(ALL SCREENINGS IN THIS SECOND HALF TAKE PLACE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. THESE ARE THE FSLC BLURBS FOR EACH FILM.)

WEEK OF MARCH 11-14, 2013

MONDAY, MARCH 11

9:00AM
THEY’LL COME BACK (105m)
Director: Marcelo Lordello
Country: Brazil
In this gentle, understated drama, an upper-middle-class 12-year-old learns how Brazil’s other half lives when she and her sullen older brother are left behind by their parents in a rural backwater. Soon, Cris (ably played by Maria Luiza Tavares, who carries the film from beginning to end) is taken in by a family living in a squatter farming community, where she waits for mom and pop to return. And waits and waits. Another fine debut from the Recife film scene, source of last year’s ND/NF hit NEIGHBORING SOUNDS.

11:00AM
DIE WELT (2012) 80min
Director: Alex Pitstra
Country: Netherlands
In his smart debut feature, director Alex Pitstra announces himself as a neo-Tarantino, employing an arsenal of cinematic techniques to explore a life he imagines he could have lived. The director sets his story in post–Jasmine Revolution Tunisia, where young Abdallah (Abdelhamid Naouara), Pitstra’s stand-in and a Tarantino-esque, head-strong twenty-something, dreams of leaving the video store where he works for Europe. Based loosely on his father’s story of coming to Holland, Pitstra's semi-autobiographical voyage is set against the backdrop of a contemporary yet traditional Tunisia trying to find a way forward.

Viola
12:45PM
THE SEARCH FOR INSPIRATION GONE (9m) + VIOLA (63m)
VIOLA (2013) 63min
Directors: Matías Piñeiro
Country: Argentina
Matías Piñeiro is one of contemporary Argentine cinema’s most sensuous and sophisticated new voices. In his latest film, VIOLA, he ingeniously fashions out of Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night a seductive roundelay among young actors and lovers in present-day Buenos Aires. Mixing melodrama with sentimental comedy, philosophical conundrum with matters of the heart, VIOLA bears all the signature traits of a Piñeiro film: serpentine camera movements and slippages of language, an elliptical narrative and a playful confusion of reality and artifice. A Cinema Guild release.
Combining animation, special effects, and live action, this silent film asks: will a writer who searches for inspiration find it in help or hindrance?

TUESDAY, MARCH 12

9:00AM
RP31 (5m) + TOWHEADS (86m)
TOWHEADS (2013) 86min
Director: Shannon Plumb
Country: USA
The Brooklyn mother of two boys and the wife of a harried theater director, Penelope barely has time to stay sane, much less create art. She finds comic relief from domestic drudgery by inhabiting the world in guises—drag king, pole dancer, Santa Claus—managing to find moments of grace even on thankless days. Accomplished video and performance artist Shannon Plumb makes a wincingly funny feature debut that strikes awfully close to home. The writer-director stars opposite her real-life husband (Derek Cianfrance, director of BLUE VALENTINE) and her talented, towheaded sons (Cody and Walker Cianfrance). Interview with Sharon Plumb in Filmmaker Magazine at Rotterdam.

10:45AM
PEOPLE’S PARK (2012) 78min
Directors: Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki
Country: USA/China
An immersive, inquisitive visit to the People’s Park in Chengdu, China, this film was created in a single virtuoso tracking shot. The joys of communal play, exercise, and leisure time come under intense scrutiny from the relentless gaze of the directors' lens, creating alternate states of unease and exhilaration. IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334076/ext ... _=tt_ov_rt

12:30PM
ANTON’S RIGHT HERE (Anton tut ryadom) (2012) 120min
Director: Lyubov Arkus
Country: Russia
Critic-turned-filmmaker Lyubov Arkus finds herself becoming the key caregiver for severely autistic teen Anton Kharitonov and documents over six years, in a reflective and fascinating style, the tremendous obstacles and problems of encouraging and supporting a sensitive but barely communicative boy. What sets Arkus’s work apart from so many other documentaries addressing autism is her majestically artful filmmaking (with a huge contribution by cinematographer Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev), her exceptionally close relationship to her subject, and her powerful voice-over commentary, one of the most sublime to be heard in recent cinema. IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2358838/
3:00PM
SHORTS PROGRAM #2 (83m)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13

