Films & Schedules - Sunday, February 21, 2010

When a volcanic eruption forces the Moomin family to take refuge in an old theater, Moominpappa decides to write a play for the family to perform.

Based on Tove Jansson’s well-loved “Moomin” books, this visually striking animated film will delight young children and big kids alike. A tranquil summer day is interrupted by a volcanic eruption, causing a flood in the Moominvalley. The water rises higher and higher in Moominhouse, forcing the family to take refuge in a strange house that floats by. The unusual lifeboat turns out to be a theatre. Moominpappa begins to write a play for the others to perform.

First Feature Film.

Ages nine and up.

Sponsored by Scandinavian Heritage Foundation.

75 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Animation, Family Fare, Literature.

Garbage Dreams explores the rapidly disappearing way of life of the Zaballeen, Cairo's "garbage people."

Garbage Dreams looks at the hopes and dreams of a group of teenage boys whose livelihoods wholly depend on trash. As members of the Zaballeen, a Coptic Christian community on the outskirts of Cairo, they inhabit a small village constructed almost entirely of the garbage they sort for a living. For generations, Cairo has depended on “the garbage people” to collect their trash. The Zaballeen survive by recycling the city’s waste—80 percent of all the garbage they collect—creating what is arguably the world’s most efficient waste disposal system. In 2003, the city decided to replace the Zabelleen with private, multinational garbage disposal companies. Their giant waste trucks now line the streets, but they are contractually obligated to recycle only 20 percent of what they collect, leaving the rest to rot in giant landfills. The Zabelleen community is finding their way of life disappearing before their eyes.

First Feature Film.

Sponsored by World Affairs Council of Oregon.

82 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Documentary Views, Global Classroom, Middle Eastern.

This riveting, unusual documentary takes a tour of 20th century battlefields through the eyes of those who kept the soldiers fed and fighting: military cooks.

This riveting film opens the door to the secrets of little-known historians to show a dimension of war not found in textbooks or archives. Cooking History presents portraits of various army military cooks from all over Europe who have witnessed the European wars of the 20th century. Their recollections tap into a subjective view of historical events, one that diverges in some respects from conventional beliefs. They take us on a journey through pivotal dates, facts, declarations of war, battles, and peace agreements. The tales they tell convey a sense of life and death in the “war apparatus,” as well as a sense of hope, longing, and survival in the midst of destruction and despair. Kerekes’ look behind “great moments in time” introduces a fresh perspective on European history.

Filmography: About Three Days in Monastary Jasov (94), The Mary-Valery Bridge (00), 66 Seasons (03).

Special Jury Prize, Toronto Hot Docs.

Sponsored by KINK.FM.

88 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Documentary Views, Narrative Feature, French Language, History.

An investigation of "disaster capitalism", based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war, and terror to establish its dominance.

“Based on the best-selling book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine seeks to explain the rise of disaster capitalism: the exploitation of moments of crisis in vulnerable countries by governments and big business. The film traces the doctrine’s beginnings in the radical theories of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and its subsequent implementation over the past 40 years in countries as disparate as Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain, and most recently through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross use a brand of artistic license to present a cinematic experience that takes this theory to a new audience. Warning: After viewing this film, you may interpret our world history in a new light.”—Sundance Film Festival.

Selected Filmography: Butterfly Kiss (95), Wonderland (99), 9 Songs (04), The Road To Guantanamo (05), A Mighty Heart (07).

82 Minutes    

Interests: Documentary Views, Literature.

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

Ulrich Tukur (The Lives of Others) gives a gripping performance as John Rabe, a German industrialist in China who, in 1937, intervened to save an estimated 200,000 Chinese civilians from the rape and slaughter perpetrated by the invading Japanese army. Reluctantly drawn into the relief effort by a coalition of fellow internationals, including an American doctor (Steve Buscemi) and a French school headmistress (Anne Consigny), Rabe and company create a safety zone at Rabe’s Siemens plant where refugees fleeing the Nanking massacre can take shelter. But mounting pressure from the aggressive Japanese commanding officer (Teruyuki Kagawa) pushes their resolve to the breaking point. Based on Rabe’s diaries (published as “The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe”), Gallenberger’s film is the winner of four German Film Awards including Best Film and Best Actor.

Filmography: Tango Berlin (97), Shadows of Time (04).

134 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, History, Literature.

Woman Without Piano is a quietly comic look at a Madrid housewife's attempt to escape from her mundane and tedious existence.

