By S.T. VanAirsdale

While it's generally more fashionable to debate the vitality (and/or the viability) of recent films about the war in Iraq, the best story going is the dynamic work that's emerged from the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Especially in the realm of short films: Spike Lee's monolithic When the Levees Broke notwithstanding, Katrina yielded a strong concentration of acclaimed fest fare like South of Ten (NYFF '06), God Provides (Sundance '07), Glory at Sea! (SXSW '08) and this year's Sundance, SXSW and Tribeca (among others) selection The Second Line, which screens Sunday night as part of Sundance at BAM.

Stacked with dread: (L-R) Dane Rhodes, Al Thompson and J.D. Williams in John Magary's short The Second Line, screening Sunday as part of Sundance at BAM

Written and directed by Columbia alumnus John Magary, Line introduces storm survivor MacArthur (Al Thompson) moments after his cash is stolen from his FEMA trailer in New Orleans. Disgruntled and not a little disenfranchised, he takes work gutting a house with his cousin Natt (J.D. Williams). Class conflict ensues; the storm's casualties mount. Magary handles proximity with uncanny aplomb, peeking into devastated souls even as his physical scope is so vast as to almost encompass the curve of Earth. His New Orleans is a world capital of filth and dread, with loathing stacked higher than scraps of old homes. Yet MacArthur's breathlessness -- both literal and metaphorical -- yields a shocking, sympathetic optimism. For better and worse, there's control in the ruins. It's the ultimate theme of virtually every Katrina-related film to date, but Magary's twist gives The Second Line its fine, maybe even unprecedented edge.

After the jump, The Reeler hears from Magary about The Second Line, adapting to his next New Orleans story and the near-death experience (really!) of traveling to Sundance.

Continue reading "Strong Second Line Brings Katrina to BAM" »

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By S.T. VanAirsdale

It occurred to me about 30 minutes into Thursday's opening-night party for the third-annual Sundance at BAM why a high-school prom theme was especially brilliant for the evening. The obvious tie-in to the Nanette Burstein's reality-skein-in-documentary-clothing opener American Teen was a convenient enough peg, but seriously: An informal poll revealed that nobody in New York film appears to have attended their own proms as teenagers. As such, the punch seemed spiked with equal parts catharsis and vodka; it was the most fun I think I'd seen 90 percent of the film community have, like, ever. So, memo to MoMA, Lincoln Center, the film institute in a neighborhood below Canal Street that shall not be named, and other local programmers: Tavern on the Green out, gym in. Trust me.

Continue reading "BAM Finds Fountain of Youth For Sundance Opener" »

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Eleanore Hendricks in The Pleasure of Being Robbed, one of the better-received NYC films at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival (Photo: Visit Films)

By S.T. VanAirsdale

The recently ended Cannes Film Festival wasn't quite the gathering of New York minds that we witnessed a year ago, but there was still a contingent worth watching, debating and -- obviously -- speculating over when it was all said and done. As The Reeler was chained in its New York salt mines, however, it became necessary to parse Synecdoche, New York, Two Lovers and other local-titles-in-limbo from this side of the Atlantic. And while the final landing place of many of these films has yet to be determined (count on at least two or three of them to screen at the New York Film Festival along with Palme D'Or winner The Class and other award-grabbers by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Dardennes), we still had plenty to go on while diagnosing how NYC fared on the Croisette.

Continue reading "NYC in the Cannes (Again)" »

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By S.T. VanAirsdale

Sure, it's raining non-stop in the middle of May and I was wearing a scarf as recently as last week, but the hell with it: Summer's here, damn it, because like our city's twisted, beloved genre groundhogs, Grady Hendrix and Co. have thrust this year's New York Asian Film Festival line-up through the asphalt and into our blistered urban consciousness. And I mean that as a good thing; just thank them already.

Writer/director/star Hitoshi Matsumoto in the outlandish man-battles-monster comedy Dainipponjin, screening at this year's New York Asian Film Festival

I expect I'll have a word here with Hendrix before the seventh annual festival launches June 20 at IFC Center (it concludes July 6 following its co-presentation of eight selections in the partially overlapping Japan Cuts festival at Japan Society). In the meantime, I'm agog at this year's potential: the Grim Reaper and his talking dog in Accuracy of Death; Thailand's spectacular, all-time box-office champs King Naresuan 1 and 2; the uncompromising Korean film industry-as-slaughterhouse metaphor The Butcher; Takashi Miike's "nutso reimagining of American Westerns," Sukiyaki Western Django; the blockbuster Chinese war film Assembly; and sooooo much more (Johnnie To! Always 2 -- with a cameo from Godzilla!!) that it's embarrassing and kind of devastating, really, to admit I'm going to be out of town for the whole fucking thing.

