New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2013

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PIXOTE (HECTOR BABENCO 1980)

ND/NF Archive index

The FSLC blog provides today an archival index by year of the lineups of every New Directors/New Films series since they began in 1972:

"After we published a brief overview of the four decade history of New Director/New Films festival, we got a lot of requests for a full archive of past ND/NF lineups. Since we aim to please, here is a list of every feature that has been screened at ND/NF since its inception in 1972. Enjoy!" Actually they might better say "Drool!

For the archive/index go here.

Discoveries include: LA SALAMANDRE (Alain Tanner), THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (Steven Spielberg), PIXOTE (Hector Babenco), WILD STYLE (Charlie Ahearn), TAMPOPO (Juzo Itami), SLACKER (Richard Linklater), CLERKS (Kevin Smith), WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (Todd Solodnz), RUN LOLA RUN (Tom Tykwer), REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES (Patricia Cardozo), HALF NELSON (Ryan Fleck), THE COVE (Louie Psihoyos), THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011).

I've only done them recently. I do think maybe the last three were better than this year's and to prove it here they are:

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39th New Directors/New Films (2010)

3 Backyards (Eric Mendelsohn, 2010)
Amer (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009)
Beautiful Darling (James Rasin, 2010)
Bilal’s Stand (Sultan Sharrief, 2009)
Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Down Terrace (Ben Wheatley, 2009)
Evening Dress (Myriam Aziza, 2009)
Every Day is a Holiday (Dima El-Horr, 2009)
The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Love, 2009)
Frontier Blues (Babak Jalali, 2009)
The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude, 2009)
How I Ended This Summer (Alexei Popogrebsky, 2010)
Hunting & Sons (Sander Burger, 2010)
I Am Love (Kuca Guadagnino, 2009)
I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan, 2009)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, 2009)
The Last Train Home (Lixin Fan, 2009)
The Man Next Door (Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, 2009)
My Perestroika (Robin Hessman, 2010)
Night Catches Us (Tanya Hamilton, 2010)
Northless (Rigoberto Perezcano, 2009)
The Oath (Laura Poitras, 2010)
The Red Chapel (Mads Brügger, 2009)
Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)
Tehroun (Nader T. Homayoun, 2009)
Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat, 2009)

40th New Directors/New Films (2011)

678 (Mohamed Diab, 2010)
At Ellen’s Age (Pia Marais, 2010)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)
Belle Epine (Rebecca Zlotowski, 2010)
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011)
Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011)
Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi, 2010)
Curling (Denis Côté, 2010)
The Destiny of Lesser Animals (Deron Albright, 2011)
El Velador (Natalia Almada, 2011)
Gromozeka (Vladimir Kott, 2010)
Happy, Happy (Anne Sewitsky, 2010)
Hit So Hard (P. David Ebersole, 2011)
Hospitalité (Koji Fukada, 2010)
Incendies (Denis Villenueve, 2010)
Majority (Seren Yüce, 2010)
Man Without a Cell Phone (Sameh Zoabi, 2010)
Margin Call (JC Chandor, 2011)
Memory Lane (Mikhaël Hers, 2010)
Microphone (Ahmad Abdalla, 2010)
Octubre (Daniel and Diego Vega, 2010)
Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, 2010)
Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011)
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (Matthew Bate, 2011)
Some Days are Better Than Others (Matt McCormick, 2010)
Summer of Goliath (Nicolás Pereda, 2010)
Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2010)
Winter Vacation (Li Hongqi, 2010)


The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011). Photo: LOUVERTURE FILMS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

41st New Directors/New Films (2012)

5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi, 2011)
The Ambassador (Mads Brügger, 2011)
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance, 2011)
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)
Breathing (Karl Markovics, 2011)
Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011)
Donoma (Djinn Carrénard, 2011)
Fear and Desire (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)
Found Memories (Julia Murat, 2011)
Generation P (Victor Ginzburg, 2011)
Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon, 2012)
Goodbye (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2011)
Hemel (Sacha Polak, 2012)
How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012)
Huan Huan (Song Chuan, 2011)
It Looks Pretty from a Distance (Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal, 2011)
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
The Minister (Pierre Schöller, 2011)
Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)
Now, Forager (Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin, 2012)
Omar Killed Me (Roschdy Zem, 2011)
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes, 2011)
The Rabbi’s Cat (Joann Sfar, Antoine Delesvaux, 2011)
The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Huw Evans, 2011)
Romance Joe (Lee Kwang-kuk, 2011)
Teddy Bear (Mads Matthiesen, 2012)
Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova, 2011)
Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki, 2010)

