ashes. Pablo, for example, has a garden and he has tried very hard to keep out transgenic seeds. The people of Cinquera have transmitted to me their love for this forest. For me, indeed, the forest is one of the film's characters.

Guillén: The voice of that forest truly emerged in your sound design: the bird trills, the little ditty about the frogs, all of that is a voice I'm familiar with having worked in Central American rainforest for many years.

Huezo: I collaborated on the sound with my excellent sound designer Lena Esquenazi and my direct sound recorder Federico Gonzalez. Federico understood that we had to capture every available sound in the forest; in other words, the soul of the forest in sounds. So he went out at different times of the day to capture different atmospheres: the sounds of the morning, the sounds in the afternoon, the sounds at night. We ended up with recordings of all the sounds of the forest at different hours of the day and night available to us. I'm proud of the direct sounds in the movie, which I think are very good. It was a challenge for Federico because he recorded it all on his own; he didn't have an assistant. He had all his equipment and two microphones, was carrying everything himself, walking miles and miles and miles. It was very hard for him. He was a warrior! Afterwards, I sought out a woman I deeply admire—Lena Esquenazi—who I felt was one of the best sound designers existing in Mexico. She lived in Mexico but now she lives in Buenos Aires. We worked on the sound design together for two months.

Guillén: Can we speak about editing? To return to the idea of how you circled us out of the film's central trauma to provide hope or to allow us to experience the hope felt by the survivors of Cinquera, you achieved this through scenes that revealed their hope in increments: the scene of Elba and the eggs hatching, for example, and the scene of the cow giving birth. Where I really felt the horror of the war wash away was in the scene with the rainfall. Can you speak to how you placed those moments in the film to reveal this sense of hope? To create that feeling of relief and acceptance?

Huezo: Even before shooting the film, I had an idea of the film's structure. This structure was a very simple structure but it was what guided the shooting of the film. I wanted to tell the structure of the story as if it had happened over three days. Maybe that wasn't so clear to the audience that three days have passed, but in my mind that is how I structured it. In the first day I wanted to show the tranquil everyday life of the characters with very small brush strokes of what had happened in the past.

The second day was the war; a total immersion in the past. The first sequences of this second day were of the people who were young at the time of the war and who are my age now. I asked them to tell me their memories of being children during the war. From their childhood stories, this was how I opened the door to their past.

I knew that the cave was the heart of the movie and that the scene in the cave would be placed at the end of the second day. The cave was like going down to Hell; the moment of pain and loss. For me, the cave is a symbol above and beyond what happened there. I knew that the cave would be the meeting point for all of their stories and that's why I filmed that sequence where everyone was sitting in the cave telling their stories.

The third day was their going back to their everyday life. As a spectator, I was hoping we could reveal another dimension to that everyday life. If we had skipped over the second day and only shown the first and third days, the truth of their experience would not have had an impact. I was confident that the spectator would give a different value to the everyday actions shown on this third day after knowing who they were and what they suffered. After having spent time with them in the cave.

As for the pregnant cow, that was sheer luck. [Laughs.] To have the birth of this calf in the third day of this narrative structure was perfect for dramatic effect. And as for Elba, I had seen her nurturing the eggs on my first visit to Cinquera and—when I returned to shoot the film—I asked her to repeat the activity. I knew I was going to have chickens being hatched on the third day of the story but I didn't know I was going to have the calf being born.

Guillén: If I may say so, this three-day structure is religiously brilliant. Along with the obvious Christian parallel, there is the mythic undertone of the harrowing of Hell found in various world mythologies. Three days is the numerological template for resurrection. The Latin root for the word "religion" is religio whose meaning is influenced by the verb religare, which refers to that string that connects and binds the material to the immaterial, the obligation of soul to spirit. So when you're talking about having this thread that runs through the three days, I consider this a marvelous stroke of brilliance. Congratulations!

Huezo: Thank you.

Guillén: So what's next for you?

Huezo: I have an idea for a story about how one makes a child one's own, even if they are not a biological child; but, I don't like to use the word adoption. Still, it's that idea. There will be two parallel stories. One is of a woman in search of a child for adoption and the other is of someone who has been happily adopted and is now older and going out to search for his biological mother. It's a story about identity and, in a way, it's about loss as well.

TIFF 2011 / PSIFF 2012: MISS BALA / MISS BULLET (2011)

2011-12-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

As one of Variety's "10 Directors to Watch", there's no denying that Gerardo Naranjo's chops are significantly maturing with each venture. Naranjo's crime thriller Miss Bala maximizes explosive action by way of impressive long shots, for example; but, as Adam Nayman has cogently summarized in Cinema Scope's (now legendary) pre-festival coverage for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF): "Miss Bala undoubtedly has a point to make: that the drug war, if you hadn't heard, is bad news. Throw in the fact that so much in Miss Bala feels like a demonstration of its maker's virtuosity, and you have a film that, while superficially totally of a piece—it's shapely, as they say, and filled with visual and dramatic rhymes—leaves a viewer feeling at odds. Naranjo's craft is to be admired, and, at least theoretically, so is his commitment to social critique. I worry, though, where those things—and the inevitable critical and possible commercial success of Miss Bala—might take him."

