2011 New Directors/New Films Reviews: "Attenberg" and "Hospitalité"

Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

From the folks who brought you Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos’ singularly and comically disturbing drama about a strange family that was one of last year’s best films (and was an unlikely Oscar nominee), comes Attenberg, an equally strange and equally brilliant film that provocatively explores familial and sexual relations, mixing the absurd, the melancholic, the political, and the erotic in astonishing ways.  The provocation begins with the very first image, of two young women tongue kissing against a peeling wall.  These are best friends Marina (Ariane Labed) and Bella (Evangelia Randou), conducting a bizarre sex education session initiated by Marina, who has never had sex herself, but is fascinated with it in an zoological fashion.  Her lack of engagement is a function of her extreme closeness with her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), who is slowly dying, but calmly accepts his fate and prepares for his exit from the 20^th century, which he terms “overrated.”  Marina watches the nature films of Sir David Attenborough (the film’s title is a phonetic respelling of his name), and imitates animal behavior with her father and with Bella.  Into the mix comes an engineer (Yorgos Lanthimos), who Marina uses to take her sexual experience out of the realm of observation and surreal dreams.  Tsangari invests her deeply strange scenario with moody visuals, rigorous internal logic, and a strong emotional quality that prevents these characters from becoming mere vessels of weird behavior.  This comes through in the strong performances all around, especially Labed, whose justly celebrated turn earned her the best actress award at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

March 31, 6pm (MoMA) and April 2, 1pm (FSLC)

Hospitalité (Koji Fukada)

The idea of the houseguest who turns everything upside down is not new to films; such disparate works as Pasolini’s Teorema and Miike’s Visitor Q explore this notion.  Koji Fukada’s debut feature Hospitalité adds dry and deliciously deadpan humor to this scenario.  In a sleepy neighborhood in downtown Tokyo, Mikio Kobayashi (Kenji Yamauchi) runs a small printing shop, where he also lives with his wife Natsuko (Kiki Sugino), his young daughter Eriko (Eriko Ono), and his divorced sister Seiko (Kumi Hyodo).  Nothing much seems to happen here, yet a xenophobic neighbor wheedles them into joining a neighborhood watch, because of supposed crime being committed by foreigners.  Eriko’s lost parakeet is the catalyst for the events that will upend this family’s calm life, which turns out to be a deceptive calm that hides all sorts of secrets.  These secrets are uncovered by Kagawa (Kanji Furutachi), who introduces himself to the family as the son of a wealthy benefactor who helped Mikio with his business.  He soon insinuates himself into the family and the business, bringing in tow his wife Annabelle (Bryerly Long), who is either from Brazil or Bosnia; it is never clear which.  The two function as a neutron bomb that lays bare the hidden tensions that exists behind the seemingly placid façade of polite pleasantries.  Writer-director Koji Fukada and principal actors Kenji Yamauchi and Kanji Furutachi are members of the Seinendan Theatre Company, and Hospitalité does indeed have a theatrical quality, as much of the action takes place in the family’s small house, and the film gets much comic mileage out of how the space gets increasingly crowded as events progress.  Cinematic values are hardly neglected, however; the surrounding environment is just as vividly drawn as what happens inside the Kobayashi home.  What is most remarkable about Hospitalité is how the drama and comedy are so carefully and subtly calibrated; from the start, there is the sense that what seems ordinary and nearly banal is in fact anything but.  The film’s success in sustaining this mood is in large part due to its excellent cast, who so skillfully embody the deceptive nature of their characters.  Alongside the theater-trained veteran actors Yamauchi and Furutachi, actress and producer Kiki Sugino proves their equal in beautifully essaying her character, who has the most profound change in eventually asserting her own agency.  Hospitalité, among is other many virtues, is a potent critique of the insularity and homogeneity that exists in Japanese society, and offers a comically rendered but rather beautiful and hopeful alternative.

April 2, 5:15pm (MoMA) and April 3, 1pm (FSLC)

For more information on these and other festival films, and to purchase tickets, visit the New Directors/New Films website.

2011 New Directors/New Films Review Round-up

The 40^th edition of New Directors/New Films screens at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s (FSLC) Walter Reade Theater from March 23 through April 3.  Below are reviews of some of this year’s selections.

Belle Epine (Rebecca Zlotowski)

Prudence (Lea Seydoux), the 17-year old girl at the center of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Epine, is left adrift and rootless after the recent loss of her mother.  She lives in their house with her older sister, and their father is far away, in Canada, and his only presence in the film is an occasional voice on the phone.  Numb from the loss, she casually gets into petty thievery; in the opening scene, she is caught shoplifting and forced to strip, along with Marilyne (Agathe Schlenker), who has also been caught, and whom Prudence befriends shortly thereafter.  The two make a decidedly odd, yet compatible, pair: Marilyne is worldly and sexually aware, while Prudence is more shy and withdrawn.  Eventually Prudence is pulled into the orbit of Marilyne and her friends, and their world of nocturnal, illicit motorcycle drag races.  However, her unresolved issues of loneliness, isolation, and aimlessness prevent her from using her new friends to escape from her circumstances.  Belle Epine nicely evokes a moody atmosphere, and is intriguingly vague about its specific time period, lending the film a timeless quality.  Unfortunately, the subtly exploitative nature of the visual fascination with these nubile and sometimes nude young girls sits rather uncomfortably with the more thoughtful and sensitive aspects of the scenario.

