New Directors/New Films Film Festival

2018 New Directors/New Films Unveils Lineup, Opens with “Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.”

[caption id="attachment_27197" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.[/caption] The 47th annual New Directors/New Films festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, will introduce 25 features and 10 short films to New York audiences from March 28 to April 8, 2018. The opening and closing night selections are the New York premieres of two Sundance award-winning documentaries: Stephen Loveridge’s Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., an intimate portrait of the global rap sensation via the artist’s own video diaries, which won the festival’s World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award; and RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a visionary and poetic look at resilient African American families in the titular Alabama region, winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. This year’s lineup boasts features and shorts from 29 countries across five continents, with 10 North American premieres, 13 films directed or co-directed by women, and 14 works by first-time feature filmmakers. Highlights include Pedro Pinho’s surprising three-hour epic The Nothing Factory, which was voted #1 on Film Comment magazine’s Best Undistributed Films of 2017 list; the late Hu Bo’s epic feature debut An Elephant Sitting Still, a masterpiece sure to be remembered as a landmark of modern Chinese cinema; New York-based filmmaker Ricky D’Ambrose’s dark, minimalist pseudo-detective tale Notes on an Appearance; Gustav Möller’s emergency call center thriller The Guilty, which won prizes at Rotterdam and Sundance; Our House, an evocative examination of female friendship by first-time Japanese filmmaker Yui Kiyohara; acclaimed documentarian Emmanuel Gras’s Cannes prizewinner Makala, which follows the monumental efforts of a young Congolese charcoal-maker at work; Khalik Allah’s stylistically rich Black Mother, a close look at Jamaica via its holy men and prostitutes; Locarno prizewinner Milla, Valérie Massadian’s moving, visually striking meditation on young motherhood; and many more exciting discoveries. “The purpose of New Directors/New Films is to seek out emerging filmmakers who are working at the vanguard of cinema,” said Film Society Director of Programming Dennis Lim. “This is as diverse and wide-ranging a lineup as we’ve assembled in years: full of pleasures and provocations and, above all, surprises—proof that film remains a medium ripe for reinvention in ways big and small.” Josh Siegel, Curator of the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art said: “The filmmakers in this year’s New Directors are as imaginative, daring and restless as any we’ve seen, whether observing a world-famous rapper fighting injustices in Sri Lanka or prostitutes and holy men in Jamaica, a coal peddler in the Congo or a credit-card scammer in Switzerland.”
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
OPENING NIGHT Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. Stephen Loveridge, Sri Lanka/United Kingdom/USA In English and Tamil with English subtitles New York Premiere Before rapper M.I.A. became a global sensation, known for her musical daring and tireless political activism for the Tamil people in her native Sri Lanka, she was an aspiring filmmaker, having made countless video diaries chronicling her youth and private life. First-time documentarian Stephen Loveridge, who attended art school in London with M.I.A. in the nineties, uses this first-hand material to craft a nuanced and intimate portrait of a woman finding her roots, voice, and stardom, and a deeply personal statement from a pop star yearning to express herself. [caption id="attachment_27199" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Hale County This Morning, This Evening[/caption] CLOSING NIGHT Hale County This Morning, This Evening RaMell Ross, USA New York Premiere “The American stranger knows Blackness as a fact—even though it is fiction,” says writer-director RaMell Ross. For his visionary and political debut feature, which premiered to great acclaim at Sundance in 2018, Ross spent five years intimately observing African American families living in Hale County, Alabama. It’s a region made unforgettable by Walker Evans and James Agee’s landmark 1941 photographic essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the impoverished lives of white sharecropper families in Alabama’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ross’s poetic return to this place shows changed demographics, and depicts people resilient in the face of adversity and invisibility. Hale County This Morning, This Evening introduces a distinct and powerful new voice in American filmmaking. 3/4 Ilian Metev, Bulgaria Bulgarian with English subtitles New York Premiere 3/4 evokes the intimacies, joys, and tensions of a contemporary Bulgarian family facing an uncertain future; the father is an astrophysicist with his head in the clouds, his son a waywardly antic teenager, his daughter a gifted but anxious pianist. Illian Metev (whose previous film was the gripping documentary Sofia’s Last Ambulance) won the Filmmakers of the Present prize at the 2017 Locarno Festival for this fiction feature debut, a gracefully shot, uncommonly tender character study that plays like an exquisite piece of chamber music. Ava Sadaf Foroughi, Iran/Canada/Qatar Farsi with English subtitles New York Premiere Adolescence creates intense pressure for any girl, but it’s particularly strong for 17-year-old Ava, buffeted by the harsh strictures of home and school in contemporary Tehran. Iranian writer-director Sadaf Foroughi won the jury prize at the Toronto International Film Festival for her intimate and intensely dramatic portrait of a young woman whose private longings drive her to rebellion and lead to public shaming. A Grasshopper Film release. Azougue Nazaré Tiago Melo, Brazil, Portuguese with English subtitles North American Premiere No measure of hellfire preaching can quell the boisterous and bawdy passions of Maracatu, an Afro-Brazilian burlesque carnival tradition with roots in slavery that takes place in the northeast state of Pernambuco. As the Falstaffian character Tiao, Valmir do Coco leads a nonprofessional cast of authentic Maracatu practitioners in a tale told through dance, music, and the supernatural, set in the sugarcane fields outside Recife. The fabulous—and fabulist—Azougue Nazaré is the first film by Tiago Melo, who worked on such recent celebrated Brazilian films as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (NYFF 2016) and Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull (ND/NF 2016), and who was awarded the Bright Future prize at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival. Black Mother Khalik Allah, USA New York Premiere The second feature by filmmaker and photographer Khalik Allah is a kind of documentary tone poem, a polyphonic work rich in atmosphere and intimate portraiture. Allah immerses us in Jamaica’s neighboring worlds of charismatic holy men and equally charismatic prostitutes, the sacred and the profane alike. Allah captures them and their environments with a haunting visual style and absorbing sense of rhythm entirely his own, their testimonies flooding the soundtrack with reflections on everyday survival and hopes for the future. Seamlessly switching from Super-8mm to HD video, Black Mother affirms its maker as one of the great stylists in documentary cinema today. Closeness / Tesnota Kantemir Balagov, Russia Russian with English subtitles New York Premiere A young woman is trapped in a tight-knit Jewish community in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, located in Russia’s North Caucasus, that demands her total dedication but provides her with little protection from the perpetual violence encompassing all aspects of life. Shot mostly in interior spaces, Closeness conjures a world of darkness and claustrophobia as the heroine quietly revolts yet succumbs to her bleak existence. This debut feature by Kantemir Balagov feels more beholden to the social realism of the Dardenne brothers than to the transcendental flair of his mentor, Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov (a producer on this film). Warning: this film contains a scene featuring images of documented violence that viewers may find upsetting. Cocote Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic/Brazil/Argentina Spanish with English subtitles New York Premiere This format-mixing, formally eclectic opus is at once a profound film about religion and a unique tale of revenge. Upon learning that his father has been murdered by a powerful local figure, Dominican private gardener Alberto travels from Santo Domingo back to his hometown to participate in his funeral rites—a mixture of Catholicism and West African mysticism that flies in the face of Alberto’s own evangelicalism. But Alberto’s family has vengeance in mind, and he finds himself at a spiritual and existential crossroads. Boldly synthesizing ethnographic documentary and scripted drama, Cocote is a visually resplendent and stylistically audacious work that evokes the films of Glauber Rocha and the fiction of Roberto Bolaño. A Grasshopper Film release. Djon África João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis, Portugal/Brazil/Cape Verde, 2018, 95m In Portuguese with English subtitles North American Premiere Documentarians João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis turn the subject of their previous film into the central character of their debut fiction work. A Cape Verdean in Portugal, Miguel Moreira, also known as Djon África, travels back home to look for his birth father. This hopefully soul-searching journey quickly gets derailed as he comes across beautiful women, colorful parties, and the local liquor known as grogue. Written by Pedro Pinho, director of The Nothing Factory, also playing in this festival, this woozily intoxicating road movie is as youthful, charming, and adventurous as its title character. Drift Helena Wittmann, Germany German with English subtitles U.S. Premiere Filmmaker-artist Helena Wittmann’s subtly audacious first feature follows friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, as they spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate— Josefina eventually returns to her family in Argentina and Theresa crosses the Atlantic for the Caribbean—and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space. Self-consciously evoking the work of Michael Snow and masterfully lensed by Wittmann herself, Drift is by turns cosmic and intimate. An Elephant Sitting Still Hu Bo, China Mandarin with English subtitles North American Premiere Sure to be remembered as a landmark in Chinese cinema, this intensely felt epic marks a career cut tragically short: its debut director Hu Bo took his own life last October, at the age of 29. The protagonist of this modern reworking of the tale of Jason and the Argonauts is teenage Wei Bu, who critically injures a school bully by accident. Over a single, eventful day, he crosses paths with a classmate, an elderly neighbor, and the bully’s older brother, all of them bearing their own individual burdens, and all drawn as if by gravity to the city of Manzhouli, where a mythical elephant is said to sit, indifferent to a cruel world. Full of moody close-ups and virtuosic tracking shots, An Elephant Sitting Still is nothing short of a masterpiece. Good Manners / As Boas Maneiras Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas, Brazil/France Portuguese with English subtitles New York Premiere An immaculately stylized twist on the monster movie, Dutra and Rojas’s second collaboration (following the acclaimed Hard Labor) inventively engages matters of race, class, and desire. Set in São Paulo, the narrative initially concerns the curious relationship between rich, white, pregnant socialite Ana (Marjorie Estiano) and her new housemaid Clara (Isabél Zuaa). As the two women grow closer, their rapport turns first sexual then shockingly macabre. Good Manners evolves into a werewolf movie unlike any other, a delirious and compulsively watchable cross between Disney and Jacques Tourneur. The Great Buddha + Huang Hsin-yao, Taiwan Taiwanese and Mandarin with English subtitles New York Premiere Provincial friends Pickle and Belly Button idle away their nights in the security booth of a Buddha statue factory, where Pickle works as a guard. One evening, when the TV is on the fritz, they put on video from the boss’s dashcam—only to discover illicit trysts and a mysterious act of violence. Expanded from a short, Huang Hsin-yao’s fiction feature debut The Great Buddha + (the plus sign cheekily nodding to the smartphone model) is a stylish, rip-roaring satire on class and corruption in contemporary Taiwanese society. The Guilty Gustav Möller, Denmark Danish with English subtitles New York Premiere In this pulsating crime thriller set entirely inside a claustrophobic emergency call center, police officer Asger is assigned to dispatcher duty following a fatal incident. An initially slow evening takes a sharp turn when he receives a mysterious call for help, and Asger must spring into action, embarking on a hair-raising journey—on the phone—to bring the caller to safety. Debut feature filmmaker Gustav Möller keeps the tension and the viewer’s imagination alive in this chamber piece that won audience awards at the Rotterdam and Sundance film festivals. Makala Emmanuel Gras, France French and Swahili with English subtitles New York Premiere Gras’s transfixing road movie and Cannes Film Festival prizewinner follows a young Congolese man named Kabwita through the making, transporting, and selling of charcoal—from the felling of a tree to pushing a teetering bicycle weighed down with bulging sacks along treacherous dirt roads to contending with motorists, extortionists, and potential customers. As Gras observes Kabwita’s perilous trade, he derives beauty from the monumental efforts that go into his day-to-day existence. Makala is a documentary that resembles a neorealist parable, locating an epic dimension in the humblest of existences. A Kino Lorber release. Milla Valérie Massadian, France/Portugal French with English subtitles New York Premiere Following up her acclaimed 2011 debut Nana, Valérie Massadian has made a moving, visually striking meditation on young motherhood and the vagaries of growing up. Severine Jonckeere turns in a remarkably subtle performance as the titular 17-year-old; just as her youthful romance with Leo (Luc Chessel) seems ready to cross the threshold into teenage parenthood, Massadian performs a radical formal gesture that both complicates Milla’s predicament and evokes the beauty and cruelty of time’s passage. A prizewinner at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, Milla audaciously eschews conventional melodrama, searching instead for a complex, truthful reflection of life itself. A Grasshopper Film release. Nervous Translation Shireen Seno, Philippines Filipino with English subtitles North American Premiere Informed by filmmaker Shireen Seno’s childhood in the Filipino diaspora and her dual training in film and architecture, this sophomore work is a stylized evocation of a child’s fanciful interpretation of the world around her. Eight-year-old Yael, left to her own devices after school, secretly plays and replays audio cassettes her father sends home to her mother while working overseas; pursues happiness as communicated to her via a TV advertisement; and, in fanciful scenes that evoke the work of American artist Laurie Simmons, enters the meditative, immersive world of her dollhouse’s kitchen. Seno offers fleeting clues from the late-eighties outside world, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster and complicated adult relations, but these never overshadow her film‘s touching depiction of childhood imagination. Notes on an Appearance Ricky D’Ambrose, USA North American Premiere Ricky D’Ambrose’s debut feature follows a quiet young man (Bingham Bryant) who mysteriously disappears soon after starting a new life in Brooklyn’s artistic circles. Distraught friends (including Keith Poulson and Tallie Medel) search for him with the help of notebooks, letters, postcards, and other tiny clues; meanwhile, a parallel story about an elusive and controversial philosopher provides a rather sinister backdrop to their pursuit. This dark, minimalist pseudo-detective tale offers plenty of humor and displays a distinctive aesthetic. Following a series of remarkable shorts, D’Ambrose has clearly defined himself as a talent to watch. Preceded by: Young Girls Vanish / Des jeunes filles disparaissent Clément Pinteaux, France French with English subtitles North American premiere Clément Pinteaux explores the echoes of violence in Essonne, France, where dozens of girls were killed by wolves in the 1600s. Centuries later, young women begin disappearing again. The Nothing Factory / A Fábrica de Nada Director: Pedro Pinho, Portugal Portuguese and French with English subtitles New York Premiere A rich and formally surprising film of ideas, beautifully shot on 16mm, and featuring one of recent cinema’s most memorable musical numbers, Portuguese director Pedro Pinho’s nearly three-hour epic concerns the occupation of an elevator plant by its workers. They are stirred to action when the factory’s machinery is removed in the middle of the night by the owners; they rapidly organize, kick out the brass who have arrived offering buyouts, and discuss the feasibility of managing the facility themselves—all the while a Marxist theorist exerts ideological influence from the sidelines. The Nothing Factory is a serious and singular look at the meaning of work today, further developing Pinho’s interest in the status of labor amid his country’s financial crisis. Our House / Watashitachi no ie Filmmaker: Yui Kiyohara, Japan Japanese with English subtitles North American Premiere This feature debut is an evocative and surprising exploration of female friendship, parallel realities, and the mysteries of everyday life. An adolescent girl named Seri lives with her mother in an old house in a coastal town. Seemingly in the very same house, amnesiac Sana is taken in by Toko, a young woman who harbors secrets of her own. As the parallel stories unfold, the boundaries between these two worlds grow increasingly porous… Inspired by the fugues of Bach and recalling the films of Jacques Rivette, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and David Lynch, Our House announces Yui Kiyohara as an exciting new voice in Japanese cinema. Scary Mother / Sashishi Deda Filmmaker: Ana Urushadze, Georgia/Estonia Georgian with English subtitles New York Premiere In Georgian filmmaker Ana Urushadze’s gripping and bleakly comic feature debut, Manana, a 50-year-old Tbilisi mother abandons her duties as a wife and mother to pursue an obsessive and hermetic life of writing poetry. In a performance of coiled fear and rage that recalls the best of Isabelle Huppert, Nato Murvanidze plunges into Manana‘s feverish imagination. Scary Mother, which won awards at film festivals around the world, is a haunting, singular new vision. Those Who Are Fine / Dene wos guet geit Filmmaker: Cyril Schäublin, Switzerland German with English subtitles North American Premiere This dark comic study of an alienated contemporary Zurich begins by following an impassive twenty-something, a call center worker by day who initiates phone scams targeting elderly workers after hours. The film then spirals out to incorporate into its narrative city residents—police, bank tellers, reporters—obliquely linked to this swindle. Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin’s feature debut (following a half-dozen short films to his name, including Stampede, ND/NF 2013) is a razor-sharp, formalist satire, using the city’s grey concrete architecture; clipped, digit-dominated exchanges between urbanites (phone numbers, Wi-Fi passwords, credit cards); and even a dash of sci-fi-esque atmospherics to portray a fractured, contemporary dystopia. Until the Birds Return / En attendant les hirondelles Filmmaker: Karim Moussaoui, Algeria/France/Germany Arabic and French with English subtitles New York Premiere A property developer is witness to random street violence. A pair of secret lovers make their way across the desert. A doctor is accused of having a criminal past. In these three interconnected tales, exciting newcomer Karim Moussaoui—whom critics at Cannes compared to Abbas Kiarostami and Leos Carax—takes the pulse of modern-day Algiers, a country once riven by colonial occupation and sectarian warfare yet still abundant in beauty and promise. A Violent Life / Une Vie Violente Filmmaker: Thierry de Peretti, France French with English subtitles New York Premiere Stéphane returns to Corsica for the funeral of a childhood friend and gang member, despite having a target on his back. Through flashbacks, this sophomore feature by Corsican filmmaker Thierry de Peretti tensely unspools as a coming-of-age tale dashed with crime, political radicalism, and youthful idealism born of the island’s separatist movement. Loosely based on actual events and cast with local actors, A Violent Life resonates with regional folklore and crafts a poignant portrait of a marginalized generation. A Distrib Films release. Winter Brothers / Vinterbrødre Filmmaker: Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark/Iceland English and Danish with English subtitles New York Premiere This debut feature from Hlynur Pálmason, an Icelandic visual artist/filmmaker based in Denmark, is an immersive sensory experience set in a desolate Danish limestone mining community. A landscape covered in indistinguishable white ash and snow masks the darkness enveloping Emil, a lonely and eccentric young man who works in the mine with his much more sociable brother. Few notice Emil until he is suspected of causing a co-worker’s grave illness, which leads to his ostracization. A relentless industrial soundscape accompanies this portrait of a man trapped in unforgiving isolation. A KimStim release.
Shorts Program 1
From an atmospheric thriller set in Iran, uncanny and moving sketches of displaced people, to a musical documentary and an atypical dance film, these five bold shorts evoke the struggles and joys of communities from around the world. City of Tales Arash Nassiri, France/USA Farsi with English subtitles North American Premiere Los Angeles plays Tehran in Arash Nassiri’s uncanny, nocturnal meditation on memory and place, which follows a group of people during Nowruz, the 13-night celebration of the Iranian New Year. Rupture Yassmina Karajah, Jordan/Canada Arabic with English subtitles New York premiere Unable to communicate with the world around them, young Arab teenagers attempt to navigate their new town on a sticky summer day, in search of comfort and a public swimming pool. Palenque Sebastián Pinzón Silva, Colombia/USA Spanish/Palenquero with English subtitles New York Premiere Sebastián Pinzón Silva’s ambulant, melodic documentary is set in San Basilio de Palenque, evoking the rich musical history and collective memory of the first freed slave settlement in the Americas. Gaze / Negah Farnoosh Samadi, Iran/Italy Persian with English subtitles New York Premiere A woman witnesses a crime and must decide whether to speak up in Farnoosh Samadi’s taut and tense film. Home Exercises Sarah Friedland, USA New York Premiere Sarah Friedland’s nonfiction dance portrait of the gestural habits of elderly people in their homes is a sweet, droll, and precisely observed study of the subtle movements and choreographies of domesticity. Friday, March 30, 9:00pm [FSLC] Sunday, April 1, 1:00pm [MoMA]
Shorts Program 2
The irreverent, melancholic, and transgressive impulses of youth collide in this program of four films, each set within their own fully realized hermetic world. Copa-Loca Christos Massalas, Greece Greek with English subtitles New York Premiere Teeming with sensational images and absurd dialogue, Christos Massalas’s irreverent coming-of-age story follows a young woman eluding adulthood at an abandoned Greek resort. After School Knife Fight Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel, France French with English subtitles New York Premiere Four bandmates prepare for the departure of their lead singer in this melancholy 16mm snapshot of youthful longing. Möbius Sam Kuhn, USA New York Premiere Following the death of her boyfriend, a teenage girl drifts through her days in a haze of memory in this eerie and atmospheric high school tale. Bad Bunny / Coelho Mau Carlos Conceição, Portugal/France Portuguese with English subtitles North American Premiere This impeccably crafted, fabulist work—a beguiling cross between bestiary and family drama—concerns a voyeuristic young man’s plot to punish his mother’s lover and satisfy a forbidden urge.
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LADY MACBETH Make its NY Debut at New Directors/New Films, Opens in Theaters on July 14 | Trailer

