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    New Directors/New Films 2017

    New Directors/New Films 2017



    March 15-26, 2017

    For updates and discussion go to the General Film Forum HERE

    Links to the reviews
    4 Days in France/Jours de France (Jérôme Reybaud 2016)
    Albüm (Mehmet Can Mertoglu 2016)
    Arábia (João Dumans, Affonso Uchoa 2017)
    Autumn, Autumn/Chuncheon, Chuncheon (Jang Woo-jin 2017)
    Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman 2017) Centerpiece Film
    By the Time It Gets Dark/Dao khanong (Anocha Suwichakornpong 2016)
    Boundaries/Pays (Chloé Robichaud 2016)
    Challenge, The (Yuri Ancarani 2016)
    Diamond Island (Davy Chou 2016)
    Dreamed Path, The/Der Traumhafte Weg (Angela Schanelec 2016)
    Future Perfect, The/El Futuro Perfecto (Nele Wohlatz 2016)
    Giant, The/Jätten (Johannes Nyholm 2016)
    Happiness Academy/Bonheur académie (Kaori Kinoshita & Alain Della Negra 2017)
    Happy Times Will Come Soon/I tempi felici verranno presto (Alessandro Comodin 2016)
    Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd 2016)
    Last Family, The/Ostatnia Rodzina (Jan P. Matuszynski 2106)
    Last of Us, The/Akhar Wahid Fina 2016)
    Menashe (Joshoa Z. Weinstein 2016)
    My Happy Family/Chemi Bednieri Ojakhi ((Naa Ekvtimiishvili, Simon Gross 2017)
    Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper 2017) Opening Night Film
    Pendular (Julia Murat 2017)
    Person to Person (Dustin Guy Defa 2017) Closing Night
    Quest (Jonathan Olshefski 2016)
    Sexy Durga (Sanal Kumar Sasidharan 2017)
    Strong Island (Yance Ford 2017)
    Summer Is Gone/Ba yue (Zhang Dalei 2016)
    White Sun/Seto Surya (Depak Rauniyar 2016)
    Wound, The (John Trengove 2017)
    Wùlu (Daouda Coulibaly 2016)

    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-17-2017 at 01:15 AM.

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    Here is the whole program of features with the FSLC blurbs:

    New Directors/New Films 2017 (15-26 March)

    The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the following 2017 program of New Directors/New Films (in collaboration with MoMA). Reviews of the films follow in the rest of this thread.

    For dates and times of the films at Lincoln Center and MoMA go HERE.


    PATTY CAKE$

    FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
    All films are digitally projected unless otherwise noted. A fuller list of short films will follow. For the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Walter Reade Theater) and Museum of Modern Art show schedules for each film go HERE.

    Opening Night
    Patti Cake$
    Geremy Jasper, USA, 2017, 108m

    New York Premiere
    Make way for the year's breakout star: newcomer Danielle Macdonald is Patti Cake$, aka Killa P, a burly and brash aspiring rapper with big plans to get out of Jersey. Patti lives with her mother (Bridget Everett), a former singer who drinks away her daughter's wages, and ill grandmother (an epic Cathy Moriarty); meanwhile Patti is assisted in realizing her dreams by her hip-hop partner and BFF Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay) and their mysterious new collaborator Basterd (Mamoudou Athie). This raucous and fresh tale from first-time writer-director Geremy Jasper—a musician and former music video director from Hillsdale, NJ—follows Patti from gas station rap battles to her shifts at the lonely karaoke bar, while empathetically portraying the aspirations and frustrations of three generations of women. With homegrown swagger and contagious energy, Patti Cake$ announces Jasper and Macdonald as major talents. A Fox Searchlight release.


    BEACH RATS

    Centerpiece
    Beach Rats
    Eliza Hittman, USA, 2017, 95m

    New York Premiere
    Eliza Hittman follows up her acclaimed debut It Felt Like Love with this sensitive chronicle of sexual becoming. Frankie (a breakout Harris Dickinson), a bored teenager living in South Brooklyn, regularly haunts the Coney Island boardwalk with his boys — trying to score weed, flirting with girls, killing time. But he spends his late nights dipping his toes into the world of online cruising, connecting with older men and exploring the desires he harbors but doesn’t yet fully understand. Sensuously lensed on 16mm by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Beach Rats presents a colorful and textured world roiling with secret appetites and youthful self-discovery. A Neon release.