The film itself is something of a fractured fairy tale, which means of course that there's no happy ending or resolution to Naranjo's brutal portrait of corruption and culpability in the Mexican drug wars. Any woman catering to a fairy tale in this volatile environment is ... well ... a pendeja and deserves what she wishes for, which explains why Lars Von Trier has nothing on Gerardo Naranjo, who puts his lead actress Stephanie Sigman through one torturous trial after the other. It's to her character Laura's credit that she survives at all, which is nothing short of miraculous, if largely unbelievable and bordering on the ludicrous. In fact, her escape from one bad situation is a mere pretext to guide her into an even worse situation: from the frying pan into the fire and then onto the top broiling rack of a gas oven. I couldn't escape the feeling—as Nayman has hinted above—that Naranjo's exploration of the rampant violence in Mexico is less social commentary than thinly-guised and glamorized brutality. Is this really what audiences want to see in Mexican movies? Obviously so, since Miss Bala has now arrived in the Awards Buzz sidebar at the 23rd edition of the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) as Mexico's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards®. Clearly, box office is expressing its prurient "watch-her-burn" interests?

At MUBI, Dave Hudson has vigilantly rounded up the enthused reviews from Cannes where Miss Bala premiered in the Un Certain Regard section. MUBI's Cannes coverage includes festival dispatches from Marie-Pierre Duhamel and Daniel Kasman and a video "questionnaire" conducted by Kasman and Ryland Walker Knight. Hudson then monitored the film's dampening critical reception at TIFF and the New York Film Festival.

I caught the North American premiere of Miss Bala in TIFF's Contemporary World Cinema sidebar where it was introduced by its Canana producers Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna with director Naranjo and actress Sigman in attendance. Further—as it was the 10-year anniversary of 9/11—Miss Bala was preceded by a TIFF-produced short that recalled the role of the festival in ameliorating the shock at the time. Bernal recalled, "Ten years ago we were presenting a film here. The first time that we worked together. For those of you who don't remember, we had just won an award in Venice for Y Tu Mama Tambien. That was exactly 10 years ago. And as we know, stuff happened and the show had to be canceled on the 11th; but, we presented it on the 12th and it was a huge relief for everyone who was there in the cinema. We perhaps had one of the best and the most emotive projections of that movie. So we're incredibly happy to be here once again in Toronto presenting on September 11 as well a film that's relevant to our situation right now."

TIFF 2011 / PSIFF 2012: THE TURIN HORSE / A TORINÓI LÓ (2011)

2011-12-29T07:51:00.000-08:00

My kneejerk reaction to watching Béla Tarr's Berlinale winner The Turin Horse when it screened in the Masters sidebar at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was to recite the childhood jingle, "One potato, two potato, three potato, four." In essence, this summed up the film's narrative thrust. Then again, only Béla Tarr could exact such exquisite rhythm, resonance and weight—not from a childhood jingle at all—but from the following anecdotal wellspring:

"In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse."

The Turin Horse suggests that the horse's possible fate is a comparable world weariness and sickness of the soul. As Dimitri Eipedes synopsizes in his program notes for TIFF, the ailing horse has given up providing the livelihood on which an aging father (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) depend, as if sensing the inevitable. The horse "refuses to eat, drink or carry them where they need to go. Nevertheless, the man and his daughter forge ahead with their tasks, even after their one attempt to escape confirms there is nowhere left to go." Eipedes explains that Tarr, "has crafted a mostly dialogue-free meditation on how humans refuse to give up the fight even when there's no battle left to win" or what Robert Koehler describes—in his informative Cinema Scope interview with cinematographer Fred Kelemen—as an "absurdist essence, the will to go on despite all dire signs to the contrary."

The Turin Horse contests mythologist Joseph Campbell's assertion that it is through the performance of everyday tasks that one's brilliance shines through. Rather, it suggests that the weight of repetitious tasks extinguishes any form of brilliance. Only a master like Béla Tarr could render such weariness incandescent. Though Fred Kelemen's B&W cinematography seems less lustrous than Tarr's previous entry The Man From London—the whites less milky and the blacks less inky—the look of the film remains hauntingly beautiful, if dauntingly grey. Tarr's long takes, of course, are an acquired taste, if not a calculated exercise to frustrate spectatorial patience and, thereby, destabilize expectation. The Turin Horse sports—count 'em!—30 such long takes or as Kelemen describes in his conversation with Koehler: "The moving image is thus a thinking image."