March 24, 6pm (FSLC) and March 26, 1pm (MoMA)

Curling (Denis Cȏté)

Curling revolves around an isolated father and daughter who most live in self-imposed hiding from the rest of the world.  Jean-Francois (Emmanuel Bilodeau), the father, when questioned by an eye doctor about her daughter not attending school, curtly replies, “That’s our business, sir.”  Jean-Francois carefully constructs a cocoon to protect his daughter Julyvonne (Philomène Bilodeau) from what he perceives as dangerous influences from others.  However, the strain of this situation is subtly evident at first, but becomes more pronounced as events slowly unfold.  Julyvonne seems a rather impassive girl, nearly autistic, due to her lack of interaction with other children her age.  Her discovery of dead bodies in the snow early in the film frightens her at first, but transforms into a rather morbid curiosity and fascination.  Jean-Francois works at a bowling alley, where his boss Kennedy (Roc Lafortune) constantly exhorts him to become more outgoing and take up some kind of interest or hobby.  Jean-Francois also works at a nearly deserted motel, which is about to be closed by the older couple who runs it because of the lack of customers.  Jean-Francois comes upon a grisly discovery of his own, when he comes upon a room whose floors and walls are covered in blood.  In most other films, these murders would be the focus, but luckily for us, Curling isn’t most films, and is far more mysterious and intriguing.  The characters of the father and daughter, played by an actual father and daughter, are central, especially the father, as interpreted by Bilodeau’s moody and restrained performance, through whose prism the film offers a penetrating psychological portrait.  Jean-Francois’ retreat from the world, broken somewhat by his nascent interest in the titular sport, is indicative of a deeper trauma, which the film doesn’t fully explain.  Curling’s wintry and beautifully shot landscapes also powerfully illustrate the protagonists’ isolation, and the film’s refusal to spell everything out in the characters’ back stories creates an enigma at its heart that draws us in even deeper.

March 26, 6:15pm (MoMA) and March 27, 3:30pm (FSLC)

Pariah (Dee Rees)

Coming-out stories are a common and familiar staple of gay-themed films, and many of them follow similar trajectories.  Dee Rees’ debut feature Pariah, an expansion of her 2007 short film, while on the surface adhering to these patterns, elevates itself by vividly rendering a very specific milieu, and accompanying its scenario with stunning visuals courtesy of cinematographer Bradford Young, who won a prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  Pariah itself won the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance.  Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year old high school girl, is open to her friends and very secure in her lesbian identity.  However, she is compelled to hide this fact from her parents, especially her religious mother Audrey (Kim Wayans).  It’s clear that they both strongly suspect the nature of her sexuality, but her mother is in stubborn denial, telling her at one point, “God doesn’t make mistakes.”  Alike confides in her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker), who drags Alike to lesbian clubs, even though this is not really her scene.  Alike is a burgeoning poet, and the film is punctuated by scenes of her reading her poetry.  Audrey’s quest to feminize her daughter leads to Alike’s meeting Bina (Aasha Davis), a daughter of one of Audrey’s friends.  Alike is at first resistant, resenting this forced friendship, but soon she warms up to Bina, when they discover common interests.  What’s more their friendship goes in a direction that would definitely not please Alike’s mother.  Alike’s romantic entanglements and her eventual confrontation with her mother compel her to seek a path to a new life, one in which she can be herself more freely.  Pariah is clearly and consciously meant to be an inspirational film for gay teens, but it succeeds in being much more, due to its beautifully drawn sense of place (the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn), and impressive performances by both Oduye and Wayans.

March 26, 8pm (FSLC) and March 28, 9pm (MoMA)

For more information on these and other festival films, and to purchase tickets, visit the New Directors/New Films website.

New Directors/New Films 2010 Review: Lixin Fan's "Last Train Home"

Last Train Home. 2009. Directed and photographed by Lixin Fan. Produced by Mila Aung-Thwin and Daniel Cross. Edited by Lixin Fan and Mary Stephens. Camera operated by Shaoguang Sun and Lixin Fan. Music by Olivier Alary.

The sharp contrast between the lives in cities and countryside always truck me. Submerged under the glamour of the modern metropolis, the poverty in the vast rural area is overwhelming. As I traveled, I started to focus on the migrant workers, whom I believe have contributed the most to China's prosperity but benefited the least... On a national level, China is dashing to become a richer country. Should tradition, morality and humanity be drowned in a world of tireless rumbling factories is the question we should ask.

-- Lixin Fan, from his director's statement.

Every winter, the world's largest human migration occurs in China, as many of its 130 million migrant workers in the cities make the arduous trek home to their families for the Chinese New Year. These scenes of the teeming masses of humanity clogging train stations, desperately trying to get their only chance all year to visit their loved ones, are some of the most startling images of Lixin Fan's superb, heartbreaking documentary Last Train Home. Fan, a Chinese-born, Montreal-based filmmaker, began his career as a journalist for the Chinese national TV broadcaster CCTV, and as the above epigraph indicates, it was there that he began to be interested in the ever widening gap between the rich in the cities and the poor in the countryside as China embarked on its dizzying rush toward world economic dominance. However, as China isn't exactly a bastion of journalistic freedom, it's not too far off base to speculate that Fan moved into independent filmmaking (as well as to Canada) in order to more freely explore the massive societal upheavals that have occurred in China as a result of its drive toward greater prosperity. What Fan illuminates with penetrating acuity and sometimes uncomfortable intimacy in Last Train Home is the fact that this prosperity is largely the result of the efforts of these many millions of migrant workers, who travel many miles from their rural homelands to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other industrial hubs to toil for many hours in factories to make the products that those in more affluent parts of China and overseas enjoy. However, these workers have very little share in the massive riches that this activity brings to others. They are low-paid, have very little rights to workers' compensation and social services, and, most pertinently for this film, are prevented from bringing their families with them, due to China's very strict residency laws. This serves to break families apart, as parents are forced to be away from their children for months and sometimes years at a time, leaving children to be raised by their grandparents and other relatives. The absence of parental structure and authority causes a whole host of problems, not the least of which is delinquency and aimlessness among the younger generation.

