New Directors – Family Films, $200 Movies and Body Builders

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Friday, 23 March 2012 19:07

Written by David D'Arcy

New Directors/New Films has showcased the work of emerging artists for over 40 years, and continues to celebrate the most innovative voices in filmmaking. Presented by Lincoln Center's Film Society and MoMA.

As New Director/New Films opens March 21, 2012, at MoMA, here are some recommendations from noted film writer/reviewer David D'arcy with more to come. --ed

The Ambassador
directed by Mads Brugger
(Denmark)
Anything but diplomatic, this documentary/mockumentary by Mads Brugger, the Colbert of Denmark, made its debut at IDFA in Amsterdam late last year. Its political incorrectness will offend some tender souls, as it did at Sundance. Brugger, posing as a businessman, buys an Liberian ambassadorship to the Central African Republic, and then opens a factory in which pygmies, roaring drunk when we meet them, will make matches one day.

It’s all a front for what the new ambassador hopes will be a lucrative diamond business. It’s not corruption at its worst, but at its most ridiculous. The problem is that the rest of the doc’s large ensemble cast doesn’t know it’s a joke.

After seeing The Ambassador, you won’t wonder why a continent like Africa, rich in resources, has kept so much of its population in poverty. Everyone in this movie is for sale. But this film isn’t a PhD thesis. This is a tragedy that makes you laugh as much as Brugger’s journey to North Korea did in his previous sort-of doc, Red Chapel.

5 Broken Cameras
directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
(Palestine/Israel, France)
Bi’lin, a village on the West Bank is being cut in two so that settlers subsidized by the Israeli government can drive conveniently back and forth to Israel. Soldiers are posted there to guard the settlement and the road to it. When the local Palestinians (and their Israeli supporters) begin to document the protests against the construction, their cameras end up destroyed in the process. It took five of those cameras to make this film, which premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam late last year.

The doc’s premiere coincided with Newt Gingrich’s smug declaration that the Palestinians were an “invented people”. Since then, Newt, Fannie Mae’s “historian” for hire, has had trouble inventing his presidential candidacy.

In the course of the making of the film, five years, young Gibreel grew up under occupation, and protesters died. If there was any step toward reconciliation happening, we don’t see it. Think of the old Vietnam era nostrum – “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Here the cameras were sacrificed so the film could be made. 5 Broken Cameras is an Arab - Israeli collaboration.

Teddy Bear
directed by Mads Matthiesen
(Denmark)
What’s a poor Danish bodybuilder to do if he can’t find love in Denmark? Muscleman Dennis Petersen (Kim Kold), the anti-Schwarzenegger, departs for Thailand, more of a commercial love destination for Danish men than a Shangri-la for real romance. He’s like Shrek -- kindhearted and oversized, minus the wit -- as he wanders among a different people who find him perplexing.

Don’t expect much sex here. That would be too obvious, and too true to life. The director expanded Teddy Bear from an earlier short with a harder edge. You can watch that short on line. I found it more satisfying than the feature at NDNF, which premiered at Sundance – but I seem to be in the minority.

Hemel
directed by Sasha Polk
(Netherlands)
Hemel is the Dutch word for heaven. Here Hemel is a young woman, more of an opportunist than a predator, whose celestial body seems to have sex with more people than Michael Fassbender does in Shame.

The sequential journey into self-destructive rebellion (her aloof priapic father is a specialist in Impressionism at Christie’s in Amsterdam who surpasses her in conquests) makes you think of Shame, and close-ups of cadaverously gaunt actress Hannah Hoekstra lurch from shots worthy of the most elegant jewelry ads to glimpses into the eyes of someone in a private hell.

Polk also manages to catch you off-guard with an odd spike of laughter. (Hemel: “I’ve never fucked a Moroccan before.” Partner: “I’m Algerian.”) Hemel won the critics prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The Rabbi’s Cat
directed by Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux
(Israel/France)
ND/NF is presenting this animated tale of a cat who eats the family parrot and battles his rabbi master with Talmudic sophistries as the first family film that the festival has ever shown. That’s true, but don’t let it deter you.

Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux evoke Algiers of the 1930’s with the charm and wit from Sfar’s original comic of the same name, and without too much nostalgia -- even a rabbi can’t drink tea at cafes for the colonial French where Arabs and Jews are banned. (Sfar directed Gainsbourgh – Une Vie Heroique.)

This antidote to the Disney-ization of the family movie should be a hit at NDNF, and in the marketplace – as long as they don’t dub it for a commercial release.

Donoma
directed by Djinn Carrenard
(France)
This French independent film, made for all of $200, we’re told, moves from struggling characters to struggling relationships, to what borders on the pathological as she ties three stories together in the unfashionable reaches of Northeast Paris and the suburbs beyond.