The program capsule for the film's appearance in the Awards Buzz program at the upcoming 23rd edition of the Palm Springs International Film Festival—as Hungary's official submission for the foreign language category at the 84th Academy Awards®—suggests that Tarr's adamance that The Turin Horse will be his final film—"he plans to stay busy by opening a film school in Split, Croatia"—might account for the film's "sense of finality." Rarely has such a keen observation of the quotidian signaled an impending end to the world. Fortunately, the cancellation of the film's release after Tarr's well-publicized interview with the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel—wherein Tarr accused the Hungarian government of obstructing artists and intellectuals, in what he referred to as a "culture war" led by the cabinet of Viktor Orbán—appears to now be a sequestered memory.

Critical reception for The Turin Horse has been thoroughly aggregated by David Hudson at MUBI, first from the film's premiere at the 2011 Berlinale (where it won the Jury Grand Prix as well as the FIPRESCI prize for best film in Competition), the subsequent Der Tagesspiegel controversy, the film's appearance at the 2011 New York Film Festival, and two lovely pieces from that festival, first by Daniel Kasman on the film's "mesmeric viscosity" and next by Doug Dibbern on "tracking shots at the gates of dawn."

PSIFF 2012—LATINBEAT

2011-12-28T10:11:00.000-08:00

Now that the full line-up has been announced for the 23rd Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) running January 5-16, 2012, I kick off my coverage as I do every year dancing to the beat of a Latin drum. Although PSIFF's national (i.e., regional) focus is "Arabian" cinema this year, 22 "Latin" entries illuminate PSIFF's various sidebars. More than enough to keep my dance card full.

AWARDS BUZZ

Black Bread / Pa Negre (dir. Agustí Villaronga, Spain, 2010, 108 min)—In the dark days following the Spanish Civil War, a young boy witnesses a brutal murder by mysterious hooded figures. When his own father is accused of the crime, he sets out to exonerate him, but the facts he uncovers in this twisted gothic underworld are far from comforting. As Frako Loden synopsized in her Evening Class capsule for the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), "Black Bread . . . shares Fascist villain Sergi López with Guillermo Del Toro's more surreal Pan's Labyrinth, as well as a child protagonist facing evil Franco nationalists in a post-Civil War Catalan forest. The newer film is darker and more austere than its predecessor because the boy has no fantasy universe to flee to when the real world becomes too cruel."

Black Bread—which screened at last year's PSIFF—returns for a one-off encore screening, garlanded since then with awards for Best Actress (Marina Comas) at the 2010 San Sebastian Film Festival, Best Spanish Film at the 2011 Turia Awards, Audience Award for Best Spanish Film at the 2011 Sant Jordi Awards, nine Goyas (including Best Picture and Best Director), 13 Gaudi Awards (also including Best Picture and Best Director) and has been tapped as Spain's official candidate for the foreign language category at the 84th Academy Awards®. Impressive, to say the least. Official website. IMDb. Wikipedia. Facebook. Twitter.

Introducing his San Francisco Bay Guardian profile of Agustí Villaronga, Dennis Harvey finds him "a fascinating Spanish director whose new film, Black Bread, is the latest in a career of superbly crafted films almost-commercial enough to gain US release. Yet seldom quite enough. Villaronga's cinema is gorgeously cinematic, often historical, high in strikingly managed melodramatic content, sexually (often homoerotically) charged, frequently tinged by the fantastical, very interested in children's perceptions of adult corruption. He's a middleman between Luis Buñuel and Guillermo del Toro—less abstract than Buñuel, but evidently less accessible than del Toro, even if the ambitious Black Bread possibly got green-lit because in many respects it resembles del Toro's international success Pan's Labyrinth (2006)."

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within / Tropa de Elite: 0 Inimigo Agora E Outro (dir. José Padilha, Brazil, 2010, 115 min)—As officially synopsized: "Wagner Moura returns to portray the most identifiable role of his career as Captain Nascimento, in the sequel to José Padilha's 2008 Golden Bear winner Elite Squad. Nascimento, now ten years older, has risen in his career, having become the commander-in-chief of Rio de Janeiro's BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion) and later, a populist choice as the Sub-Secretary of Intelligence. In his new post, Nascimento strengthens BOPE and cripples the drug trade even further to its knees, but soon comes to a sobering realization that upon doing so, he ends up aiding his true enemies: corrupt cops and dirty politicians with major electoral interests. Now, Nascimento's enemies are much more dangerous." Credited as the highest-grossing film of all time in Brazil, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is Brazil's official submission to the foreign language category at the 84th Academy Awards®. Official website. IMDb. Wikipedia.