Plain, middle-aged Rosa is a married woman with no friends and no social life. She has devoted her life to her family and doesn’t seem to think much of herself. But when night falls, she enters a fun, dark, and absurd new world. With her husband Francisco tucked in bed, Rosa (Spanish TV superstar Carmen Machi, recently seen in Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces) sneaks out to meet a young Polish construction worker at the bus station, instigating a provocative tour of nocturnal Madrid: neon-lit hotels, all-night bars, and dingy launderettes. Rebollo creates a fascinating, disquieting work in which “anything might happen, and the film—winner of the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Best Director award—holds the viewer in thrall by a chain of extraordinarily staged sequences fueled by a visual command and wit that honors the cinema of Jacques Tati, Otar Iosseliani, and Fellini.”—AFI Fest.

Filmography: Lola (06).

Sponsored by Blue Heron Paper.

95 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Spanish Language, Comedy.

Reporter, a feature documentary about Nicholas Kristof, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, reveals the man and his methods, and just how and why real reporting is vital to our democracy, our world-awareness, and our capacity to be a force for good.

Old-fashioned investigative journalists who rely on a unique synthesis of persistence, guile, courage, curiosity, and very thick skins to break the news are increasingly in short supply. One such rare creature is New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof’s columns have earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, convinced Bill Gates to significantly increase his charitable donations, introduced the world to places like Darfur and arguably changed the tide of history. Filmmaker Metzgar trailed after Kristof when he took off to pay a visit to rebel warlord General Nkunda in the middle of a Congolese jungle in 2007. What Reporter reveals is the dangerously high price of reporting on world events at a time when the translation of complex facts half a world away into meaningful, impelling stories has never been as necessary nor as urgent.

Filmography: The Chances of the World Changing (07), Life. Support. Music (08).

92 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Documentary Views, Global Classroom, History.

In this retelling of the tale of the wife-killing Bluebeard, Breillat reminds us all that the best fairytales are dark around the edges. The film intercuts between the stories of two pairs of sisters. The first is set in the 1950s and features a young girl who loves torturing her older sister with dramatic readings of the story of Bluebeard. In the second, set during the Renaissance, a young girl becomes engaged to Lord Bluebeard, despite the suspicious disappearances of his previous wives.

Following the death of their father, Anne and Marie-Catherine are cast from boarding school and sent back to their mother. With no money for dowry, younger sister Marie-Catherine agrees to wed the wealthy but notorious aristocrat Lord Bluebeard, whose previous wives have all suspiciously disappeared. Will Marie-Catherine be next? Both surprisingly straightforward and slyly subversive, Breillat’s telling of Charles Perrault’s lurid 18th-century fable teases out the class and gender conflicts present in the original, reminding us that the best fairy tales are tinged with perverse darkness. Using parallel storylines, Breillat intercuts the fairy tale itself with childhood scenes set in a safe, bourgeois home in the 1950s, where a young girl frightens her older sister, and herself, with repeated readings of the titillating Freudian tale.

Selected Filmography: 36 Fillette (87), Romance (99), Fat Girl (00), Sex Is Comedy (02), The Last Mistress (06).

Sponsored by TV5MONDE and with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

80 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Narrative Feature, French Language, Literature.

The Letter for the King follows the medieval quest of sixteen-year old Tiuri, who risks his future as a knight to fulfill a promise, and in so doing discovers adventure, honor, valor, and love.

Based on the story by Tonke Dragt, The Letter for the King brings one of the most popular young-adult books in Dutch history vividly to life in this knights-on-horseback adventure. Sixteen-year-old Tiuri sets out on a dangerous journey marked by sword-clanging battles and unexpected help from a beautiful princess. On the eve of becoming a knight, he must sacrifice his own dreams when he promises a dying messenger that he will deliver an extremely important letter to the King. Join Tuiri on his perilous, life-changing journey through mountain, forest, and valley where not only lives but also kingdoms hang in the balance.

Selected Filmography: Mark of the Beast (80), The Dream (85), Nynke (01).

Ages nine and up.

Sponsored by French American International School.

108 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Family Fare, Literature.

Financial concerns tempt an ex-con to return to his smuggling ways in this taut psychological thriller.

Ex-con Kristófer, recently released from a jail term for smuggling alcohol while working on a freighter, now works as a lowly-paid security guard. Bored with his dreary existence and struggling to support his family, he is tempted when his friend Steingrímur offers to help him get back his old job on the ship—which would provide the opportunity to do one last smuggling job on a freighter between Reykjavik and Rotterdam. Contending not only with the suspicious local police, but also with a captain who mistrusts him and a psychopathic Dutch criminal, Kristófer sets out on his mission to solve his financial woes. Reykjavik-Rotterdam’s gritty naturalism is evocatively realized by the work of Jar City cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson and hardened performances from a fine cast.