    PERSON TO PERSON

    Closing Night
    Person to Person
    Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2017, 84m

    New York Premiere
    This understated yet ambitious sophomore feature by one of American independent cinema’s most exciting young voices follows a day in the lives of a motley crew of New Yorkers. A rookie crime reporter (Abbi Jacobson of Broad City) tags along with her eccentric boss (Michael Cera), pursuing the scoop on a suicide that may have been a murder, leading her to cross paths with a stoic clockmaker (Philip Baker Hall); meanwhile, a precocious teen (Tavi Gevinson) explores her sexuality while playing hooky, and an obsessive record collector (Bene Coopersmith) receives a too-good-to-be-true tip on a rare Charlie Parker LP while his depressed friend (George Sample III) seeks redemption after humiliating his cheating girlfriend. With Person to Person (exquisitely shot in 16mm by rising-star DP Ashley Connor), Defa matches the sophistication of his acclaimed shorts and delights in the freedoms afforded by a bigger canvas.

    4 Days in France / Jours de France
    Jérôme Reybaud, France, 2017, 141m

    French with English subtitles
    North American Premiere
    An erotic road movie like no other, Jérôme Reybaud’s fiction feature debut begins in the dark, as Pierre (Pascal Cervo) uses his smartphone to snap photos of his lover’s sleeping body. Then, as if in a trance, he hits the road without any clear destination, drawn this way or that only by the connections he forges with strangers on a hookup app. Soon, his lover will set out in hot pursuit of Pierre across four long days and nights, crossing paths with a succession of curious characters. In the sophisticated angle he takes on the state of modern Eros, Reybaud evokes the work of Stranger by the Lake director Alain Guiraudie, imbuing the proceedings with mystery, humor, and a restrained yet pronounced sensuality.

    Albüm
    Mehmet Can Mertoglu, Turkey/France/Romania, 2016, 105m

    Turkish with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    In this shrewd and visually accomplished social satire from Turkish filmmaker Mehmet Can Mertoglu, a taxman named Bahar (Şebnem Bozoklu) and his history teacher wife, Cüneyt (Murat Kiliç), adopt a child, only to find they feel no emotional connection to the kid. Further complicating their own situation, the self-involved couple initiates an elaborate ruse, with the assistance of contemporary social media, to alter the facts about how they came to have a family. Stunningly photographed on 35mm by Marius Panduru (DP of Romanian New Wave cornerstone Police, Adjective), Mertoglu’s debut feature uses biting black humor to lampoon present-day Turkish society, capturing in equal measure the absurdity of reality and the reality of the absurd.

    Arábia
    João Dumans & Affonso Uchoa, Brazil, 2017, 97m

    Portuguese with English subtitles
    North American Premiere
    Arábia begins by observing the day-to-day of Andre, a teenager who lives in an industrial area in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. After a local factory worker, Cristiano, has an accident on the job, he leaves behind a handwritten journal, which the boy proceeds to read with relish. The film shifts into road-movie mode to recount the story of Cristiano, an ex-con and eternal optimist who journeys across Brazil in search of work, enduring no shortage of economic hardship but gaining an equal amount of self-knowledge. Invigorating and ever surprising, Arábia is a humanist work of remarkable poise and maturity.

    Autumn, Autumn / Chuncheon, chuncheon
    Jang Woo-jin, South Korea, 2017, 78m

    Korean with English subtitles
    North American Premiere
    With a surprising structure that recalls the work of both Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this delicate sophomore feature by Jang Woo-jin is a tale of human connection and searching for one’s place in the world. It begins simply enough, with a young man sitting next to an older couple on a train from Seoul to the city of Chuncheon. From there, we follow the man as he copes with the anxiety of trying to find a job, and then the couple, who, as it turns out, don’t know each other as well as it seems. With funny and moving scenes that play out in understated yet bravura long takes, Autumn, Autumn is as attuned to the passage of time and fluctuations of light as it is to everyday human drama.

    Screens with
    Léthé
    Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2016, France/Georgia, 15m

    Georgian with English subtitles
    U.S. Premiere
    A lonely horseman wanders past the river of forgetfulness and through a rural Georgian village where both children and adults explore life's more instinctual pleasures.

    Boundaries / Pays
    Chloé Robichaud, Canada, 2016, 100m

    English and French with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    Chloé Robichaud’s sophomore feature centers on three women trying to square their political careers with complicated personal lives. Besco, a fictitious island country off the eastern coast of Canada, possesses vast natural resources that foreign companies would love to tap into, which occasions negotiations between Besco’s president (Macha Grenon) and Canadian government reps (including Natalie Dummar as a junior aide from the Ottawa delegation), mediated by a bilingual American (Emily Van Camp). As these three suffer through endless condescensions and mansplanations, they must also contend with an array of outside threats, from lobbyists, terrorists—and their own families. The performances are impeccable, and Robichaud stylishly renders the often absurd mundanity of her heroines’ political ordeal.