At Variety, Robert Koehler concedes Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a better movie than the original, "even though Padilha—a filmmaker who remains hard to get a grip on in terms of ideas, content or style—goes in for sensationalism, hyperactivity and obvious dramatics. However, when this Enemy Within settles into key action sequences, such as a stunning nighttime ambush or a daytime battle against Fabio, it becomes wildly entertaining." Koehler cautions, however: "The script by Padilha, Braulio Mantovani and Rodrigo Pimentel once more employs a massive wall of voiceover narration by Rio-based "Elite Squad" Capt. Nascimento (Wagner Moura, again dripping cynicism), explaining not only his internal thought process but also the baroque structures of Rio's criminal and law-enforcement organizations. Though such narration lends the pic a novelistic quality, it can be a turnoff to auds (especially non-Portuguese speakers) unwilling to wade through huge slabs of subtitled text. Indeed, while the v.o. is key to the franchise's local popularity—as is its ripped-from-the-headlines sensibility—it could be the very element that keeps the film from translating well internationally."

At The Village Voice, Mark Holcomb likewise warns the film "will test the ideological mettle of law-and-order conservatives and lefty peaceniks alike. That's a virtue, because though Elite Squad 2 . . . plays footsie with both socialism and fascism, it's never easy to peg." Holcomb adds that Padilha's "preference for giddily shot bloodbaths that invite both tongue-clucking and anticipatory drooling will understandably irk hair-splitters."

At Slant, Diego Costa observes: "Brazilsploitation films frequently offer very little besides the Schadenfreude spectacle of aesthetic slickness mapped onto the darkness of expendably chiseled Brazilian limbs. The new aesthetics of hunger if you will—bigger, faster, and gleaming. But if international audiences can get their fix of outsourced hyper-masculinity gone lethally berserk, the kind of homoerotic frisson that must be displaced onto the Other, director José Padilha gives us more than just favela pornography. An impeccable exposition of the structures of Brazilian power in which the gun is the necessary phallic prosthesis that guarantees existential visibility for the socially castrated classes and the 'democratic' vote is the ultimate market commodity (sold to the highest bidder), Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss."

Jose & Pilar (dir. Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, Portugal, 2010, 117 min)—PSIFF's website mistakenly attributes this documentary to Brazil but it is actually Portugal's official submission to the foreign language category at the 84th Academy Awards®. Notwithstanding, as officially synopsized, this documentary "is a deeply moving story about love, loss and literature. It follows the days of José Saramago, the Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, and his wife, Pilar del Río. The film shows their whirlwind life of international travel, his passion for completing his last masterpiece, The Elephant's Journey and how their love quietly sustains them throughout. José and Pilar reveals the hidden Saramago, unravels any preconceived notions about him, and proves that genius and simplicity are indeed compatible. It is a funny and touching portrait on the endurance of the artistic spirit. A glimpse into the life of one of the greatest creators of the 20th century, it shows us that, as Saramago says, 'There is always another way to say everything.' " Official website. IMDb. Wikipedia.

As Jonathan Holland notes at Variety, the highs and lows of Gonçalves' documentary portrait "are so carefully constructed that at times it feels like fiction, shuttling easily and with a surprising level of intimacy between Saramago the public persona and Saramago the private man. Indirectly raising some interesting metaphysical questions, it remains firmly grounded in its narrative." At The Hollywood Reporter, Deborah Young finds the documentary "long, repetitive but intermittently engrossing."

Miss Bala (dir. Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2011, 113 min)—Miss Bala premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The film has been selected as the Mexican entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards®. It tells the story of a young woman clinging on to her dream to become a beauty contest queen in a Mexico dominated by organized crime. Official website. IMDb. Wikipedia.

Patagonia (dir. Marc Evans, Argentina, 2010, 118 min)—Per Wikipedia, "Patagonia is a 2010 drama film about different Welsh and Argentine people connected to Y Wladfa, the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, Argentina. The film stars several well-known Welsh actors including Matthew Rhys, Nia Roberts, and the singer Duffy. Directed by Welsh director Marc Evans, it premièred at the Seattle International Film Festival on 10 June 2010 and had its U.K. première in Wales on 8 March 2011 in Cardiff. It was selected as the British entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards®." Official site. IMDb. Wikipedia. Facebook.

At Variety, Dennis Harvey observes: "Offbeat even beyond its standing as perhaps the first feature co-production between its two co-producing nations, Patagonia unspools two parallel narratives connected only by a historical anomaly—the boatload of poor Welsh settlers who reached remotest Argentina in 1865, establishing a unique, still-extant cross-cultural corner of the desert there. While its separate parts may not quite add up, they complement each other quite pleasingly. . . . Evans nimbly cuts between the two unhurried threads, which form a nice textural contrast in d.p. Robbie Ryan's lensing of the disparate landscapes—one all lush, verdant hills, the other rich in desert hues. Jumping back and forth also helps balance out stories that might have seemed insubstantial if each stood alone."

At Little White Lies, Adam Woodward adds: "Patagonia is spiced with moments of intense passion and melodrama—as well as humor in the chance romance that blossoms between Alejandro [Nahuel Pérez Biscayart] and a vivacious Cardiff girl (Duffy)—but the core ingredient is the metaphorical kinship that exists between our two female protagonists. Each place and character, though distinctively and intimately rendered, comes together in absolute alchemical harmony."