Filmography: SLC-25 (90), Remote Control (92), Pearls and Swine (97).

This year’s Icelandic submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

88 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature.

The early life and rise of Benito Mussolini is shown here through the eyes of his first wife, Ida, all but erased from history. Juxtaposing Ida's tragic decline into insanity with Mussolini's phantasmagoric rise to power, Bellocchio fashions a unique glimpse of a little-known aspect of history.

Bellocchio delves into the hidden early life and rise to power of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, as seen through the eyes of his quietly erased first wife. Beginning as a theater actor, journalist, and socialist on the rise, Mussolini meets Australian aristocrat and socialist Ida Dalser in 1914—and she falls hard for him. Their torrid affair compels her to sell everything to help him fund “Il Popolo d’Italia,” the newspaper that would soon become the propaganda tool of the newly formed Fascist party. After Ida gives birth to their son, Mussolini rejects them both. He eventually has them arrested, marries another woman, and dispassionately watches as Ida slips into insanity. Juxtaposing Ida’s tragic story with the phantasmic public one of the grand Il Duce, Bellocchio fashions a unique glimpse into an extraordinary period in Italian history.

Selected Filmography: Fists in the Pocket (65), Leap Into the Void (80), The Butterfly’s Dream (94), The Nanny (98), The Wedding Director (07).

Cultural Partner: Italian Cultural Institute, San Francisco.

128 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, History.

Resnais' career-defining masterpiece deals with the fate-altering ripples triggered by a seemingly ordinary purse snatching.

“Resnais delivers a career-crowning masterpiece with this delightful roundelay, based on Christian Gailly’s novel ‘The Incident,’ about the fate-altering ripples triggered by a seemingly ordinary purse snatching. The purse belongs to Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), a dentist who moonlights as an aviatrix. Its contents are retrieved by Georges (André Dussollier), a married man who soon finds himself infatuated with the purse’s owner, even though he hasn’t actually met her yet. Add in a couple of keystone cops, some dizzying aerial acrobatics, and the glorious camerawork of cinematographer Eric Gautier and you have the recipe for a uniquely playful meditation on coincidence and desire that suggests Resnais, at age 87, is truly in his prime.”—New York Film Festival.

Selected Filmography: Hiroshima mon amour (59), Last Year at Marienbad (61), Muriel (63), Mon oncle d’Amérique (80), Mélo (86), Smoking/No Smoking (93), The Same Old Song (97), Cœurs (06).

Sponsored by TV5MONDE and with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

104 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, French Language.

In this companion piece to Nightwatching (PIFF 32), Greenaway, a former painter, deconstructs Rembrandt's The Night Watch and examines it in terms of the time and place it was completed, and the controversy surrounding its accusation of murder.

In Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, Greenaway deconstructs The Night Watch, the greatest of the Dutch master’s portraits of Holland’s 17th-century militias. Greenaway, who began his career as a painter, takes the painting apart plane by plane and reads it the way it was read in 1642 after Rembrandt completed it: as an outrageous piece of theater in which the painter bit the aristocratic hand that fed him by embedding within the painting a sensational charge of murder. “A scholarly yet broadly accessible illustrated lecture that examines the Dutch master’s most famous painting for proof that it was responsible for his dramatic fall from grace. A companion piece to Greenaway’s Nightwatching [PIFF 32], this film brims with juicy conspiracy theories and forensic investigations worthy of top-tier TV crime drama.”—Variety. “Just because you have eyes does not mean you can see.”—Peter Greenaway.

Selected Filmography: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife (89), Pillow Book (96), Nightwatching (07).

Sponsored by Southpark Seafood Grill.

86 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Documentary Views, Art.

Room and a Half portrays the life of Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, who was forced into American exile in 1972.

Exiled to the United States in 1972, the famous Russian poet Joseph Brodsky always wanted to return anonymously to St. Petersburg, the city of his youth. Through a variety of imaginative techniques, 69-year-old animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky has made the Nobel Prize winner’s wish come true in Room and a Half. A fictional Brodsky narrates this nostalgic fantasy on board a cruise ship destined for Russia. Through a series of flashbacks he recalls his childhood, in particular the return of his father, laden with gifts, from World War II, and his parents’ affectionate reunion. It appears an idyllic time for the budding scribe who “live[s] in a city whose color [is] fossilized vodka.” Through the seamless fusion of documentary footage, classical Russian music, still photography, recordings of Brodsky reading his work, and beautiful, dreamlike animation, Khrzhanovsky has created a film as poetic as his subject matter.