But that's not your problem. You have to decide what you're seeing, so browse on after the jump (and keep an eye on Subway Cinema's site and new blog for more updates about appearances, extras and what-not).

Continue reading "NY Asian Film Festival Line-Up Comes to Claim Our Very Souls" »

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By S.T. VanAirsdale

The lineup for the third annual Sundance at BAM program just slid under the door at Reeler HQ, and with 22 features and 36 shorts selected, it's the biggest one yet. It looks good overall: A bunch of Jury Prize winners (Frozen River, Trouble The Water, Man on Wire), some buzz titles (the opening-night selection American Teen, Ballast, Gonzo) and a crapload of shorts (36!) and special events fill out the schedule from May 28 to June 8. In keeping with what I guess is now tradition, the slate features a little more overlap with New Directors/New Films (or distributed titles like Choke and Man on Wire) than I expected, but whatever; as BAM Cinematek curator Florence Almozini told The Reeler when I had the same issue in 2007, "We thought that it was more important to the program to keep the films we really loved than to eliminate them because they were not a New York premiere."

Phillippe Petit does his thing in Man on Wire, the World Documentary Jury Prize winner screening May 30 at Sundance BAM (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)

Not having been in Park City this year to discover gems of my own, I'll take her word for it. I'd still like to have seen something like Brooklynites Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar on here, but a person close to the production told me the other day that distribution priorities are overriding the chance for local fest bookings. Baghead or Goliath would have been nifty adds for the kids, but hey. Gregg Araki will be around with the restored version of his 1992 queer nihilist classic The Living End, and the Canadian heavy metal band Anvil, profiled in Sacha Gervasi's appropriately titled doc Anvil! The Story of Anvil, will perform a free concert May 31 at the BAMCafe.

Follow the jump for the complete program, and check back for more in May as opening night approaches.

Continue reading "Award-Winners and Buzz Titles Pack Sundance at BAM" »

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Last dance: Heavy Metal in Baghdad, the opening-night film at the last NY Underground Film Festival (Photos: NYUFF)

By S.T. VanAirsdale

We hear a lot of ambitious, imaginative marketing pushes for film festivals every day at Reeler HQ. Hats off, however, to the gang at the New York Underground Film Festival, whose "15th and FINAL" ordinal simultaneously piques our interest while provoking aggressive fits of head-scratching: Who organizes, mounts and carefully programs a festival just to put the word out: "This is the last time we're doing this." Nellie Killian, Kevin McGarry and Mo Johnston, that's who, the co-directors of NYUFF who, like Barry Sanders, Big Black and various other cultural institutions before them, are calling it quits in their prime.

Both the Village Voice and indieWIRE today feature remembrances and analyses of the scenarios facing NYUFF over the years. The Reeler, meanwhile, corresponded with Killian in advance of the fest's last opening night, which gets underway this evening at Anthology Film Archives with the New York premiere of Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Other programs throughout the week feature more premieres as well as highlights from years past. "A lot of the filmmakers who we work with and long time friends of NYUFF were sad about the news," she told me. "I think the fact that Kevin McGarry and I are starting a new festival softened the blow a bit, but many of the filmmakers are sad to see a venue that's shown their work and work they're interested in close. There has been a lot of reminiscing; it's nice, if a little bittersweet."

THE REELER: "The 15th and Final"... that's an unusual way to brand a film festival.

NELLIE KILLIAN: The idea for calling this the 15th and Final New York Underground sprung from discussions about how to celebrate this year as a milestone. The conversation turned to all the festivals that have faded out over the last few years. We didn't want NYUFF to end because we just didn't do it one year. Once we realized it was going to be our last hurrah, it seemed only natural to let people know.

Continue reading "Show-stoppers, Literally: Final NYUFF Launches Tonight" »

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By S.T. VanAirsdale

The annual New Directors/New Films Directors Party is coming up a little later tonight, when the default question to revive every stalled conversation in the room will be: "So what have you seen that you like?" It's one I'm nervous about and only slightly wanted to address after the festival kicked off last Wednesday at MoMA with Courtney Hunt's Sundance-winning drama Frozen River, probably my 15th or 16th film viewed in the program and one of only four or five I'd recommend.