    By the Time It Gets Dark / Dao Khanong
    Anocha Suwichakornpong, France/Netherlands/Qatar/Thailand, 2016, 105m

    Thai with English subtitles
    U.S. Premiere
    In the beguiling, mysterious second feature by Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong, the story of a young film director researching a project about the 1976 massacre of Thai student activists at Thamassat University is just the beginning of a shape-shifting work of fictions within fictions, featuring characters with multiple identities. Drifting across a dizzyingly wide expanse of space and time, By the Time It Gets Dark offers a series of narratives concerning love, longing, the power of cinema, and the vestiges of the past within the present. Asking quietly profound questions about the nature of memory—personal, political, and cinematic—this self-reflexive yet deeply felt film keeps regenerating and unfolding in surprising ways. A KimStim release.

    The Challenge
    Yuri Ancarani, Italy/France/Switzerland, 2016, 69m

    Arabic with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    If you have it, spend it: Italian artist Yuri Ancarani’s visually striking documentary enters the surreal world of wealthy Qatari sheikhs who moonlight as amateur falconers, with no expenses spared along the way. The Challenge follows these men through the rituals that define their lives: perilously racing blacked-out SUVs up and down sand dunes; sharing communal meals; taking their Ferraris out for a spin with their pet cheetahs riding shotgun; and much more. Ancarani’s film is a sly meditation on the collective pursuit of idiosyncratic desires.

    Diamond Island
    Davy Chou, Cambodia/France/Germany/Qatar/Thailand, 2016, 101m
    Khmer with English subtitles

    U.S. Premiere
    In this stylish coming-of-age story, an 18-year-old from the Cambodian provinces arrives at Diamond Island luxury housing development outside Phnom Penh to work a construction job transporting scrap between building sites. He makes friends and courts a local girl, but things grow ever more complicated when his long-estranged brother resurfaces. Making his feature-length fiction debut, Chou (whose documentary Golden Slumbers explored the vanished past of Cambodian cinema) creates an intoxicating blend of naturalism and dreamy stylization, rendering the ecstasies and agonies of late youth with remarkable attention to detail.

    The Dreamed Path / Der traumhafte weg
    Angela Schanelec, Germany, 2016, 86m

    English and German with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    The Dreamed Path traces a precise picture of a world in which chance, emotion, and dreams determine the trajectory of our lives. In 1984 in Greece, a young German couple, Kenneth and Theres, find their romantic relationship tested after his mother suffers an accident. Thirty years later in Berlin, middle-aged actress Ariane splits with her husband David, an anthropologist. Soon, these two couples’ paths cross in unexpected ways, short-circuiting narrative conventions of cause and effect as well as common conceptions of the self. Angela Schanelec, part of the loose collective of innovative German filmmakers that came to be known as the Berlin School, puts her signature formal control to enigmatic and subtly emotional ends in a film of mesmerizing shots and indelible gestures.

    The Future Perfect / El Futuro perfecto
    Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016, 65m

    Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Wohlatz’s assured debut is a playful, exceptionally idea-rich work of fiction with documentary fragments. Seventeen-year-old Xiaobin arrives in Argentina from China unable to speak Spanish. Employed at a Chinese grocery store, she saves up enough money to pay for language classes, and enters into a secret romance with a young Indian man, Vijay. As she begins to grasp the Spanish language’s conditional tense, she imagines a constellation of possible futures.

    Screens with
    Three Sentences About Argentina / Tres oraciones sobre la Argentina
    Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016, 5m

    Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
    U.S. Premiere
    Nele Wohlatz transposes archival footage of Argentinian skiers into prompts for language exercises in this short made as part of an omnibus feature for the Buenos Aires Film Museum.

    The Giant / Jätten
    Johannes Nyholm, Sweden/Denmark, 2016, 86m

    Swedish with English subtitles
    U.S. Premiere
    Rikard lives to play petanque (a kind of lawn-bowling played with hollow steel balls). But his severe physical deformity, coupled with autism, makes communication with the world beyond a very small group of family, friends, and petanque teammates nearly impossible. As Rikard’s team gears up for a prestigious tournament, his fantasies—some involving his mother, who lives in squalor with her pet parrot, and some imagining himself as a giant stomping across a kitschy, romanticist landscape—transport him beyond the confines of the long-term care facility where he lives. Nyholm’s debut feature is a true original: a provocative, grittily realist sports movie, suffused with compassion and humor.