These issues are given indelible life by the case of the Zhang family, the troubled unit Fan focuses on in the film. Zhang Changua and his wife Chen Suqin are factory workers in Guangzhou, who left their village home in Sichuan province and their newborn daughter 17 years earlier to seek work in the cities. They have since regularly sent money home, while their daughter Qin and younger son Yang were raised by their grandmother, so that their children will have enough money to attend school, and hopefully, escape the hard fate of their parents. Tragically, these hopes are dashed by Qin, who has grown up with seething resentment at what she sees as essentially abandonment by her parents, who are virtually strangers to her, since she has seen them so seldom over the years. She feels oppressed and smothered by their expectations of her, and sees their parental authority over her as illegitimate. "All they care about is money," Qin says at one point, her voice dripping with scorn. She also hates having to work on the family farm with her brother and grandmother, and describes her school as a "cage." Her restlessness and yearning to be rid of these strictures on her personal freedom eventually leads to Qin fulfilling her parents' worst nightmare: she drops out of school and becomes a factory worker in the city. Qin doesn't really enjoy this work either, but she takes solace in the fact that she at least earns her own money and can feel that she has greater freedom, however limited or illusory it may be. Qin's mortified mother and concerned father embark on a rescue operation to convince Qin to return to the village and finish her schooling; they also want to ensure that her brother doesn't follow her example. They all go back home for New Year's, Qin sullen and reluctant. Back home, this sets the stage for a dramatic confrontation, one that is predictable if we pay close attention to Qin's moods, but is no less shocking and tragic.

Last Train Home bears some stylistic resemblance to another recent Canadian documentary about China, Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze, which followed stories centering around the Three Gorges Dam project. Fan worked on that film as an associate producer and a sound man, and Chang was a consultant on Fan's film. Both directors share an emphasis on individual stories set against a larger societal backdrop, and making clear how the macro and micro aspects of their subjects' situations entwine. Fan eschews voiceover and uses music sparingly, constructing his documentary with a dramatic arc similar to fictional films. Fan prominently name-checks Jia Zhang-ke in interviews as a major influence; and indeed, Fan's concerns dovetail with Jia's ongoing project to record the effects of China's massive social changes on the daily lives of people. Fan, however, brings an intense intimacy to his material that is all his own. Fan's camera (he did his own cinematography) is an unseen character of this drama; it is not the Frederick Wiseman-like objective fly-on-the-wall, but rather a sympathetic confidante. Fan's prodigious gifts of observation (in abundant evidence in his depiction of the massive crush of travelers at the Guangzhou train station, just barely controllable by the police) honor all his subjects, whether they are the main characters like the Zhangs' or someone glimpsed for a few seconds, affording them the respect and dignity that they are too often denied. The overwheming impression that I took away from Last Train Home was not how unique the Zhangs were, but to the contrary, how typical they were. A film just as compelling could conceivably be made of the lives of any of the millions taking the trains every year, and I think this is Fan's main contention. A country that compels so many to tear apart their own families and toil away at numbing, repetitive labor with little to look forward to except a never-ending struggle, is a country that is deeply in trouble, despite the efforts of governments to whitewash this fact, or offer temporary distractions such as the Olympics. It is a situation that will eventually prove to be unsustainable. Last Train Home, beyond being a deeply moving work of art, is a passionate wake-up call, vividly illuminating issues that the powers that be will ignore to their peril.

Last Train Home screens tomorrow at 12pm at the Walter Reade Theater as part of New Directors/New Films 2010. It will be released later this summer by Zeitgeist Films. Click here to purchase tickets.

New Directors/New Films 2009: Review Round-up #3

The Maid (Sebastián Silva)

A cross between Luis Bunuel and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, The Maid focuses on Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the titular servant who has been serving her family for over two decades. Repetition and routine, as well as her long separation from her own family, have taken their toll on her mental health, as she constantly pops pills to ease her splitting headaches, and becomes increasingly passive-aggressive toward the family, especially the eldest daughter, who cuts her to the quick by reminding her that she’s just the hired help and not a true member of the family. A young maid from Peru (Mercedes Villanueva) is hired to help out after Raquel’s condition begins to affect the quality of her work. Raquel takes this as an insult and a threat to her status in the family, and proceeds to terrorize the new girl. Silva’s camera tracks sinuously through the house (he shot the film in his own family home), subtly raising the tension between the maid and the other members of the house. Saavedra (who won an acting prize at Sundance; Silva also won the Grand Jury Prize in the world cinema dramatic category) makes this forbidding, opaque character increasingly sympathetic as we discover more about her. (March 27, 29)

Parque vía (Enrique Rivero)

Another intensely penetrating character study is at the heart of Parque vía, an unnervingly quiet film which retains its riveting intensity right up until the conclusion, which still startles even though such an ending is somewhat anticipated. The film’s central figure, Beto (Nolberto Coria), is the custodian of an empty house in Mexico City, where he has been living for ten years while his elderly boss (Tesalia Huerta), called “Lady” in the credits, searches for a buyer. “I’m a weird man,” Beto says of himself at one point. The initial scenes take us into his daily routine, where he lives in (to him) glorious isolation. The only people he interacts with on a regular basis are his boss and Lupe (Nancy Orozco), a prostitute whom Beto takes an almost fatherly interest in, despite his frequent use of her services. Beto has developed a form of agoraphobia as a result of his self-imposed separation from the world. In one brilliantly staged scene, on a rare outing in the daytime, Beto is overwhelmed by the noise and bustle of the outdoors, and faints in a supermarket. When the house finally has a buyer, and Beto is about to be expelled from the careful cocoon he has wrapped around himself, Beto resorts to extreme measures to preserve the life he has become so used to. Rivero proves to be remarkably adept at calibrating a slow-burn mood of tense anticipation, in which it becomes clear that the quiet prevalent in much of the film will be violently disrupted. Rivero is also an apt disciple of the minimalist mode of Mexican filmmaking that is a hallmark of such directors as Carlos Reygadas and Amat Escalante, to name a couple. In fact, a remarkable 360-degree panning shot recalls a similar one in Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven. However, Rivero brings a penetrating, sensitive approach to character on the table that make the central character of Beto a fully realized one, rather than a blank cipher, as too often happens with spare films such as this. The effect is also greatly aided by Coria’s riveting performance. An opening title tells us the film is based on his life, and indeed Coria in real life is the sort of caretaker depicted in the film, although of course this film is far from a documentary. (April 4, 5)