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If Upstream Color ends up in many Top 10 lists at year's end, it would confirm my impression that this is the most over-rated film in recent years. Ok, let's be diplomatic shall we: there is no other contemporary movie I find less worthy of praise relative to the opinion of the majority of critics. I watched it with 2 friends who are 27 and 32 years old, a filmmaker/archivist and a film professor, and both found the film mannerist, shallow, and juvenile. The frenetic pace of the film (we estimated average shot length (ASL) at bet. 1 to 2 seconds) hides a dearth of ideas or feelings of any substance or consequence. I can see how UC works as a puzzler for some people and probably also as a kind of audiovisual sensation machine but it didn't work for me even within those narrow confines.

I take your point that all younger, informed viewers (they're not a uniform block, after all) do not praise Shane Carruth's long awaited UPSTREAM COLOR and your disliking it should not be taken as a sign of your age. I shouldn't have implied that, or even hint at it as a possibility, if I seemed to. Artists don't get "old" and good critics don't either.

Adjectives like "mannerist, shallow, and juvenile" have little value, however -- I've said this many times before -- without arguments and examples to explain what one means by them in any particular instance. What's needed from you here then, therefore, is a review, not just a reaction, however that reaction may have been shared with putatively well informed younger viewers. I should think you particularly as a film teacher would be aware that intelligent discourse is not a matter of emoting or tossing out adjectives but of information, illustration, and reasoned argument. Our former contributor arsaib used to say, very wisely and helpfully I think, that what mattered here wasn't evaluations of films but the reasons given for making them. This should be obvious if this is to remain the intelligent, informed film review and discussion site it has always sought to be, often with your strong support. I'd want to know rather what you or your screening comrades thought of PRIMER, if you've thought about his earlier film and how you relate it to this one. That would be interesting, and would carry more weight, even if it were still negative.

You may be right. I may be wrong. That's why I'd like to hear what you really have to say. Or the truth, as so often is the case and then is so much more interesting, may be somewhere in between.

As I said earlier in more than one post, I don't write reviews, not anymore. I write comments and I will continue to write them. It's your choice whether to respond to them or not. I promise to stop posting if no one responds to my posts.

Well, I got you to write something, anyway. But why not write reviews? Too busy teaching film to write about film for us anymore? What a shame. 25 words don't take long to write, and can constitute a pretty decent review, if well worded. As I said or meant to say, this is a film that needs watching more than once, you often watch films more than once and revise your opinion, and I hope you'll do that for UPSREAM COLOR.

It's a film I wrote about favorably on this site in the New Directors series. Variety and Hollywood Reporter had good things to say about it. Almost everybody did -- but that's why you say it's the Most Overrated. Well. We'll see. Metacritic 80, and the lowest score, the worst review, is rated at a 60. Mike D'Angelo on the Chicago Music Box Theater site (expanded from an earlier review):

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You’re Going To Want To
See It More Than Once:
UPSTREAM COLOR By Mike D’Angelo

Nine years ago, an obscenely talented, entirely self-taught filmmaker named shane Carruth made a
cautionary tale called PRIMER, about two engineers who accidentally build a time machine in their
garage. It turned out to be more cautionary than he probably anticipated. Carruth practically shot
the movie in his own garage, on a budget of roughly $7000; it won the grand prize at that year’s
sundance Film Festival, landed a distribution deal, was hailed as a masterpiece of lo-fi sci-fi. For all
its self-evident brilliance, however, PRIMER is a tad impenetrable. Few saw it during its theatrical run,
and those who did often went back multiple times—partly for the sheer pleasure of the experience,
but also in an attempt to work out the precise mechanics of its recursive narrative. Carruth then
spent years struggling in vain to secure financing for an even more ambitious follow-up. It’s not hard
to imagine him identifying with the character he played in his first picture, running himself ragged
trying to capitalize on his astonishing good fortune.