    Happiness Academy / Bonheur Academie
    Kaori Kinoshita & Alain Della Negra, France, 2016, 75m

    French with English subtitles
    U.S. Premiere
    Uncannily melding fiction and documentary, Happiness Academy transports us to a hotel retreat for the real-life Raelian Church, a religious sect devoted to the transmission of knowledge inherited from mankind’s extraterrestrial ancestors. As the new candidates for "awakening" (two of whom are played by actress Laure Calamy and musician Arnaud Fleurent-Didier) spend time together at meals, out by the pool, at bonfires, and participating in new age-y group exercises, an unexpected humanism emerges amid the absurd spirituality. Humorous and moving, direct and enigmatic, this singular film meditates on the peculiar ways in which people strive to give their lives meaning.

    Happy Times Will Come Soon / I Tempi felici verranno presto
    Alessandro Comodin, Italy/France, 2016, 102m

    Italian with English subtitles
    North American Premiere
    Two young fugitives out in the wild, a series of talking heads recounting a local legend about a wolf on the prowl, a loose dramatization of that same myth… With a narrative that enigmatically leaps from one hypnotic passage to another, Alessandro Comodin’s sophomore feature, set deep in the northern Italian woods and drawing on local folklore, is the work of a true original. This beautiful and haunting meditation on the relationships between imagination, desire, and violence is a dreamlike fable with the weight of documentary reality.

    Lady Macbeth
    William Oldroyd, UK, 2016, 89m

    New York Premiere
    The debut feature by accomplished theater director William Oldroyd relocates Nikolai Leskov’s play Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to Victorian England. Florence Pugh is forceful and complex as Lady Katherine, who enters into an arranged marriage with the domineering, repressed Alexander (Paul Hilton), and must contend with her husband’s even more unpleasant mine-owner father (Christopher Fairbank). In this constrictive new milieu, she finds carnal release with one of her husband’s servants (Cosmo Jarvis), but there are profound consequences to her infidelity. Boasting deft performances by an outstanding ensemble cast, Lady Macbeth is a rousing parable about the price of freedom. A Roadside Attractions release.

    The Last Family / Ostatnia rodzina
    Jan P. Matuszynski, Poland, 2016, 124m

    Polish with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    This sort-of biopic of Polish surrealist artist Zdzisław Beksiński, renowned for his stark, unsettling, postapocalyptic paintings, focuses as much on the rest of the funny and reclusive Beksiński family: his religious wife Zofia, a perennially steadying presence; and his son Tomasz, a DJ/translator always on the verge of spiraling out of control. Jan P. Matuszynski’s fiction feature debut renders Beksiński’s home life as a vivid and affecting succession of near-death experiences and psychodramatic blowouts, and shows the brilliant artworks that emerged from all the sturm und drang.

    The Last of Us / Akher Wahed Fina
    Ala Eddine Slim, Tunisia/Qatar/UAE/Lebanon, 2016, 95m

    North American Premiere
    Two men silently traverse a vast, flat landscape; they get in the back of a smuggler’s truck, and soon after they’re attacked by men with guns; one of them escapes to sea, perhaps headed to Europe. He soon then finds himself in an endless forest, where a kind of spiritual journey unfolds. In Ala Eddine Slim’s mysterious, entrancing, dialogue-free film, the political significance of the unnamed protagonist’s journey is given a metaphysical twist. Urgent and evocative, The Last of Us speaks powerfully about both contemporary migration and the ancient struggle between man and nature.

    Menashe
    Joshua Z. Weinstein, USA, 2017, 79m

    Yiddish with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    Something like Woody Allen meets neorealism in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Menashe follows its titular hapless protagonist through a host of existential, spiritual, and familial crises. In the wake of his wife’s recent death, Menashe must care for his ten-year-old son—despite the fact that he knows bupkis about parenting—at the same time that he finds himself straying from the rigid norms of his Hasidic community. His friends and family insist that he remarry as soon as possible, but since he can’t get over his deceased wife or make enough money to feed his son, an uncle attempts to intervene. Joshua Z. Weinstein’s fiction feature debut is a poignant and funny parable about the tension between our best intentions and our efforts to make good on them. An A24 release.

    My Happy Family / Chemi bednieri ojakhi
    Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Gross, Georgia/France, 2017, 120m

    Georgian with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    The second feature by Ekvtimishvili and Gross subtly and sensitively follows a middle-aged woman as she aims to leave her husband and escape from the multi-generational living situation she shares with her aging parents, the aforementioned husband, her son, her daughter, and her daughter’s cheating live-in boyfriend. Lacking both personal space and free time, she breaks out on her own, building a new life for herself piece by piece while contemplating the family structure she has left behind. My Happy Family is a funny, perceptive, and sociologically rich work about the myriad roles we play in life and the obligations we endlessly strive to fulfill.