[caption id="attachment_19551" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Lady Macbeth[/caption] Lady Macbeth, an adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” relocated to Victorian England, will make its New York premiere at the 2017 New Directors/New Films series, and open theatrically on July 14. The film, the debut feature of acclaimed UK theater director William Oldroyd, written by up-and-coming playwright Alice Birch, is described as a riveting drama of oppression, adultery and murder. Florence Pugh plays Katherine, a young woman stifled by her loveless marriage to a bitter man twice her age, and his cold, unforgiving family. When Katherine embarks on a passionate affair with a young worker on her husband’s estate, a force is unleashed inside her so powerful that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Featuring a breakout performance by British newcomer Florence Pugh, who was only 19 when she shot the film, Lady Macbeth was one of the discoveries of the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and recently screened at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhSnP7wRIeg
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Complete Lineup Announced for New Directors/New Films, Opens with PATTI CAKE$

[caption id="attachment_19920" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Patti Cake$[/caption] The complete lineup of 29 features and nine short films has been announced for the 46th annual New Directors/New Films (ND/NF), taking place March 15 to 26, 2917. The festival, dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent, is organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The opening, centerpiece, and closing night selections showcase three exciting new voices in American independent cinema: Geremy Jasper’s Patti Cake$, a breakout hit of Sundance, is opening night; Eliza Hittman’s portrait of a Brooklyn teenager’s sexual awakening, Beach Rats, is the centerpiece selection; and Dustin Guy Defa closes the festival with Person to Person, a day-in-the-life snapshot of a group of eccentric New York characters. This year’s lineup boasts eight North American premieres, eight U.S. premieres, and two world premieres, with features and shorts from 32 countries across five continents. A number of films have won major awards on the festival circuit, including Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga, winner of Rotterdam’s Tiger Award; Ala Eddine Slim’s accomplished debut The Last of Us, awarded Venice’s Lion of the Future; Dalei Zhang’s Golden Horse best feature winner The Summer Is Gone; as well as Locarno prizewinners The Future Perfect, The Last Family, and The Challenge, which took home honors for best first-time filmmaker, best actor, and the special jury prize, respectively. FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS All films are digitally projected unless otherwise noted. 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. 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. 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.
SHORTS PROGRAMS
Shorts Program 1: Events in a Cloud Chamber Ashim Alhuwalia, India, 2016, 20m New York Premiere Filmed on Super 8mm and 16mm, this documentary traces a collaboration between director Ashim Alhuwalia and Akbar Padamsee, a pioneer of modern Indian painting, to recreate Padamsee’s 1969 film, lost for decades and now regarded as potentially the birth of experimental cinema in India. Old Luxurious Flat Located in an Ultra-central, Desirable Neighborhood / Apartament interbelic, în zona superbă, ultra-centrală Sebastian Mihăilescu, Romania, 2016, 19m Romanian with English subtitles U.S. Premiere A young man spends the night alone in his apartment plagued by jealousy and anxieties as his wife goes out with an old high school friend in an attempt to sell the family car. Spiral Jetty Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2017, 15m World Premiere A young archivist is hired to whitewash a late psychotherapist’s legacy in this exquisitely crafted story, imbued with an arch, conspiratorial air and told at a perfectionist’s pace. Manodopera Loukianos Moshonas, France/Greece, 2016, 28m Greek and Albanian with English subtitles North American Premiere Oscillating between labor and leisure, a young man alternates helping an Albanian workhand renovate an Athens apartment and joining in ponderous conversations with his friends on the roof. Nyo Wveta Nafta Ico Costa, Portugal/Mozambique, 2017, 21m Portuguese, Gitonga, and Shitsua with English subtitles U.S. Premiere Ico Costa casually observes the rhythms of daily life in Mozambique in this freeform film shot on 16mm. Shorts Program 2: As Without So Within Manuela De Laborde, Mexico/USA/UK, 2016, 35mm, 25m New York Premiere This experimental meditation on the detailed surfaces of objects confronts representation in theater and cinema and forces the viewer to confront hierarchies of viewership. The Blue Devils / Los diablos azules Charlotte Bayer-Broc, France, 2017, 48m Spanish with English subtitles World Premiere More than 3,000 miners of Chile’s La Pampa were shot down by the national army during a demonstration in Iquique, a massacre told in Luis Advis’s 1969 cantata Santa María de Iquique. In The Blue Devils, Charlotte Bayer-Broc wanders through one of the ghost mining towns—a remote outpost in the Atacama Desert—interpreting Advis’s lament across eerily abandoned landscapes and industrial vistas. Bayer-Broc upends cinematic convention in a beguiling adaptation that is entirely her own; this medium-length musical is at once personal and political, reverent and burlesque.
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Under the Shadow Kicks Off Lineup for 2016 New Directors / New Films