The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa)

The title of Claudia Llosa’s film refers to what has been passed on to Fausta (Magaly Solier), the traumatized woman at the center of this film, whose mother was a rape victim during Peru’s brutal 20-year civil war before regime change in 1990. The terror that her mother experienced, which Fausta witnessed while in the womb, was transmitted to Fausta through her mother’s breast milk. (The film’s title in Spanish translates as “The Frightened Breast.”) In the film’s extraordinary opening, Fausta’s mother sings about her brutal rape and the murder of her family in front of her on her deathbed. After her mother dies, Fausta struggles to find a way to give her mother a proper burial, which entails making a long trip which she must raise money toward. Fausta separates herself from others, and has planted a potato inside her vagina to prevent what happened to her mother from happening to her. Fausta is the living aftermath of this dark period of Peruvian history, and she remains consumed by the terror of this time. Fausta’s fear and extreme discomfort is contrasted with the colorful wedding ceremonies she works at along with her uncle. Llosa’s beautiful sense of composition, along with her understated use of magical realist elements, makes this a mesmerizing and memorable work which astutely connects personal and national trauma in an indelibly vivid way. (April 1, 3)

New Directors/New Films 2009 Review Round-up #2

The Shaft (Zhang Chi)



Recycled stylistic and cinematic tropes rear their ugly heads once again in The Shaft, which separately details the lives of three members of a family in a bleak mining town in western China. Not to be confused with Li Yang’s far superior film Blind Shaft, The Shaft seems to follow every rule in the playbook for cinematic depictions of present-day China. The film’s very structure of refracted perspectives of a single family is identical to yet another much more artistically successful Chinese film, Gu Changwei’s Peacock. In the first story, Jingshui (Zheng Louqian) a safety monitor at the town’s mine, is forced to leave her job when vicious rumors spread about her supposed affair with a superior, ruining her relationship with her boyfriend Daming (Li Chen). The second story follows Jingshui’s brother Jingsheng (Huang Xuan), who vows not to become like their father Baogen (Luo Deyuan), working his whole life at the mine until it kills him, either through an accident or through slow attrition from failing health. Jingsheng entertains dreams of traveling to Beijing to become a pop star and pursues various schemes to achieve this end. The results bring to mind the saying that if you want to make the fates laugh, tell them your plans. The film concludes with Baogen’s story, as he searches for his wife who had left many years before, and whom we learn he had actually bought. Time is short for him, as his lungs are practically shot from decades of working in the mine. The Shaft misses no opportunity to indulge in the familiar long-shot landscapes and the artful arrangement of actors in the sort of scenes so familiar from recent Chinese films, to such an extent that almost no shot composition (especially in the arrangements of characters in the frame) looks the least bit natural, and we are always painfully aware of the self-conscious auteur behind the scenes. All this pseudo-art does little to mask a scenario that is banal and shallow in the extreme. (April 1, 2)





Mid-August Lunch (Gianni Di Gregorio)



This delightful Italian comedy goes down as smoothly as the wine that freely flows in the film. Di Gregorio, a major screenwriter in Italy (he most recently co-wrote Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah), essays the main role here, as Gianni, a middle-aged man who lives with his widowed mother (Valeria De Franciscis) in a condominium and whose life consists of caring for his mother and consuming wine and beer and shooting the breeze with his pals to make his monotonous existence a bit more bearable. Months behind on his rent and on the verge of being evicted, the building manager proposes that Gianni look after his mother while he goes away for the mid-August bank holiday, promising to forgive Gianni’s debt. Although Gianni’s mother is a handful on her own, this is the proverbial offer he can’t refuse, and he reluctantly agrees. However, the manager also foists his aunt on Gianni, and later his doctor friend asks Gianni to take care of his mother as well. Now saddled with four old women to care for, Gianni is run ragged trying to negotiate each of their needs, especially the hilariously elaborate diet the doctor has put his mother on. Much of the film takes place in the rather small condo apartment, and Di Gregorio fluidly moves his camera in this space with great skill. All four women are played by nonprofessional actors, and their performances brim with life, making the film a tribute to women such as themselves, who are not revered for their wisdom, but are treated as nuisances to be fobbed off on others at the first opportunity. Mid-August Lunch is a great example of a uniquely Italian approach to depicting families, and Di Gregorio enhances the charm of his film by not imposing a plot, but letting his characters determine the flow of events. (April 3, 4)





Home (Ursula Meier)



Initially comforting domesticity gradually takes more disturbing and sinister tones in Home. Featuring outstanding turns by principal actors Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet and Adelaide Leroux, and equally outstanding cinematography by Agnes Godard, Meier’s film is both an intense chamber drama and a potent satire on modern construction’s assault on the environment. The family in this film lives on an abandoned stretch of highway in virtual isolation from the rest of society. They have constructed their own quiet little world, playing hockey on the road and other games at home; the eldest daughter (Leroux) spends her days sunning herself by the road and listening to death metal. It is mentioned that they live here due to the mother’s fragile health, but the exact nature of her illness remains unspecified. But the bad old industrial world intrudes in a big way: the long promised extension of the highway, which runs right in front the family’s house, is finally realized, and soon the thunderous sounds of passing traffic invade every inch of their existence. The fissures that have been kept underground by their previous idyllic life come roaring to the surface. The simple act of crossing the road now becomes a potentially deadly activity, the younger daughter becomes obsessed with the pollution from the cars’ exhaust tanks, and the eldest daughter defiantly continues her sunbathing, despite now giving practically the whole country a free show. These new changes impact most dramatically on the mother who, unable to bear the noise, begins a radical process of soundproofing the house that turns the home into a prison. Meier deftly controls the film’s tone so that it doesn’t veer too far in the direction of overwrought melodrama or silly farce. As the family attempts to maintain its separation from society, the psychological states of the family members are drawn with an astute attention to detail and a perceptive sense of naturalism. Meier and Godard deliver a number of indelible scenes, including a massive traffic jam which becomes an elegant tip of the hat to Godard’s Weekend. (April 2, 4)


You can view the trailer for Home here.