    Pendular
    Julia Murat, Brazil/Argentina/France, 2017, 108m

    Portuguese with English subtitles
    North American Premiere
    A male sculptor and a female dancer live and work together in their big, barren loft, a mere strip of orange tape serving as the boundary between his atelier and her studio. Here, the stage is set for a low-key psychosexual drama centered around the couple’s erotic, artistic, and everyday rituals. This absorbingly intimate third feature by Julia Murat (her second, Found Memories, was a ND/NF 2012 selection) is a moving portrait of a couple caught between rivalry and the desire to build a future with each other.

    Quest
    Jonathan Olshefski, USA, 2017, 105m

    New York Premiere
    Jonathan Olshefski’s documentary chronicle of an African-American family living in Philadelphia is a powerful and uplifting group portrait rooted in today’s political realities. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, the film follows the Raineys: patriarch Christopher, who juggles various jobs to support his family and his recording studio; matriarch Christine’a, who works at a homeless shelter; Christine’a’s son William, who is undergoing cancer treatment while caring for his own son, Isaiah; and PJ, Christopher and Christine’a’s teenage daughter. A patient, absorbing vérité epic, Quest covers eight years filled with obstacles, trials, and tribulations.

    Sexy Durga
    Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, India, 2017, 85m
    Malayalam with English subtitles
    North American Premiere
    Sasidharan’s third feature, main competition winner at this year’s International Rotterdam Film Festival, is a wildly tense nocturnal thriller with a razor-sharp political message. Late one night, Kabeer and Durga, a young couple on the run, are picked up by two strange men in a minivan who offer them a lift to a nearby train station. However, these men reveal themselves to be anything but benevolent, and so begins a long, claustrophobic drive that feels like Funny Games meets The Exterminating Angel. Sasidharan renders this bad trip with precision and an economy of style.

    Strong Island
    Yance Ford, USA/Denmark, 2017, 107m

    New York Premiere
    A haunting investigation into the murder of a young black man in 1992, Yance Ford’s Strong Island is achingly personal — the victim, 24-year-old William Ford Jr., was the filmmaker’s brother. Ford powerfully renders the specter of his brother’s death and its devastating effect on his family, and uses the tools of cinema to carefully examine the injustice perpetrated when the suspected killer, a 19-year-old white man, was not indicted by a white judge and an all-white jury. As a work of memoir and true crime, Strong Island tells one of the most remarkable stories in recent documentary; as a political artwork, its resonance is profound.

    The Summer Is Gone / Ba yue
    Dalei Zhang, China, 2016, 106m

    Mandarin with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    Dalei Zhang’s atmospheric debut feature is a portrait of a family in Inner Mongolia in the early 1990s that doubles as a snapshot of a pivotal moment in recent Chinese history. As the country settles into its new market economy, 12-year-old Xiaolei stretches out his final summer before beginning middle school, while his father contends with the possibility of losing his job as a filmmaker for a state-run studio, and his mother, a teacher, worries about her son’s grades and future. Beautifully shot in shimmering black-and-white, The Summer Is Gone is intimate and far-reaching, creating ripples of uncertainty from the microcosm of one family’s everyday life.

    White Sun / Seto Surya
    Deepak Rauniyar, Nepal/USA/Qatar/Netherlands, 2016, 89m

    Nepali with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    The second feature by Nepalese filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar sensitively explores the damage done to the fabric of Nepalese society by the decade-long civil war between the Maoists and Nepal’s monarchical government. On the occasion of his father’s funeral, Chandra returns to the village he left years earlier to join the Maoists, and finds himself united with the daughter he never met and revisiting uneasy relations with family members and neighbors. Past traumas return and cause tensions to boil over. Finding the political within the everyday, White Sun uses one village’s complex tribulations to speak to an entire national history. A KimStim release.

    The Wound
    John Trengove, South Africa/Germany/Netherlands/France, 2017, 88m

    Xhosa with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    In a mountainous corner of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, an age-old Xhosa ritual introducing adolescent boys to manhood continues to this day. This is the backdrop for this stark and stirring first feature by John Trengove, in which Xolani, a quiet and sensitive factory worker (played by musician Nakhane Touré), guides one of the boys, Kwanda, an urban transplant sent against his will from Johannesburg to be toughened up, through this rite of passage. In an environment where machismo rules, Kwanda negotiates his own identity while discovering the secret of Xolani’s sexuality. Brimming with fear and violence, The Wound is an exploration of tradition and masculinity. A Kino Lorber release.