[caption id="attachment_11872" align="aligncenter" width="1100"] Under the Shadow[/caption] The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art have announced the complete lineup for the 2016 New Directors / New Films (ND/NF), taking place March 16 to 27 in New York City. Opening the festival is Babak Anvari’s debut feature Under the Shadow, about a mother and daughter haunted by a sinister, largely unseen presence during the Iran-Iraq War. Brimming with a mounting sense of dread until its ominous finish, this expertly crafted, politically charged thriller was a breakout hit at Sundance.. The Closing Night selection is Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, a remarkable chronicle of the cinematographer-turned-director’s life through her collaborations with documentary icons Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, and others. A self-described memoir, Johnson’s first solo directorial effort examines the delicate, complex relationship between filmmaker and subject and is one of nine festival features and four shorts directed by women. This year’s slate includes a number of films that have won major awards on the festival circuit, including Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg’s Sundance Grand Jury Prizewinner Weiner; Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour, for which the main cast shared Locarno’s Best Actress award; Avishai Sivan’s Tikkun and Pascale Breton’s Suite Armoricaine, winners of the Locarno Special Jury and critics’ prizes, respectively; and Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues, which took home both the Golden Horse Award for Best New Director and Locarno’s honors for Emerging Artist and Best First Feature. Among the feature debuts are Zhang Hanyi’s Life After Life, executive-produced by Chinese master Jia Zhangke; Anita Rocha da Silveira’s psychosexual coming-of-age story Kill Me Please; Tamer El Said’s Cairo-set film within a film In the Last Days of the City; and Ted Fendt’s Short Stay, the only film in the festival to screen on 35mm. FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS Opening Night Under the Shadow Babak Anvari, UK/Jordan/Qatar, 2016, 84m Farsi with English subtitles It’s eight years into the Iran-Iraq War, but the troubles of wife and mother in Tehran have only just begun. Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is thwarted in her attempts to return to medical school because of past political activities. And as Iraqi bombs close in, her husband is sent off to serve in the military, neighbors begin to flee, and she is left alone with her young daughter, Dorsa, who refuses to be separated from her favorite doll. At first, Dorsa’s tantrums seem to simply be the complaints of a cranky child. But soon she’s in conversation with an invisible woman—no imaginary friend, this one—and the cracks in the walls and ceilings of their apartment could just be the result of something more than air raids. And what is that she sees down the hall, from the corner of her eye? Though Shideh is a woman of science, she begins to suspect that a malevolent spirit, a djinn, is stalking them. A political horror story that rises up from the rubble of war, Babak Anvari’s feature debut boasts a terrific performance by Rashidi as a woman with more than one war going on in her home and in her head, who must save her daughter from dangers both physical and supernatural. Closing Night Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2015, 102m How much of one’s self can be captured in the images shot of and for others? Kirsten Johnson may be a first-time (solo) feature-film director, but her work as a director of photography and camera operator has helped earn her documentary collaborators (Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, Barbara Kopple) nearly every accolade and award possible. Recontextualizing the stunning images inside, around, and beyond the works she has shot, Johnson constructs a visceral and vibrant self-portrait of an artist who has traveled the globe, venturing into landscapes and lives that bear the scars of trauma both active and historic. Rigorous yet nimble in its ability to move from heartache to humor, Cameraperson provides an essential lens on the things that make us human. The Apostate / El apóstata Federico Veiroj, Spain/France/Uruguay, 2015, 80m Spanish with English subtitles With wry humor and deep conviction, Uruguayan filmmaker Federico Veiroj (A Useful Life, ND/NF 2010) observes a young Spaniard’s maddening efforts to abandon the Catholic Church. Petitioning the local bishop in Madrid to hand over his baptismal records, the philosophy student is soon confronted with a stubborn bureaucracy and comically agonized tests of his fidelity and patience. Scenes of pithy theological discussion (performed by the film’s excellent ensemble cast) are interspersed with oneiric flights of imagination, cohering to produce a work that is by turns seriously philosophical and irreverently funny. While Veiroj’s tone may be more gently ironic than that of Luis Buñuel (his spiritual forebear), The Apostate nonetheless traces in bracing fashion the competing forces of conformity and rebellion, spiritual yearning and carnal desire, at war within us all. Screening with: Concerning the Bodyguard Kasra Farahani, USA, 2015, 10m This stylish adaptation of Donald Barthelme’s story, narrated by Salman Rushdie, takes on the power structures of a dictatorship with brio. Behemoth / Beixi moshuo Zhao Liang, China/France, 2015, 91m Mandarin with English subtitles Political documentarian Zhao Liang draws inspiration from The Divine Comedy for this simultaneously intoxicating and terrifying glimpse at the ravages wrought upon Inner Mongolia by its coal and iron industries. A poetic voiceover speaks of the insatiability of desire on top of stunning images of landscapes (and their decimation), machines (and their spectacular functions), and people (and the toll of their labor). Interspersed are sublime tableaux of a prone nude body—asleep? just born? dead?—posed against a refracted horizon. A wholly absorbing guided tour of exploding hillsides, dank mine shafts, cacophonous factories, and vacant cities, Behemoth builds upon Zhao’s previous exposés (2009’s Petition, 2007’s Crime and Punishment) by combining his muckraking streak with a painterly vision of a social and ecological nightmare otherwise unfolding out of sight, out of mind. Winner of the environmental Green Drop Award at the Venice Film Festival. North American Premiere Demon Marcin Wrona, Poland/Israel, 2015, 94m English, Polish, and Yiddish with English subtitles Newly arrived from England to marry his fiancée Zaneta, Peter has been given a gift of her family’s ramshackle country house in rural Poland. It’s a total fixer-upper, and while inspecting the premises on the eve of the wedding, he falls into a pile of human remains. The ceremony proceeds, but strange things begin to happen… During the wild reception, Peter begins to come undone, and a dybbuk, that iconic ancient figure from Jewish folklore, takes a toehold in this present-day celebration—for a very particular reason, as it turns out. The final work by Marcin Wrona, who died just as Demon was set to premiere in Poland, is an eerie, richly atmospheric film—part absurdist comedy, part love story—that scares, amuses, and charms in equal measure. Winner of Best Horror Feature at Fantastic Fest. An Orchard release. Donald Cried Kris Avedisian, USA, 2016, 85m Trust me, you can’t go home again. Kris Avedisian’s unhinged first feature is a brilliant twist on the family-reunion melodrama and the classic buddy comedy. Returning after 20 years to Warwick, Rhode Island, for his grandmother’s funeral, Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman), now a slick city financier, has to endure a blast from the past and relive some very cringeworthy moments when hanging out with his former high-school bestie, the obnoxious Donald Treebeck (Avedisian). By turns depressing and funny while subtly shifting our sympathies thanks to sharp dialogue and extremely well-written characters, Donald Cried can perhaps best be summed up as The Color Wheel meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Eldorado XXI Salomé Lamas, Portugal/France, 2016, 125m Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara with English subtitles Salomé Lamas’s Eldorado XXI immerses the viewer in the breathtaking views and extreme conditions of La Rinconada in the Peruvian Andes, the highest-elevation permanent human settlement in the world. Here, some 17,000 feet above sea level, miners face misery and lawlessness in the hopes of striking gold, chewing coca leaves to stave off exhaustion. They toil for weeks without pay under the inhumane lottery system known as cachorreo, gambling on an eventual fortune if they can survive the despoiled landscape long enough. Life in this remotest outpost of civilization seems to unfold in the grip of an illusion, and the film itself frequently resembles a hallucination, not least in an extended tour-de-force shot that reveals an endless stream of miners trekking up and down the mountain as we hear radio reports and stories of their daily lives. Full of unforgettable images and sounds, Eldorado XXI is a transporting, fundamentally mysterious experience that renews the possibilities of the ethnographic film. North American Premiere Evolution / Évolution Lucile Hadžihalilović, France, 2015, 81m French with English subtitles On a remote island, populated solely by women and young boys, 10-year-old Nicolas plays with other children, but not in a carefree manner. And while the women may have maternal instincts, something is awry: they gather on the beach at night for a strange ritual that Nicolas struggles to understand, and the boys are taken to a hospital regularly for mysterious treatments. And water is everywhere. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, and Nicolas appears to be living out one of his own. In the follow-up to her directorial debut, Innocence, Lucile Hadžihalilović continues her exploration of growing up—where we’re going and what we’re leaving behind. As Nicolas discovers more, feelings of fear, melancholy, and also eroticism bubble to the surface. Hadžihalilović has created a dark fantasy that we are invited to explore and make our own discoveries, however macabre they may be. An Alchemy release. The Fits Anna Rose Holmer, USA, 2015, 72m The transition from girlhood to young womanhood is one that’s nearly invisible in cinema. Enter Anna Rose Holmer, whose complex and absorbing narrative feature debut elegantly depicts a captivating 11-year-old’s journey of discovery. Toni (played by the majestically named Royalty Hightower) is a budding boxer drawn to a group of dancers training at the same rec center in Cincinnati. She begins aligning herself with one of the two troupes, the Lionesses, becoming immersed in their world, which Holmer conveys with a hypnotic sense of rhythm and a rare gift for rendering physicality—evident most of all when a mysterious, convulsive condition begins to afflict a number of girls. Set entirely within the intimate confines of a few familiar settings (public school, the gym), and pulsating with bodies in motion, The Fits encourages us to recall the confused magic of entering the second decade of life. An Oscilloscope release. Happy Hour Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2015, 317m Japanese with English subtitles Four thirtysomething female friends in the misty seaside city of Kobe navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives. They speak solace in one another’s company, but a sudden revelation creates a rift, and rouses each woman to take stock. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s wise, precisely observed, compulsively watchable drama of friendship and midlife awakening runs over five hours, yet the leisurely duration is not an indulgence but a careful strategy—to show what other films leave out, to create a space for everyday moments that is nonetheless charged with possibility, and to yield an emotional density rarely available to a feature-length movie. Developed through workshops with a cast of mostly newcomers (the extraordinary lead quartet shared the Best Actress award at the Locarno Film Festival), and filled with absorbing sequences that flow almost in real time, Happy Hour has a novelistic depth and texture. But it’s also the kind of immersive, intensely moving experience that remains unique to cinema. In the Last Days of the City / Akher Ayam El Madina Tamer El Said, Egypt/Germany/Great Britain/United Arab Emirates, 2016, 118m Arabic with English subtitles This film within a film is a haunting yet lyric chronicle of recent years in the Arab world, where revolutions seemed to spark hope for change and yield further instability in one stroke. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, The Square) plays the protagonist of Tamer El Said’s ambitious feature debut, a filmmaker in Cairo attempting to capture the zeitgeist of his city as the world changes around him—from personal love and loss to the fall of the Mubarak regime. Throughout, friends send footage and stories from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut, creating a powerful, multilayered meditation on togetherness, the tactile hold of cities, and the meaning of homeland. Shot in 2008 and completed this year, the film explores the weight of cinematic images as record and storytelling in an ongoing time of change. North American Premiere I Promise You Anarchy / Te prometo anarquía Julio Hernández Cordón, Mexico/Germany, 2015, 100m Spanish with English subtitles Miguel (Diego Calva) and Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martinez) are in deep. Badass skater-bros, crazy-in-love blood hustlers, they’re flowing inevitably toward a sea swimming with narco-sharks. This is Mexico City today, and for two boys from different worlds but the same house—Johnny is the son of Miguel’s family maid—there is no future. On the days they do have at their disposal, they will live as hard as they can, even if it means total destruction for everyone around them. A harrowing vision of the 21st century replete with garishly lit sex scenes, inebriated slow motion, and an exhilarating, eclectic pop soundtrack, and winner of numerous prizes at festivals in Latin America, Julio Hernández Cordón’s film is exploding with beats, sweat, and pain—an ecstatic and anguished portrait of youth teetering on the brink of nihilism. U.S. Premiere Kaili Blues / Lu bian ye can Bi Gan, China, 2015, 113m Mandarin with English subtitles A multiple prizewinner at the Locarno Film Festival and one of the most audacious and innovative debuts of recent years, Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future. Chen Sheng, a country doctor in the Guizhou province who has served time in prison, is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother Crazy Face intends to sell. Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him, embarking on a mystical quest that takes him to the riverside city of Kaili and the town of Dang Mai. Through a remarkable arsenal of stylistic techniques, the film develops into a one-of-a-kind road movie, at once magical and materialist, traversing both space and time. U.S. Premiere Kill Me Please / Mate-me por favor Anita Rocha da Silveira, Brazil/Argentina, 2015, 101m Portuguese with English subtitles Anita Rocha da Silveira’s vibrantly morbid debut feature is a coming-of-age story in which passive aggression on the handball court, jealousy among friends, and teenage angst unfold in the foreground of a slasher flick. In Rio de Janeiro’s Barra da Tijuca—a newly formed upper-middle-class neighborhood of car-lined thoroughfares, gigantic malls, and monolithic white condos—a clique of teenage girls become fearfully captivated by a string of gruesome murders. The most fascinated is Bia (Valentina Herszage), whose own sexual discoveries evolve alongside the mounting deaths in this skewed world of wild colors and transformative desires. With nods to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, and the atmospheres of David Lynch, Rocha da Silveira’s contribution to the genre is nonetheless entirely her own. Life After Life / Zhi fan ye mao Zhang Hanyi, China, 2016, 80m Mandarin with English subtitles Zhang Hanyi’s exquisitely restrained ghost story combines the gentle supernaturalism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul with the clear-eyed social realism of Jia Zhangke (one of the film’s executive producers). A young boy, Leilei, becomes possessed by his late mother, Xiuying, whose spirit has wandered the Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. With the help of Leilei’s father (who receives his late wife’s return with matter-of-fact equanimity), they set out to move a tree from her family’s courtyard before she departs again. In ethereal, beautifully composed sequences of a barren rural-industrial village on the edge of collapse, itself a kind of purgatorial space, Zhang captures the spectral gap between life and oblivion. North American Premiere Lost and Beautiful / Bella e perduta Pietro Marcello, Italy/France, 2015, 87m Italian with English subtitles Pietro Marcello continues his intrepid work along the borderline of fiction and documentary with this beautiful and beguiling film, by turns neorealist and fabulist, worthy of Pasolini in its matter-of-fact lyricism and political conviction. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and freely incorporating archival footage and folkloric tropes, it begins as a portrait of the shepherd Tommaso, a local hero in the Campania region of southern Italy, who volunteered to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello despite the state’s apathy and threats from the Mafia. Tommaso suffers a fatal heart attack in the course of shooting, and Marcello’s bold and generous response is to grant his subject’s dying wish: for a Pulcinella straight out of the commedia dell’arte to appear on the scene and rescue a buffalo calf from the palace. With Lost and Beautiful, a documentary that soars into the realm of myth, Marcello has crafted a uniquely multifaceted and enormously moving work of political cine-poetry. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival. U.S. Premiere Mountain / Ha’har Yaelle Kayam, Denmark/Israel, 2015, 83m Hebrew with English subtitles Atop Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, Zvia, a Jewish Orthodox woman, lives surrounded by an ancient cemetery with her four children and husband, a Yeshiva teacher who pays scant attention to her. Yaelle Kayam’s feature debut moves beyond the symbolic landscape of a woman’s isolation to offer a subtle and finely paced entryway into the character’s surprising inner life. On a nighttime walk through the tombstones, Zvia encounters a group of prostitutes and their handlers and gradually becomes an unlikely bystander to their after-hours activities, trading home-cooked meals for companionship—an usual sort, perhaps, but one that upends her existence as a mother and wife. Shani Klein’s arresting lead performance challenges clichés of female subjectivity in the filmmaker’s own society, culminating in Zvia’s dramatic attempt to bring change to her life; throughout, keenly observed frames, by turn luminous and moody, asserts the heroine’s volition with intention and finesse. Nakom T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris, Ghana/USA, 2016, 90m Kusaal with English subtitles When his father dies suddenly, medical-student Iddrisu (Jacob Ayanaba) leaves the good life in the city and returns home to Nakom, a remote farming village. He’s now the head of the family, and he finds he must repay a debt that could destroy them all. Over the course of a growing season, Iddrisu confronts both the tragedy and the beauty of village life and must choose between a future for himself in the city or one for his family and the entire village. Filming in the village of Nakom in northern Ghana, directors T.W. Pittman and Kelly Daniela Norris capture in exquisite detail the lives of people steeped in rural tradition but who yearn to be a part of a new world. Along with writer Isaac Adakudugu and a nonprofessional cast—many of whom are revelations—they have created in Nakom an intimate yet universal story about the search for independence while feeling the pull of tradition. North American Premiere Neon Bull / Boi neon Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands, 2015, 101m Portuguese with English subtitles A rodeo movie unlike any other, Gabriel Mascaro’s Venice and Toronto prize-winning follow-up to his 2014 fiction debut August Winds tracks handsome cowboy Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) as he travels around to work at vaquejada rodeos, a Brazilian variation on the sport in which two men on horseback attempt to bring a bull down by its tail. Iremar dreams of becoming a fashion designer, creating flamboyant outfits for his co-worker, single mother Galega (Maeve Jinkings). Along with Galega’s daughter Cacá and a bullpen worker named Zé, these complex characters, drawn with tremendous compassion and not an ounce of condescension, make up an unorthodox family, on the move across the northeast Brazilian countryside. Sensitive to matters of gender and class, and culminating in one of the most audacious and memorable sex scenes in recent memory, Neon Bull is a quietly affirming exploration of desire and labor, a humane and sensual study of bodies at work and at play. A Kino Lorber release. Peter and the Farm Tony Stone, USA, 2016, 92m Peter Dunning is a rugged individualist in the extreme, a hard-drinking loner and former artist who has burned bridges with his wives and children and whose only company, even on harsh winter nights, are the sheep, cows, and pigs he tends on his Vermont farm. Peter is also one of the most complicated, sympathetic documentary subjects to come along in some time, a product of the 1960s counterculture whose poetic idealism has since soured. For all his candor, he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing. Imbued with an aching tenderness, Tony Stone’s documentary is both haunting and heartbreaking, a mosaic of its singular subject’s transitory memories and reflections—however funny, tragic, or angry they may be. Remainder Omer Fast, UK/Germany, 2015, 97m The feature debut by celebrated video artist Omer Fast is a striking, stylish adaptation of English novelist Tom McCarthy’s landmark 2005 novel. Set in London, the narrative kicks off when the anonymous protagonist (Tom Sturridge) is struck by a large object plummeting from the sky. When he comes to, he has no recollection of what happened, and a reparations settlement nets him millions of pounds. The man channels these resources toward creating preposterously ambitious reconstructions of his own dim memories, in the process raising a host of questions about the relationship between reality and simulation, the minute details essential to our perception of places and events, and the limits of artistic monomania. Fast, who has explored similar themes in his own work, adapts McCarthy’s idea-packed novel with lucidity and wit, and Sturridge is mesmerizing as an existential hero searching the void for a trace of meaning. North American Premiere Short Stay Ted Fendt, USA, 2016, 35mm, 61m Multi-hyphenate Ted Fendt delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor. Shooting on 16mm (blown up to 35mm), the writer-director-editor here focuses on Mike (Mike MacCherone), an ambitionless resident of Haddonfield, New Jersey, who finds himself subletting a friend’s room in Philadelphia and (ineptly) covering his shifts at a by-donation walking-tour company. Mike floats, as if in a trance, from one low-key comic folly to another, each one a strange and subtle moral tale. Fendt’s economy of expression, expert handling of his nonprofessional cast, and incomparable nose for the tragicomic dimension of the everyday distinguishes Short Stay as a truly anomalous work in contemporary American cinema: a film made entirely on its maker’s terms. North American Premiere Suite Armoricaine Pascale Breton, France, 2015, 148m French with English subtitles In her first feature since her distinctive 2004 debut, Illumination, Pascale Breton returns to her native region of Brittany for this rapturous ensemble film about the persistence of the past in the present. Françoise (Valérie Dréville), an accomplished art historian, leaves Paris to teach at her alma mater in Rennes. Most of her former schoolmates never left town, it turns out, and are curiously eyeing her return. Meanwhile, Ion (Kaou Langoët), a sensitive geography student, falls in love with the blind Lydie (Manon Evenat), and clashes with his estranged, now-homeless mother, Moon (Elina Löwensohn), one of Françoise’s closest friends from the old punk-rock days… As these idiosyncratic, richly drawn characters intersect, their points of view overlap and the tricks of time and memory become apparent. Bursting with ideas and emotion, Suite Armoricaine is a work of symphonic scope and grand themes (love and death, art and beauty, language and music) that finds deep wells of meaning in the smallest and most surprising details and gestures. North American Premiere Thithi Raam Reddy, India/USA, 2015, 120m Hindi with English subtitles Raam Reddy’s bold, vibrant first feature is closer to Émile Zola than it is to Bollywood. Filmed in India’s southern Karnataka state with all nonprofessional actors, the sprawling narrative follows three generations of sons following the death of the family’s patriarch, their 101-year-old grandfather known as “Century Gowda.” The men’s respective vices—ranging from greed to womanizing to cut-and-dry escapism—bring deliciously comedic misadventures to their village in the days leading up to the thithi, a funeral celebration traditionally held 11 days after a death. This incisive portrait of a community in a time of radical change (while some are looking after their sheep, others are lost in their cell phones) yields exemplary humanist comedy. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival, the film equally affirms the advent of a new realism within Indian cinema, as well as an engaging new voice in contemporary world cinema. Tikkun Avishai Sivan, Israel, 2015, 120m Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles In Avishai Sivan’s intense and provocative Tikkun, a prizewinner at the Jerusalem and Locarno Film Festivals, an ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva student experiences a crisis of faith—and visions of earthly delights—when his father brings him back from the brink of death. Was the young man’s improbable survival a violation of God’s will, or was it “tikkun,” a way toward enlightenment and redemption? Sivan imbues the narrative with an indeterminate, hypnotic blend of black comedy and alienated modernism, effecting a singularly uncanny atmosphere. Nonprofessional actor Aharon Traitel, himself a former Hasidic Jew, gives a nuanced, knowing performance as the anguished prodigy, and the black-and-white chiaroscuro photography casts the devoutly private, regimented Hasidic community of old Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim in a morally shaded light. A Kino Lorber release. The Wakhan Front / Ni le ciel ni la terre Clément Cogitore, France/Belgium, 2015, 100m French and Persian with English subtitles The ingenious conceit of The Wakhan Front, a critical success at Cannes, is to transform the Afghan battlefield—dust and boredom and jolts of explosive violence—into the backdrop for a metaphysical thriller. Jérémie Renier stars as a French army commander who begins to lose the loyalty of his company, as well as his sanity, when soldiers start mysteriously disappearing one by one. Rarely is the madness of war conveyed on screen with such simmering tension and existential fear. Rarely, too, is the ignorance and mistrust between cultures—are the shepherd villagers innocent civilians or Taliban spies?—limned with such poetic insight. U.S. Premiere Weiner Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg, USA, 2016, 100m Truly compelling vérité filmmaking requires several key factors to coalesce: intimate access, cinematographic acumen, genuine inquisitiveness, and fascinating subjects. Directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg brilliantly meld these elements to create one of the most engaging and entertaining works of nonfiction film in recent years. A truly 21st-century hybrid of classic documentary techniques and reality-based dramatic storytelling, Weiner follows the mayoral election bid of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner in 2013, an attempted comeback that, as we all know now, was doomed to failure. By turns Shakespearean in its tragedy (it’s clear that Weiner and his inner circle have real political talent) and Christopher Guest-ian in its comedic portrayal of what devolves into a Waiting for Guffman–esque campaign, this is the perfect political film for our time. A Sundance Selects release. SHORTS PROGRAMS Shorts Program One Under the Sun / Ri Guang Zhi Xia Yang Qiu, China, 2015, 19m Chinese with English subtitles An incident of random nature entangles two families and brings their plights into sharp focus. Dirt Darius Clark Monroe, USA, 2014, 7m With an unsettling lyricism all his own, Darius Clark Monroe traces an evocative and elliptical portrait of a dirty deed. Totem Marte Vold, Norway, 2015, 20m Norwegian with English subtitles In seemingly idyllic Oslo, a couple demonstrates the discontents of intimacy with wit and biting honesty. U.S. Premiere Reluctantly Queer Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana/USA, 2016, 8m In a letter home to his beloved mother, a young Ghanaian man attempts to unpack his queerness in light of her love. North American Premiere Isabella Morra Isabel Pagliai, France, 2015, 22m French with English subtitles The courtyards of a housing project become a de facto stage on which unsupervised children perform, spreading rumors and shouting insults in an imitation of adulthood. North American Premiere Shorts Program Two The Digger Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France/UAE, 2015, 24m Arabic and Pashto with English subtitles With ritualistic serenity, a lone caretaker maintains ancient graves in the Sharjah Desert long after the bodies are gone. North American Premiere We All Love the Seashore / Tout le Monde Aime le Bord de la Mer Keina Espiñeira, Spain, 2016, 16m French and Pulaar with English subtitles A poetic distillation of the liminal space of refugees and migrants, developed collaboratively through encounters on the African coast of the Mediterranean. North American Premiere Of a Few Days Timothy Fryett, USA, 2016, 14m On the South Side of Chicago, final touches on one’s journey on Earth are meticulously made in a decades-old community funeral home. North American Premiere The Park / Le Park Randa Maroufi, France, 2015, 14m French and Arabic with English subtitles A series of tableaux vivants mesmerizingly locate the intersection of public space, inner lives, and social media within an abandoned Casablanca amusement park. U.S. Premiere
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Final Lineup Revealed for 2015 New Directors/New Films