Rumble of the Stones / El rumor de las piedras (dir. Alejandro Bellame Palacios, Venezuela, 2011, 101 min)—As director Palacios has synopsized at IMDb: "Delia is a young woman who survived a river-flood ten years ago among her mother and her two sons. They have been forced to live in a poor neighborhood of Caracas. She works hard trying to rebuild their lives, but she soon discovers that her sons, William (17) and Santiago (11) are exposed to the violent and dangerous environment they live in. And Raiza, the grandmother, is the living image of hopelessness. The four characters will show us that the hope of reconstruction is possible, because the force of love, despite all, keeps them united." The film has been selected as the Venezuelan entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards®. IMDb. Wikipedia. Facebook. U.S. Premiere.

At Variety, Jonathan Holland writes: "A single mom's struggles to raise her family in adverse circumstances are brought to vivid dramatic life in Rumble of the Stones, a social drama that bravely aims to fuse a realistic study of Venezuelan life to a crowd-pleasing dramatic structure." Cognizant of the film's weaknesses, Holland nonetheless asserts that Rumble of the Stones "looks great, packs an emotional punch and features a fine perf from Rossana Fernández [Díaz] in a challenging central role. . . . The violence of the slums has been more authentically and energetically rendered than it is here, but Stones is nonetheless often a visual treat, with some striking nighttime shots of the city. Local street-gang argot (largely incomprehensible for those who don't use it), is avoided, which sacrifices some credibility. . . ."

NEW VOICES, NEW VISIONS

Las Acacias (dir. Pablo Giorgelli, Argentina, 2010, 85 min)—As paraphrased from IMDb's synopsis: Rubén is a lonely truck driver on the motorway from Asunción del Paraguay to Buenos Aires. He's been carrying wood covering for years. One morning, at a motorway stop near Asunción, he agrees to drive Jacinta and her 8-month-old child Anahí to Buenos Aires. As kilometres go by, the relationship between Rubén and Jacinta grows as they slowly slip into each other's souls. Neither volunteer much about their lives nor do they ask questions of each other. Though their journey is one of few words, it is not necessarily a silent one. IMDb. U.S. Premiere.

At Variety, Leslie Felperin approves: "Delicate yet rigorously executed, road movie Las acacias touchingly unfolds a passing-ships encounter between a truck driver and a mother who hires him to get her from Paraguay to Buenos Aires. A debut feature for editor and documaker Pablo Giorgelli, pic reps a master class in low-key but wholly effective thesping, as characters played by German De Silva and Hebe Duarte get to know each other via dialogue that would barely cover 20 written pages. Slow-burning pic takes a while to warm up, but once it gets going, it's a corker that could enchant. . . . Perfs from the core cast are pitch-perfect, with experienced character actor De Silva and newcomer Duarte projecting everything auds need to know about their thoughts through exchanged glances, crisp dialogue and body language. Naturalistic but subtle camerawork by Diego Poleri underscores their growing familiarity by shifting by degrees from single-figure shots to two-person setups, literally bringing them together as a couple within the frame. With their matching Roman noses and strong profiles, they even start to resemble one another, as long-standing or well-matched couples often do. Meanwhile, magic-hour timing and the region's strong light are cannily exploited to give Duarte a backlit halo around her curly hair, enhancing her natural but ordinary beauty. Use of long takes, slow-tempo editing and lack of non-source music are par for the Latin American arthouse course."

TRUE STORIES

Die Standing Up / Morir de pie (dir. Jacaranda Correa, Mexico, 2011, 90 min)—Winner of the Best Mexican Documentary at the Guadalajara Film Festival, Die Standing Up is an inspiring trans-narrative that profiles Irina Layewska, a tireless fighter in the war for personal freedoms, who continues to work for progressive causes from her wheelchair despite being severely disabled with multiple sclerosis. IMDb. U.S. Premiere.

At Variety, Robert Koehler found the documentary "conceptually striking and emotionally piercing" and added that the film's success "lies in its ability not only to pull off the stark shift in tone and style, but also to provide an honest, unsentimental yet emotional study of its central subjects, who clearly provided Correa extraordinary access to their lives."

The Tiniest Place / El lugar más pequeño (dir. Tatiana Huezo Sanchez, El Salvador, 2011, 104 min)—According to its official synopsis, The Tiniest Place "is a story about mankind's ability to arise, to rebuild and reinvent himself after surviving a tragedy. A story about a people that have learned to live with their sorrow; an annihilated town that re-emerges through the strength and deep love of its' inhabitants for the land and the people. A tiny place nestled in the mountains amidst the humid Salvadorean jungle." Official site. IMDb. Facebook.