First Feature Film.

130 Minutes    

Interests: New Directors, Narrative Feature, Animation, Literature.

A suspenseful psychological thriller, Chameleon centers on a clever con man who targets lonely, disillusioned women, playing on their romantic fantasies. But can the con man be conned if love gets in the way?

Gábor cleans offices. Working nights, he rarely has any contact with his employers, yet he learns everything about them by thoroughly analyzing their garbage. Nobody suspects that Gábor is in fact a con man who carefully chooses his victims by the trash they leave behind, and usually targets disillusioned, lonely women. In a few months he destroys all their romantic illusions by taking all of their savings. When he gets a job at a psychologist’s office, Gábor meets Hanna, an injured dancer from a wealthy family. Insecure and vulnerable, Hanna seems to be the perfect victim. Gábor pretends to be a doctor who can cure her body and her soul. Everything goes according to plan until Gábor falls in love, and must choose between his beloved and her money. A suspenseful psychological thriller, Chameleon is this year’s Hungarian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Filmography: Just Sex and Nothing Else (05), Children of Glory (06).

104 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Comedy.

“The Rape of Nanking” by Japanese soldiers remains one of China's darkest historical chapters. This luminous black-and-white film uses several small stories to illustrate the bigger picture: man's incredible inhumanity to man.

The atrocities committed by the Japanese army during its occupation of Nanking in December 1937—more than 300,000 were massacred, sexual assault was pandemic, and the city was virtually decimated—remain some of the most harrowing chapters of war in the 20th century. Lu Chuan’s vivid recreation of the “Rape of Nanking” tells the story of a small group of Westerners and Chinese engaged in anguished negotiations with the Japanese to limit the suffering of the civilian population. A series of key vignettes—a young Chinese soldier leads a doomed resistance group; a confused and anguished Japanese private is overwhelmed by the insanity; John Rabe, a German businessman, establishes a safety zone in an attempt to protect the lives of countless Chinese; and the harried secretary of a Nazi official betrays his charges to try and save his family—told with Lu’s burning, black-and-white images, bespeak man’s amazing inhumanity to man.

Filmography: Missing Gun (01), Kekexili Mountain Patrol (04).

135 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Asian, History.

Love, identity, and role-playing games all come together in this meshing of myth and reality. A man enters a LARP (Live Action Role Playing) game to find his girlfriend, who has left him for the game. His refusal to role-play angers the dedicated players and sets fantasy and reality on a collision course, capturing the potentially dangerous intersection of actual and made-up worlds.

In a dark forest, a battle is brewing between the power-hungry Celts, the rampaging Vikings, the secretive wood elves, and a mysterious shaman who is about to unleash his latest fiendish scheme. Clever, funny, and intense, The Wild Hunt is set in the fantasy-reality of a large role-playing game, and the plot mirrors the legend behind the game. Erik goes looking for his girlfriend, Evelyn, who has left him for the game. He will need the help of his brother Bjorn, who happens to be the Viking leader and owner of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir. Erik’s entry into the game angers the dedicated players when he refuses to role-play, setting fantasy and reality on a collision course. Capturing the potentially dangerous intersection of actual and made-up worlds, Franchi’s film is a timely, potent comment on the modern yearning for ritual and the consuming nature of adopting another identity.

First Feature Film.

Best Canadian First Feature Film, Toronto International Film Festival.

96 Minutes    

Interests: New Directors, Narrative Feature.

This surreal, stop-motion adaptation of a popular European television show has Cowboy, Indian, and Horse traveling through space and time on a quest to free their wrongly imprisoned neighbor. A gleefully surreal treat for animation fans of all ages.

This thoroughly delightful, surreal stop-motion animated fantasy tells of an eccentric provincial village and its beguiling inhabitants. The impetuous Cowboy and Indian, eager to buy a birthday gift for their more mature roommate, Horse, accidentally set off a chain of events that destroys their residence and places their innocent neighbor behind bars. Setting out to right their wrongs, Cowboy and Indian are joined by Horse and taken on a journey to the center of the earth, across a frozen tundra, and into a bizarre underwater parallel universe. Rendered in a completely charming style, this feature film version of a popular European television program will thrill animation lovers of all ages.

First Feature Film.

In French with English subtitles.

Sponsored by French American International School.

75 Minutes    

Interests: New Directors, Narrative Feature, Animation, Family Fare.