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the complete lineup for the 44th New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) taking place March 18 to 29, 2015

The Opening Night selection, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which premiered at Sundance and recently took the top prize in the Generation section at the Berlin Film Festival, recounts the coming-of-age adventures of 15-year-old Minnie Goetze in 1970s San Francisco. Brilliantly adapted for the screen by first-time writer/director Marielle Heller, and based on the acclaimed illustrated novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the film is expertly cast, with British newcomer Bel Powley as Minnie, Kristen Wiig as her mother, and Alexander Skarsgård as the object of both of their desires.

Entertainment, the latest from director Rick Alverson (The Comedy), will close the 2015 edition of New Directors/New Films. The film reteams Alverson with Tim Heidecker (here serving as co-writer), and takes the audience on a hallucinatory journey with anti-comedian Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and a teenage mime (Tye Sheridan) as they encounter an assortment of characters, played by John C. Reilly, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Dean Stockwell, and Heidecker along the way.

The 2015 lineup stands out in many ways, but what is particularly exciting is a unifying sense of unconventional storytelling through visual experimentation and inventive dialogue (or a lack thereof). Whether told in sign language without subtitles (The Tribe), through beautifully shot landscapes and imagery shot on 16mm (Theeb, Mercuriales, Fort Buchanan, Tired Moonlight, and Christmas, Again) or visually arresting imagery on 35mm (in low-contrast black and white in Tu dors Nicole), the integrity and importance of the story remains paramount.

Several of the films in the lineup will also premiere after winning major awards on the festival circuit: The Fool was awarded four prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, which also gave the Best Emerging Director prize to Simone Rapisarda Casanova for his feature documentary-hybrid The Creation of Meaning (La creazione di significato); Court was the winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals; Britni West’s Tired Moonlight won the Jury Award for Narrative Feature at this year’s Slamdance; and Kornél Mundruczó’s White God won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes.

Previously announced titles include Charles Poekel’s Christmas, Again (USA), Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court (India), Rick Alverson’s Entertainment (USA), Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy (Austria), Sarah Leonor’s The Great Man (France), Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher (Israel/France), Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb (Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK), Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (Ukraine), and Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (Hungary).

Opening Night
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Marielle Heller, USA, 2014, 100m
Minnie could be your typical 15-year-old girl, awash in the throes of sexual awakening. But because she’s growing up in the free-love-induced haze of 1970s San Francisco, instead of losing her virginity to a schoolmate, Minnie opts for an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s illustrated novel and brought beautifully to cinematic life by first-time writer/director Marielle Heller, The Diary of a Teenage Girl features a heroine who is smart, funny, and talented—with the cartoon characters she sketches occasionally coming off the page to offer additional insight into her psyche. As the precocious protagonist, British newcomer Bel Powley is a revelation, fearlessly embodying the curiosity, heartache, and pleasures of adolescence as Minnie stumbles along on her journey to adulthood. Powley is supported by the moving and tender performances of Alexander Skarsgård as Monroe, the object of both mother and daughter’s affection, and Kristen Wiig as the mom who sees her own youth slipping away in Minnie’s face. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Closing Night
Entertainment
Rick Alverson, USA, 2015, DCP, 110m
Following up his 2013 breakthrough, The Comedy, director Rick Alverson reteams with that film’s star, Tim Heidecker (here serving as co-writer), for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. Or is it the end of comedy? Cult anti-comedian Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) stars as a washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime (Tye Sheridan), working his way across the Mojave Desert to a possible reconciliation with the estranged daughter who never returns his interminable voicemails. Our sort-of hero’s stand-up set is an abrasive assault on audiences, so radically tone-deaf as to be mesmerizing. Alverson uses a slew of surrealist flourishes and poetic non sequiturs to fashion a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. John C. Reilly, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Dean Stockwell, and Heidecker are among the performers who so memorably populate the strange world of Entertainment, a film that utterly scrambles our sense of what is funny—and not funny.

Christmas, Again
Charles Poekel, USA, 2014, DCP, 79m
A forlorn Noel (Kentucker Audley) pulls long, cold nights as a Christmas-tree vendor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As obnoxious, indifferent, or downright bizarre customers come and go, doing little to restore Noel’s faith in humanity, only the flirtatious innuendos of one woman and the drunken pleas of another seem to lift him out of his funk. Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling evergreens on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship. While Christmas, Again heralds a promising newcomer in Poekel, it also confirms several great young talents of American indie cinema: actors Audley and Hannah Gross, editor Robert Greene, and cinematographer Sean Price Williams.