    Wùlu
    Daouda Coulibaly, France/Mali/Senegal, 2016, 95m

    Bambara and French with English subtitles
    New York Premiere
    A gangster picture with political resonance, Wùlu tracks the rise to power of Ladji, a 20-year-old van driver in Mali who takes to crime so that his older sister can quit a life of prostitution. He calls in a favor from a drug-dealer friend and soon finds himself deeply involved in a complex and illicit enterprise; as he discovers his knack for his new profession and his lifestyle ostensibly improves, the stakes grow higher and deadlier by the day. Set during the lead-up to 2012’s Malian Civil War, Wùlu is more than an exciting and superbly made thriller—it offers a powerful glimpse at the complexities of a particular historical moment.

    FILMLEAF REVIEWS OF THE SERIES FOLLOW BELOW.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-02-2017 at 01:13 PM.

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    PATTI CAKE$ (Geremy Jasper 2016)

    GEREMY JASPER: PATTI CAKE$ (2016)


    PATTI CAKE$

    Plus size white girl from Jersey as a rising rapper

    Patricia Dombrowski (Australian find Danielle Macdonald) is a fat girl in New Jersey who pursues a challenging role as a rap artist with her best friend and co-star Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay), who works as a pharmacist assistant. Patti, aka Killa-P, aka to her macho competition Dumbo, works at part-time catering jobs, where she pushes her CD when she can. One big chance is a famous black rapper's spread, but when she demonstrates her style he puts out his cigar on the disc and tells her to stick with her day job, along with some cruel put-downs. A love interest appears in a black outsider death metal guitarist-singer who calls himself "Bastard - The Anti-Christ" (Mamoudou Athie): he lives in a shack with elaborate sound equipment and when he finally speaks turns out to be named Bob and have a dad who's a lawyer. The director lights up many scenes with humor and visual excitement and the actors have fun - this was a Sundance hit.

    Patti's home life revolves around her disabled, cigarette smoking Nana (Cathy Moriarty) and her potty-mouth alcoholic mom Barb (Bridget Everett), who had singing aspirations in her youth and still has a good voice. Even Barb puts Patti's rap aspirations down. She gives up hope midway. But then she comes back to Hareesh and they enter a competition even Barb comes to, and shares in - a climactic performance that redeems this movie's hitherto spotty progress - it seems more interested in rap and music video-style moments and wallowing in down and dirty New Jersey white trash atmosphere to advance the plot much - with a galvanizing musical moment that makes you walk out humming along with Hareesh's melodious obligato.

    Patti Cake$ may arouse comparisons with Precious - at least the haters call her "white Precious" - and various other films and worlds. It's of the flashy editing-surreal-bright colored style of filmmaking and might remind you of Tangerine in that regard, or the gay coming-of-age movie Closet Monster. Geremy Jasper, for whim this is the feature debut, has directed music videos, and many of the scenes sparkle with ADD editing and lurid colors - though paradoxically, Macdonald's rap performances shine most when she performs a cappella and the words are really clear. She lacks the precise diction, though she occasionally echoes the rhythms, of Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mathers II), the preeminent white rapper. Another comparison must be to the 2002 white rapper battle to recognition movie 8 Mile, written by Scott Silver and directed by the late Curtis Hansen. Though less dazzling visually, that one is more fantasy - after all, Eminem did become a famous rapper, and it has rap duels that are fascinating and real; Patti Cake$ lacks a sense of the creative process. But here there are multiple themes, rising from low life poverty inspired by MTV; recognition for other-sized ladies. This is the time of the underdog Millennials who have their day in the limelight.

    Patti Cake$, 108 mins., debuted and was a hit at Sundance. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Film Society of Lincoln Center-MoMA) 2017, at is the Opening Night Film in the series. Ir is a Fox Searchlight release.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-27-2017 at 09:29 PM.

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    THE LAST FAMILY/OSTATNIA RODZINA (Jan P. Matuszynski 2106)

    JAN P. MATUSZYNSKI: THE LAST FAMILY/OSTATNIA RODZINA (2016)


    ANDRZEJ SEWERYN, ALEXANDRA KONIECZA, DAWID OGRONIK, CENTER, IN THE LAST FAMILY


    Tame craziness

    This Polish film is actually a true story. It recounts the lives and deaths of a family of three. First is the highly respected painter Zdzislaw Beksinski (Andrzej Seweryn) - and the works on view in their digs, of which there are many, look very interesting though, perhaps for copyright reasons, we never get a very close look. Second, there is his strange but talented son Tomok, or Tomasz (Dawid Ogrodnik, of Ida), who became a well known music critic, translator, and radio broadcaster. Spoiler alert: things do not end well for either of them. In the middle, a patient, stabilizing element, is the wife and mother, Zofia (Aleksandra Konieczna), who surprises Beksinski by predeceasing him due to a fatal heart condition. The movie takes us along with this trio for about 25 years. Most of the action transpires in the artist's and his son's apartments. They are located in one of those looming blocks of flats surrounded by empty space we know so well from Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful Dekalog.

