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    New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2015

    Selects

    FEBRUARY 29-Narch 5, 2015 2014 PUBLIC SCREENINGS
    Full FSLC program here.

    GENERAL FILM FORUM discussion and announcement thread HERE.



    MARCH 18-29 2015 PUBLIC SCREENINGS

    As before I will attend screenings of all the New Directors/New Films series and a few of the more elusive Film Comment Selects. A link index of the reviews is below. All but Theeb were shown in the press screenings and are covered in this thread.

    Links to the reviews:

    Christmas, Again (Charles Poekel 2014)
    Screening with Going Out (Ted Fendt 2014, 8 mins.)

    Court (Chaitanya Tamhane 2014)
    The Creation of Meaning/La creazione di significato (Simone Rapisarda Casanova 2014)
    Diary of a Teenage Girl, The (Marielle Heller 2014)
    Dog Lady (Laura Citarella, Verónica Llinás 2015)
    Entertainment (Rick Alverson 2015)
    Fool, The/Durak (Yuriy Bykov 2014)
    Fort Buchanan (Benjamin Crotty 2014)
    Screening with Taprobana (Gabriel Abrantes 2014, 24 mins.)

    Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz 2014)
    The Great Man (Sarah Leonor 2014)
    Haemoo (Shim Sung-bo 2014)
    High Society/Le beau monde (Julie Lopes-Curval 2014)--FCS
    Los Hongos (Oscar Ruiz Navia 2014)
    K (Darhad Erdenibulag & Emyr ap Richard 2015)
    The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid 2014)
    Screening with: Why? (Nadav Lapid 2015, 5 mins.)

    Line of Credit (Salomé Alexi 2014)
    Listen to Me Marlon (Stevan Riley 214)
    Mercuriales (Virgil Vernierj 2014)
    Ow (Yohei Suzuki 2014)
    Parabellum (Lukas Valenta Rinner 2015)
    Screening with Colours (2 mins.) (Evan Johnson 2014)

    Phoenix (Christian Petzold 2014)--FCS
    SHORTS Program 1
    SHORTS Program 2
    Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar (2014)
    Tired Moonlight (Britni WesT 2014)
    The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (2014)
    Tu dors Nicole (Stéphane Lafleur 2014)
    Violet (Bas Devos 2014)
    Western (Bill, Turner Ross 2015)
    White God (Kornél Mundruczó 2014)
    SURVEYING THE SERIES.


    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 01-20-2016 at 11:05 AM.

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    March 18-29, 2015
    Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation as the premier festival for works that break or re-cast the cinematic mold. Celebrating its 44th year in 2015, the festival takes place March 18-29 and is presented jointly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art.

    Tickets go on sale to FSLC and MoMA members on March 3. Tickets go on sale to the general public on March 10.

    Early selections.


    Christmas, Again | Charles Poekel
    USA | 2014 | 79 min.

    Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling Christmas trees on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship, shot on 16mm by acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Listen Up Philip, Heaven Knows What).


    Court | Chaitanya Tamhane
    India | 2014 | 116 min.

    Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi with English subtitles
    Chaitanya Tamhane’s absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India won top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals and features a brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors who capture the rich complexity and contradictions of Indian society.

    The Creation of Meaning / La creazione di significato | Simone Rapisarda Casanova
    Canada/Italy | 2014 | 95 min.

    Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s documentary-fiction hybrid—winner of the Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno—lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation, filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains.


    Entertainment | Rick Alverson
    USA | 2015 | 110 min.

    The Comedy director Rick Alverson teams with comedians Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and Tim Heidecker for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. A washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime works his way across the Mojave Desert on a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing.


    Goodnight Mommy | Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz
    Austria | 2014 | 100 min.

    German with English subtitles
    The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Produced by Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year.


    The Great Man | Sarah Leonor
    France | 2014 | 107 min.

    French with English subtitles
    The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s by turns heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature, which follows two French Legionnaires at the end of their posting in Afghanistan.


    The Kindergarten Teacher | Nadav Lapid
    Israel/France | 2014 | 119 min.

    Hebrew with English subtitles
    Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation in which a fortysomething teacher in Tel Aviv becomes obsessed with one of her charges, a 5-year-old poetry prodigy, yielding a perversely romantic work whose underlying conviction seems to be that in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.


    Theeb | Naji Abu Nowar
    Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK | 2014 | 100 min.

    Arabic with English subtitles
    Classic storytelling at its finest, this quietly gripping adventure tale, set in 1916 in a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, follows the younger brother of a Bedouin guide, tasked with helping a British Army Officer and his translator, as he learns to survive and becomes a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults.