New Directors/New Films 2009 Review: So Yong Kim's "Treeless Mountain"

Treeless Mountain. 2008. Written and directed by So Yong Kim. Produced by Bradley Rust Grey, Ben Howe, Lars Knudsen, Jay Van Hoy, and So Yong Kim. Cinematography by Anne Misawa. Edited by So Yong Kim and Bradley Rust Grey. Music by Asobi Seksu. Production design by See Hee Kim.

Cast: Hee Yeon Kim (Jin), Song Hee Kim (Bin), Soo Ah Lee (Mom), Mi Hyang Kim (Big Aunt), Boon Tak Park (Grandma).

So Yong Kim's ineffably lovely second feature Treeless Mountain, having already screened at the Toronto, Pusan and Berlin film festivals, is one of the major must-sees of this year's New Directors/New Films. Beginning from an autobiographical place in much the same manner as her auspicious debut In Between Days, Treeless Mountain focuses in almost microscopic detail on two sisters, 7-year old Jin (Hee Yeon Kim) and her younger sister Bin (Song Hee Kim), and their increasingly precarious existence after their mother (Soo Ah Lee) suddenly decides to search for the girls’ absent father. She leaves them in the care of Big Aunt (Mi Hyang Kim) while she is away. Big Aunt, a boozy and neglectful guardian, reluctantly takes them in and afterward can barely be bothered to look after them, leaving the girls mostly to their own devices. When Big Aunt finally tires of having the girls around, she sends them to the countryside to live on the farm tended by their grandmother (Boon Tak Park). That’s the story of the film in a nutshell, as simple as can be. But this description doesn’t begin to convey the magic Kim works with her materials. Alternating close shots of the girls playing, fighting, and roasting grasshoppers with startlingly lovely static shots of the sky, trees, and other natural phenomena, as well as a stunning landscape that concludes the film (all testaments to the skilled cinematography provided by Anne Misawa), Kim allows everything to unfold with an uncommonly patient subtlety that yields rich rewards. The film is so subtle, in fact, that it took me a second viewing (I first saw the film in Pusan) to fully appreciate its gifts, proving that it often pays to revisit films. The first time I saw Treeless Mountain, I did appreciate its visual beauty, but I felt somewhat emotionally distanced from what was happening on screen. During my second screening, that distance dissolved as I got more in tune with the intensely intimate nature of this film, and as I began to understand that Kim was making evocative use of a fairy tale structure to inform the girls’ journey. Abandoned children are a perennial fairy tale motif, Hansel and Gretel coming immediately to mind. What brought me to this reading was the detail of the piggy bank that the girls’ mother gives to them just before she leaves them, telling them that if they listen to Big Aunt, they will receive a coin for the bank. When the bank is full, their mother promises to return to them. This piggy becomes a magical object that the girls invest all their hope and faith in. One of the film’s loveliest and most humorous sequences occurs when they discover that one large coin can be exchanged for much smaller ones, after which they rush from store to store to exchange their money. When the piggy bank is bursting, they rush to a large pile of dirt and rocks (the “treeless mountain” of the film’s title) to await their mothers’ return. What occurs afterward becomes the poignant aftermath of lost illusions, especially for Jin, forced to grow beyond her years as a surrogate mother to her sister Bin (whose beloved “princess” dress reinforces the fairy tale theme).

So Yong Kim proves to be not only a master of mise-en-scène, but a wonderful director of actors, of both nonprofessionals and veterans. Hee Yeon Kim and Song Hee Kim as the sisters are mesmerizing to watch, every gesture drawing the viewer further into their world, filled with as much humor and joy as sadness. (The two girls aren’t related in real life, despite a shared surname.) Song Hee is especially memorable, with her twinkling eyes and pixie smile. The fact that she is an abandoned child herself (So Yong Kim found her in an orphanage located in suburban Seoul) only makes her performance all the more remarkable. The adult actors impress as well. Soo Ah Lee, a veteran actress returning to films after a long absence, interprets her character with such bold strokes that she remains a strong presence in the film, even though we see her in very few scenes. Mi Hyang Kim skillfully conveys the delicate nuances of a character who is not simplistically evil despite her benign neglect towards her charges. The contrasts between the film’s two locales, Seoul City and Heunghae (Kim’s hometown), are rendered in vivid detail, making the film’s exquisite pastoral conclusion all the more moving.

Treeless Mountain screens at New Directors/New Films on March 27 and 29 and opens in New York on April 22 at Film Forum, and nationally soon after.

Interview with So Yong Kim on Treeless Mountain:

Treeless Mountain trailer:

TREELESS MOUNTAIN: Movie Trailer - Watch today’s top amazing videos here

New Directors/New Films 2009: Review Round-up

The 2009 edition of New Directors/New Films screens at the Walter Reade Theater and the Museum of Modern Art from March 25 through April 5. Below are brief reviews of this year's selections.

