WEEK OF MARCH 4-8, 2013

MONDAY, MARCH 4

Blue Caprice
9:00AM
BLUE CAPRICE (2012) 92min
Director: Alexandre Moors
Country: USA
Inspired by the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks in which ten random victims were killed in Washington D.C., Alexandre Moors’s debut feature is a semi-road movie that looks at the killers' stories prior to the event. He follows the elder John and 17-year old Lee as they prepare to carry out their acts of gun violence. Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond play the infamous criminals Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo respectively. Abandoned by his mother, Lee is taken in by John, who becomes a mentor preaching hate and teaching marksmanship in what develops into a powerful if warped father-son style mentor relationship. Blind loyalty grows, and death becomes mundane. The French-raised Moors gives the two mean sympathetic treatment. He and his screenwriter R.F.I. Porto navigate the violence discreetly, focusing more on the origins than the trappings of violence. Raffi Asdourian wrote a helpful short review of the film at its Sundance debut. OPENING NIGHT SELECTION

Emperor Visits the Hell
10:45AM
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (Tang huang You Di Fu) (2013) 71min
Directors: Li Luo
Countries: China/Canada
Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver Film Festival, Li’s crafty reworking of part of the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West is one of the most inspired recent works from an independent Chinese filmmaker. Emperor Li Shimin is now a bureaucratic boss in a big city, where the crooked Dragon King’s attempt to change the weather has backfired and condemned him to death. Li pulls the rug out from under everyone, from the audience to those whose power has gone to their heads.

The Color of the Chameleon
12:30PM
THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (Tsvetat na hameleona) (2012) 114min
Director: Emil Christov
Country: Bulgaria
Unfolding in the years before and after the fall of Communism, this black comedy
about a rogue secret police informant goes down a rabbit hole into a realm of twisted absurdity. The scenario by Vladislav Todorov, adapting his own 2010 novel Zincograph, centers on young misfit Batko Stamenov, who’s recruited to infiltrate…a book club. After being dropped for his strange ideas, Batko embarks on his own private investigation and targets the intellectuals of the “Club for New Thinking,” hatching a scheme that fully exposes the ludicrous reality of secret policing. Well, it is much more complicated than that, and to some viewers seems wonderfully hip, to others devoid of sense. In either case, Bulgaria is back with its first film at ND/NF in thirty-five years. Reviews by and James McNally.

TUESDAY, MARCH 5

Küf
9:00AM
KÜF (2012) 94min
Director: Ali Aydin
Countries: Turkey/Germany
A railroad inspector spends his days in the gorgeous Anatolian outback looking for cracks on the line and his evenings writing letters to the government looking for news about his son who disappeared 18 years ago. Basri (Ercan Kesal) fights bureaucracy and secrecy in the person of police inspector Murat (Muhammet Uzuner) and the spellbinding character study, with shades of Raskolnikov, is completed by a third man, Cemil, whose anti-social behavior begs confrontation. As tension mounts Aydin shows his considerable talent bringing this poignant tale to its heartbreaking finale. Winner of the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice Film Festival 2012.

Tower
10:45AM
TOWER (2012) 78min
Director: Kazik Radwanski
Country: Canada
For his feature debut, Kazik Radwanski has opted to train his camera with great intensity and control on a character who utterly lacks a center or direction, even an identity. In his mid-thirties yet still living at home with his parents, Derek (Derek Bogart) struggles to make a small animation about a green creature building rock towers. He can’t maintain any real friendships, let alone romantic involvements, until he encounters Nicole (Nicole Fairbaim), who offers a glint of promise. Radwanski‘s single-minded vision suggests filmmaking of uncommon discipline combined with unmistakable empathy.

12:30PM
A HIJACKING (Kapringen) (2012) 99min
Director: Tobias Lindholm
Country: Denmark
On its way to harbor, cargo ship MV Rozen is seized by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Moving between claustrophobic life on the ship and negotiations by the freight company in Denmark, Lindholm creates a climate of unbearable tension with an unexpected climax. The narrative is based on a true event, and his use of actual locations and people who have been in similar situations create palpable authenticity. Augmented by a terrific cast, Lindholm explores the danger of the disparity between impoverished nations and the developed world. A Magnolia Films release.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6

9:00AM
BURN IT UP DJASSA (Le djassa a pris feu) (2012) 70min
Director: Lonesome Solo
Countries: Ivory Coast/France
Brimming with the fateful energy of the ghetto, this cinema-vérité-shot, noir-tinged drama was shot in 11 days and created collectively by its streetwise protagonists eager to give voice to their present situation. Tony (Abdoul Karim Konate) is stuck in a rut and desperate to get out of the ghetto; the cocky youth hangs out gambling and hawking cigarettes until bad luck pushes him into an irrevocable dead-end situation. Narrated by a storyteller in Nouchi slang and set to slam poetry this vibrant snap-shot will have you cheering for cosmic justice.