    The Tribe | Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
    Ukraine | 2014 | 132 min.

    Set it in a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds and told entirely through un-subtitled sign language, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize–winning feature debut overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget.


    White God | Kornél Mundruczó
    Hungary | 2014 | 119 min.

    Hungarian with English subtitles
    Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity, as an outcast mutt and an army of fellow canines set out to take their revenge on the humans who have wronged them.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-17-2015 at 01:11 PM.

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    New Directors/New Films: FULL SLATE 2015



    ND/NF 2015 full series:

    The Diary of a Teenage Girl | Marielle Heller
    USA | 2014 | 100 min.

    Winner of a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at Sundance, this adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel, set in 1970s San Francisco, features stunning newcomer Bel Powley as a 15-year-old girl whose sexual awakening involves having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård). Opening Night!

    Entertainment | Rick Alverson
    USA | 2015 | 110 min.

    The Comedy director Rick Alverson teams with comedians Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and Tim Heidecker for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. A washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime works his way across the Mojave Desert on a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. Closing Night!

    Christmas, Again | Charles Poekel
    USA | 2014 | 79 min.

    Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling Christmas trees on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship, shot on 16mm by acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Listen Up Philip, Heaven Knows What).

    Screening with:
    Going Out | Ted Fendt
    USA | 2014 | 8 min.

    Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn.

    CourtCourt | Chaitanya Tamhane
    India | 2014 | 116 min.

    Chaitanya Tamhane’s absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India won top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals and features a brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors who capture the rich complexity and contradictions of Indian society.

    The Creation of Meaning / La creazione di significato | Simone Rapisarda Casanova
    Canada/Italy | 2014 | 95 min.

    Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s documentary-fiction hybrid--winner of the Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno—-lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation, filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains.

    Dog Lady
    Dog Lady | Laura Citarella
    & Verónica Llinás
    Argentina | 2015 | 95 min.
    This indelible and quietly haunting study of an enigmatic, nameless woman living with a loyal pack of stray dogs in silent, self-imposed exile on the edge of Buenos Aires follows her across four seasons with an attentive and sympathetic eye, culminating in an unforgettable extended final shot.

    The Fool | Yuriy Bykov
    Russia | 2014 | 116 min.

    An engineering student discovers two massive cracks in a decaying provincial housing project but is stymied in his attempts to avert a catastrophe in this stinging rebuke to the endemic corruption of the Russian body politic, which earned writer-director-actor Yuriy Bykov four awards at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival.

    Fort Buchanan | Benjamin Crotty
    France/Tunisia | 2014 | 65 min.

    Shot in richly textured 16mm, Benjamin Crotty’s queer soap opera chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, who seeks comfort and companionship from the sexually frustrated army wives of a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti.

    Screening with:
    Taprobana | Gabriel Abrantes
    Portugal/Sri Lanka/Denmark/France | 2014 | 24 min.

    A sensuous and debauched portrait of Portugal’s national poet Luís Vaz de Camões teetering on the borderline between Paradise and Hell.

    Goodnight Mommy | Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz
    Austria | 2014 | 100 min.

    The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Produced by Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year.

    The Great Man | Sarah Leonor
    France | 2014 | 107 min.

    The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s by turns heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature, which follows two French Legionnaires at the end of their posting in Afghanistan.

    Haemoo | Shim Sung-bo
    South Korea | 2014 | 111 min.

    First-time director Shim Sung-bo distills a gripping drama from a real-life incident and delivers a gritty, brooding spectacle of life and death on the high seas. This tense, hair-raising nautical thriller was produced by Bong Joon-ho—whose second feature, Memories of Murder, was written by Shim.

    Los HongosLos Hongos | Oscar Ruiz Navia
    Colombia/Argentina/France/Germany | 2014 | 103 min.

    Full of vibrant color and great music, Los Hongos is a charming and surprising coming-of-age film that follows Cali street artists Ras and Calvin, good friends from disparate class backgrounds who band together with other artists to paint a tribute to the student protestors of the Arab Spring.

    K | Darhad Erdenibulag & Emyr ap Richard
    China | 2015 | 88 min.

    At once familiar and strange, this reimagining of Kafka’s The Castle is utterly specific to its striking Inner Mongolia setting, and totally faithful to is origins in portraying faceless bureaucracy as a timeless and universal frustration. Produced by Jia Zhang-ke, K is the rare literary adaptation that honors the source material even while reinventing it.

    The Kindergarten Teacher | Nadav Lapid
    Israel/France | 2014 | 119 min.

    Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation in which a fortysomething teacher in Tel Aviv becomes obsessed with one of her charges, a 5-year-old poetry prodigy, yielding a perversely romantic work whose underlying conviction seems to be that in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.

    Screening with:
    Why? | Nadav Lapid
    Israel | 2015 | 5 min.

    A filmmaker is asked by Cahiers du Cinéma to choose the image that made him believe in cinema.

    Line of Credit | Salomé Alexi
    France/Georgia | 2014 | 85 min.

    Nino is a forty-something woman with a small shop in Tbilisi who grew up without thinking about the complexities of finance. But when the money gets tight, Nino goes about taking loan after loan, but even as the situation grows reckless, Salomé Alexi maintains a beautifully light, comedic tone in her feature-film debut.

    Listen to Me Marlon | Stevan Riley
    UK | 2015 | 100 min.

    Documentarian Stevan Riley explores the on- and off-screen lives of Marlon Brando, using a vast trove of audio recordings made by the actor himself to allow Brando to tell his own story, filled with bones to pick, strong opinions, and fascinating traces of one of the most alluring figures in the history of cinema.


    Mercuriales | Virgil Vernier
    France | 2014 | 100 min.

    This freely inventive breakthrough work from ambitious young French director Virgil Vernier is a radical experiment in form that also lavishes tender attention on its characters. As two young receptionists in the titular Paris high-rise drift from one situation to the next, Vernier’s visual style grows ever more surprising and beautiful.

    OwOw | Yohei Suzuki
    Japan | 2014 | 89 min.

    Jobless young Tetsuo and his girlfriend Yuriko are inexplicably immobilized after laying eyes on an orb-like object that appears out of nowhere, setting into motion an enigmatic chain of events and an obsessive investigation by journalist Deguchi in this deadpan mystery that just might be a comment on the social malaise and inertia of 21st-century Japan.

    Parabellum | Lukas Valenta Rinner
    Argentina/Austria/Uruguay | 2015 | 75 min.

    In the midst of riots and social unrest, a Buenos Aires office worker puts his life on hold and departs for a vacation with a difference—think hand-to-hand combat and homemade explosives training in place of yoga and nature walks—in Austrian filmmaker Lukas Valenta Rinner’s carefully composed, minimalist end-of-days tale.

    Screening with:
    Colours | Evan Johnson
    Canada | 2014 | 2 min.

    A compact, chromatic visual essay on our way of seeing by Guy Maddin collaborator Evan Johnson.

    Theeb
    Theeb | Naji Abu Nowar

    Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK | 2014 | 100 min.
    Classic storytelling at its finest, this quietly gripping adventure tale, set in 1916 in a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, follows the younger brother of a Bedouin guide, tasked with helping a British Army Officer and his translator, as he learns to survive and becomes a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults.

    Tired Moonlight
    Tired Moonlight | Britni West
    USA | 2014 | 76 min.

    Britni West’s Slamdance-winning directorial debut, photographed on Super-16mm and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast in semi-fictionalized roles, discovers homespun poetry among the good folk of her native Kalispell, Montana, yielding a sui generis slice of contemporary naturalism.

    The Tribe
    The Tribe | Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
    Ukraine | 2014 | 132 min.

    Set it in a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds and told entirely through un-subtitled sign language, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize–winning feature debut overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget.

    Tu dors Nicole
    Tu dors Nicole | Stéphane Lafleur
    Canada | 2014 | 93 min.

    This disarmingly atmospheric comedy, following the summer (mis)adventures of a band of utterly unique characters and shot in lush black-and-white 35mm, is Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur’s ode to the wry tradition of Aki Kaurismäki, Fernando Eimbcke, and Jim Jarmusch.

    VioletViolet | Bas Devos
    Belgium/Netherlands | 2014 | 82 min.

    Writer/director Bas Devos’s feature debut is a muted but harrowing portrayal of aimless, maladjusted youth. With an uneasy yet entrancing atmosphere, Violet is a continually surprising exploration of pain and guilt, an interior voyage that only grows tenser and more affecting as it arrives at darker, less comprehensible regions of the soul.

    Western
    Western | Bill & Turner Ross
    USA | 2015 | 93 min.

    Drug cartel violence and border politics threaten the neighborly rapport between Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico in Bill and Turner Ross’s trenchant and passionately observed documentary, which firmly positions the brothers at the frontier of a new, compelling kind of American vernacular cinema.

    White God
    White God | Kornél Mundruczó
    Hungary | 2014 | 119 min.

    Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity, as an outcast mutt and an army of fellow canines set out to take their revenge on the humans who have wronged them.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-06-2015 at 06:40 AM.

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    Marielle Heller: DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL (2015)

    Opening Night
    MARIELLE HELLER: DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL (2015)


    WIIG, SARSGARD, ET AL. IN DIARY

    Growing up bold and hedonistic in Seventies San Francisco

    In The Diary of a Teenage Girl, first-time director Marielle Heller succeeds admirably in adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel—about sexual and drug experimentation in 1970s San Francisco. This is due primarily to the discovery of young English actress innie Bel Powley, whose precocious 15-year-old character Minnie Goetze, Gloeckner's alter ego, is in every scene and voice-over narrates in a facsimile of Minnie's cassette-taped diaries. "Oh my God, I had sex today!" she breathlessly declares at the very outset. And she's had sex, for the first time but by no means the last, with her mother (Kirsten Wiig's) boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), a handsome, slightly goofy, beer-quaffing almost-hippie. For a while, this titillating and ostensibly shocking material is wholly absorbing and almost delightful. It may go on a few minutes too long, but Heller & Co. have got it right.

    Without being sticklers for accuracy, the filmmakers have used their faded sepia cinematography and authentic locations to recreate the mood and look of 1975 San Francisco beautifully. This is still going on, and works pretty well for those of us who were there, all the way to the end of the film when its lack of a strong story line has caused interest in Minnie to fade. For young women looking for experiences to identify with, there may be no fading. Kirsten Wiig keeps her edge as the hard-partying mom, though the role isn't one quite worthy of a comic of Wiig's caliber. For those young women, Skarsgård's generic attractiveness and almost perfect replication of an ineffectual young American male may stay interesting, even if it's clearly no more than skin-deep.

    The important aspect of the film, for sophisticated and broad minded audiences, is that it manages to show a 35-year-old adult male deflowering (at her instigation) and repeatedly bedding an underage girl, without seeming shocking or in bad taste. It's a situation that fits in perfectly with semi-boho 1975 San Francisco while it might feel decadent or repellant shown in another milieu. Gloeckner was putatively depicting the environment where she actually grew up. This is an era of hedonism: Minnie is unabashedly hedonistic. And as Bilge Ebiri wrote at Sundance for The Vulture, "the earthiness that Heller and Powley bring to Minnie’s experimentation with sex, drugs, and independence is refreshingly amoral, funny, and poignant."

    The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of those cute-bold-offbeat indie films Sundance dreams of, one that convinces, that has a point of view, and flows. Ideally, it will appeal to an audience beyond young women or nostalgia seekers. Another element that makes it worth watching is the most specifically autobiographical one. Minnie (so brightly and compellingly embodied by Bel Powley) is wide eyed and naive but also boldly experimental and gloriously enthusiastic about sex (some little animations, adding to the post-Flower Child era feel, embellish this). But she's also a budding Crumb-style cartoonist and graphic artist, filling sketchbooks with drawings and comic page layouts on a daily basis. As with so many coming of age stories about a young artist, the main event is that becoming -- going out into the world with her drawings. This too the film effectively portrays, thus giving the film a little wider context.

    The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance 2015. Now a Sony Pictures Classics release. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, a series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-16-2015 at 07:55 AM.

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    Bas Devos: VIOLET (2014)

    BAS DEVOS: VIOLET (2014)


    Still from Violet

    Belgian bike boy suffering vivid loss

    In Bas Devos' mute, artful feature, Jesse (Cesar De Sutter) is a blond Belgian teenager who is forced to watch his pal Jonas knifed to death in a mall (an event the viewer also sees helplessly, playing off on CCTV surveillance monitors); and he spends the rest of the film trying to process this loss. A lot of things happen (and it has a vérité feel that can't be entirely faked). Not much is said. The sometimes avant-garde-feeling cinematography speaks volumes, to our aesthetic sense, at least.

    Clearly, the material in Devos' Violet closely matches Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, though Jesse is less overtly guilty, just appeals complicit to his friends, who don't understand why he was there but couldn't stop Jonas from getting killed, or why Jonas got killed and he didn't. The slim, inarticulate boys are much the same, with BMX bikes and a forested bike playground reached by car replacing the questionable "Paranoid Park" of Van Sant's skateboarders. I am obliged to Boyd van Hoeij, reviewing Violet at the Berlinale for Hollywood Reporter, for the reminder that Paranoid Park was shot by Wong Kar Wai's eccentric and brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle. This film turns out to have been done, in 65mm. and with the digital Alexa by Nicolas Karakatsanis, perhaps an equal ace behind the camera and who has recently also been the dp for not only Bullhead, the extraordinarily talented Matthias Schoenaerts' breakthrough film directed by Michaël R. Roskam, but for Roskam's The Drop (with Schoenaerts as well as Gandolfini) and The Loft, another Belgian-directed film with Schoenaerts and American actors. But all these are guaranteed to be more accessible than the mute and withholding Violet, which challenges its viewers to stay tuned and put things together into a coherent tale. Van Sant did however do much the same thing in Paranoid Park, if more accessibly.