Screening with:

Going Out
Ted Fendt, USA, 2014, 35mm, 8m
Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn. World Premiere

Court
Chaitanya Tamhane, India, 2014, DCP, 116m
Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi with English subtitles
Winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals, Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court is a quietly devastating, absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India. An elderly folk singer and grassroots organizer, dubbed the “people’s poet,” is arrested on a trumped-up charge of inciting a sewage worker to commit suicide. His trial is a ridiculous and harrowing display of institutional incompetence, with endless procedural delays, coached prosecution witnesses, and obsessive privileging of arcane colonial law over reason and mercy. What truly distinguishes Court, however, is Tamhane’s brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors; his affecting mixture of comedy and tragedy; and his naturalist approach to his characters and to Indian society as a whole, rich with complexity and contradiction. A Zeitgeist Films release. U.S. Premiere

The Creation of Meaning / La creazione di significato
Simone Rapisarda Casanova, Canada/Italy, 2014, 95m
Italian with English subtitles
Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s second documentary-fiction hybrid—winner of the 2014 Locarno Film Festival’s Best Emerging Director prize—lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation. Filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains, where memories of Nazi massacres and partisan resistance remain vivid, The Creation of Meaning centers on Pacifico Pieruccioni, an aging but defiant shepherd whose very livelihood and traditions are threatened by a New European reality of Berlusconi-caliber corruption (hilariously evoked in a profanity-laden radio talk show rant) and German land speculation. U.S. Premiere

Dog Lady
Laura Citarella & Verónica Llinás, Argentina, 2015, 95m
Spanish with English subtitles
An indelible and quietly haunting study of a nameless woman (memorably played by co-director Verónica Llinás) living with a loyal pack of stray dogs in silent, self-imposed exile in the Pampas on the edge of Buenos Aires. Almost dialogue-free, the film follows this hermit across four seasons as she patches up her makeshift shack in the woods, communes with nature, and forages for and sometimes steals food, making only the briefest of forays into the city and only fleetingly engaging with other people. She’s a distant cousin of Agnès Varda’s protagonist in Vagabond, perhaps, and just as enigmatic. Dog Lady is filmed with an attentive and sympathetic eye yet is careful never to “explain” its subject—but be sure to stay to the very end of the film’s extended final long shot. North American Premiere

The Fool
Yuriy Bykov, Russia, 2014, DCP, 116m
Russian with English subtitles
The lives of hundreds of the dregs of society are at stake in this stark and grotesque portrait of a new Russia on the verge of catastrophe. Investigating a maintenance problem in a decaying provincial housing project, plumber and engineering student Dima (Artyom Bystrov) discovers two massive cracks running the length of the building. Convinced that the building is about to collapse, he rushes to alert the mayor, who is celebrating her birthday with a drunken crowd. The town’s councillors, who’ve siphoned off much of the town’s budget to feather their nests, greet his warning with skepticism and hostility—and as events spiral out of control during one long night, Dima learns that nobody, even those he’s trying to help, likes a whistle-blower. Building on his first film, The Major, about a police cover-up, writer, director, and actor Yuriy Bykov delivers a stinging rebuke to the endemic corruption of the Russian body politic that earned him four awards at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival.

Fort Buchanan
Benjamin Crotty, France/Tunisia, 2014, 65m
French with English subtitles
The feature debut of American-born, Paris-based writer-director Benjamin Crotty marks the arrival of something rare in contemporary cinema: a wholly original sensibility. Expanding his 2012 short of the same name, Crotty chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, stranded at a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti. Over four seasons, Roger (Andy Gillet, the androgynous star of Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) seeks comfort and companionship from the army wives of this leisurely yet sexually frustrated community, while trying to keep a lid on his volatile adopted daughter, Roxy. Shot in richly textured 16mm, Crotty’s queer soap opera playfully estranges and deranges any number of narrative conventions, finding surprising wells of emotion amid the carnal comedy. North American Premiere

Screening with:

Taprobana
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal/Sri Lanka/Denmark/France, 2014, DCP, 24m
Portuguese and French with English subtitles
A sensuous and debauched portrait of Portugal’s national poet Luís Vaz de Camões teetering on the borderline between Paradise and Hell. U.S. Premiere

Goodnight Mommy
Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz, Austria, 2014, DCP, 100m
German with English subtitles
The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Lukas and Elias are 9-year-old twins, alone with their fantastical playtime adventure-worlds in a countryside home, until their mother comes home from facial-reconstructive surgery. Or is she their mother? Her head entirely bandaged, and her personality radically changed, the boys begin to wonder what this stranger has done to their “real” mother. They set out to uncover the truth, by any means their childish minds can conjure. As with most fairy tales, it turns out that children can imagine and endure things that cause more mature minds and bodies to wither from fear. Produced by renowned auteur, and frequent script collaborator with Franz, Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is an intelligent and engaging step forward for Austrian cinema. Fans of Michael Haneke’s work will find much to appreciate as well. Ultimately, this is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year. A RADiUS-TWC release.

The Great Man
Sarah Leonor, France, 2014, DCP, 107m
French with English subtitles
When we first meet Markov (Surho Sugaipov), he and fellow French Legionnaire Hamilton (Jérémie Renier) are tracking a wild leopard in a desert war zone, at the end of their posting in Afghanistan. An ambush results in an abdication of duty—despite it stemming from an act of fidelity. We learn that Markov had joined the Legion as a foreign refugee, hoping to gain his French citizenship and provide a better life for his young son. Ultimately, the complications of immigration and legal status seem petty when compared with the primal urge to do right by those who have committed their lives to saving others’. The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s alternately heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature. A Distrib Films release. U.S. Premiere

Haemoo
Shim Sung-bo, South Korea, 2014, DCP, 111m
Korean with English subtitles
First-time director Shim Sung-bo (screenwriter of Memories of Murder, the debut film of Haemoo’s producer Bong Joon-ho) distills a gripping drama from a real life incident and delivers a gritty, brooding spectacle of life and death on the high seas. With the country in the throes of an economic crisis, the Captain of run-down fishing boat Junjin sets out with his five-man crew to smuggle a group of Korean-Chinese illegal immigrants. During the hair-raising transfer of their human cargo from a freighter, rookie fisherman Dong-sik (Park Yu-chun) saves the life of Hong-mae (Han Ye-ri). Smitten and solicitous, he shelters the young woman in the engine room. But after a tense coast-guard inspection, things go horribly wrong and as the titular sea fog rolls in, the Captain forces his crew to set a new course from which there’s no turning back.

Los Hongos
Oscar Ruiz Navia, Colombia/Argentina/France/ Germany, 2014, 103m
Spanish with English subtitles
Cali street artists Ras and Calvin are good friends and collaborators despite hailing from disparate backgrounds. While one takes art classes, the other steals paint from his job in order to tag whatever surfaces he can find. Inspired by the Arab Spring protests, the pair bands together with a group of graffiti artists in order to paint a tribute to the student demonstrators. Oscar Ruiz Navia’s second feature could be termed a coming-of-age film, but Los Hongos heads in unexpected directions: while possibilities of hooking up abound, the pair’s mutual interest in making a statement that might also push forward new ideas in their own country expands what we usually see in characters growing up on-screen. This moment in the lives of two kids figuring it out encompasses all the possibilities: family, friends, sex, art, and, when they least expect it, the prospect of doing something of value. Full of color and great music, Los Hongos comprises a charming and vibrant portrait of a young, lively Colombia.

K
Darhad Erdenibulag & Emyr ap Richard, China, 2015, 88m
Mongolian with English subtitles
Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle is relocated to present-day Inner Mongolia, and the translation is startlingly seamless. Land surveyor K (Bayin) arrives in a frontier village, and soon discovers that his summons was a clerical error. Taking a job as a school janitor, K seeks an audience with the high-level minister he believes will resolve the situation, but cannot gain access to the castle where the local government is based. Intermittently aided by a barmaid and two hapless minions, K finds his efforts at clarification stymied by local hostility and administrative chaos alike. Produced by Jia Zhang-ke and rendered with great stylistic economy and a delirious sense of illogic, K is the rare literary adaptation that honors the source material even while reinventing it. At once familiar and strange, the film is both specific to its setting and faithful to Kafka in portraying faceless bureaucracy as a timeless and universal frustration. North American Premiere

The Kindergarten Teacher
Nadav Lapid, Israel/France, 2014, DCP, 119m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation and a coolly ambiguous film of ideas. Nira (Sarit Larry), a fortysomething wife, mother, and teacher in Tel Aviv, becomes obsessed with one of her charges, Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), a 5-year-old with a knack for declaiming perfectly formed verses on love and loss that would seem far beyond his scope. The impassive prodigy’s inexplicable bursts of poetry—Lapid’s own childhood compositions—awaken in Nira a protective impulse, but as her actions grow more extreme, the question of what exactly she’s protecting remains very much open. The Kindergarten Teacher shares the despair of its heroine, all too aware that she lives in an age and culture that has little use for poetry. But there is something perversely romantic in the film’s underlying conviction: in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.

Screening with:

Why?
Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2015, DCP, 5m
French and Hebrew with English subtitles
A filmmaker is asked by Cahiers du Cinéma to choose the image that made him believe in cinema. North American Premiere

Line of Credit
Salomé Alexi, France/Georgia, 2014, 85m
Georgian with English subtitles
Things are tough all over. Mortgage crises and other economic woes have hit the entire world, including the Republic of Georgia. Nino is a fortysomething woman with a small shop in Tbilisi who grew up (along with her countrymen and -women) without thinking about the complexities of finance. But the advent of Capitalism in the former Soviet republic changed all of that. When the money gets tight, Nino goes about taking loan after loan, but even as the situation gets out of hand, Salomé Alexi maintains a beautifully light, comedic tone in her feature-film debut (her short Felicità showed in ND/NF 2010). Her camera observes the deadpan humor that exists alongside the desperate straits in which the people find themselves: entertaining a French tourist in her shop while finagling yet another loan with her employee, who’s been skimming money from her, Nino represents us all: someone trying to keep her head above water while working to make things right. North American Premiere

Listen to Me Marlon
Stevan Riley, UK, 2015, 100m
With a face and name known the world over, Marlon Brando earned acclaim for his astonishing acting range and infamy for his enigmatic personality. With unprecedented access to a trove of audio recordings made by the actor himself (including several self-hypnosis tapes), documentarian Stevan Riley explores Brando’s on- and off-screen lives, from bursting onto the cinematic scene with such films as The Men and A Streetcar Named Desire to his first Oscar-winning role in On the Waterfront. Archival news clips and interviews shed light on Brando’s support for the civil rights movement as well as on the many trials and tribulations of his children, Christian and Cheyenne. But between these many revelations and disclosures, Brando manages to tell his own story, filled with bones to pick, strong opinions, and fascinating traces of one of the most alluring figures in the history of cinema. A Showtime presentation.

Mercuriales
Virgil Vernier, France, 2014, DCP, 100m
French and Russian with English subtitles
With an eclectic assortment of shorts, documentaries, and hybrid works to his name, Virgil Vernier is one of the most ambitious young directors in France today, and one of the hardest to categorize. Taking a cue from Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Vernier’s most accomplished film to date trains his camera on the Parisian suburb of Bagnolet, shadowing two receptionists who work in the lobby of the titular high-rise (Ana Neborac and Philippine Stindel). As the girls drift from one enigmatic situation to the next—going to the pool, visiting a maze-like sex club, hunting for new employment—Vernier’s visual strategies and narrative gambits grow ever more inventive and surprising. Beautifully shot on 16mm by cinematographer Jordane Chouzenoux and set to James Ferraro’s haunting electronic score, Mercuriales is that rarest of cinematic achievements: a radical experiment in form that also lavishes tender attention on its characters. U.S. Premiere

Ow
Yohei Suzuki, Japan, 2014, HDCAM, 89m
Japanese with English subtitles
You might call this blackly comic indie whatsit a Japanese episode of The Twilight Zone—except that it’s not so easily classified. Jobless young Tetsuo and his girlfriend Yuriko are inexplicably immobilized after laying eyes on an orb-like object that appears out of nowhere, hovering near his bedroom’s ceiling. In short order, Tetsuo’s (secretly unemployed) father and several policemen find themselves likewise transfixed and when all are eventually released from their frozen state, they are left permanently catatonic. After a botched police inquiry, young journalist Deguchi sets out to get to the bottom of the mysterious happening. Given that the Japanese title, Maru translates as “Zero,” he has his work cut out for him. An enigmatic, deadpan mystery that just might be a comment on the social malaise and inertia of 21st-century Japan. U.S. Premiere

Parabellum
Lukas Valenta Rinner, Argentina/Austria/Uruguay, 2015, DCP, 75m
Spanish with English subtitles
A Buenos Aires office worker finishes his day, visits his father in a rest home, lodges his cat in a kennel, and cancels his phone service. (Did you overhear the news report of riots and social unrest on the radio?) The next day, he and 10 equally nondescript individuals are transported up the Tigre delta in blindfolds and arrive at a secluded, well-appointed resort for a vacation with a difference. Instead of yoga and nature walks, the days’ activities range from hand-to-hand combat and weapons instruction to classes in botany and homemade explosives. Welcome to boot camp for preppers, the destination of choice for the serious Apocalypse Tourist. Austrian filmmaker Lukas Valenta Rinner handles his material in his home country’s familiar style, with cool distance, minimal dialogue, and carefully composed frames, interpolating the action with extracts from the invented Book of Disasters, a must-read for anyone warming up for the collapse of civilization as we know it—people, are you in? North American Premiere

Screening with:

Colours
Evan Johnson, Canada, 2014, DCP, 2m
A compact, chromatic visual essay on our way of seeing by Guy Maddin collaborator Evan Johnson. World Premiere

Theeb
Naji Abu Nowar, Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK, 2014, DCP, 100m
Arabic with English subtitles
A quietly gripping adventure tale that’s perhaps intended as a corrective to the romantic grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia, Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb is classic storytelling at its finest. The year is 1916, the setting is a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, and it’s a time of war. Seeking help, a British Army officer and his translator arrive at an encampment of Bedouins, who, according to their traditions, provide hospitality and assistance in the form of a guide. The guide’s younger brother Theeb (Jacir Eid) follows and then tags along with the three grown-ups, who soon find themselves threatened by hostiles. As a boy who learns how to survive and become a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults, Eid carries this concise and unsentimental film on his young shoulders with amazing assurance.