At Slant, Diego Costa asserts that "Salvadorian-born and Mexican-raised filmmaker Tatiana Huezo transforms collective trauma into chilling poetry." He adds: "Huezo's main character is the suffering that links the people and etches the history of a nation onto its land, not the people themselves, all of whom remain nameless for most of the film."

At Variety, Robert Koehler enthuses: "The film's beauty would be more than enough to recommend it, but Huezo's work, supported by Ernesto Pardo's incandescent cinematography, is more than simply gorgeous. It manages a highly unusual synthesis of personal human stories, affectingly told on a soundtrack designed separately from the images (that is, few talking heads), with precise deployment of syncopated montage and an accumulation of details during the filming in the highland jungle village of Cinquera. The result is one of the most impressive debuts by a Mexican filmmaker since Carlos Reygadas' Japon, both linked by an audacious embrace of cinema's power to prompt the deepest thoughts and feelings."

Unfinished Spaces (dirs. Benjamin Murray & Alysa Nahmias, Cuba, 2011, 86 min)—Cuba's ambitious National Art Schools project, designed by three young artists in the wake of Castro's Revolution, is neglected, nearly forgotten, then ultimately rediscovered as a visionary architectural masterpiece. Official site. IMDb. Wikipedia.

At Variety, Robert Koehler writes: "An object lesson in a regime's uses and abuses of artists, Unfinished Spaces elegantly traces the brief heyday and longer dark years of Cuba's National Art Schools and the campus' unconventional architecture. The essence of a nation's attitude toward its culture may be read through specific angles and episodes, and Alysa Nahmias' and Benjamin Murray's film allows for such a reading of Cuba from 1961 to now. Classy mounting, an original subject, solid interviews and fine research . . . ."

WORLD CINEMA

All Your Dead Ones / Todos tus muertos (dir. Carlos Moreno, Colombia, 2011, 88 min)—As synopsized at IMDb: "Salvador is a peasant who one day wakes up as usual to work on his land but instead finds a pile of corpses in the middle of his crops. He runs to notify the authorities but it is Sunday and Election Day so the dead ones end up being a nuisance that nobody wants to deal with." Winner of the Cinematography Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and of Best Director at the Bogota Film Festival. IMDb. Facebook.

At Twitch, Ard Vijn wrote: "All Your Dead Ones is a scathing look at how a local government is rendered completely immobile by corruption and vanity. Despite the dour subject, the fresh approach by writer / director Carlos Moreno makes this a very entertaining movie indeed, and pleasantly surprises all the way till the end. Very highly recommended!"

At Variety, Robert Koehler was less impressed, describing the film as "a crudely conceived bit of absurdist shockorama that lays on its allegorical messages with the subtlety of a pounding to the head" and complained that "much of pic's time is wasted in a waiting game whose absurdist humor quickly wilts."

Blood of My Blood / Sangue do Meu Sangue (dir. João Canijo, Portugal, 2011, 140 min)—As Diana Sanchez synopsized for TIFF 2011: "Magnificently acted and orchestrated, João Canijo's family saga, Blood of my Blood, depicts the harshness of life in inner city Lisbon and the sacrifices that two women are willing to make for their family. Marcia is determined to end the cycle of poverty for her family and when she discovers that her daughter is dating an older professor, she will stop at nothing to end this unwelcome relationship." Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2011 San Sebastián International Film Festival. IMDb.

At Variety, Robert Koehler concedes the acting is "gifted" but, otherwise, finds Blood of My Blood to be "an overlong portrait of a family living in one of Lisbon's rougher districts" whose "actual material consists of little more than the customary tropes found in many urban melodramas." His final impression is that Blood of My Blood "is, fundamentally, a high-class telenovela."

At The Flickering Wall, Jorge Mourinha counters: "Contemporary Portuguese cinema finds another potential breakout film in João Canijo's eighth theatrical feature—a remarkable dive into a struggling working-class family that extends the director's fascination with the structure of classical tragedy into what is possibly his masterpiece. Undoubtedly, some will look at the convoluted comings and goings of this family drama as high-end soap-opera miserablism with a side order of voyeurism; but that doesn't take into account both Mr. Canijo's poised handling of the scenes (mostly captured in long takes unfolding before a discreetly moving camera), and the astoundingly naturalistic performances of the ensemble cast, who had a hand in structuring and developing the shooting script through a series of workshopped improvisations à la Mike Leigh."

By the Fire / Sentados frente al fuego (dir. Alejandro Fernandéz Almendras, Chile, 2011, 95 min)—Per the program capsule for the San Sebastían Film Festival: "Daniel and Alejandra have been together for a couple of years. Both are approaching their 40s, and now they set out on a new adventure: to try their luck in the countryside. But Alejandra suffers from a serious illness that slowly eats into their dreams while putting Daniel's love and patience to the test."