Sometimes its look has the modern classical purity of a 1960s love story a la francaise. Other sections have a handheld brusqueness (echoing that of The Class from 2007) that mimics the fickleness and emotional volatility of its young characters.

Watch for Emilia Derou-Bernal as a teacher of Spanish to a class of bad-ass slackers who uses her sexual leverage to discipline a cocky unruly troublemaker.

While it helps that the generally gorgeous young cast is more than easy to look at, Carrenard has edited his interlocking stories with a remarkable composure that makes subtle dramas out of its shifts from the explosive to the meditative to the everyday. It’s a remarkably watchable two hours and 20 minutes. Watch for the pull-quote -- "Best film for the money."

The Raid: Redemption
directed by Gareth Huw Evans
(Indonesia)
If you thought that Michael Bloomberg’s ham-handed tactics in storming Zucotti Park to conquer and displace Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were extreme, The Raid: Redemption by Gareth Huw Evans will overwhelm you.

The martial arts police film has journeyed through the festival circuit and opens in NY. Plot doesn’t matter much in this filmed ballet about a raid on a high-rise repository of drugs and drug dealers by a ninja-garbed elite unit. The hook here is that the raid was ordered by corrupt cops to winnow out their competition. That means winnowing by swords, machine guns, fists and anything else that you can hit someone with.

The vertical element of The Raid is a wry twist on any notion of Upstairs/Downstairs, and this Towering Inferno has wooden floors and walls, so the opportunity to shoot and stab through partitions, or chop your way through with an axe,  provides another novelty.

Think of choreography instilled with the can-you-top-this octane of extreme sports (blood sports?), and you’ll be ready for The Raid. The logistics are daunting. The jokes are as dark as the prospects of any cops or crooks walking out alive.  I’m sure they’re mapping out the sequels as we speak. Speak may be the key word – there’s barely a spoken script here – why talk when you can slash someone throat with his own knife? – so the international reach is enormous for The Raid.

One caveat -- as you watch in awe  at the somersaults, don’t forget that Indonesia is a corrupt place where drug dealers have run rampant.  At the end of The Raid, a surviving cop limps away, assuring a buddy that there are some honest cops out there. Where? Only in a movie...

Generation P
directed by Victor Ginzburg
(Russia)
From the world of martial arts at the core of The Raid, we move to music videos, the background of Victor Ginzburg, the director whose debut feature is an adaptation of Victor Pelevin’s novel, Generation P. (The American version of this is called Homo Zapiens. You can read sections here. )

The Russian-born Ginzburg relocated from the Soviet Union to Venice, California, so don’t be surprised to hear the tonalities of a surfer dude if you meet him. Yet his story takes place in Russia, in the early days of post-Communism, where an educated Everyman, Babilen Tatarsky, has been marginalized into working at a kiosk near Red Square run by crooks from the Caucasus.

When an old schoolmate who’s flush in new rubles happens by looking for condoms, and hears Babilen promoting the prophylactics with a catchy phrase that relieves the boredom of selling newspapers and contraception from a cage, the old friend outfits Babilen with a new job, new clothes, and a place in the vanguard of New Russia’s new propaganda, all in the name of consumerism.

If the universe of consumption draws Babilen in one direction, the asceticism of New Age mysticism draws him in another. So do the hallucinogens that are part of that higher consciousness. The satirical becomes the centrifugal in a portrait of the assault on the hearts, minds and wallets of an unprepared population.

In the kaleidoscopic Generation P, the letter that Pelevin selected stands for Pepsi, Putin, Propaganda, and Psychedelia. Did I leave out Paranoia?

How To Survive a Plague
directed by David France
(United States)
Politics, specifically the gender politics of the 1980s, is revisited in How To Survive a Plague, one of the few docs in ND/NF 2012. This chronicle of AIDS activism in the United States in the early days of that movement is the film debut of David France, a journalist who covered those events.

France looks at the indifference of much of the political and medical establishments toward a new disease that they didn’t understand, and which seemed to strike gay, black and drug-addicted constituencies that lacked political power back then.

My how things have changed. He tracks how political power emerged among gay groups, in a bumpy and contentious way, particularly with the loud and shrill direct action of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Are the Occupy Wall Street people aware of this experience?

The less-known story of AIDS activism is the prodigious self-education that turned some protesters into experts who directed pharmacological research and redirected policy. These are achievements that have been forgotten and ignored as the public moved their attention to the next tragedies, and AIDS moved from a seemingly incurable disease to a largely treatable one.

There are poignant poetic moments in How To Survive a Plague that I won’t give away, but the broader task here was to distill thousands of hours of video footage  from the first movement to document itself at the participant level in moving pictures. It’s unruly, and a prefiguration of the cell phone documentation of everything these days. What they lacked back then was youtube.

Even so, much of that era (and the personalities who were essential and unavoidable then) didn’t make it into How To Survive a Plague. My guess is that they’ll make it into the audiences and the question periods afterwards.

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