Amreeka (Cherien Dabis)


Amreeka (the title is Arabic for “America”) is not a bad film, just utterly predictable, as safe a crowd-pleaser as can be for the opening night film. This coming-to-America tale featuring Muna (Nisreen Faour) and Fadi (Melkar Muallem), a Palestinian mother and son escaping their constricted West Bank existence, telegraphs every element with heavy-handed sincerity, smothering any hint of nuance. Setting the film at the start of the Iraq War saps what little subtlety is left in the scenario, as the clueless Americans (of course) associate them with Iraqis. What saves the film from being a complete waste of time are the strong performances of Faour and Hiam Abbass as her sister Raghda. The film sweats and strains for authenticity, beginning with the grainy visuals, but the by-the-numbers script, containing such cardboard villains as the racist high-school bullies who harass Fadi, make it all for naught. Amreeka is competently made, to be sure, but there are no real insights, nothing on this subject that hasn’t been explored much better elsewhere. The press notes go into great detail about how personal this story is to the filmmaker, which makes it so much more of a shame that this experience has been flattened out into such a generic presentation. The strongest sections of the film are the early scenes depicting the daily humiliations of Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints, which felt the most directly drawn from actual experience. The film’s conclusion is nicely understated, as the entire family retreats into an ethnic enclave, a respite from the cruel, prejudicial world outside. But at that point, it’s just too little, too late. At least White Castle gets some nice product placement out of it. (Mar. 25, 26)

Stay the Same Never Change (Laurel Nakadate)


“I made this film, because I wanted to talk about beauty, loneliness, desire and hope,” video artist Laurel Nakadate says in her director’s statement describing her debut feature. This film began life as another video art piece, until she was given money to expand it into a feature. Whether or not you like this film depends very much on your tolerance for extended single-shot tableaux which mostly exhibit the creepy vibe stemming from the interaction of men with much younger girls, which in each case skirt just at the edge of transgressive behavior. The film desultorily follows a series of characters, many of them young blonde girls wearing very short shorts, ambulatory doll figures with glassy stares, set in unnervingly generic domestic settings and featureless Midwestern landscapes. The result isn’t a film per se, and would probably be more at home in an art gallery. Which is to say, that sitting through this for 90-plus minutes may be torture for some. Nakadate does have a knack for giving her banal settings a touch of the sinister, however, and the predatory gaze of the men toward the walking jailbait paraded in front of them does have a sort of creepy fascination. It may not be your thing, or most people’s thing, for that matter, but Nakadate’s fierce commitment to her perhaps dubious vision comes through clearly. (March 26, 28)



Barking Water (Sterlin Harjo)


A film like this makes me wonder if the Sundance Institute (also behind Amreeka and several others of this year’s selections) isn’t actually helping to destroy the vitality of American independent cinema, whatever great things it does for filmmakers. Like Amreeka, Barking Water is utterly generic down to the final frame. Harjo is telling a story that clearly has great personal import, but precious little of that interest comes through to the viewers, or at least this one. Essentially a road movie, the film follows Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman), who is spirited out of a hospital where he is dying of cancer, and who is accompanied by his ex-wife Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek) on their way to meet Frankie’s daughter by another woman, whom Irene has never met, who lives at a place called (spoiler alert!) “Barking Water.” Along the way they meet relatives and various strangers, and there are interminable music montages that feel more and more like lazy padding as the film wears on. There are attractive vistas, to be sure, but they aren’t very well served by the flat video cinematography. What a shame that films such as this are shackled to such tired, exhausted forms. There is nary a narrative surprise to be found anywhere, which made staying awake through this a monumental struggle. It would have been nice if Harjo could have at least attempted to come up with a form for his film that would actually reflect the Native American culture depicted, rather than simply using these details as window dressing for tropes we’ve seen a million times before. (Mar. 26, 28)



The Fly (Vladimir Kott)



This Russian comedy (which oddly mixes elements of perestroika-era Russia with the present day) follows Fyodor (Alexey Kravchenko, who was the boy shattered by war in Elem Klimov’s Come and See), a drinking-and-whoring trucker who comes to a gray and drab town to search for an old lover who has written him a letter. When he finds out the woman has now died, he finds out he may have fathered a daughter, Vera (Alexandra Tuftey), who since being left by her mother and forced to care for herself, has now become the town’s holy terror, engaging in gang fights and arson. When a local tycoon holds Fyodor responsible for Vera’s latest crimes, Fyodor decides to stay in the town, taking an interest in this troubled young girl. The film’s humor is quite broad and earthy, including a scene of a man showered with the contents of a septic tank. Much of the references in the film would seem to be lost on non-Russians, as they were lost to me, and there isn’t much interesting happening visually. (Mar. 26, 29)

New Directors/New Films 2008 Review: Lee Isaac Chung's "Munyurangabo"

Munyurangabo. 2007. Produced, directed, edited and photographed by Lee Isaac Chung. Written by Samuel Anderson and Lee Isaac Chung. Co-produced by Samuel Anderson and Jenny Lund. Art direction by Jean Kwezi. Sound by Jenny Lund. Original solo music by Claire Wibabara.

Cast: Jeff Rutagengwa (Munyurangabo), Eric Dorunkundiye (Sangwa), Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka (Sangwa's Father), Jean Pierre Mulonda Harerimana (Gwiza), Uwayo B. Edouard (Poet), Narcicia Nyirabucyeye (Sangwa's Mother), Etienne Rugazora (Ngabo's Father), Pierre Claver Kayitsinga (Father's Killer).

A near-classic work of cinematic and cultural alchemy, Munyurangabo is not only the stunning debut of a major talent, but also an expressively beautiful vessel where the voice and experiences of a people scarred by genocide, poverty, and ethnic warfare is given shape through a sensitive outsider who uses these materials to create a work of art that is transformative for both its creators and its viewers. In a similar process recalling Dave Eggers’ recent novel What Is the What, which related the experiences of a refugee who survived the genocide in Sudan, Korean-American Chung, along with collaborators Samuel Anderson and Jenny Lund, improvised this film with his cast, all of whom experienced the Rwandan civil war first hand, losing family members and struggling with the impoverished aftermath. Opening with a quote from the book of Isaiah, this film in its basic outline is a revenge story with biblical overtones. Also, with its rural setting, and many shots of characters framed though doorways, there is more than a hint of John Ford’s westerns.