At Variety, Jonathan Holland writes: "The dying embers of a love affair are delicately raked over to haunting effect in By the Fire, a gentle, carefully observed drama. Helmer Alejandro Fernandez Almendras revisits the rural Chilean setting of his well-received debut, Huacho, a visually stunning background against which his characters play out their quiet personal tragedy with as much dignity as they can muster. Similarly concerned with unearthing the transcendental hidden within the everyday, pic is elliptical, oblique and wary of easy emotion, making for demanding but rewarding viewing."

Cousinhood / Primos (dir. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Spain, 2011, 98 min)—Three cousins travel to the village where they spent summer vacations as kids. Columbia University grad Daniel Sánchez Arévalo (DarkBlueAlmost Black) returns with a terrific guy movie with heart, a wry and skillful dissection of competing ideas of Spanish manhood. Official site [Spanish]. IMDb.

At Variety, Jonathan Holland writes: "Three cousins head back to the pueblo in search of better times in the entertaining but uneven comedy Cousinhood. Helmer Daniel Sánchez Arévalo's previous two pics had some bite that's mostly missing from this softer, more commercial project, which isn't as funny as it thinks it is. Still, its unusual blend of slick and fresh, emotional undertow, and carefully manicured visuals nonetheless make for an enjoyable, sometimes surprisingly moving ride that improves as it rolls along. . . . The Spanish title neatly translates as both 'cousins' and 'suckers.' "

At The Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Mintzer adds: "Cojones might have been the better title of Cousinhood (Primos), a highly bromantic Spanish comedy about three thirtysomething dudes trying to recharge their manhood in the seaside town where they spent summers as children. This crisply executed, occasionally funny bachelor romp reveals how well writer-director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo (Darkbluealmostblack) is versed in the teachings of Judd Apatow and the Farrelly Bros."

Expiration Date / Fecha de caducidad (dir. Kenya Márquez, Mexico, 2011, 100 min)—Kenya Márquez, a former director of the Guadalajara Film Festival, debuts her first film. Ramona's compulsive life becomes a wreck when she finds out, after a long search that Osvaldo, her only son, has died. IMDb. U.S. Premiere.

Happy New Year Grandma! / Urte berri on, amona! (dir. Telmo Esnal, Spain, 2011, 107 min)—With a superb ensemble cast, Happy New Year Grandma! uses touches of black humor to steer us through the misfortunes of a couple who have to take care of the wife's elderly mother. Official site. IMDb. North American Premiere.

At Variety, Jonathan Holland writes: "Not a dream job at the best of times, taking care of one's mother-in-law becomes a full-blown nightmare in the satisfying black comedy Happy New Year, Grandma! Well assembled and featuring a wonderfully depicted family whose sufferings are all too easy to identify with, Basque director Telmo Esnal's solo directorial debut . . . is solid rather than spectacular, and never quite sheds its slightly musty air of old-fashioned craftsmanship. Enjoyable but eminently deja vu . . . ."

The Perfect Stranger / El Perfecto Desconocido (dir. Toni Bestard, Spain, 2011, 107 min)—Per IMDb's synopsis: "The mysterious arrival of a foreigner to a small village in a Mediterranean island, awakes the sudden interest from a diverse group of residents, who will appear unexpectedly in the stranger's life, believing that he's going to reopen an old shop. In contrast, the real intentions of the stranger are hidden behind an old Polaroid photo, which has led him to that place in search of answers." Official site [Spanish]. IMDb. Facebook [Spanish]. North American Premiere.

Real Truths: The Life of Estela / Verdades verdaderas, la vida de Estela (dir. Nicolás Gil Lavedra, Argentina, 2011, 97 min)—As synopsized in the program capsule for the Mar del Plata International Film Festival: "Director Nicolás Gil Lavedra and the head of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo met a few years ago during the shoot of an institutional short called Identidad perdida, about the recovery of a stolen grandson. That was the beginning of a relationship marked by friendship and mutual respect, which resulted in this film that depicts Estela de Carlotto's life story and her endless struggle using the powerful weapons of fiction." Official site [Spanish]. IMDb. Facebook [Spanish]. North American Premiere.

The Silver Cliff / O Abismo Prateado (dir. Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2011, 85 min)—The Silver Cliff won Aïnouz the Première Brazil Best Director Award at the 2011 Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. IMDb.

At Slant, Oscar Moralde takes a cue from urban cinematics when he writes: "One city, one day. That Aristotelian unity is an alluring structure for a film. Following a character's journey through a city over the course of a day is a plot progression that's popular and visible enough to mark the boundaries of a kind of subgenre defined by films like Cléo from 5 to 7 and Before Sunrise. There are built-in narrative advantages and expectations to the form. . . . The day-in-a-city structure is also well-suited to study characters that are displaced from their routine and interact with the city in entirely different ways; those characters may be lost and adrift internally, but the pathways of the city and the hours of the day are there to anchor them. In The Silver Cliff, Brazilian dentist Violeta (Alessandra Negrini) is certainly displaced from her routine when she receives a voicemail from her husband that he's leaving for Porto Alegre and that he's not coming back. She resolves to follow him, but the next available flight isn't until the morning; in the meantime she wanders the streets of Rio in the grips of something resembling a fugue state."