    The film charms initially with its intelligence and its composure. Tomok, obviously, is a strange and maladjusted personality. There is a funny, yet troubling scene in which he sits talking to a bearded, pipe-puffing psychiatrist, begging him to say something. He needs help, but doesn't get it. He seems dangerous, but his father is never worried. It isn't indifference: it's a close-nit family, and an indulgent one for Tomok - but that may be the problem. Later in life he wishes that his father had punished him, even once, to give him a sense of structure. He has been indulged, and ignored, and on his own, he does not fare well.

    One of the film's problems is figuring out whether it's about Tomok or his father. There is much about interviews with the painter, who expresses many views, and a sense of the stylistic periods he goes through is provided. But the crises all come from Tomok. It is a continual surprise that Tomok becomes successful at things - though hardly with women, a field in which he is a very late and spotty developer. Or with acceptance of life, since he is constantly thinking of ending his.

    The sets are characters. The artist has a great collection of records, books, and tapes; he is always taking pictures, first with a 35mm camera, later with a video recorder, a large, solid, dark one, that looks like a small artillery weapon. How neatly his collections are arrayed along the walls, with his paintings! And Zofia has her collection of the paintings, and Tomok, who moves into his own place, has a larger, and an eager collector things, better, collection (he wants to buy it; neither wife nor son will do so). Tomok's collections are a little different. He has more records, more tapes, more videos. When he brings a woman in on a date, she wants to make out; he wants to show her his collections. They are his life; which is to say, in a sense, that he has no life.

    These three people are famous, and interviewed and written about, but they have no social life, and this makes the action seem a little hollow. The film is also too caught up in the details of the lives, and never quite gets around to organizing them into a movie with dramatic highlights that would grab non-Polish viewers not acquainted already with this family's biography. When the artist finds his son lying dead in his apartment, he says "Congratulations, you finally succeeded." Is it surprising that we feel no more involvement, if the father's reaction is so cold?

    The film was scripted by Robert Bolesto, who also recently penned the surreal horror version of "The Little Mermaid," The Lure.

    The Last Family/Ostatnia rodzina, 124 mins., debuted at Locarno, Aug. 2016, and opened theatrically in Poland a month later; also showed at a dozen international festivals, including the Film Society of Lincoln Center-MoMA 2017 New Directors/New Films series, as part of which it was screened for this review.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-27-2017 at 08:09 PM.

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    WHITE SUN/SETO SURYA (Depak Rauniyar 2016)

    DEEPAK RAUNIYAR: WHITE SUN/SETO SURYA (2016)


    DAYAHANG RAI IN WHITE SUN

    The personal and the public

    It's not so often that you see a movie set in Nepal, and the Nepalese director Eeepak Rauniyar and his cowriter David Barker have created an involving, palpably real tale that skillfully interweaves the country's turbulent recent warfare with intimate, local, personal events. Chandra (Dayahang Rai) comes back to his remote village for the first time in years on the death of his father. He has been fighting in the Maoist army that defeated Royalist government forces in the 1996-2006 conflict, with 16,000 lives lost along the way. Chandra carries the wounds of this war.

    Things get complicated, and Chandra has to deal with both his past and traditional customs to which the generations have different degrees of loyalty. To begin with a homeless war-orphaned kid among the boys jostling to carry Chandra's bags up the hills, Badri (Amrit Pariyar), attaches himself to him and claims to others to be his son. (Maybe he is.) He remains a touching presence throughout; we worry what will happen to him. Durga (Asha Margranti), Chandra's ex-wife, is a fiercely independent lower-caste woman who is cursed by the elders for touching the corpse. Durga has problems of her own. She has a daughter, Pooja (Sumi Malla), not Chandra's, but she wants Chandra to sign paternity papers so the girl can be legal and attend school.