10:20AM
RENGAINE (2012) 75min
Director: Rachid Djaïdani
Country: France
The French title of this no-budget urban drama translates as “refrain,” and repetition is what it embodies—in this case the well-worn story of Romeo and Juliet. Sabrina (Sabrina Hamida) accepts the marriage proposal of struggling actor Dorcy (Stéphane Soo Mongo), but Dorcy is a black Christian and Sabrina a Muslim Arab. Her eldest brother, Slimane (Slimane Dazi), enlists the 39 “brothers” in their extended clan to prevent the taboo union. Shot in the streets, this film is part love letter to the irresistible energy of Paris, part call for interracial tolerance.

12:00PM
SHORTS PROGRAM #1 (85m)
Chiralia by Santiago Gil, 2013, Germany
A boy’s disappearance at a wooded lake leads to a questioning of memory and perception. (New York Premiere)
The Village (A Cidade) by Liliana Sulzbach, 2012. Brazil
A small village’s inhabitants are all elderly, and no one new is moving in. New York Premiere!
To Put Together a Helicopter (Para armar un helicóptero) by Izabel Acevedo, 2012. Mexico
When summer rains bring power outages to his neighborhood, 17-year-old Oliverio comes up with an ingenious solution. (North American Premiere)

THURSDAY, MARCH 7

9:00AM
THE SHINE OF DAY (Der Glanz des Tages) (2012) 90min
Directors: Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel
Country: Austria
Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have amply demonstrated, with their previous semi-fictional, semi-documentary films, a generous perspective on people struggling at the fringes of showbiz—namely, the circus. In their latest film, vagabond performer Walter Saabel embraces what he calls “Der Glanz des Tages” (the shine of day) as a personal North Star. His nephew, the great theater actor Philipp Hochmair, finds Walter arriving at his Hamburg home unannounced, and the two begin a fascinating, testy, and wholly unpredictable relationship.

10:45AM
THE ACT OF KILLING (2012) 116min – theatrical cut, 158min – director’s cut
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Country: Denmark
What is one to make of the men who freely admit their involvement—and pleasure—in the mass killing of millions of Indonesians during that country’s bloody anti-Communist campaign in the 1960s? American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING bypasses the usual documentary tropes of exposing injustice, instead provoking the viewer to consider the murderers’ sense of responsibility for their crimes. Teetering between sheer horror and grotesque comedy, this is a glimpse into the heart of darkness that’s rarely been achieved in cinema. Both the theatrical version and the longer, director’s cut of the film will be screened at ND/NF. A Drafthouse Films release.

1:00PM
SOLDATE JEANNETTE (2012) 79min
Director: Daniel Hoesl
Country: Austria
Fanni buys clothes from an upscale boutique and lives in a beautifully appointed apartment. But something—well, everything—seems askew in her world, and she leaves town when her games with commerce are discovered. Hiking through the mountains, she encounters Anna, a young woman who has spent her life on a pig farm. Their worlds could collide—or they could help each other find brave new ones. In his first feature, director Daniel Hoesl fashions an absurdist morality play that pits an urban, manufactured world against nature.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8

9:00AM
LES COQUILLETTES (2012) 75min
Director: Sophie Letourneur
Country: France
Girls gone wild! Filmmaker Sophie brings her film and friends Carole and Camille to the Locarno Film Festival. The festival is a merry-go-round of parties, and these girls are boy crazy—when Sophie’s not stalking Louis Garrel, ineffectual attempts to hook up with unimpressed guys and emotional meltdowns ensue. Sophie Letourneur’s comedy of arrested development is a delightfully giddy, screwball lark, a self-mocking, thirty-something French counterpart to Lena Dunham’s Girls. Are Letourneur, Camille Genaud, and Carole Le Page playing themselves? Espérons que non!

10:30AM
JISEUL (2012) 109min
Director: O Muel
Country: South Korea
As part of a brutal anticommunist purge of the island of Jiju in 1948, Korean troops hunt down the inhabitants of a village caught in the crossfire. The villagers hide out in a mountain cavern, enduring an extended ordeal of cold and hunger, 120 souls crammed together below ground like the potatoes alluded to in the film’s title. Recounting a forgotten chapter in postwar Korean history, Jiju native O Muel draws out amazing performances from his nonprofessional cast, in an austere, beautifully composed, and deliberately paced requiem.

12:45PM
LEONES (2012) 80min
Director: Jazmin Lopez
Countries: Argentina/France/Netherlands
Is this a story about five friends wandering through a forest, or is it about a forest that receives five visitors? In this metaphysical trance film, the verdant environment is as much a character as the youngsters, enfolding them as they move through it, their playful banter, word games, and ruminations filling the air. In a succession of long takes, a gliding camera follows this enigmatic hike to nowhere. Nothing is what it seems, but a malfunctioning tape recording may contain an explanation.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.