UPstREAM COLOR is Carruth’s second feature. here at last. It’s not the insane project he spent the
last decade pursuing, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that from watching it. Perhaps no movie you
see this year will excite so much discussion. And while it’s recognizably Carruth’s work—particularly in
its unfashionable emphasis on montage, deriving meaning primarily from the way each brief, precise
shot relates to those before and after—it’s also a dramatic gear-shift from chilly and intellectual to
intuitive and sensual. Indeed, while uPstREAM CoLoR has a fair amount of (purely functional)
dialogue, it’s essentially a silent film, obsessed not just with color but with texture and movement
and rhythm. you’ll want to turn off the decoder ring, if you can manage it, and just allow yourself to
luxuriate in its associative grandeur.

Still, let’s not pretend this is an easy film to grasp—though it’s knotty in a very different way from
PRIMER. What happens isn’t in question this time; what to make of what happens is the tricky
part. here’s what’s certain: We meet a woman, Kris (Amy seimetz), who appears to be an upscale
professional working with special effects in some capacity. she’s drugged, hypnotized, and robbed
of everything she owns. unable to recall or comprehend what’s happened to her, she falls into
a codependent relationship with Jeff (Carruth), a man she meets on a train, who seems to have
undergone the same traumatic experience. Both, meanwhile, have been “sampled” by a strange man
(Andrew sensenig) who has surgically transferred their essence—and while I’ve been working very
hard to obscure the bizarre details up to this point, I can’t keep it up any longer—into some pigs.
henry David thoreau’s Walden plays a key role in the story, as does a grub that inhabits the dirt
underneath certain orchids. Also, pigs. Did I mention pigs?

Trying to make literal sense of this baldly metaphorical picture can be fun but isn’t strictly
necessary—it’s meant to work on a more primal level, bypassing the logic circuits. Visual and aural
rhymes are constant and richly suggestive. Judging from the two films he’s made so far, Carruth
seems particularly interested in destructive feedback loops; one memorable interlude in uPstREAM
CoLoR (there are few conventional “scenes”) finds Kris and Jeff heatedly arguing about whether
certain childhood memories are his or hers. the film is a study of damaged people in which both
the damage and the method of recovery has been made productively strange, allowing Carruth to
reclaim some potent ideas that have become clichés. It’s also a dazzling exercise in pure form, with
a cinematic syntax that’s confident and exacting yet still feels wildly spontaneous—part Kubrick,
part Malick. And it provides seimetz (who’s a filmmaker herself) with a role that in many ways defies
traditional acting, but which she nonetheless makes defiantly vivid.

The most exciting aspect of Carruth’s movies, though, in the end, may be the immense respect they
afford the viewer. Not only does he refuse to spoon-feed, in the tiresome manner of most hollywood
fare (and even a sizable percentage of indie films), but he continually credits you with the intelligence
to infer cause from effect, presenting you with B and trusting that you’ll work out A, which remains
firmly offscreen, on your own. “you can step off the tile,” the thief (thiago Martins) tells a catatonic
Kris at the outset of her ordeal, as her toes hover nervously in mid-air. “the rest of the floor will
support your weight now.” Rather than show us Kris being hypnotized into immobility, as almost any
other filmmaker would do for clarity’s sake, Carruth cuts directly to her release—which is every bit as
clear and far more arresting. And this moment, too, feels vaguely autobiographical. that such a gifted
artist has at long last sprung himself from the imaginary prison of development hell should make film
buffs everywhere let out a mighty cheer.

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http://www.musicboxtheatre.com/asset...INAL-LoRes.pdf

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Playing back to back at Roxie Theater, Amy Seimetz's directorial debut Sun Don't Shine and Shane Carruth's Upstream Color!
--press release from San Francisco Film Society 16 May 2013.

In this wondrously accomplished and furiously expressive drama [Sun Don't Shine] blending the moody rambles of a road movie with the tightly ratcheted criminal tension of a film noir the director Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color), in her first feature, captures the wildly flailing energy and exhausted torpor of grinding frustration as well as the flickering grace of stifled dreams. Her protagonists, Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley), are classic young lovers on the run, driving through rural Florida with a body in the trunk of their car, but violence, fear, and distrust poison their romance from the movie's very start, and things only get worse as they head toward St. Petersburg, where Leo hopes to get help from a former girlfriend (Kit Gwin). - Richard Brody, The New Yorker. For details and tickets, visit roxie.com.