Tired Moonlight
Britni West, USA, 2014, HDCAM, 76m
Britni West’s directorial debut, which won the Jury Award for Narrative Feature at this year’s Slamdance, discovers homespun poetry among the good folk of West’s native Kalispell, Montana. Kalispell is a small town populated by lonely hearts engaging in awkward one-night stands, children with starry eyes and bruised knees, stock-car drivers, junkyard treasure hunters, and bighorn sheep. Rarely has Big Sky Country ever cast such a sweetly comic and tender spell. Photographed in Super-16mm by Adam Ginsberg and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast (with the exception of indie favorite Alex Karpovsky) in semi-fictionalized roles, Tired Moonlight is a sui generis slice of contemporary naturalism.

The Tribe
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, Ukraine, 2014, DCP, 132m
A silent film with a difference, this entirely unprecedented tour de force was one of the must-see flash points at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Why? Because its entire cast is deaf and mute and the “dialogue” is strictly sign language—without subtitles. Set at a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds, The Tribe follows new arrival Sergey (Grigory Fesenko), who’s immediately initiated into the institution’s hard-as-nails culture with a beating before ascending the food chain from put-upon outsider to foot soldier in a criminal gang that deals drugs and pimps out their fellow students. With his implacable camerawork and stark, single-minded approach (worthy of influential English director Alan Clarke), first-time feature director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget. A Drafthouse Films release.

Tu dors Nicole
Stéphane Lafleur, Canada, 2014, 93m
French with English subtitles
With this disarmingly atmospheric comedy, Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur continues to secure his place high among the recent surge of talent flowing from French Canada. Tu dors Nicole follows the summer (mis)adventures of a band of utterly unique characters, centering on the coquettish 22-year-old Nicole (Julianne Côté), who leads an ostensibly carefree lifestyle. When the belatedly acknowledged reality of adulthood begins to nip at her heels and her older musician brother Rémi (Marc-André Grondin) enters the picture, complications prove inevitable. Shot in low-contrast black-and-white 35mm, Tu dors Nicole is a sweet and finely crafted ode to restless youth that, in its seductive and charming way, recalls the likes of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch. A Kino Lorber release.

Violet
Bas Devos, Belgium/Netherlands, 2014, DCP, 82m
Flemish with English subtitles
The muted but harrowing tone of Violet emerges in the prologue, as closed-circuit monitors impassively display the stabbing death of a teenager at a mall. The victim’s friend Jesse (Cesar De Sutter), unable to intervene, is the lone witness to the murder. Between attending black-metal concerts and prowling the suburban sprawl with his BMX biker gang, Jesse grapples with the aftermath of the crime within his community. Favoring exquisitely fluid compositions and telling silences over dialogue, writer-director Bas Devos’s feature debut has a profoundly uneasy yet entrancing atmosphere, punctuated with bursts of online imagery and a meticulous, startling soundtrack. Reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park in its minimalist portrayal of aimless, maladjusted youth, Violet is a continually surprising exploration of pain and guilt, an interior voyage that only grows tenser and more affecting as it arrives at darker, less comprehensible regions of the soul.

Western
Bill & Turner Ross, USA, 2015, 93m
Drug cartel violence and border politics threaten the neighborly rapport enjoyed for generations between Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico. In their trenchant and passionately observed documentary, Bill and Turner Ross render palpable the unease and uncertainty of decent, hardworking folk as they are buffeted by forces beyond their control, including senseless acts of torture, murders committed just outside their homes, and the temporary USDA ban on livestock trade. Drawing on archetypes of rugged individualism and community, Western focuses on Mayor Chad Foster, who presides over Eagle Pass with a winning, conspiratorial smile; José Manuel Maldonado, his kindly Piedras Negras mayoral counterpart; and Martin Wall, a cattle rancher whose Marlboro Man stoicism melts away in the presence of his young daughter, Brylyn. Western firmly positions the Ross brothers at the frontier of a new, compelling kind of American vernacular cinema.

White God
Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary, 2014, DCP, 119m
Hungarian with English subtitles
Thirteen-year old Lili and her mixed-breed dog Hagen are inseparable. When officials attempt to tax the mutt (a law that didn’t pass in Hungary, but was actually attempted), Lili’s father dumps Hagen on the street. While Lili tries in vain to find her dog, he goes through numerous trials and tribulations, along with other cast-off pets that wander alleyways looking for food and avoiding the pound. Hagen is taken in by some no-goods and trained to be a fighter, losing his domestic instincts in the process. When Hagen finally escapes with an army of canines in tow, they set out to take their revenge on the humans who wronged them, taking no prisoners. Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity. A Magnolia Pictures release.

SHORTS PROGRAMS

Shorts Program 1
Five short films by exciting new talents from around the world: San Siro (Yuri Ancarani, Italy, 24m), Boulevard’s End (Nora Fingscheidt, Germany, 15m), Blue and Red (Zhou Tao, Thaliand, 25m), Nelsa (Felipe Guerrero, Colombia, 13m), and The Field of Possible (Matías Meyer, Mexico/Canada, 10m).

San Siro
Yuri Ancarani, Italy, 2014, DCP, 24m
This portrait of Milan’s famed stadium is both clinical and otherworldly, casting game-time preparation as the subliminal, collective ritual of our day.

Boulevard’s End
Nora Fingscheidt, Germany, 2014, DCP, 15m
Venice Pier, where L.A. meets the ocean, draws people to play, flirt, and dream. Two immigrants recount their long journeys to this place shared by so many. North American Premiere

Blue and Red
Zhou Tao, Thailand, 2014, DCP, 25m
From anti-government protests in Bangkok to rural areas in China, the march of human life is bathed in vibrant colors as if under a microscope, in what the artist dubs an “epidermal touch.” World Premiere

Nelsa
Felipe Guerrero, Colombia, 2014, DCP, 13m
An obscure, trance-like tour of a place as menacing as it is incomprehensible. North American Premiere

The Field of Possible
Matías Meyer, Mexico/Canada, 2014, DCP, 10m
A single shot charts a Montreal residential building over the course of four seasons, deriving poetry from observation. World Premiere

Shorts Program 2
Seven short films by exciting new talents from around the world: Icarus (Nicholas Elliott, USA, 16m), The Chicken (Una Gunjak, Germany/Croatia, 15m), Heartless (Nara Normande & Tião, Brazil, 25m), I Remember Nothing (Zia Anger, USA, 18m),Discipline (Christophe M. Sabe, Switzerland, 11m), We Will Stay in Touch About It (Jan Zabeil, Germany, 8m), and Odessa Crash Test (Notes on Film 09) (Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria, 6m).

Icarus
Nicholas Elliott, USA, 2014, DCP, 16m
Desire and emotion pervade this enigmatic hangout film in which a procession of mystery men emerge ex nihilo and seek shelter in a young woman’s cabin. World Premiere

The Chicken
Una Gunjak, Germany/Croatia, 2014, DCP, 15m
Bosnian with English subtitles
Six-year-old Selma is forced to confront the realities of life during wartime after she decides to let go of her birthday present.

Heartless
Nara Normande & Tião, Brazil, 2014, DCP, 25m
Portuguese with English subtitles
These sun-kissed fragments of a coming-of-age tale follow a boy who, while on vacation at a fishing village, finds himself entangled with an enigmatically nicknamed local girl. U.S. Premiere

I Remember Nothing
Zia Anger, USA, 2015, DCP, 18m
A student, unaware that she is epileptic, tries to get through another day. Structured in five sections after the phases of a seizure. World Premiere

Discipline
Christophe M. Saber, Switzerland, 2014, DCP, 11m
French, German, Arabic, and Italian with English subtitles
In this biting comedy of manners, it really does take a village.

We Will Stay in Touch About It
Jan Zabeil, Germany, 2015, DCP, 8m
After the shock of impact, reality suddenly seems out of reach. World Premiere

Odessa Crash Test (Notes on Film 09)
Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria, 2014, DCP, 6m
An iconic moment from Battleship Potemkin, remixed and reimagined. U.S. Premiere
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First 9 Films Announced for 2015 New Directors/New Films

Goodnight Mommy

The first nine official selections are announced for the 44th New Directors/New Films (ND/NF), taking place March 18 to 29, 2015 in New York City.

Representing 11 countries from around the world, the initial nine selections are Charles Poekel’s Christmas, Again (USA), Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court (India), Rick Alverson’s Entertainment (USA), Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy (Austria), Sarah Leonor’s The Great Man (France), Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher (Israel/France), Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb (Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK), Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (Ukraine), and Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (Hungary).

Four of the first nine titles announced will screen at the Sundance Film Festival including two feature-film directorial debuts: Charles Poekel’s Christmas, Again about a heartbroken Christmas tree salesman, and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s winner of the Critics’ Week grand prize at Cannes, The Tribe, which is set in a school for deaf and mute coeds, and is communicated entirely in sign language—with no subtitles. Rick Alverson’s Entertainment, a follow-up to The Comedy, follows a broken-down comedian playing a string of stand-up gigs across the Mojave Desert. Kornél Mundruczó’s White God, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, follows the brutal struggle a little girl’s dog must go through to find his way back to her after he is abandoned in the city.

Winner of numerous prizes at film festivals, including the Luigi De Laurentiis Award and the Venice Horizons Award at the Venice Film Festival, Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court is a devastating exploration of a kangaroo court process railroading an aging folk singer. Another multiple prizewinner is Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb. Winner of the Jury Prize for Best Cinematography and Art Direction at the Cairo International Film Festival, Best Directorial Debut at Camerimage, and the Venice Horizons Award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, the film is a coming-of-age story of a young Bedouin boy as he guides a British officer through harsh territory.

Nadav Lapid follows his impressive first feature, Policeman (which was a New York Film festival selection and subsequently screened at FSLC’s Film Center), with The Kindergarten Teacher. A winner at the Jerusalem Film Festival and Seville European Film Festival, the film is about a teacher who becomes overly protective of a young prodigy in her class. And Sarah Leonor follows her award-winning feature debut, A Real Life, with The Great Man, about an immigrant in the French Legionnaire’s whose actions lead to an ambush on his unit. Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. The thriller focuses on a pair of 9-year-old twins who believe their mother, recently returned from facial reconstruction surgery, is actually a stranger.

The nine official selections include:

Christmas, Again
Charles Poekel, USA, 2014, 79m
A forlorn Noel (Kentucker Audley) pulls long, cold nights as a Christmas-tree vendor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As obnoxious, indifferent, or downright bizarre customers come and go, doing little to restore Noel’s faith in humanity, only the flirtatious innuendos of one woman and the drunken pleas of another seem to lift him out of his funk. Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling evergreens on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship. While Christmas, Again heralds a promising newcomer in Poekel, it also confirms several great young talents of American indie cinema: actors Audley and Hannah Gross, editor Robert Greene, and cinematographer Sean Price Williams.

Court
Chaitanya Tamhane, India, 2014, 116m
Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi with English subtitles
Winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals, Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court is a quietly devastating, absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India. An elderly folk singer and grassroots organizer, dubbed the “people’s poet,” is arrested on a trumped-up charge of inciting a sewage worker to commit suicide. His trial is a ridiculous and harrowing display of institutional incompetence, with endless procedural delays, coached witnesses for the prosecution, and obsessive privileging of arcane colonial law over reason and mercy. What truly distinguishes Court, however, is Tamhane’s brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors; his affecting mixture of comedy and tragedy; and his naturalist approach to his characters and to Indian society as a whole, rich with complexity and contradiction.

Entertainment
Rick Alverson, USA, 2015, 110m
Following up his 2013 breakthrough, The Comedy, director Rick Alverson reteams with that film’s star, Tim Heidecker (here serving as co-writer), for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. Or is it the end of comedy? Cult anti-comedian Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) stars as a washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime (Tye Sheridan), working his way across the Mojave Desert to a possible reconciliation with the estranged daughter who never returns his interminable voicemails. Our sort-of hero’s stand-up set is an abrasive assault on audiences, so radically tone-deaf as to be mesmerizing. Alverson uses a slew of surrealist flourishes and poetic non- sequiturs to fashion a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. John C. Reilly, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Dean Stockwell, and Heidecker are among the performers who so memorably populate the strange world of Entertainment, a film that utterly scrambles our sense of what is funny—and not funny.

Goodnight Mommy
Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz, Austria, 2014, 100m
German with English subtitles
The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Lukas and Elias are 9-year-old twins, alone with their fantastical playtime adventure-worlds in a countryside home, until their mother comes home from facial-reconstructive surgery. Or is she their mother? Her head entirely bandaged, and her personality radically changed, the boys begin to wonder what this stranger has done to their “real” mother. They set out to uncover the truth, by any means their childish minds can conjure. As with most fairy tales, it turns out that children can imagine and endure things that cause more mature minds and bodies to wither from fear. Produced by renowned auteur, and frequent script collaborator with Franz, Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is an intelligent and engaging step forward for Austrian cinema. Fans of Michael Haneke’s work will find much to appreciate as well. Ultimately, this is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year. A RADiUS-TWC release.

The Great Man
Sarah Leonor, France, 2014, 107m
French with English subtitles
When we first meet Markov (Surho Sugaipov), he and fellow French Legionnaire Hamilton (Jérémie Renier) are tracking a wild leopard in a desert war zone, at the end of their posting in Afghanistan. An ambush results in an abdication of duty—despite it stemming from an act of fidelity. We learn that Markov had joined the Legion as a foreign refugee, hoping to gain his French citizenship and provide a better life for his young son. Ultimately, the complications of immigration and legal status seem petty when compared with the primal urge to do right by those who have committed their lives to saving others’. The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s alternately heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature.

The Kindergarten Teacher
Nadav Lapid, Israel/France, 2014, 119m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation and a coolly ambiguous film of ideas. Nira (Sarit Larry), a fortysomething wife, mother, and teacher in Tel Aviv, becomes obsessed with one of her charges, Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), a 5-year-old with a knack for declaiming perfectly formed verses on love and loss that would seem far beyond his scope. The impassive prodigy’s inexplicable bursts of poetry—Lapid’s own childhood compositions—awaken in Nira a protective impulse, but as her actions grow more extreme, the question of what exactly she’s protecting remains very much open. The Kindergarten Teacher shares the despair of its heroine, all too aware that she lives in an age and culture that has little use for poetry. But there is something perversely romantic in the film’s underlying conviction: in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.