    The large body of the father, a village elder and a staunch royalist, has to be removed from an upstairs window because it's against custom to take it out the front door. Only males can attend the funeral. The only men qualified to carry the body down to the river are his sons, Chandra and his royalst brother, Suraj (Rabindra Singh Baniya), but they have a fight and Suraj goes off, leading Chandra on a meandering trail to find somebody else, while the village elders cluster around the corpse, stuck there for hours. No one can touch it unless the old priest (Deepak Chhetri), an absolute stickler for traditions, allows it.

    Pooja and Badri, who at first are at odds, join forces and begin taking steps on their own. The arrival in the area of Chandra's former commander, with Maoist troops at hand, will also alter the course of things. All this is symbolic, of course, but it seems emotional and circumstantial because it all happens in such a relaxed, natural way, with - to the outside eye, at least - such authentic locations and performances, that we can't help getting emotionally involved. The 10-year-old newcomer Amrit Pariya, as Badri, is particularly convincing. Dayahang Rai, a locally well-known actor, inhabits his role profoundly, and exudes an inner sadness that is expressive of the country's long turbulence and troubles. This is an outstanding example of vernacular naturalism. It's exotic, for sure, but Depak Rauniyar has achieved some of the intimacy of Satyajit Ray.

    White Sun/Seto Surya, 89 mins., debuted Sept. 2016 at Venice in the Horizons section; seven other festivals so far, including MoMA-FSLC's 2017 New Directors/New Films series, as part of which it was screened for this review.

    A KimStim release. It's now been announced that it begins limited theatrical release 6 Sept. 2017 at MoMA (NYC) and 29 Sep t. at Laemmle Music Hall (LA).
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-28-2017 at 07:29 PM.

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    THE CHALLENGE (Yuri Ancarani 2016)

    YURI ANCARANI: THE CHALLENGE (2016


    التحدي

    At play and at play

    Italian documentary filmmaker Yuri Ancarani's film The Challenge is a matter of access. He had it, but he also keeps his distance. He shot wealthy Qatari men at play - serious play, that costs serious money. It is a rare and special scene, but Ancarani isn't seeking to tell you all about it; it's simply material he works with visually. His interest is in ritual, and repeated gestures, and odd customs, and surreal situations.

    The main focus is their pursuit, now utterly altered by the introduction of modern gadgetry such as lightweight cameras and SUVs, of the ancient Arabian gentleman's sport of falconry. We also see a man driving a Lamborghini with a leopard in the passenger seat; and we see a group riding gold Harley Davidson bikes, dressed for once not in white thawbs and kufiyas but jeans and biker jackets. The falconers buy their special birds for up to 87,000 riyals ($24,000) via an auction they view on flatscreen TV as they bid by smart phone. We fly inside a posh private plane fitted with not passenger seats but rows of perches for flacons. We see men share a tasty meal of meat, rice, and side dishes in the traditional way, with the right hand only, the fingers molding the rice into a ball.

    There are closeups of men's faces, young, dark, handsome, ancestrally Arabian, with perfectly trimmed short beard. Do they trim it themselves or, more likely, have a barber come in every morning? But for all this intimacy, there is no sense of entering the personal lives of these men. Ancarani's film is more like an art piece, shifting from scene to scene in a distancing way, occasionally bringing in soaring music, often offering nothing but ambient sound or the childish, repetitious dialogue of the 'sportsman' or buyers, saying nothing but 'that's a good one,' 'it's worth the price,' or most often the phrase 'ma shaa' Allah', which in this context is just a muslim way of saying 'wow!'

    Mike D'Angelo wrote in Letterbox'd: "My kind of documentary: utterly devoid of exposition (or even basic contextualization), formally adventurous, offhandedly witty (love the sharp cut to a tranquil landscape shot that happens mid-car accident, just as a dude witnessing the vehicle roll over clutches his hands to his head in shock), confident enough to let viewers intuit the film's meaning/intention/big idea."

    It is a confidently accomplished film and an elegant one. It's also an alarming one that makes its very rich subjects look like morons. But they look good too. Their cars and their hooded birds and they are handsome, and surreal. Jonathan Romney of Film Comment wrote: "the film is so elegantly shot, with heightened attention to staging and symmetry, that at first thought I was watching a gallery-art fabulation à la Matthew Barney. But no. . ." Material to play with, too good to be true. And in a sense itself making this film is as idle a kind of play as the "shaykhs'" with their dangerous SUV races, their falcons, and their Lamborghinis. And the photographs from the camera attached to a bird of prey on the hunt for a pigeon: the cinema of the future!

    The Challenge, 69 mins., debuted at Locarno where it won the Special Jury Prize and was nominated for the Golden Leopard. Ten other international festivals, including the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films (NYC), as part of which it was screened for this review.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 04-03-2017 at 12:38 PM.

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