The Best (maybe): Giorgos Symeonidis in Correction, one of the two excellent Greek entries featured in this year's New Directors/New Films program (Photo: Thanos Anastopoulos)

In fact, if you had told me two weeks ago that the Greek tandem of Correction and Valse Sentimentale would likely be the duo to beat in this year's crop -- rich with festival alums out of Park City, Berlin and other high-profile berths -- I would have asked if you wanted another drink. But it's a sobering year that way, with Correction, director Thanos Anastopoulos's near-silent class-war Odyssey, utilizing fantastically modulated performances by Giorgos Symeonidis and Ornela Kapetani as a Greek ex-con and the Turkish woman whose distance upon his release belies the excruciating proximity of their pasts. A little too earnest in its humanism (soccer hooligans have never been easier targets than they are here) and pat in its ending, Correction nevertheless possesses a remarkable objectivity regarding society's long odds on rehabilitation.

It tentatively shares that quality (and only that quality) with Valse Sentimentale, featuring Thanos Samaras and Loukia Mihalopoulou as a wounded pair of Greek 20-somethings vexed by love, independence and compulsive viewings of Carrie. It's a post-postmodern romance with bad courtship and worse sex, all refracted through low-fi digital imagery and a consistently counterintuitive narrative arc; think of it like a nihilist Me and You and Everyone We Know, refreshing despite a staggering ugliness gleefully compounded by the minute by director Constantina Voulgaris.

Continue reading "Where's the Cream in New Directors' Crop?" »

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Brother's keepers: (L-R) Everett Silas and Ronnie Bell in My Brother's Wedding, featured in this week's Charles Burnett retrospective at Anthology Film Archives
(Photo: Milestone Films)

By Rich Zwelling

It might be tempting to refer to the recent outpouring of interest in Killer of Sheep and its filmmaker Charles Burnett as a trend, yet the austere realism and low-key humanitarianism he has displayed over a three-decade career hardly qualifies as trendy. And while the 1977 landmark opens a new Burnett retrospective starting Friday at Anthology Film Archives, the progammers sought also to highlight shorts dating back to 1969, lower-profile features like The Glass Shield, and Burnett's other recent revival, the 1983 feature My Brother's Wedding.

"Killer of Sheep is the one that's gotten plenty of attention lately, and I think deservedly so," said Jared Rapfogel, the retrospective's programmer. "But we wanted to give My Brother's Wedding another chance to be seen. It didn't have the lasting success that Killer of Sheep did, and it feels somewhat neglected."

The comedy/drama Wedding centers around 30-year-old Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) -- who works for his parents in Los Angeles -- and his relationships with a more successful brother and a much less successful friend. The new print represents Burnett's first fully edited cut of the film since his producers rushed a rough (and ultimately unpopular) edit onto the festival circuit in 1983; Wedding was subsequently shelved, never receiving a theatrical or video release until last year.

Another highlight is 1990's To Sleep with Anger, which tells the story of a rural southern family adjusting to life in Los Angeles urbanity. With the aid of its star Danny Glover, Anger became Burnett's most critically successful feature to date. "It's his best known film, but for certain reasons, prints are hard to come by," Rapfogel said. "So it's rarely screened these days."

The shorts include the 1969 student film Several Friends and When It Rains, both focusing on the untoward realities of Los Angeles ghetto life and deliver rebukes to the sensationalism of '70s blaxploitation. A pair of 2003 releases merge fiction and documentary: Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property examines the mystique of the Turner myth through a mixture of interviews and dramatizations; and Warming by the Devil's Fire (Burnett's contribution to the PBS television series The Blues) draws from his childhood experiences while expressing the contrast between the harshness of the blues and the uplift of gospel.

The retrospective concludes with a screening of director Billy Woodberry's 1984 drama Bless Their Little Hearts, another rarely screened effort for which Burnett provided the script and cinematography. "We're really excited," Rapfogel said, "because we've wanted to show it for a while now, and we're finally getting the chance."

The Films of Charles Burnett runs Feb. 8-14 at Anthology Film Archives; visit the venue's Web site for additional program and schedule information.

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Language student Chin speaks up in A Hebrew Lesson, screening this month at the New York Jewish Film Festival (Photo: Eden Productions)

By Ben Gold

While some film festivals strive to provide a thematic undercurrent in their programs, the 17th annual New York Jewish Film Festival, which opened Wednesday and runs at the Walter Reade Theater and The Jewish Museum through Jan. 24, would rather highlight its films' range.