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OUR NIXON

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An opening date has been announced for Penny Lane's private White House footage film frm ND/NF 2013, OUR NIXON: August 30, 2013.

Review here.

I don't know how you manage to write so many well-written reviews in such a short time. You are both very talented and hard-working. And here I am complaining that your review of STORIES WE TELL is unnecessarily revealing, or revealing in a way that would have diminished my enjoyment of the film had I read the review before watching the film. I also wish you would analyze the way this doc is just as much about cinematic narrative as it is about a family's history. This film is as self-conscious as movies get. Brilliant!

You say

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I don't know how you manage to write so many well-written reviews in such a short time.

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Then you say

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I also wish you would analyze the way this doc is just as much about cinematic narrative as it is about a family's history.

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Well, there is your answer to the first question. I can manage to write so many well-written reviews in such a short time by not going into every analytical possibility.

I've always been warned I tend to tell too much. However I invariably find out that there have been in-print mainstream reviews in New York publications that turn out to have revealed just as much about the movie in question or even more.

In the case of Sarah Polley's documentary, revelation is the name of the game. What comes up, is whether the revelations are really ultimately true. Or how much the arrangement of revelations is calculated to create a distorting effect. Whatever the case, it all works very well, and though I had doubts about Polley, severe after her second film, this convinces me she is good and has talent and staying power.

However I think, for instance, Alan Berliner's First Cousin Once Removed (NYFF 2012) makes for a family/personal intimate documentary study that is as deep and interesting or more so. Self-consciousness comes with the game, in making family docs.

You're right.
It's just that for me what truly makes this movie extraordinary, what makes it worth seeing more than once, what elevates this film beyond the curiosity it generates about Polley's origins, are certain notions about the nature of remembrance and memory and, even more so, the self-consciousness of its narrative process.
Do you know whether the Berliner film is scheduled for US release?

No, it's still being shown at a lot of festivals. Follow it on its Facebook page.

Viola (MATÍAS PIÑERO)

Viola was released theatrically by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Frid., July 12, 2023. It has gotten rave reviews (Metacritic 85), though this is based on only seven reviews, and AV Club (D'Angelo, oft an independent) gives it B- (but in his severe personal rating system only a 46) VIOLA shows promise and a distinctive style and point of view, were the needed jolt out of the hermetic festival world I've spoken of to come. The accolades surprise me; the positive reaction is due to rewakening to Shakespearean cinematic possibilities via Wheedan's MUCH ADO, plus the summer blockbuster doldrums with Guellermo del Toro's new one beautiful but numbing and even Almoddovar coming out with a bad movie.

Our Nixon (Penny Lane 2013)

The film premieres Thursday, Aug. 8, 2013 on CNN. As mentioned theatrical release begins with IFC Aug. 30. The film's own website will give you locations and dates in the future.

Though I think there's less than meets the eye, or less than people expect, it has botten very good reviews judging by a Metacritic rating: 74.

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM 2103
SXSW 2013
NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS (CLOSING NIGHT FILM) 2013
WINNER, "Best Documentary" Seattle International Film Festival 2013
WINNER, "Adrienne Shelly Award for Excellence in Filmmaking" Nantucket Film Festival 2013
WINNER "Karen Schmeer Editing Award" Independent Film Festival Boston 2013
WINNER "Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival" Ann Arbor Film Festival 2013

OSCAR JUBIS:

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Do you know whether the Alan Berliner film is destined for US release?

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I can answer your question now (Aug. 7, 2013):

HBO Debut: Monday, September 23 [2013]

> Susan Norget Film Promotion | 198 Sixth Avenue | Suite 1 | New York | NY | 10013

"FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED
ACCLAIMED FILMMAKER ALAN BERLINER'S
INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF HIS COUSIN, POET EDWIN HONIG
AND HIS JOURNEY THROUGH ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE
HBO Debut: Monday, September 23"