At Variety, Jay Weissberg concurs: "Guided by the textures of the city, this enormously empathetic helmer takes auds on an inner journey over 24 hours that, like tides on Copacabana Beach, surge and subside until a calmer spirit prevails. Though Aïnouz's pics are stylistically diverse, they all display a respect for their protags that suffuses spirit and form . . . . The city and its changing moods play a vital role here, especially in the way urban chaos can be oppressive one moment and energizing the next. Rio's special location on the beach further enriches her city aspects, and Aïnouz beautifully conveys the kind of dialogue its residents have with the sea."

The Squad / El páramo (dir. Jaime Osorio Marquez, Argentina, 2011, 90 min)—The Squad is a story about nine professional soldiers of an special anti-guerrilla "comando" unit sent to an abandoned base located over a 14.000 ft. mountain in the Colombian Andes. Having lost contact a few days previously with the camp, allegedly because they were under guerrilla attack, the commandos arrive and find only one survivor. Official site [Spanish]. IMDb.

At Twitch, Peter Martin writes: "In his directorial debut, Osorio Marquez fires up a cauldron of masculine anxiety. The men are trained soldiers, but their training is breaking down. What, exactly, have they done before they arrived at the foot of the mountain? Why have their loyalties become divided? We're tossed into the cauldron without knowing how to get out, just like the men, and the temperature is rising, slowly but inexorably. The performances are very strong and the filmmaking is rock hard, utilizing handheld footage and ground-level perspectives without losing track of the geography. . . . The Squad creates an edgy mood, casts a dramatic spell, and then sits on its haunches, waiting to see who will be the first to buckle under the pressure."

At Fangoria, Samuel Zimmerman adds: "An absolute ensemble piece, The Squad nails an essential aspect of any effective horror film in giving us a slew of well-rounded characters worth investing in. Set against the backdrop of a war-torn Colombia, the cast represents the diversity of the South American nation and as we watch the guilt-ridden Ponce (Juan Pablo Barragan), the desperate Arango (Andres Torres), the superstitious Fiquitiva (Nelson Camayo) and the menacing Cortez (Alejandro Agulilar) slowly lose their cool, the film becomes a harrowing tale of terror as much as it's seemingly a story of how both sides of a civil war are essentially battling themselves."

The Student / El estudiante (dir. Santiago Mitre, Argentina, 2011, 110 min)—Writer turned director Santiago Mitre (Leonera, Carancho) has crafted a masterfully-executed coming-of-age story within the context of collegiate politics. I refer readers to my MUBI interview with Mitre. IMDb.

Wrinkles / Arrugas (dir. Ignacio Ferreras, Spain, 2011, 89 min)—As officially synopsized: "Based on Paco Roca's comic of the same title (2008 Spanish National Comic Prize), Wrinkles is a 2D animated feature-length film for an adult audience. Wrinkles portrays the friendship between Emilio and Miguel, two aged gentlemen shut away in a care home. Recent arrival Emilio, in the early stages of Alzheimers, is helped by Miguel and colleagues to avoid ending up on the feared top floor of the care home, also known as the lost causes or 'assisted' floor. Their wild plan infuses their otherwise tedious day-to-day with humor and tenderness, because although for some their lives are coming to an end, for them it is just a new beginning." Official site [Spanish]. IMDb. Wikipedia. North American Premiere.

Wikipedia has synopsized the film's critical reception: "The film premiered on 19 September 2011 at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Neil Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film 'a genuine crowd pleaser deserving of the widest possible exposure' and 'one of the most accomplished Spanish films, from any genre, of recent years.' Young wrote: 'Wrinkles takes a commendably unsentimental and nuanced approach to a complex subject, one that avoids melodramatic situations and simplistic characterizations while adhering to certain conventions of this particular sub-genre. . . . There's no shortage of genuine poignancy here and though Nani Garcia's score largely hits conventional, predictable beats, each tear is hard earned and never simply "jerked." Ferreras' animation style is realistic and direct with close attention paid to tiny specifics of decor, clothing and gesture.' Fionnuala Halligan wrote in Screen Daily: 'Ignacio Ferreras worked on Sylvain Chomet's Oscar-nominated The Illusionist and he carries the flame forward here with the moving cel animation Wrinkles (Arrugas), easily one of the better films to emerge from San Sebastian this year.' Halligan praised the characterizations of the two main characters and their relationship, and wrote: 'Some of the story's other aspects are more broadly sketched, however, and they could occasionally be accused of labelling out the pathos too liberally . . . There are nicely-judged moments of humor, however, and Wrinkles restrains itself in a most dignified manner when it comes to the inevitable, but tender, denouement.' "