It's really rather fitting, said Aviva Weintraub, NYJFF director and associate curator at The Jewish Museum. "With the Jewish experience around the world there are some common threads, and there also interesting differences," she told The Reeler in a recent interview. "So we want to present both of those." Specifically, this year's festival focuses on rarely seen points of view like those presented in Red Zion, a documentary using found footage to tell the story of Russian Jews immigrating to Palestine in the 1920s. "You kind of get the Russian side of the story," Weintraub said. "It's a story that, if you've seen a lot of Jewish documentary films or read certain books, you've heard told from the American or Israeli perspective, but it's interesting to see it told from the inside perspective."

Among its selection of 23 world, U.S. and New York premieres, the NYJFF also features seven documentaries from Israel, presenting more diverse viewpoints from what is anything but a monolithic society. A Hebrew Lesson, for example, about a language immersion program for immigrants in Israel, exemplifies the country's diversity. "It may be an eye opener for some people to realize -- it's true, it's always been a country of immigrants," Weintraub said. "But I think it's even more striking that most of the characters in the film are not Jewish. And I think that's increasingly the state of Israeli society. I think it's great a film shows that without being a kind of didactic educational documentary saying, 'This is what Israeli society is like today.'"

In addition to more mainstream US premieres like A Secret, starring Mathieu Almaric and Ludivine Sagnier, Weintraub noted that she is especially proud of films like A Hebrew Lesson for their ability to appeal to a wide, not necessarily Jewish, audience -- a mission in line with the Museum's mandate as well. "[They're] absolutely in sync," she said. "The museum presents art work in all different media, and film has always been one of the focuses here. So, in a way, it's yet another platform for exhibition of artwork. One of the museum's main missions is to present art and Jewish culture for people of all backgrounds, and we're hoping the festival does that as well."

The New York Jewish Film Festival runs through Jan. 24 at the Walter Reade Theater and The Jewish Museum. Visit the festival's Web site for additional program and ticket information.

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By Miriam Bale

"Choreocinema" was the term New York Times dance critic John Martin coined in 1946 to describe a new art, an equal collaboration between camera and dancer that he observed in Maya Deren's short films of the time. As the 36th Dance on Camera Festival opens tonight at the Walter Reade Theater, programmers and presenters there continue to expand on this idea of "choreography for the camera," as festival programmer Joanna Ney described it to me in a recent conversation: "It's where the visual and movement converge."

(L-R) Maris Liepa as Crassus and Nina Timofeeva as Phyrgia in Spartacus, screening at the Dance on Camera Festival (Photo: Film Society of Lincoln Center)

Opening the festival is the recently restored Spartacus, a filmed Russian ballet from 1975. It's an epic (natch) that combines dance and film techniques zealously, giving a sense of both classic ballet and Russian film, as Ney described it. Tightly packed synchronized bodies divide the stage horizontally, acting as a living curtain on the stage. Then, immediately following, the frame is divided in another way, using a showy triple split screen that packs in every aspect of ballet that we need to see at once -- the swish of so many ankles in long-view kicking towards an emotional close-up of the main dancer in the center. Whether jagged editing or dissolves, the filmmakers grab whatever tools are at their disposal to convey the forcefulness of the performance.

Utilizing a different timbre and pace is Jacques Tati's languid, yet as always brilliant, Jour de Fête. The film is about the day a carnival comes to a sleepy French village and also about a postman's misadventures in efficiency. It was filmed in 1947 in both black and white and simultaneously in a new technique called Thompson-Color that would have made it the first color film in France. But it didn't work, so the film was released in black and white. In 1964, still wanting to get closer to his original vision, Tati rereleased the film with a new color title and with some red and blue details colored in with stencils. In 1995, 13 years after his death, Tati's film editor daughter, Sophie Tatische, completely restored the original color version and released the film in a new Technicolor print.

Tati's careful choreography of full-body folly -- and the way this interplays with his playfully enhanced sound effects -- always makes his films seem cartoonish. Jour de Fête's dusty pastels enhance that impression; its softness of movement and subtlety in coloring look like a rotoscoped Fleisher short, like the Popeyes or Betty Boops of the '30s and '40s. (This is in contrast to the brightly colored Tashlin films of the fifties, which were almost literally Looney Toons come to life.) The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who will introduce the Sunday screening, points out another benefit of this color version: "This is color that truly looks like 1947 -- not films of that period so much as 1947 itself -- and its bucolic postwar euphoria."

The Dance on Camera Festival runs Jan. 2-6, 11 and 18-19 at the Walter Reade Theater; visit the festival's Web site for program and ticket information.

Seduced and Abandoned is a regular feature about repertory cinema highlights in New York. Miriam Bale programs the monthly series The Movie Night Disco at Frank's Lounge in Fort Greene.

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