    One could go on at length about the special beauties of Karakatsanis' images. As van Hoeij puts it, the 65mm images, which provide a wealth of shallow focus in closeup portraits -- lingering long on De Sutter's head from above, for instance, right after the crime, as he stares down for a long silent stretch waiting for his mother to comfort him and clean the blood off him -- everything but the long blond swath of hair a beautiful blur. Images contrasty like this seem to sing but also, more to the point here, can seem to shriek at us. Or there is Jesse's family's house seen from a distance in the twilight, with colors quietly intense and everything in the rooms clearly visible, though small. Meanwhile the academy ratio images feel intimate but confined, like the uptight sensibility of the inarticulate boys, who seem to re-bond with Jesse only by riding bikes beside and around him; and the confinement of his (again inarticulate) grief. It's not clear every viewer will grasp any of this; for anybody it may take some effort, and for those out of tune it will seem just willful artiness. But we'd like to see more collaborations between Devos and Karakatsanis. Their use of actors and milueux as well as images is pro.

    But this film risks seeming little more than an arty remake. Mike D'Angelo saw it as part of ND/NF too, and has tweeted: "Gave up on a moody ND/NF film, shot in 1.33, about a teen dirt biker who witnesses a death. Aren’t filmmakers aware of other major films?" and "What I saw was almost exactly PARANOID PARK, except with fewer dialogue scenes and even more shots of kids flying through the air."

    Violet, 82 mins., debuted at the Berlinale February 2014; over a dozen other festival showings since then, including Edinburgh, Karlovy, Sarajevo and Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films of March 2015.


    Cesar De Sutter in Violet
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-17-2015 at 05:45 PM.

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    Britni West: TIRED MOONLIGHT (2014)

    BRITNI WEST: TIRED MOONLIGHT (2014)



    Tired viewer

    The New Directors blurb about Britni West's directorial debut says it "discovers homespun poetry about the good folk of West's native Kalispell, Montana. . . a small town populated by lonely hearts engaging in awkward one-night stands, children with starry eyes and bruised knees, stock-car drivers, junkyard treasure hunters, and bighorn sheep." "Rarely," the blurbist enthuses, "has Big Sky Country ever cast such a sweetly comic and tender spell." The spell eluded me in this sloppy docudrama, which reads more like a poorly edited collection of random footage than a film. West edits as if he had ADD, jumping from one subject to another randomly over and over with no buildup of meaning, though indeed, the kids, drivers, junk hunters, clumsy youthful suitors and oddball couples keep recurring.

    "Photographed in Super-16mm by Adam Ginsberg," the blurb points out, "(who shot Alex Karpovsky's Red Flag (SFJFF 2013)and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast (with the exception of indie favorite Alex Karpovsky) in semi-fictionalized roles, Tired Moonlight is a sui generis sliceof contemporary naturalism." That is a nice way of putting it.

    This film makes most sense when regarded not as a movie but as someone collecting still images (without yet editing them) using a motion picture camera. There is something of Robert Frank's frumpy but iconic photo classic The Americans here. Something of Stephen Shore's semi-urban, not-quite-random American cross-country, crossroads landscapes. Something of Lee Friedlander. Since this is color, often bright color, there is or may need to be something of William Eggleston. But whether Adam Ginsberg and Britni West are aware of these borrowings or they are unconscious is uncertain. More likely the latter, since aesthetically this film is as ugly as any documentary could be that had the justification this lacks of solid content. In any case, West and Ginsberg have not found a mood or a focus. They have not found a story to tell. Or, to put it differently, they have found too many stories to tell, and needed to narrow them down. This is rural Americana. But what does that mean now? How is it different from the heyday of Frank, Friedlander, or Eggleston? West and Ginsberg need to transcend the traditions in their own fresh way. Here they have given us material for a film, but not a film. Winding up with the Fourth of July and a lot of fireworks does not make a conclusion.

    Tired Moonlight, 76 mins., debuted simultaneously at Slamdance and Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-03-2015 at 08:03 AM.

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