Munyurangabo (Jeff Rutagengwa) is on a mission to avenge his father’s death by searching for, and murdering his father’s killer. He is accompanied by his close friend Sangwa (Eric Dorunkundiye), who is seeking to reunite with the family he left behind three years earlier, and especially to repair his strained relationship with his father (Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka). Sangwa’s desire to reconnect with his home life immediately clashes with Munyurangabo’s single-minded desire for revenge. He is also more than a little envious of Sangwa’s intact family, since he was orphaned because of the war. Also complicating matters, and creating considerable strife in the village, are the two friends’ ethnicities: Munyurangabo is a Tutsi and Sangwa is a Hutu, each an opposite member of the warring tribes of Rwanda’s civil war. Instead of their friendship being regarded as an example of reconciliation, their relationship is looked on with hostility and suspicion, especially by Sangwa’s father, who angrily admonishes his son: “Don’t you know we’re enemies?” Munyurangabo eventually leaves the village, determined to carry out his revenge, where he meets a poet (Uwayo B. Edouard), who delivers the most moving moment of the film, where he recites directly to the camera a long lament for Rwanda’s violent history. Thereafter this revenge story is transformed into something very different from what it was when it began, as is evident during the film’s lyrical final scenes. Munyurangabo’s experience at this point parallels that of another cinematic character out for revenge: Ethan Edwards, portrayed by John Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers. Chung’s unerring eye for the perfect visual and musical accompaniment to his narrative, as well as the impressive and truly authentic performances by his cast, come together to create an experience that is truly original and lingers long in the memory.

New Directors/New Films 2008 Review Round-up #2

Epitaph (Jung Bum-sik and Jung Sik)






The Jung Brothers (as the sibling co-directors prefer to bill themselves) use the crowded genre of Korean horror to deliver a visually elegant and beautifully crafted ghost story, evoking ghosts both historical and literal. The framing device and the film narrative proper are set in two distinct historical periods in Korean history. In October 1979, the month of the assassination of dictatorial president Park Chung-hee, an aging doctor, Park Jung-Nam (Jeon Mu-song), is prompted by a photo album to reminisce on his experiences in Anseng Hospital, which is about to be torn down. The bulk of the story takes place three decades earlier, over the course of four days in 1942, at the height of imperial Japan’s stranglehold of colonized Korea. Although this hospital, with its spookily dark interiors and hushed, funereal corridors, was “as quiet as the eye of a storm” during this turbulent period, the historical circumstances of the imperial Japanese government, which sought to suppress all traces of Korean culture, are felt throughout the film, most notably in the hospital architecture, which is a mix of Western and Japanese elements. A major plot device of the film concerns the murders of Japanese soldiers. The Jung Brothers, in their debut feature, display an impressively prodigious command of all elements of their film craft, especially in the art direction, color schemes, and cinematography. Besides the requisite shocks and scares, which are in this context genuinely frightening in some scenes, there are some passages of stunning visual beauty, one example being the scene utilizing Japanese-style sliding doors to depict the marriage of Jung-Nam to a Japanese bride. The conventions of K-horror are successfully transcended, not only because of the film’s visual strategies, but by provocatively paralleling the fictional horror story that unfolds with the all too real horrors experienced by the Korean people in the late stages of World War II. (April 5 and 6)














La Zona (Rodrigo Plá)



The haves and the have-nots are at war in Plá’s dystopian tale, the titular community a walled-in, gated suburbia protected with armed guards and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. When a wild storm breaches the defenses of this wall, allowing a few of the unwashed masses to break in, and for one of them to murder one of the privileged citizens, the rest rally to keep the authorities out of it, and deal with the situation themselves, vigilante style. The film ticks off familiar points dealing with encroaching surveillance, police corruption, and the overwhelming amount of state apparatus necessary to preserve the lopsided balance of rich and poor. However, despite the high-tech veneer, no points are made here that George Orwell hadn’t already addressed six decades ago. (April 4 and 6)








Falling From Earth (Chadi Zeneddine)



An experimental fantasia evoking life during and after the Lebanese civil war and spanning across four decades, Zeneddine’s film contains many arresting and intriguing images. In 2008, an old man (Rafik Ali Ahmad) lives in a bombed out building, collecting photos of various people. Stories of three of them unfold in the course of the film. In 1990, a man deals with the aftermath of his wife’s suicide and his own history of abuse toward his family. In 1975, a security guard begins a bathroom stall correspondence with a mysterious person. In 1982, a woman (Carmen Lebbos) pines for her missing lover. Although the parts don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying whole, and the ending uses a disappointingly clichéd image, Zeneddine’s impressively fluid images successfully transcend the film’s faults. (April 1 and 2)

A Lost Man (Danielle Arbid)

Despite the singular noun in the film’s title, two men are at the center of the story: Fouad Saleh (Alexander Sidding), a Lebanese man shattered by his experience in the civil war and suffering from memory loss; and Thomas Koré (Melvil Poupaud), a French photographer who prowls the streets at night, drinking in bars and picking up women, using everyone around him as fodder for his photography, practicing a disturbing sort of artistic vampirism. Both men become symbiotically intertwined in Arbid’s erotically charged scenario, as Thomas haunts the night districts of Jordan, incessantly snapping photos during his sexual assignations, pulling Fouad into his world, greedily uncovering the troubled man’s secrets. Inspired by the work of French photographer Antoine d’Agata and American novelist William T. Vollmann, A Lost Man effectively evokes the atmosphere of night life in the border towns Arbid depicts, and while it flirts with orientalist fetishizing of its Arabic characters, especially the women (surprising for a female filmmaker born in Lebanon), the film remains a fascinating and unsettling exploration of the dangers of taboo-breaking in Muslim societies. (April 5 and 6)

New Directors/New Films 2008 Review Round-up

The 2008 New Directors/New Films festival, screens from March 26 through April 6 at the Walter Reade Theater and the Museum of Modern Art. This year’s edition is the strongest in years, collectively providing a potent snapshot of current social, political, and cinematic trends. Civil wars, multicultural life in major cities, the legacies of colonialism, and natural disasters are but a few of the major themes touched upon in this year’s film selections. Quirky and individualistic character portraits are also thrown into the mix, with varying results.