Theeb
Naji Abu Nowar, Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK, 2014, 100m
Arabic with English subtitles
A quietly gripping adventure tale that’s perhaps intended as a corrective to the romantic grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia, Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb is classic storytelling at its finest. The year is 1916, the setting is a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, and it’s a time of war. Seeking help, a British Army officer and his translator arrive at an encampment of Bedouins, who, according to their traditions, provide hospitality and assistance in the form of a guide. The guide’s younger brother Theeb (Jacir Eid) follows and then tags along with the three grown-ups, who soon find themselves threatened by hostiles. As a boy who learns how to survive and become a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults, Eid carries this concise and unsentimental film on his young shoulders with amazing assurance.

The Tribe
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, Ukraine, 2014, 132m
A silent film with a difference, this entirely unprecedented tour de force was one of the must-see flash points at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Why? Because its entire cast is deaf and mute and the “dialogue” is strictly sign language—without subtitles. Set at a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds, The Tribe follows new arrival Sergey (Grigory Fesenko), who’s immediately initiated into the institution’s hard-as-nails culture with a beating before ascending the food chain from put-upon outsider to foot soldier in a criminal gang that deals drugs and pimps out their fellow students. With his implacable camerawork and stark, single-minded approach (worthy of influential English director Alan Clarke), first-time feature director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget. A Drafthouse Films release.

White God
Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary, 2014, 119m
Hungarian with English subtitles
Thirteen-year old Lili and her mixed-breed dog Hagen are inseparable. When officials attempt to tax the mutt (a law that didn’t pass in Hungary, but was actually attempted), Lili’s father dumps Hagen on the street. While Lili tries in vain to find her dog, he goes through numerous trials and tribulations, along with other cast-off pets that wander alleyways looking for food and avoiding the pound. Hagen is taken in by some no-goods and trained to be a fighter, losing his domestic instincts in the process. When Hagen finally escapes with an army of canines in tow, they set out to take their revenge on the humans who wronged them, taking no prisoners. Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity. A Magnolia Pictures release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGFyFvrPVlU
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Complete Lineup for 43rd New Directors/New Films; Ana Lily Amirpour’s A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT is the Opening Night Film

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

The complete lineup was unveiled for the 43rd edition of New Directors/New Films taking place March 19 to March 30, 2014 in New York City and presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art. This year’s festival will screen 27 international feature films and 13 short films. The opening night feature is Ana Lily Amirpour’s A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, a Persian, black-and-white, noirish thriller that recently bowed at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim and is based on a graphic novel written by Amirpour about a young female vampire who stalks the streets of a fictional lonely Iranian ghost town. The closing night feature, 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH, by visual artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, also had its premiere at Sundance, where it won directing and editing awards in the World Cinema Documentary category. The film follows a fictitious 24 hours in the life of musical and cultural icon Nick Cave as he is writing his 2013 album “Push the Sky Away.”

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Seven Films Selected for 43rd New Directors/New Films

Richard Ayoade’s THE DOUBLE (UK)

Seven films have been picked as official selections for the 43rd New Directors/New Films Festival (ND/NF), presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and taking place March 19 to 30, 2014. Representing eleven countries from around the world, the initial seven selections are Richard Ayoade’s THE DOUBLE (UK), Benedikt Erlingsson’s OF HORSES AND MEN (Iceland), Abdellah Taïa’s SALVATION ARMY (L’Armée du salut) (France/Morocco/Switzerland), Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (Estonia/France), Roberto Minervini’s STOP THE POUNDING HEART(Belgium/Italy/USA), Albert Serra’s STORY OF MY DEATH (Història de la meva mort) (Spain/France), and Vivian Qu’s TRAP STREET (Shuiyin Jie) (China).

The seven official selections include:

THE DOUBLE (2013) 93 min
Director: Richard Ayoade
Country: UK
Richard Ayoade has built a loyal following with his hilariously off characters, notably the one he plays in the TV series The IT Crowd and those that inhabit his 2010 directorial debut, SUBMARINE. His cerebral, visually arresting follow-up, THE DOUBLE, based on Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella, enters slightly darker territory, and recalls the stylizations of Terry Gilliam. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James, a humdrum worker drone, and James Simon, his gregarious doppelgänger, the film is set within both the claustrophobic confines of Simon’s bureaucratic workplace and his paranoid mind. Aided by a stellar supporting cast (including Wallace Shawn, Mia Wasikowska, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine, and Chris O’Dowd), THE DOUBLE firmly establishes Ayoade as a leading voice in contemporary cinematic comedy. A Magnolia Pictures release.

OF HORSES AND MEN (2013) 80 min
Director: Benedikt Erlingsson
Country: Iceland
The debut feature by celebrated stage director Benedikt Erlingsson announces the arrival of an innovative new cinematic voice. Set almost exclusively outdoors amid stunning Icelandic landscapes, the film features in equal parts a cast of exquisite short-legged Icelandic horses and human characters—including the terrific Ingvar E. Sigurdsson and Charlotte Bøving as meant-for-each-other but put-upon lovers—illuminating with great inventive flair the relationship between man and beast. Several narrative strands defined by the way each character relates to their horse recount a variety of situations according to the particulars of the seasons, resulting in a surprising and sometimes humorous symbiosis between horses, humans, and nature.

SALVATION ARMY (L’Armée du salut) (2013) 81 min
Director: Abdellah Taïa
Countries: France/Morocco/Switzerland
Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. First seen as a 15-year-old, Abdellah (Saïd Mrini) habitually sneaks away from his family’s crowded Casablanca home to engage in sexual trysts with random men in abandoned buildings. A decade later, we find Abdellah (now played by Karim Ait M’hand) on scholarship in Geneva, involved with an older Swiss professor (Frédéric Landenberg). With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, and worthy of Robert Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity.

A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013) 98 min
Directors: Ben Rivers and Ben Russell
Country: Estonia/France
As collaborators, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two intrepid and nomadic talents of experimental film and art, have created one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences to come along in a great while. In A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS, Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om, gives a strangely affecting, perhaps even trance-inducing performance as the film’s Parsifal figure, a quixotic man who embarks on a quest for utopia—the holy grail of infinite truth, self-knowledge, and spiritual connectedness. He finds some measure of it in three seemingly disparate contexts: in a small collective community on a remote Estonian island, in isolation in the northern Finnish wilderness, and onstage fronting a black metal band in Norway. While his experience seems to be a perpetual one of home, exile, and return, for us, it is purely magical.

STOP THE POUNDING HEART (2013) 100 min
Director: Roberto Minervini
Countries: Belgium/Italy/USA
Sara (Sara Carlson, playing herself) is part of a devout Christian goat-farming family with 12 children, all home-schooled and raised with strict moral guidance from the Scriptures. Set in a rural community that has remained isolated from technological advances and lifestyle influence—no phones, TVs, computers, or drunken teen brawls—the subtly narrative film follows Sara and Colby, two 14-year-olds with vastly different backgrounds who are quietly drawn to each other. In Minervini’s intimate documentary-style portrait—the third in the Italian-born filmmaker’s Texas trilogy—Sara’s commitment to her faith is never questioned. It’s the power of the director’s nonintrusive handheld-camera style that reveals his protagonist’s spiritual and emotional inner turmoil about her place in a faith that requires women to be subservient to their fathers before becoming their husbands’ helpers. By also presenting an authentic, impartial portrayal of the Texas Bible Belt, Minervini allows for the humanity and complexity behind the stereotypes to show through.

STORY OF MY DEATH (Història de la meva mort) (2013) 148 min
Director: Albert Serra
Countries: Spain/France
No one else working in movies today makes anything remotely like the films of Catalan maverick Albert Serra, a cerebral oddball and improbable master of cinematic antiquity. Known for his unconventional adaptations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS) and the Biblical parable of the Three Kings (BIRDSONG), Serra here stages the 18th-century passage from rationalism to romanticism as a tussle between two figures of legend, Casanova and Dracula. Against a backdrop of candlelit conversation and earthy carnality, Serra sets in motion contrasting ideas about pleasure and desire, alternating between winding philosophical dialogue and wordless passages of savage beauty. Winner of the top prize at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival, the film is both a painterly feast for the eyes, abounding with art-historical allusions, and an idiosyncratic, self-aware revamping of the costume melodrama.

TRAP STREET (Shuiyin Jie) (2013) 94 min
Director: Vivian Qu
Country: China
Notions of surveillance and observation are turned inside out in TRAP STREET, producer Vivian Qu’s first turn as a director. While surveying city streets for a digital-mapping company, engineer Qiuming catches sight of Lifen, a beautiful young woman. Immediately smitten, he follows her to a street that doesn’t appear on any map or even a GPS. In between his other gigs—installing security cameras, sweeping hotel rooms for electronic bugs—he tries to get to know this alluring stranger. And he does—sort of. But things take a disturbing turn when Qiuming is accused of stealing secrets from the lab where Lifen works, and the mystery, as well as the paranoia, deepens from there. Noir in tone, and a great representation of the newest generation of Chinese filmmakers, TRAP STREET is a bold story about who is really watching whom that, while firmly embedded in the current cultural context of China, could happen to any one of us.
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29 Films on Lineup for 2012 New Directors/New Films
[caption id="attachment_2331" align="alignnone"]5 BROKEN CAMERAS[/caption]

The 41st New Directors/New Films (March 21 – April 1) organized by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art will screen 29 feature films (24 narrative, 5 documentary) and 12 short films representing 28 countries.

The opening night feature is Nadine Labaki’s WHERE DO WE GO NOW?. Screening on Wednesday, March 21 at MoMA, Labaki’s follow up to the critically acclaimed CARAMEL follows the events that transpire after women of different religions in a remote Lebanese village band together and invent schemes to prevent their men from killing each other in the intractable religious conflict that surrounds their community. This entertaining and unlikely near-musical tears down stereotypes of women in the Middle East and uses humor to explore serious subjects, with one eye toward Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the other toward Bollywood. Winning audience awards at the Toronto and San Sebastian Film Festivals after a successful premiere in Cannes, WHERE DO WE GO NOW? is refreshing and unflinching. The film is a Sony Pictures Classics Release.

The 41st edition of New Directors/New Films will be marked by a series of first time events for the festival: The screening and celebration of Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, FEAR AND DESIRE (1953) breaks precedent by presenting a film nearly 20 years older than the festival itself. THE RABBI’S CAT, directed by Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar will be the first 3-D feature screened at ND/NF, as well as the first feature shown as a family film. Two programs of short films have also been added to this year’s schedule and Gareth Huw Evans’ Indonesian martial-arts thriller THE RAID will be the first late-night screening of a ND/NF selection.

This year a special surprise screening will be featured as the Closing Night selection. The film will not be revealed to the audience until it screens at the Film Society on Sunday, April 1.

Among the feature debuts are films by actors-turned-directors Karl Markovics and Roschdy Zem. Markovics’ BREATHING follows an inmate at a juvenile detention center whose last hope of parole rests on his ability to hold down a job as a morgue assistant, while Zem’s thriller OMAR KILLED ME is about a Moroccan gardener wrongly accused of murder. Visual artist and musician Terence Nance’s AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY is a personal meditation on love in the new millennium. The film was an audience favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Additional first-time feature outings include Adam Leon’s GIMME THE LOOT, a New York-fueled adventure about two ambitious graffiti artists with a plan to make their revenge-inspired mark on the city. Song Chuan’s HUAN HUAN weaves an emotionally charged story about a woman whose indiscretions have a domino effect within her rural village. Similarly, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s NEIGHBORING SOUNDS looks at the unexpected consequences that occur when a private security firm is hired to police a prosperous middle class neighborhood sitting next to a low-income area. Finally, Lee Kwang-Kuk puts the lessons learned from being assistant director to Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo on display with his film ROMANCE JOE which thrusts the viewer into a series of intertwined stories triggered by a bar maid telling of the time she met a suicidal guy called ‘Romance Joe.’

Returning to New Directors/New Films are Mads Brügger (THE RED CHAPEL, 2010) with his film THE AMBASSADOR, in which he takes center stage as the title character in an effort to expose African political misdeeds; and Joachim Trier (REPRISE, 2007) with his (previously announced) OSLO, AUGUST 31ST which follows a young man on what will be the most significant day of his life.

Daring and experimental approaches to documentary filmmaking are highlighted by Anca Damian’s (previously announced) CRULIC: THE PATH TO BEYOND which utilizes hand-drawn, cutout and collage animation techniques and Victor Ginzburg’s GENERATION P, a metaphysical Mad Men from the go-go 1990s. Other documentaries include Emad Burnat’s and Guy Davidi’s Sundance award-winner for Best Documentary Direction, 5 BROKEN CAMERAS, which chronicles the jarring events that have taken place in Palestine over the past five years and David France’s HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, which provides an immersive moving-image document chronicling the rise of AIDS activism.

The 41st New Directors/New Films features selections include:

THE AMBASSADOR (Ambassadøren) (2011) 94min
Directed by Mads Brügger
Country: Denmark
The consummate agent-provocateur–his method fittingly described as “Graham Greene meets Borat”–Brügger (THE RED CHAPEL, NDNF 2010) shocks and mightily entertains by performing an artistic intervention in reality using role-playing and hidden cameras to expose an awful truth about life in central Africa.

BREATHING (Atmen) (2011) 90min
Director: Karl Markovics
Country: Austria
The remarkably assured directorial debut from veteran Austrian actor Karl Markovics (THE COUNTERFEITERS) creates a slipstream between the perilousness of youth and the inevitability of death as it tells the story of an inmate at a juvenile detention center whose last hope of parole rests on his ability to hold down a job…as a morgue assistant. A Kino Lorber release.

CRULIC: THE PATH TO BEYOND (2011) 73min
Director: Anca Damian
Country: Romania
Anca Damian’s documentary utilizes hand drawn, cutout and collage animation techniques, combined with some very dark humor to create a striking documentary about a young Romanian’s hunger strike in a Polish jail.