9:00AM
UPSTREAM COLOR (2012) 96min
Director: Shane Carruth
Country: USA
Ever since his 2004 debut, filmmaker Shane Carruth has prompted curiosity over what he’d come up with next. UPSTREAM COLOR meets expectations but is also starkly different and markedly advanced. It represents something new in American cinema, exploring life’s surprising jumps and science’s strange effects. A love story embedded in a kidnap plot, UPSTREAM COLOR leaps with great audacity through its sequences, a cinematic simulacrum of the way we reflect on our lives, astonished at, as in the title of Grace Paley’s fiction collection, our Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. UPSTREAM COLOR opens in NY on April 5.

11:00AM
STORIES WE TELL (2012) 108min
Director: Sarah Polley
Country: Canada
What is real? What is true? What do we remember, and how do we remember it? Actor/director Sarah Polley turns from fiction to nonfiction, in the process cracking open family secrets. Using home movies, still photographs, and interviews, Polley delves into the life of her mother, a creative yet secretive woman. But while she is talking to her own relatives, Polley’s interest lies in the bigger picture of what families hold onto as truth. STORIES WE TELL is a delicately crafted personal essay about memory, loss, and understanding. A Roadside Attractions release, sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada. Debuted at Venice, shown also at Toronto and Telluride. Edited by Michael Munn. Polley, who is Canadian, previously starred in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, Doug Liman's Go, and Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. She later wrote and directed Away From Her, which received Oscar nominations for her screenplay and Julie Christie's performance.

1:15PM
L’INTERVALLO (2012) 86min
Director: Leonardo Di Costanzo
Country: Italy
Winner of the Critics’ Prize at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, this portrait of two adolescents thrown together under the eye of the Neapolitan Camorra has an air of menace and sexual tension. A shy ice-cream vendor (Alessio Gallo) guards a feisty girl (Francesca Riso) who has allegedly wronged a local gangster. Holed up in an abandoned building, they warily share dreams of escaping their fate. Director Di Costanzo brings documentary realism and a poetic eye to this quietly intense drama; his nonprofessional actors give beautifully shaded performances in Neapolitan dialect.

THURSDAY, MARCH 14

9:00AM
JARDS (2012) 93min
Director: Eryk Rocha
Country: Brazil
The celebrated composer and musician Jards Macalé is in the recording studio where director Eryk Rocha captures him in a wide variety of poses and states of creating, imaginatively varying style and shooting formats. Fashioning an intimately attuned portrait of an artist, Rocha uses his camera as an instrument to riff with Jards in a poetic exchange between images and music. The repetitive, time-stopping process of rehearsal and the flow of energy between the two art forms create an elegiac vision of the creativity of some of Brazil’s most beloved singers and musicians.
10:45AM
SHORTS PROGRAM #3 (86m), MOMA

12:45PM
OUR NIXON (2013) 85min
Director: Penny Lane
Country: USA
As President Richard Nixon tape-recorded his conversations for posterity, so his devoted aides—H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin—shot hundreds of rolls of Super-8 film documenting the presidency. Filmmakers Penny Lane (DIR/Co-SCR/Co-PROD) and Brian L. Frye (Co-SCR/Co-PROD) have edited this footage—virtually unseen since the FBI seized it during the Watergate investigation—and interwoven it with period news footage and pop culture, excerpts from the Nixon tapes, and contemporary interviews. OUR NIXON offers an unprecedented, insider’s view of an American presidency, chronicling watershed events including the Apollo moon landing and the path-breaking trip to China, as well as more intimate glimpses of Nixon in times of glory and disgrace.
CLOSING NIGHT SELECTION

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