Frozen River (Courtney Hunt)

The opening night film’s central image, the frozen-over St. Lawrence River, over which the protagonist Ray (Melissa Leo) smuggles illegal immigrants over the Canada-U.S. border, is a potent representation of the fragility of the circumstances that Ray and the other film’s characters find themselves in. Their constricted existences, and their struggles to gain some sort of financial and personal stability, resonate between the worlds of the upstate N.Y. trailer park where Ray lives and the Mohawk reservation where Lila (Misty Upham) tries to get back her son from her mother-in-law. Ray’s big dream is to find a new double-wide trailer for herself and her two kids, which is jeopardized when her husband runs off with the money needed for their home. Authority lays a heavy hand on everyone, although it works differently for Indians as opposed to whites. Ray, as a white woman, is able to travel more freely, at least at first, between these two worlds. But as circumstances force them together, their destinies crisscross in an unexpected fashion. Stark, de-saturated colors dominate, as the harsh elements mirror the lives, and often desperate circumstances, of the characters. The Chinese and Pakistani immigrants who are used for money by both sides are the most powerless of all, shuttled back and forth as human cargo and commodities, unwilling pawns in the efforts of the poor to survive. (March 26 and 27)


Jellyfish (Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen)




This gentle comedy crisscrosses the destinies of several denizens of Tel Aviv, creating a portrait of the city that beautifully captures the ebb and flow of their lives. Honeymooners Michael and Keren (Gera Sandler and Noa Knoller) are stuck in a hotel in the city, unable to travel to the Caribbean because of the bride’s broken foot. Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), a Filipina caretaker, deals with two very different charges, while feeling guilty over the young son she left back home. Batya (Sara Adler), an aimless young woman is put in charge of a mute little girl (Nikol Leidman) who comes out of the ocean. This scenario flows naturally, without feeling contrived or forced. Beneath the genial, comic tone of the piece is an underlying melancholy and loneliness that comes through, with Joy’s pining for her son, the single woman who lives alone in the same hotel as Michael and Keren, and an actress’ strained relationship with her mother. Appropriately making extensive use of marine imagery as a metaphor for the characters’ desire for connection, Jellyfish offers memorable images and incident (e.g. a hilarious experimental staging of Hamlet), and is a successful transition to cinema for the film’s co-directors, who previously made their names as literary artists. (March 27 and 30)






Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat)

Set in the Thailand coastal town of Takua Pa, which lost thousands of its inhabitants in the December 2004 tsunami, Wonderful Town represents a beautiful expression of the figurative (and possibly literal) ghosts that haunt this place, still existing in the woozy hangover of the town’s loss. This is a quiet film, full of silent spaces, and hushed, funereal tones, dealing in the contrasts between country and city, history and progress. Ton (Supphasit Kansen), an architect overseeing a new development in town, stays at a nearly deserted hotel, run by Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), who up to this point has remained safe in the cocoon of her life in town, running her daily errands in the hotel. As Ton, longing for an escape from the hectic bustle of Bangkok, and Na, feeling trapped between mountains on one side of Takua Pa and the sea on the other, are inevitably drawn together, the delicate balance that has existed in this lonely town is upset. The aimless youths riding through the streets on their motorbikes (including Na’s troubled younger brother) become steadily more menacing, and the whispers of gossip grow ever louder. This is an impressive debut, its odd melancholic rhythms encompassing mordant humor, lyrical visual passages, and a conclusion that combines heartbreak and hope. (April 2 and 4)


Trouble the Water (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal)




Ever since the initial calamity and continuing outrage and horrors that resulted from Hurricane Katrina, films on this subject have been a virtual documentary sub-genre. In this extraordinarily moving film, something new and vital is brought to the table: a view from the inside, literally, of the storm. This unique perspective comes courtesy of Kimberly Roberts, a resident of the lower Ninth Ward who brought her camcorder with her as the raging waters trapped her and her family on their roof. Scenes from this footage are inter-cut with her efforts to rebuild her life after the storm, complicated by both bureaucratic barriers and her own difficult family history. The co-directors, who previously worked with Michael Moore, allow this footage to tell their own stories, without a falsely authoritative voiceover, which puts into vivid relief such moving scenes as Kimberly performing her rap song directly to the camera, documenting her life story and her unflagging resilience. (April 3 and 6)







Soul Carriage (Conrad Clark)





UK director Clark delivers a reasonable facsimile of recent Chinese cinema: Xinren (Yang Fen Jun), a young construction worker paid such low wages that he can’t even afford a few beers to entertain his friends after work, is forced to carry the body of his dead co-worker (killed in a workplace accident) to the man’s hometown. He is given some hush money to give to the family, so that the company can keep everything below the radar of the authorities. The rapid industrial creep and lack of humanity prevalent in this vast landscape, represented by the hapless protagonist, a physical manifestation of depression and hopelessness, are duly present. Despite some brief flashes of attempted humor, misery is the dominant mode. However, what one misses is the sort of formal brilliance found in such filmmakers as Jia Zhang-ke, which would have added some substance to what is essentially a shallow outline for a film, rather than a fully realized one. Interestingly enough, Zhang Yang’s recent film Getting Home features a nearly identical basic storyline, but Zhang uses these elements to create a comic story told with much more soul and a firmer grasp of the complexity of the characters depicted than in Clark’s film. Soul Carriage, despite its lofty ambitions, remains an outsider’s view, however sympathetic, that fails to get below the surface of its minimal scenario. (April 3 and 5)