DONOMA (2011) 133min
Directed by Djinn Carrénard
Country: France
Rumored to have been shot for about $200, DONOMA announces the arrival of an intriguing new talent on the French scene, Haitian-born, Paris based Djinn Carrénard. Devised, shot (often guerrilla-style) and edited over a period of years, the film is a choral piece that chronicles the romantic destinies of three women, offering a fresh, funny portrait of an emerging French generation.

FEAR AND DESIRE (1953) 72min
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: USA
Directed, photographed, and edited by the talented and ambitious 24-year-old Kubrick, FEAR AND DESIRE was written by his high school classmate, Howard Sackler, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in playwriting. Some Kubrick scholars see this wartime drama of five soldiers behind enemy lines and their encounter with a native woman as a dry run for PATHS OF GLORY; others see it as the original to the second half of FULL METAL JACKET. A Kino Lorber release.

5 BROKEN CAMERAS (2011) 90min
Directors: Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
Countries: Palestine/Israel/France
Emad Burnat’s and Guy Davidi’s documentary began five years ago in the Palestinian town of Bil’in when Burnat bought a camera to record the birth of his son Gibreel. Gibreel’s arrival, however, coincided with a period of great unrest in the area, which is witnessed by five video cameras, each subsequently damaged by bullets or rocks. A Kino Lorber release.

FOUND MEMORIES (Historias Que Só Existem Quando Lembradas) (2011) 98min
Director: Julia Murat
Country: Brazil
The original title, which translates as “stories that only exist when remembered,” beautifully expresses the theme and core sentiment of Julia Murat’s poetic rendering of the fictive town of Jotuomba. A magical confluence of generations and cultures is occasioned by the visit of Rita, a young photographer, to this place where time has seemingly stood still and life is rooted in the fixed roles of tradition soon to be rendered obsolete. A Film Movement release.

GENERATION P (2011) 116min
Director: Victor Ginzburg
Country: Russia
Ginzburg’s GENERATION P could be described as a metaphysical Mad Men from the go-go 1990s – a wonderland of images and ideas that emerged from the rebirth of a nation as a marketer’s paradise. The film offers a “view” of post-Communist Russia as the arrival of democracy and Pepsi-Cola brought the advance of capitalism with all of its mechanisms and fuzzy messages.

GIMME THE LOOT (2012) 81min
Director: Adam Leon
Country: USA
In his feature film debut, Adam Leon has created a raucous, car-less road trip that is an homage to street-smart kids and New York City. Malcolm and Sofia, two determined teens from the Bronx, are the ultimate graffiti writers. When their latest masterpiece is wiped out by a rival gang, they must hustle, steal and scheme to get spectacular revenge and become the biggest graffiti writers in the city.

GOODBYE (Bé omid é didar) (2011) 104min
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof.
Country: Iran
In his latest film, celebrated Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof creates a dramatic and tense tale set in Tehran, where a young woman is desperately attempting to acquire a visa to leave the country. The beautifully shot film uses the confinement of space to cinematically express claustrophobia, its precise framing catching every subtle expression on the face of the astonishing Leyla Zareh, who plays the disbarred human rights lawyer, Noora, looking for a way out.

HEMEL (2012) 80min
Director: Sacha Polak
Country: The Netherlands/Spain
Sacha Polak’s HEMEL features Hannah Hoekstra as a strong-willed, complicated, and vulnerable heroine who longs (perhaps too much) to connect with her elusive father and ultimately find herself. The film is a powerful investigation of a sexually-empowered woman and her search for physical and intellectual intimacy.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (2012) 109min
Director: David France
Country: USA
David France’s immersive moving-image document chronicling the rise of AIDS activism shows a movement though the lenses of those who captured it firsthand. Desperate people leveraged the skills they had—some wrote, some lobbied, many marched, and all mobilized—to flight a plague that vast swaths of society saw as just punishment for immoral actions. A Sundance Selects release.

HUAN HUAN (2011) 90min
Director: Song Chuan
Country: China
Song Chuan’s first feature captures the dreams and desires, disappointments and regrets, of a life not fully lived via the title character. In a rural Chinese village, a young woman who is the local doctor’s mistress struggles against her family, government bureaucracy and social mores to move away and create a life for herself.

IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE (Z daleka widok jest piekny) (2011) 77min
Directors: Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal
Country: Poland
Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal’s film is set in a Polish village effectively cut off from civilization, where rough and impassive Pawel makes a living scavenging for scrap metal. There’s bad blood between him and the “community” (a more spiteful collection of individuals would be hard to imagine), and when he goes AWOL his neighbors loot and vandalize his home. What if he returns? A brooding, almost wordless drama vision of a world in an advanced state of entropy.

LAS ACACIAS (2011) 85min
Director: Pablo Giorgelli
Country: Argentina
One of the discoveries of the 2011 Cannes Critics Week, Pablo Giogelli’s road movie with a difference takes a 900-mile trip from Asunción in Paraguay to Buenos Aires in the company of Rubén, a gruff, taciturn truck driver and the two illegal immigrants—a young woman, and her new-born daughter—he is reluctantly transporting.

THE MINISTER (L’exercice de l’État) (2011) 115min
Director: Pierre Schöller
Country: France
Pierre Schöller’s political thriller focuses on a cabinet minister (Olivier Gourmet) in charge of national transportation who believes himself to be a man of the people. He wants both to be and do good, but in order to get anything done he must, given the exigencies of compromise, cajole, bend and even betray.

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (O som ao redor) (2012) 124min
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Country: Brazil
A thrilling debut from a breakout talent, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s NEIGHBORING SOUNDS delves into the lives of a group of prosperous middle-class families residing on a quiet street, close to a low-income neighborhood. A private security firm hired to police the street becomes the catalyst for an exploration of the neighbors’ discontents and anxieties, which are exacerbated by a palpable sense of unease over their society’s troubled past and present inequities.

NOW, FORAGER (2012) 93min
Directors: Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin
Countries: USA/Poland
A quiet tale about the search for integrity and the perfect mushroom, Jason Cortlund’s and Julia Halperin’s NOW, FORAGER follows Lucien and Regina, an urban couple living off the land foraging for fungi in upstate New York with a dream of following the seasonal emergence of exotic varieties across the country. That is, until Regina’s decision to take a job in the kitchen of a hip restaurant offers a more solid opportunity, even as it betrays Lucien’s off-the-grid ethos.

OMAR KILLED ME (Omar m’a tuer) (2011) 85min
Director: Roschdy Zem
Country: France
Actor-turned-director Roschdy Zem’s OMAR KILLED ME tells a story of racism, politics, and injustice with the clarity of a documentary and the pacing of a thriller. When a rich widow was murdered in the south of France 20 years ago, her Moroccan gardener was convicted and jailed with no evidence; it took a committed journalist to try to unravel the rush to judgment that laid bare the racism that was hidden in the French justice system.

OSLO, AUGUST 31ST (2011) 96min
Director: Joachim Trier
Country: Norway
Daylight lingers at the end of August in Oslo, but sunlight is not a friend to Anders, a semi-recovered addict, facing a new life, which may not be appealing without former habits. Adapted from the same novel as Louis Malle’s THE FIRE WITHIN (1963), Joachim Trier’s OSLO, AUGUST 31ST follows Anders as he tries to adjust – making love, wandering through Oslo, having a job interview, seeing old friends, and trying to get comfortable with his situation. A Strand Releasing Film.

AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY (2011) 95min
Directed by Terence Nance
Country: USA
Frank, funny, and bracingly contemporary, visual artist Terence Nance gleefully bends the cinematic rules for his personal meditation on love in the new millennium with his film, AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF BEAUTY. Passages of live action sequences and direct-to-camera interviews are accented with a wide variety of animation styles as Nance analyzes his amorous history as well as his current circumstances.

PORFIRIO (2011) 101min
Director: Alejandro Landes
Country: Colombia
Paralyzed from the waist down by a stray police bullet, the title character in Alejandro Landes’ remarkable film spends his days selling minutes on his cell phone when not flirting with his comely neighbor, and secretly plotting his revenge. Landes worked on the film for five years, creating a tale that joined the most intimate details of Porfirio’s day-to-day life with an astonishing re-creation of his attempt to hijack an airplane.

THE RABBI’S CAT (Le chat du rabbin) (2011) 89min
Director: Antoine Delesvaux
Countries: France/Austria
Adapted from the graphic novels by Joanne Sfar, THE RABBI’S CAT is a vivid, lively, and imaginative animated film co-directed by Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux . Set in 1920’s Algiers, a widower rabbi lives with his voluptuous and dutiful daughter and their pesky cat who swallows a parakeet and begins to speak, driving everyone crazy and moving the plot ahead by insisting on having a bar-mitzvah.

THE RAID (2011) 100min
Director: Gareth Huw Evans
Countries: Indonesia/USA
In Gareth Huw Evans’ sensational thriller, THE RAID, a police SWAT team storms a housing project ruled by gangsters and inhabited by machete-wielding lowlifes—but the mission has been leaked, the tables are turned, and a dwindling band of elite fighters find themselves massively outnumbered in a lethal game of cat and mouse. What ensues is a relentless and savage succession of close-quarters shoot-outs and punishing martial-arts combat sequences, each jaw-dropping smackdown unbelievably topping the previous one. This film is wild! A Sony Pictures Classics release.

ROMANCE JOE (Ro-maen-seu Jo ) (2011) 115min
Director: Lee Kwang-Kuk
Country: South Korea
In his playful first feature, Lee Kwang-Kuk expertly weaves several narrative strands into an elegant web and a meditation on storytelling. A teasing and pleasing portrait of a filmmaker in search of a story to tell, ROMANCE JOE begins as a young, self-possessed barmaid in a remote inn recalls the time she met the title character.

TEDDY BEAR (2012) 92min
Director: Mads Matthiesen
Country: Denmark
Mads Matthiesen’s character-based and understated comedy, TEDDY BEAR tells the story of a gentle giant of a body builder who self sculpts his muscles by day and lives quietly at home with his mom at night. But at 38, he really wants a proper girlfriend, and despite his mother’s resistance (she is a master of emotional manipulation) and his own profound awkwardness, he draws up the courage to find one–even if he has to leave Denmark to do so.

TWILIGHT PORTRAIT (2011) 105min
Director: Angelina Nikonova
Country: Russia
TWILIGHT PORTRAIT is a powerhouse collaboration co-written and co-produced by Angelina Nikonova, who directed, and Olga Dihovichnaya, who stars in this very dark, provocative and constantly surprising debut feature film. In a modern Russian city where corruption, apathy and class warfare are the norm, a woman is raped, rather casually, by the police. What follows explodes the conventions of sexual politics—and will certainly have filmgoers talking.

WHERE DO WE GO NOW? (2010) 100min
Director: Nadine Labaki
Countries: France/Lebanon/Italy/Egypt
Labaki’s film focuses on a group of women of different religions in a remote Lebanese village that band together and invent schemes to prevent their men from killing each other in the intractable religious conflict that surrounds their community. This entertaining and unlikely near-musical tears down stereotypes of women in the Middle East and uses humor to explore serious subjects, with one eye toward Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the other toward Bollywood. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.

The 41st New Directors/New Films shorts selections include:

PROGRAM 1 (In alphabetical order) 84min

CHICA XX MUJER (2011) 12min
Director: Isabell Šuba
Countries: Germany/France
In a country with the highest percentage of cosmetic surgery and beauty queens per capita, a Venezualian girl prepares to be celebrated like a princess on her quinceañera.
THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT (Les enfants de la nuit) (2011) 26min
Director: Caroline Deruas
Country: France
Girl meets boy, the oldest story in the book: but it’s France in 1944, and he’s German.
GIONGO (2011) 8min
Director: Colin Elliott
Country: France
What did Shakespeare know of love? How many words are there in Japanese for rain? Can anyone really dance the Mashed Potato?
MEANING OF ROBOTS (2011) 4min
Director: Matt Lenski
Country: USA
“I’ve been working on this robot movie… and over the years it developed into a sex movie.” Seriously.

THE ROOM (Soba) (2011) 5min
Director: Ivana Jurić
Country: Croatia
Stop motion animation explores sensuality and sex through the eyes of a doll.

STREET VENDOR CINEMA (Cine camelô) (2011) 16min
Director: Clarissa Knoll
Country: Brazil
When a filmmaker and his team set up a shop that makes and sells short films on demand, wild fantasies come to life in the middle of a bustling marketplace.

SUMMIT (2011) 13min
Director: Medeni Griffiths
Countries: UK/USA
A chance encounter on a mountain road can lead to friendship and understanding or mistrust and betrayal.
PROGRAM 2 (In alphabetical order) 96min

THE END (2011) 16min
Director: Didier Barcelo
Country: France
A respected actress’ work gets refurbished.

OH SORROW (Ay pena) (2011) 20min
Director: Elisa Cepedal
Country: Spain
When you lose your last connection to the place you once called home, what’s to keep you there?

THE PLAIN (A chjána) (2011) 21min
Director: Jonas Carpignano
Countries: Italy/USA
Based on real events in Italy, an African immigrant discovers an unexpected cost to his activism.

REVOLUTION REYKJAVIK (2011) 20min
Director: Isold Uggadottir
Country: Iceland
As Iceland sinks into economic meltdown, 58-year-old Gudfinna tries, against all odds, not to do the same.

ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING (2011) 19min
Director: Russell Harbaugh
Country: USA
Two sons become over-protective with their mother at a dinner to celebrate her birthday.
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40th New Directors/New Films (March 23 – April 3) Announces Lineup

Opening Night Film: MARGIN CALL

The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the full lineup for the 40th edition of New Directors/New Films (March 23 – April 3). Dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent, the film festival will screen 28 feature films (24 narrative, 4 documentary) representing 22 countries.

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Official Selections – 2011 New Directors/New Films Film Festival

Denis Côté’s CURLING

The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the six official selections for the 2011 New Directors/New Films Film Festival running March 23 – April 3,2011.

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New Directors/New Films Film Festival

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Shorts Program 1

Shorts Program 2